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The Osborne Ultimatum
Robert Skidelsky
The New Statesman
| Thursday, March 24, 2011
The ideas of two dead economists, David Ricardo and J M Keynes, are shaping the cuts debate. The coalition is in thrall to the former’s small-government agenda and says there is no alternative – but its plans aren’t working.
The course of deficit cutting has been set in stone and few expected that the Budget, announced on 23 March, would dislodge it. The purpose of this article is not to supply the facts and figures of the Chancellor’s policy failings – though these are plentiful – but to explain why his policy of slashing public spending cannot be expected to produce a robust recovery. To put it simply, it is based on false premises. This gives Labour an opportunity to wrest the intellectual initiative, but only if it can develop an
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Vince Cable is working. The coalition isn’t.
Robert Skidelsky and David Blanchflower
New Statesman
| Monday, January 24, 2011
Vince Cable’s essay in the 17 January issue of the New Statesman (“Keynes would be on our side”) is the first, and very welcome, sign of a senior coalition politician being willing to engage in a serious public debate on economic policy. It is in a different intellectual league from the jejune meditations of the Chancellor, George Osborne. Cable has written a well-argued – but ultimately unconvincing – defence of the coalition’s economic strategy.
His first, and perhaps least interesting, argument is that the parties are in agreement about a deficit reduction policy: the only question is the speed of reduction. This may be so, but a consensus is not the same thing as the truth. Cable argues that it is appropriate to begin to pay off the
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When confidence is shattered
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Tuesday, October 26, 2010
I.
In economics, you cannot convict your opponents of error, but only convince them. Economics isn’t like physics; you can’t conduct controlled experiments to prove or disprove your theories. History provides a very partial way of overcoming this weakness. No events repeat themselves exactly, but past events offer some kind of test of current theories about the economy. The main question of current interest is the effect of fiscal consolidation.
The programme of fiscal consolidation has just been unveiled by George Osborne. The claim behind it is that slashing the deficit – removing £123bn from the economy over the next five years, partly by raising taxes, mostly by cutting spending – will make the economy recover faster and more
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For a New World, New Economics
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Monday, August 30, 2010
The 2008 financial crash and the shift of power from west to east raise questions about the future of capitalism. Robert Skidelsky appraises the latest thinking, from Ha-Joon Chang, Anatole Kaletsky and Ian Bremmer.
23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang
Allen Lane, 304pp, £20
Capitalism 4.0: the Birth of a New Economy
Anatole Kaletsky
Bloomsbury, 416pp, £20
The End of the Free Market
Ian Bremmer
Viking, 240pp, £20
These three books are about the future of capitalism. Their inquiry is stimulated not just by the financial collapse in 2008-2009, but by the shift of power from west to east. These events have robbed free-market capitalism of much of its sheen. Anatole Kaletsky says it will be replaced by
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Deficit Disorder: the Keynes Solution
Robert Skidelsky
New Statesman
| Monday, May 17, 2010
The new chancellor will find himself in the worst starting position of anyone new in that job since the Second World War. According to the Treasury, we are just starting to limp out of the "most severe and synchronised downturn since the Great Depression in the 1930s". Recovery is not secure. With the Greek crisis as the trigger, the world monetary system is starting to disintegrate. The historically minded will recall that the international financial crisis of 1931, two years after the start of the Depression, aborted an incipient recovery and forced Britain off the gold standard. A double-dip recession is a distinct possibility today.
Once a new government is in place, the chancellor will have to face the situation as it is, not as
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