In the United States it is easy to view falling rates of vaccination for diseases like measles as a simple consequence of a right wing populist Republican party that has become anti-science. However I suspect that may be confusing an effect (the promotion of anti-vax views by members of the Republican party) with a cause, albeit a very important amplifying effect. My reason for thinking this goes back to the MMR vaccine and autism scare that was begun by a then physician, Andrew Wakefield, who published in 1998 a paper in the Lancet suggesting a link between the former and the latter ..read more

  To say I have never been a fan of the way Germany views government debt is an understatement. Here I asked whether Germany’s debt brake mechanism, foolishly enshrined in the country’s constitution, was the worst ever fiscal rule. The answer was not quite, but it came close. The root cause of why it’s such a bad rule is that much of the German policy making community sees the main goal of fiscal policy as the control of government debt, rather than seeing debt as a means of having better fiscal policy (I discuss this here.) So the serious moves in Germany to exempt defense spending (bey ..read more

  In the UK the definition of recession used by most people is two successive quarters of falling GDP. This definition always involved a knife edge problem. If GDP fell by 0.1% in two successive quarters we were officially in recession, but if output fell by 1% in one quarter and grew by 0.1% in the next there was no official recession. If a recession is meant to indicate periods in which output growth is particularly poor, then in this example it fails. The knife edge problems also means that mild recessions can easily disappear after data revisions. A second problem has only become sig ..read more

  I don’t write about international power politics because normally I just don’t know enough about the countries and actors involved, even though it often seems as if this is also true of many of those who do talk about such things. If there was ever going to be an exception to this self-imposed rule, it would have to be now. But in reality this post is about the same battle between right wing populists and those supporting pluralist democracy that I have been writing about for some time. It is also inspired by this excellent discussion between Paul Krugman and Phillips O’Brien. When I w ..read more

  Answering questions of this type inevitably involves a discussion of definitions, in this case about what populism and fascism actually mean. It is perfectly reasonable to therefore ask whether the answer matters, if by making reasonable changes in definition we can get a different answer. After all we know what Trump is and what he is doing, so why is an answer to this kind of question interesting? My answer would be that such a discussion can help sort out ideas and help distinguish underlying causes from symptoms. Your answer may depend on how happy you are with lists. As an econo ..read more

  In her October budget the Chancellor raised total government spending by 1.8% of GDP compared to the plans of her predecessors, which means that total public spending as a ratio to GDP stays pretty flat over the 5 year forecast period. (Anyone who calls this the share of government spending in GDP is either being sloppy or deliberately misleading. [1]) As a result, that ratio is planned in 2029/30 to be roughly where it was in 2022/3, the penultimate financial year of the Conservative government. Just before the budget, I calculated that spending to GDP needed to be about 3% higher tha ..read more

  Since the end of the 1970s, when a new party has taken power in the UK they have started with a reasonably loud bang. Thatcher brought monetarism and neoliberalism. With Blair/Brown came an independent Bank of England, a national minimum wage, peace in Northern Ireland, a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly. With Cameron/Osborne came austerity. Compared to this, Labour’s first six months have been pretty low key. There have been changes to planning procedures to speed up investment projects, legislation to extend workers rights and protect those renting their accommodation. The ne ..read more

  Is this Labour government right to make achieving growth so central to its missions? Does making higher growth a central priority require Labour has a theory of growth? I think the answer to the first question is yes and no! Wanting better economic growth is just the same thing as saying you want better living standards for UK citizens in the future. Of course growth is not everything. It matters what that growth involves and how that growth is distributed, In addition stable growth is better than erratic growth, and the wellbeing of citizens depends on many other things besides their ..read more

  The UK macroeconomy was one of the big stories of the previous two weeks, so you might think this blog post should have covered it earlier. However my guess at the time was that media coverage was a bit like a nervous flyer who, when the plane hits a bit of normal turbulence, decides it's is going to crash and everyone will die. As I’m not a journalist, it seemed better to wait a week to see if I was right. I’m glad I did. This is what got the media so excited about, and what happened next From around the 6th January interest rates on UK 10 year government debt rose over a week from ..read more

  In my last post of 2024 I noted that the main political battles in many countries would be between on the one hand socially conservative right wing plutocratic populists and on the other centre or centre/left parties tentatively moving away from neoliberalism. The populists might be represented by what had once been a mainstream centre/right or right wing party or they could be represented by an insurgent party from the further right, but it really didn’t matter which it was, because their rhetoric and policies would be much the same. The last week in UK political discourse has been ent ..read more