Angus Deaton is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Emeritus, at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. He is the 2015 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Questioning one’s views as circumstances evolve can be a good thing
We are all here for a limited time, but when we have to work harder and harder to stay in one place, that is not really living. Who is stealing our time? Were it not for the cost of housing, Australians would need to work only half the hours they have to and manufacturers would halve their costs! We have only to consider how, in two generations, Australians have gone from needing one income to purchase a house to a situation where both spouses must work and pay for others to bring up any children they may find a brief instant to produce. The writer reviews two works on time-poverty: one a heavyweight and the other a lightweight and remarks that time is money. Time is life. See the film or watch the trailer; feel the truth: spot the enemy.
I rushed out and bought Barbara Pocock, Natalie Skinner and Philiippa Williams' book, Time Bomb, NewSouth, NSWU Press, 2012, because it seemed like such a great title and subject. I should have been warned off by the fact that it was recommended by Geraldine Doogue, a great apologist for growth and economic neo-liberalism.
Disappointingly, Pocock et al's book fails to make some blindingly obvious points. It phaffs around the edges. I wonder if the authors simply did not see beyond the superficial or they thought that the publishing market could not take the heat. Are they somehow placed in the eye of the storm where all is quiet whilst the damage rages all around them. The book is published by the University of New South Wales, which makes me wonder again why universities these days turn out such dross. Is polite comment and a few boring graphs a prerequisite for a doctoral thesis these days? What's the market? The anguished New Class?
Could be.
What really got to me was the fact that the authors don't ever link the ridiculously rising cost of living to the time-poorness of Australians. They don't even mention the cost of housing, which is easily the greatest thief of time. Okay, they give two pages (pp. 130-131) to the idea that 'for a minority of young people, housing is a significant issue.'
Housing is the Number One issue! Were it not for the cost of housing, Australians would need to work only half the hours they have to and manufacturers would halve their costs! We have only to consider how, in two generations, Australians have gone from needing one income to purchase a house to a situation where both spouses must work and pay for others to bring up any children they may find a brief instant to produce. And then there are the other Australians, who live on the streets, sell drugs and beg on trains to survive.
Why do people publish this kind of much ado about nothing? Are they just marketing titles at airports which people buy, read the first chapter of, and bin on their way out of the arrivals door?
In contrast, the movie In Time was a (for lack of a new word) brilliant dramatization of how the parasitic rich are thieves of time and that life is measured out in money. In Time is about a world just like ours where the poor die young and spend their precious lives hanging around begging for work or for credit from a rarer class of landlords by any other name that owns the means of production and all the assets.
"Four minutes for a cup of coffee? Yesterday it was only three!" a customer exclaims in a down-market take away shop.
Time is money. Money is time. Time is life.
People might recognise the metaphor more easily if the short-lived class were from the traditional poor and overcrowded countries but the poor in this film are mostly unremarkable by their colour or their accent. They could be Americans, Australians, Canadians, British. The wealthy live almost indefinitely in this film, while the poor must pay by the hour for their lives after the age of 21. Most people accept an ideology called the Demographic Transition where peoples of 'undeveloped countries' are supposed to normally not live past 35 or so, until 'we' bring development to them. So if the film had been made on the edges of the Ganges River, perhaps no-one would have been startled. But this was a film about the future that many candobetter readers would recognise as Now. In Australia.
This is a short article because I don't have much time - frankly. Maybe readers can add to this with their experiences and their responses to In Time.
The current economic crisis in Europe can be compared to a couple in a street building a three storey mansion in a street made up of one storey dwellings and then forcing the residents of the one storey dwellings to stop paying their electricity and gas bills to meet the mortgage repayments of the couple who built the three storey mansion.
Article by Joe Toscano
The scramble by members of the European Union to appoint technocrats as leaders of Greece and Italy highlights how little input electors have on government policy in the 21st century. Unfortunately they have forgotten what is good for the markets isn’t as most governments believe, good for the people they rule.
The current economic crisis in Europe can be compared to a couple in a street building a three storey mansion in a street made up of one storey dwellings and then forcing the residents of the one storey dwellings to stop paying their electricity and gas bills to meet the mortgage repayments of the couple who built the three storey mansion.
The people of Italy and Greece are seething with uncontrolled anger at seeing governments that theoretically represent their interests squandering their taxes to bolster the fortunes of banks and corporations who found themselves at the pointy end of the Global Financial Crisis because of their greed and unconscionable behaviour.
Irrespective of how many technocrats are appointed to European parliaments, irrespective of how many austerity measures are introduced by parliaments that dance to the tune of the corporate parliamentary puppet masters, irrespective of how many governments of national unity are formed to save corporate capitalism’s bacon the people in the streets will ultimately determine government policy.
The parliamentary puppet masters seem to have forgotten that ultimate political authority in a democracy rests in the hands of the people, not the state, the corporate sector, the bureaucracy or the government of the day. When working up the right channels fails, when the ballot box does not reflect the will of the people, when parliament is hijacked by unaccountable corporations and societies institutions are subverted by that small section of society that owns the means of production, distribution, exchange and communication to maximise their profits, the people are left with no other option but to use direct action to put ultimate political authority back into the hands of the people.
Original Source, Issue No.957 of the Anarchist Age Weekly Review which covers the two week period 21st November - 4th December. Latest issue here.
In 2001, the UK had the second highest child poverty rates in the European Union. Ten years on they have grown into angry disaffected youths
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The police brutality issue and the case of the police killing of Duggan is a legal issue and likely a police cultural problem associated with the UK riots last week.
But Duggan's killing belies broader and deeper social problems across English urban societies. The rioting thus far has been in England (London's underprivileged Tottenham, Hackney, Croydon, and working-class English cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Liverpool and Wolverhampton). It has not spread to Scotland, Wales, Ireland, or Northern Ireland yet - why?
Rioting though has also copycatted to the more rural privileged English towns of Cambridge, Gloucester, Bristol and around County Kent - why? What is the common denominator? All riots involved youths and Y-Gens committing break and enter and burglary of retail shops and communicating with social media mobile devices, notably Blackberry's.
It is convenient knee-jerk ignorant simplism by the English government and the media attributing blame to just 'criminals', poor-parented youth, opportunistic hooligans, and gangs.
Poor understanding of social problems by any government will not enable its social problems to be addressed. Inept media analysis also confuses the situation.
Prime Minister Cameron, with his elite background is distant and aloof to England's urban social problems. His ideological mindset as a Conservative is centred upon national economic prosperity, which presumes social good flows from economic growth and prosperity. He seems incapable of recognising the disconnect between the parallel economy of the 'haves' and the 'have nots'.
Cameron is narrow-minded in his reading of the situation. He has said in Parliament last week that what the nation had witnessed was criminality "pure and simple". He said his government would do "whatever it takes to restore law and order". How easy and simplistic it is for Cameron to blame criminals? He sees it as a matter of parental discipline and a lack of responsibility in society. Cameron rejects the suggested underlying causes of underclass and poverty in Britain. He says: "This is not about poverty, it's about culture...a culture that says everything about rights, but nothing about responsibility." Impressive words, but when the leader of country is in denial about the causes of widespread urban riots being more than criminal opportunists, the root causes are ignored and the problems risk getting worse.
Cameron clearly has inherited a depressed and debt-ridden economy from Labor and the GFC. He came to office with an economic mandate to restore sound economic management and this has necessitated severe austerity measures reducing government public service delivery. But by simplistically focusing on addressing the economic ills will not auto-address social ills. Economic and economic policy is a subset of sociology and social policy. Societies don't magically become healthy by delivering on economic policy. Did Blair's Labor window of opportunity for social reform deliver to British have-nots? If not, how could British 'have-nots' have appealed to opposition Conservatives for recognition through the Blair years? What political party was listening to the plight of British underclass who probably voted informally anyway?
David Cameron, like his counterparts in Greece and Italy, are "flat-footed, reactive, trapped in double-talk, these are second-rate political creatures unprepared to deal with those responsible for the crisis". Even Barack Obama has been spineless. Hence the blunt words of Jacques Delors, three times president of the European Commission: "We don't just need firefighters; we need architects too."
A British blogger responding to the riots in Britain agreed: "WTF is going on with this government? Are they deliberately trying to rub our noses in it, or do they just have a tin ear? What a frightening bunch of amateurs."
With injustice now the blighted face of democracy, cynicism and fatalism gain ground. "What's the best way to deal with this crisis?", runs a popular Japanese joke. The answer: "Let the system collapse." The panacea looks more plausible by the day.' [Professor John Keane, 12th August 2011].
Cameron needs to get out more and listen to the ordinary citizens of urban England. He is sending an arrogant classist message by taking foreign holidays in Tuscany, while England's poor and unemployed are suffering abject downtrodden hopelessness. The public's perception that the government has let the banks and financial gamblers get away with rampant insolvency and handballing the corporate debt to the State is not helping matters.
England's and Britain's demographic been allowed to radically alter as a consequence of open door immigration. Whilst the country side may be relatively similar, Britain's urban demographic has little similarity to that of the 1960s or even the 1980s. Immigrants are a dominant characteristic of British urban society. What was the population policy plan and intended outcome? Where was the social investment in making multiculturalism work? There has been none. Since Thatcher economics has been rather liberal and laissez faire. Problem is the same approach has been taken of changing urban society. Economic theory is inappropriate for social re-engineering. Much of urban England and Britain is characterised by inter-generational unemployment, truancy, child poverty, broken homes, domestic violence and street crime.
What causes thousands of people in multiple urban centres to riot, commit violence, arson and loot shops? Recognise no single one cause. Many are clearly opportunists. Not all are disaffected underclass. But as to the underlying causes, start where people see injustice. Examine the social problems in England urban centres over the past twenty years. Who sent the messages inciting the riots? Controlling street violence is essential in the short term, and I am sure we will see the water canon armoured vehicles in London reminiscent of their use in the Northern Ireland riots of the 1970s. But water canons can't prevent riots and can't address the causes.
In 2001, the UK had the second highest child poverty rates in the European Union. [Read More]
Well those children are now adolescents and many have nowhere to go and no hope for the future. And dangled in front of them and in the media constantly is the government's Olympic decadence.
Cameron's Olympics do not have a happy outlook. English urban society has a far bleaker outlook.
London 2012 Olympics logo - it may well become a legacy of English society divided
Tigerquoll
Suggan Buggan
Snowy River Region
Victoria 3885
Australia
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