It seems I'm not the only one to have thought of comparing (in my post on 'Debt: Now we are Paying for the Future we Borrowed' on 13 December) how some people are reacting to the difficult circumstances of the present time to the stages of grief or bereavement. I saw an article today saying that Zizek in 'Living in the End Times' thinks the West has suffered a form of bereavement in the past five years and that he quotes Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief.
Nothing is original, but I hadn't read the book first - but perhaps it would sound more impressive if I claimed that I had!
Monday 19 December 2011
Friday 16 December 2011
Unemployment in Worcesershire - November 2011
Against this week's gloomy news about unemployment Worcestershire offers a small bright spot insofar as the claimant count has fallen by 177 compared with last month to 10,666. Having said that, the claimant count was up only slightly nationally, compared with the more widely used labour force survey figure that showed an increase of 128,000 to 2.64m. And when one compares the figures with a year ago the claimant count in Worcestershire has increased by 395 with the biggest increase by far being in Worcester at 207 higher. There is insufficient information to be able to point to a cause such as the large number of public sector jobs in the city and, of course, the County Council, for example, employ many people across the county and not just at County Hall. Although not quoted in the figures from the monthly County Economic Summary I heard a figure of 6.5% quoted in the media as the level of unemployment in the county on the more widely used basis as compared with their county claimant level of 3.8%.
More generally, whilst the claimant count isn't broken down by industry, it is possible to get an indirect indication of occupations where unemployment has increased. The greatest increase in claimants since November 2010 has been in Sales and Customer Service occupations (565 and 32.2%). The largest decrease has been in Process, plant and machine operatives (205 and 16.1%). As in previous months, the three urban districts in the county have claimant count rates in excess of 4% as compared with the rural districts that are around 3%.
The number of vacancies at JobCentres has fallen compared with last month, perhaps reflecting the decrease in unemployment, but this is a seasonal trend with the same kind of fall in vacancies 12 months ago. Rather strangely, the largest proportion of vacancies is in the category real estate, renting and business activities at 2,953 out of 4,532 or 65.2%. Quite what the business activities are in not clear but they must surely account for most of the vacancies rather than real estate and renting - there can't be that many new letting agencies! It is interesting to look at the destinations of those who leave the claimant count, with the largest number (1,095 out of a total of 2360) reassuringly being because they have found work, but nearly as many are because they failed to sign (685) and 'not known' (260). All the other categories are in double figures or less.
The trend in long-term unemployment is going up again with the proportion of claimants in the county who have been in receipt of benefit for more than six months having increased by 0.1 % to 37.3% between October and November 2011 and the proportion in receipt of benefit for more than 12 months increasing by 1.5% between September and October 2011 to 14.7%.
Youth unemployment has thankfully fallen by 0.3% since last month to 7.5% but is still 0.5% higher than this time last year. The ward with the highest figures is again Oldington and Foley Park in Kidderminster which has gone up by 1% since last month and 1.9% since November 2010. All of the wards in the county on the 'top 10' have a rate of 12.3% or higher with Gorse Hill, which I have an interest in through the Tolladine Project in my 'home' parish third (behind Ripple with 10 out of 64 young people out of work making an unusual entry). There are then three Redditch wards, Church Hill, Greenlands and Abbey. Harvington and Norton, which is in Wychavon's rural 'area of highest need' project area and Great Hampton, also in Wychavon, both appear for the first time, probably due to relatively small numbers affecting percentages. This may be telling us something about the changing spread of young people's unemployment, or may be a statistical blip. With my rural hat on, I will keep an eye on this.
So far against the gloomy national and wider West Midlands (where the figures went up) backdrop, Worcestershire continues to fare reasonably well. But the worrying outlook for coming months, and some of the darker predictions, suggests we need to keep a careful watch on the human effects that the statistics point to. Will there be anything we and the Church more generally, might do to ameliorate the human cost?
More generally, whilst the claimant count isn't broken down by industry, it is possible to get an indirect indication of occupations where unemployment has increased. The greatest increase in claimants since November 2010 has been in Sales and Customer Service occupations (565 and 32.2%). The largest decrease has been in Process, plant and machine operatives (205 and 16.1%). As in previous months, the three urban districts in the county have claimant count rates in excess of 4% as compared with the rural districts that are around 3%.
The number of vacancies at JobCentres has fallen compared with last month, perhaps reflecting the decrease in unemployment, but this is a seasonal trend with the same kind of fall in vacancies 12 months ago. Rather strangely, the largest proportion of vacancies is in the category real estate, renting and business activities at 2,953 out of 4,532 or 65.2%. Quite what the business activities are in not clear but they must surely account for most of the vacancies rather than real estate and renting - there can't be that many new letting agencies! It is interesting to look at the destinations of those who leave the claimant count, with the largest number (1,095 out of a total of 2360) reassuringly being because they have found work, but nearly as many are because they failed to sign (685) and 'not known' (260). All the other categories are in double figures or less.
The trend in long-term unemployment is going up again with the proportion of claimants in the county who have been in receipt of benefit for more than six months having increased by 0.1 % to 37.3% between October and November 2011 and the proportion in receipt of benefit for more than 12 months increasing by 1.5% between September and October 2011 to 14.7%.
Youth unemployment has thankfully fallen by 0.3% since last month to 7.5% but is still 0.5% higher than this time last year. The ward with the highest figures is again Oldington and Foley Park in Kidderminster which has gone up by 1% since last month and 1.9% since November 2010. All of the wards in the county on the 'top 10' have a rate of 12.3% or higher with Gorse Hill, which I have an interest in through the Tolladine Project in my 'home' parish third (behind Ripple with 10 out of 64 young people out of work making an unusual entry). There are then three Redditch wards, Church Hill, Greenlands and Abbey. Harvington and Norton, which is in Wychavon's rural 'area of highest need' project area and Great Hampton, also in Wychavon, both appear for the first time, probably due to relatively small numbers affecting percentages. This may be telling us something about the changing spread of young people's unemployment, or may be a statistical blip. With my rural hat on, I will keep an eye on this.
So far against the gloomy national and wider West Midlands (where the figures went up) backdrop, Worcestershire continues to fare reasonably well. But the worrying outlook for coming months, and some of the darker predictions, suggests we need to keep a careful watch on the human effects that the statistics point to. Will there be anything we and the Church more generally, might do to ameliorate the human cost?
Tuesday 13 December 2011
Rebalancing - or Turning Round - the Economy
I said in my previous post I wanted to think about about 'rebalancing' the economy. I was struck by a piece by Paul Mason, the Economics editor of Newsnight, which was shown at the end of November. It was a packed programme and there was no discussion afterwards, but I think it was a very significant film in which he went back to his native North West to discuss how we might grow manufacturing. The North West is still apparently the largest area in the UK by value for manufacturing. Fortunately, a good deal of the essence of the programme is captured in his blog.
Go behind the detail, probably at the point about half way down when he says, 'I've spent the week in the north of England...' and you get the essence of the policy changes needed. The reason for my interest in this is that, of course, it's pretty obvious that the West Midlands is an area that has just as much of an interest in making manufacturing work as has the North West. And as I have said before, over the past nearly fifteen years the 'output gap' of the West Midlands compared with the UK average has widened, despite the best efforts of the now defunct Advantage West Midlands regional development agency and all those other people and organisations that worked with them. And as I have also said previously, with less resources the prospects don't look good for our Local Enterprise Partnerships.
The reality is, however, that the kind of long-term structural changes that Paul Mason is talking about are beyond the remit of the LEPs. As the graphs at the end of his article show, we would need to move from a country and society that has based so much of its economy and life on consumption to one that embraces investment and trade in the sense of making and selling things. Some of those 'things' might be intangible like the manufacturing services that Mason uses to illustrate his article, but they would not be ephemeral like so much of the 'output' of the financial services industry, much of which, as again I have said before, is a zero-sum game of moving money around.
Manufacturing has withered in this country to the extent that now it produces only 12% of GDP, and employs only 2 million people, although the proportions are higher in the West Midlands and even in Worcestershire. By comparison, financial services creates nearly as high a proportion of GDP (around 10%) but employs only 1 million people and many of them are in ordinary high street banks and not the City. In the US, Wall Street is one sixth of the size of US manufacturing. And whilst much is made of the taxes financial services have paid that are claimed to have supported welfare spending and things such as tax credits, research has shown that the financial sector paid only £193bn in tax between 2002 and 2008 compared with £378bn paid by manufacturing.
Whilst it would be foolish to reduce the role of financial services too quickly, I am still of the opinion that devices such as a financial transactions (or Robin Hood) tax should be a means of putting sand in the wheels of the mass of socially useless transactions carried out in the City (and hedge funds in Mayfair) as part of reducing the excessive role of the financial sector in our economy and society. Obviously, I wouldn't agree with Mr. Cameron's EU veto, nor with my MP who was toeing the party line in a letter to me on the subject of the transactions tax a couple of months ago.
On the other side, if manufacturing and productive services are to grow there is a need to stimulate demand. Much of the Chancellor's Autumn Statement was about easing supply side restrictions and making more credit available. However, firms won't invest unless they can see a demand for more production and the current melancholy state of much of the market-place provides little encouragement. With options so constrained in stimulating the economy, Mr Osborne is trying hard to free up some of the private money held by pension funds and the like who need a reliable dividend stream by encouraging them to invest in infrastructure. Ultimately, this kind of quasi-Keynesian investment will make the economy more efficient and productive and thus grow demand, but infrastructure takes time and can't simply be turned on.
There are no real quick fixes. As Mason says, it is 'about all the buzzwords politicians like to use - skill, tax-breaks, clusters, apprenticeships, seed-funding', but these are long-term policies, many of which we've supposedly been trying for some time. It is also about our state of mind as a nation that begins to say again that production and creativity are more important than consumption and dealing. On Panorama on 12 December (How to Survive the Downturn) James Dyson was bemoaning the number of science, engineering and similar graduates who could make far more money in the City than in working for him or similar firms. The Church has produced some thinking recently about the nature and meaning of work, such as the recent series of essays in Crucible (January -March 2011). It may be time to take this further than the nature of work at an individual level to look instead at the wider significance of different types of work.
This may connect with the distinction I have alluded to already, and that I heard Professor David Green make at the seminar organised by the Diocese with Worcester University Business School last May and also Andrew Dilnot in his talk at the diocesan clergy conference, between the value of production and consumption within our society. This it seems to me is an area of Christian ethical thinking that merits further attention.
Go behind the detail, probably at the point about half way down when he says, 'I've spent the week in the north of England...' and you get the essence of the policy changes needed. The reason for my interest in this is that, of course, it's pretty obvious that the West Midlands is an area that has just as much of an interest in making manufacturing work as has the North West. And as I have said before, over the past nearly fifteen years the 'output gap' of the West Midlands compared with the UK average has widened, despite the best efforts of the now defunct Advantage West Midlands regional development agency and all those other people and organisations that worked with them. And as I have also said previously, with less resources the prospects don't look good for our Local Enterprise Partnerships.
The reality is, however, that the kind of long-term structural changes that Paul Mason is talking about are beyond the remit of the LEPs. As the graphs at the end of his article show, we would need to move from a country and society that has based so much of its economy and life on consumption to one that embraces investment and trade in the sense of making and selling things. Some of those 'things' might be intangible like the manufacturing services that Mason uses to illustrate his article, but they would not be ephemeral like so much of the 'output' of the financial services industry, much of which, as again I have said before, is a zero-sum game of moving money around.
Manufacturing has withered in this country to the extent that now it produces only 12% of GDP, and employs only 2 million people, although the proportions are higher in the West Midlands and even in Worcestershire. By comparison, financial services creates nearly as high a proportion of GDP (around 10%) but employs only 1 million people and many of them are in ordinary high street banks and not the City. In the US, Wall Street is one sixth of the size of US manufacturing. And whilst much is made of the taxes financial services have paid that are claimed to have supported welfare spending and things such as tax credits, research has shown that the financial sector paid only £193bn in tax between 2002 and 2008 compared with £378bn paid by manufacturing.
Whilst it would be foolish to reduce the role of financial services too quickly, I am still of the opinion that devices such as a financial transactions (or Robin Hood) tax should be a means of putting sand in the wheels of the mass of socially useless transactions carried out in the City (and hedge funds in Mayfair) as part of reducing the excessive role of the financial sector in our economy and society. Obviously, I wouldn't agree with Mr. Cameron's EU veto, nor with my MP who was toeing the party line in a letter to me on the subject of the transactions tax a couple of months ago.
On the other side, if manufacturing and productive services are to grow there is a need to stimulate demand. Much of the Chancellor's Autumn Statement was about easing supply side restrictions and making more credit available. However, firms won't invest unless they can see a demand for more production and the current melancholy state of much of the market-place provides little encouragement. With options so constrained in stimulating the economy, Mr Osborne is trying hard to free up some of the private money held by pension funds and the like who need a reliable dividend stream by encouraging them to invest in infrastructure. Ultimately, this kind of quasi-Keynesian investment will make the economy more efficient and productive and thus grow demand, but infrastructure takes time and can't simply be turned on.
There are no real quick fixes. As Mason says, it is 'about all the buzzwords politicians like to use - skill, tax-breaks, clusters, apprenticeships, seed-funding', but these are long-term policies, many of which we've supposedly been trying for some time. It is also about our state of mind as a nation that begins to say again that production and creativity are more important than consumption and dealing. On Panorama on 12 December (How to Survive the Downturn) James Dyson was bemoaning the number of science, engineering and similar graduates who could make far more money in the City than in working for him or similar firms. The Church has produced some thinking recently about the nature and meaning of work, such as the recent series of essays in Crucible (January -March 2011). It may be time to take this further than the nature of work at an individual level to look instead at the wider significance of different types of work.
This may connect with the distinction I have alluded to already, and that I heard Professor David Green make at the seminar organised by the Diocese with Worcester University Business School last May and also Andrew Dilnot in his talk at the diocesan clergy conference, between the value of production and consumption within our society. This it seems to me is an area of Christian ethical thinking that merits further attention.
Debt: Now we're Paying for the Future we Borrowed
I've not been able to post anythingfor a couple of weeks due to work and other pressures, but there have been a couple of items that have been in my mind that merit comment. The first is why all the debt we are burdened with is slowing down the recovery and will continue to do so without some radical action. The second, which I will put in a separate post, is a reflection on how difficult it will be to 'rebalance' the economy.
So firstly, Robert Peston has pointed up how much debt there is in the UK. In his two Sunday night programmes 'The Party's Over: How the West Went Bust', and particularly the one on 11 December he shows how we are struggling as compared with the way, for example, China is working and saving hard in the first programme. This isn't just about government debt that so worries the Chancellor, but all the debt both corporate and private. And what Peston in a blog on this particular issue is saying, is that 'the aggregate indebtedness of the UK - that's the sum of household debts, company debts, government debts and bank debts - had risen to 492% of GDP, or almost five times the value of everything we produce in a single year'. This is up from 481% at the end of 2008. You can look at the numbers in Peston's article, but essentially what it is saying is that household and business debt has come down very slightly since 2008, financial debt has actually increased (though this isn't so bad because this has resulted in debt being swaped from shorter-term to longer-term) and government debt has increased from quite a lowish figure to somewhere near the average for similar countries, because debt has been shuffled from the private to public sector. The government kept spending when everyone else stopped, and as Peston says, if they hadn't we'd have had an even worse recession.
The upshot of all this debt is that we will have a pretty thin time of it over the coming years (perhaps 1% growth p.a. instead of the 3% of the 16 boom years before the crash) as we gradually pay down the debt, which inevitably takes spending out of the economy, thus reducing demand. Alongside this has been the emerging realisation, beside all the smoke and fireworks of Mr. Cameron's EU veto is that the regime Germany wants to impose on the rest of the Eurozone will lead to precuious little growth in the coming years because there is no space for expansionary fiscal spending.
At the tail end of Newsnight on 12 December was a discussion with Gillian Tett (the FT's US Editor), Richard Koo (Chief Economist of Nomura Bank) and Amartya Sen. It focussed on Koo's analysis of Japan, whose companies' balance sheets were 'under water', as he put it, and the 'lost decade' or more since the 1990s. Part of the discussion centred around whether social cohesion is possible with 1% or less growth. He pointed out that unemployment never rose above 5.5%, largely because others took on debts to enable companies to pay down their indebtedness. Japan now has one of the highest levels of government debt in the world, but this isn't seen as a threat because most of it is held by Japanese individuals rather than banks around the world. The question seems to be if we don't think we can increase government spending, can we hold society together with little or no growth - or even as in some parts of southern Europe austerity and inevitable contraction?
This is the point at which the Euro-crisis and indeed the wider economic crisis is no longer an economic or even a political issue, but a social and ethical issue. The point was also made (I think in the same Newsnight discussion) that the question is also about how the pain is shared around. At the moment the pain is being taken largely by the poor, and to some extent, the so-called 'squeezed middle', largely because of inflation out-stripping wages.
There is much debate about the causes of the summer riots, and it is a minefield I hesitate to enter, with those condemning it as pure criminality shouting loudest. In the first instance that may be true, but if we look beneath the surface there is a group of people (not just the opportunists) with little hope who see a world whose values are predicated upon consumption of status symbols they can't hope to share in. That's not to condone what happened, and I have great sympathy for the shopkeepers and others who suffered because of the looting, but if we reach a situation with youth and other unemployment continuing to rise (there is a report this morning saying hiring intentions are flat for the next three months and perhaps beyond) then there may come a point at which discontent will rise up. Rowan Williams's recent comment on the 'Reading the Riots' research is rich in the sense of the way in which so many young people in the poorer parts of our country do not feel in any sense that they are valued. This surely ought to be a huge challenge. In a very small way, the Tolladine Project here in Worcester, in which I have some small involvement, is trying to begin to do something about that with some of the children on the estate. It is very early days, but by having our church open and by making contact in other ways through our new community missioner and others, we are trying to say that we will not turn those children away and that they are to be valued for who they are. At times that is challenging and it means that for us as adults we have to adapt what we do or to go out on a limb when we would be more comfortable doing things differently. This is a long way from the kind of structural changes that Rowan Williams is talking about, but it is the beginning of something that we have been bold enough to say we hope will transform lives through the Christian gospel. That is a very bold claim, but if we believe that Christianity is about more than loving our neighbour, it is about new life, than it is a challenge we must seek to rise to.
I also sense anger and disillusion, though hardly likely to result in civil discontent, amongst many other people I visit in workplaces as a chaplain - perhaps members of the 'squeezed middle'. With living standards eroded by inflation, pension prospects being threatened and anxiety about job security, many are not used to this state of affairs and they are pretty unhappy about it. I wondered in a recent sermon if this was a bit like the early stages of bereavement. We are used to drawing the parallel in redundancy situations, where there is a sense of numbness and/or anger in the early stages before at least some coming to terms if not acceptance. It is only after this that it is possible to see how a new way of living might be possible. I don't want to overdo the analogy, but what I was trying to say in the sermon was this may be an opportunity to rebalance values away from the material and from consumption in itself as giving meaning to life, to something that we Christians would want to point to in the Advent and Christmas message. The Church does, though, have a great deal of work to do if it is to communicate this in a way that can be understood by the many whose lives have given them so little contact with anything that Christianity might say.
We face some difficult years ahead, and alongside that, there is much talk of rebalancing our economy into something that is based on firmer foundations and is more productive. As I said at the beginning, I want to say something about that in another post, but it seems to me, that there is also a need to rebalance our society both in terms of how the pain, but also the good is shared out, and into something where values that drive it are different. There is work to be done here by Christians if they want to connect more than by simply restating basic beliefs. It may be that a book by John Reader, a former colleague of mine, and some others from the William Temple Foundation, entitled 'Christianity and the New Social Order' might help with this. It is on my Christmas holiday reading list! Also on my reading list is a book called 'Debunking Economics: the naked emperor dethroned' by Steve Keen, which advances the theory of debt deflation. If the present orthodoxy isn't working and Keynesian expansion is difficult because of the level of debt (though not all Keynesians would agree with this), then perhaps we need to look to an alternative way out of the crisis.
So firstly, Robert Peston has pointed up how much debt there is in the UK. In his two Sunday night programmes 'The Party's Over: How the West Went Bust', and particularly the one on 11 December he shows how we are struggling as compared with the way, for example, China is working and saving hard in the first programme. This isn't just about government debt that so worries the Chancellor, but all the debt both corporate and private. And what Peston in a blog on this particular issue is saying, is that 'the aggregate indebtedness of the UK - that's the sum of household debts, company debts, government debts and bank debts - had risen to 492% of GDP, or almost five times the value of everything we produce in a single year'. This is up from 481% at the end of 2008. You can look at the numbers in Peston's article, but essentially what it is saying is that household and business debt has come down very slightly since 2008, financial debt has actually increased (though this isn't so bad because this has resulted in debt being swaped from shorter-term to longer-term) and government debt has increased from quite a lowish figure to somewhere near the average for similar countries, because debt has been shuffled from the private to public sector. The government kept spending when everyone else stopped, and as Peston says, if they hadn't we'd have had an even worse recession.
The upshot of all this debt is that we will have a pretty thin time of it over the coming years (perhaps 1% growth p.a. instead of the 3% of the 16 boom years before the crash) as we gradually pay down the debt, which inevitably takes spending out of the economy, thus reducing demand. Alongside this has been the emerging realisation, beside all the smoke and fireworks of Mr. Cameron's EU veto is that the regime Germany wants to impose on the rest of the Eurozone will lead to precuious little growth in the coming years because there is no space for expansionary fiscal spending.
At the tail end of Newsnight on 12 December was a discussion with Gillian Tett (the FT's US Editor), Richard Koo (Chief Economist of Nomura Bank) and Amartya Sen. It focussed on Koo's analysis of Japan, whose companies' balance sheets were 'under water', as he put it, and the 'lost decade' or more since the 1990s. Part of the discussion centred around whether social cohesion is possible with 1% or less growth. He pointed out that unemployment never rose above 5.5%, largely because others took on debts to enable companies to pay down their indebtedness. Japan now has one of the highest levels of government debt in the world, but this isn't seen as a threat because most of it is held by Japanese individuals rather than banks around the world. The question seems to be if we don't think we can increase government spending, can we hold society together with little or no growth - or even as in some parts of southern Europe austerity and inevitable contraction?
This is the point at which the Euro-crisis and indeed the wider economic crisis is no longer an economic or even a political issue, but a social and ethical issue. The point was also made (I think in the same Newsnight discussion) that the question is also about how the pain is shared around. At the moment the pain is being taken largely by the poor, and to some extent, the so-called 'squeezed middle', largely because of inflation out-stripping wages.
There is much debate about the causes of the summer riots, and it is a minefield I hesitate to enter, with those condemning it as pure criminality shouting loudest. In the first instance that may be true, but if we look beneath the surface there is a group of people (not just the opportunists) with little hope who see a world whose values are predicated upon consumption of status symbols they can't hope to share in. That's not to condone what happened, and I have great sympathy for the shopkeepers and others who suffered because of the looting, but if we reach a situation with youth and other unemployment continuing to rise (there is a report this morning saying hiring intentions are flat for the next three months and perhaps beyond) then there may come a point at which discontent will rise up. Rowan Williams's recent comment on the 'Reading the Riots' research is rich in the sense of the way in which so many young people in the poorer parts of our country do not feel in any sense that they are valued. This surely ought to be a huge challenge. In a very small way, the Tolladine Project here in Worcester, in which I have some small involvement, is trying to begin to do something about that with some of the children on the estate. It is very early days, but by having our church open and by making contact in other ways through our new community missioner and others, we are trying to say that we will not turn those children away and that they are to be valued for who they are. At times that is challenging and it means that for us as adults we have to adapt what we do or to go out on a limb when we would be more comfortable doing things differently. This is a long way from the kind of structural changes that Rowan Williams is talking about, but it is the beginning of something that we have been bold enough to say we hope will transform lives through the Christian gospel. That is a very bold claim, but if we believe that Christianity is about more than loving our neighbour, it is about new life, than it is a challenge we must seek to rise to.
I also sense anger and disillusion, though hardly likely to result in civil discontent, amongst many other people I visit in workplaces as a chaplain - perhaps members of the 'squeezed middle'. With living standards eroded by inflation, pension prospects being threatened and anxiety about job security, many are not used to this state of affairs and they are pretty unhappy about it. I wondered in a recent sermon if this was a bit like the early stages of bereavement. We are used to drawing the parallel in redundancy situations, where there is a sense of numbness and/or anger in the early stages before at least some coming to terms if not acceptance. It is only after this that it is possible to see how a new way of living might be possible. I don't want to overdo the analogy, but what I was trying to say in the sermon was this may be an opportunity to rebalance values away from the material and from consumption in itself as giving meaning to life, to something that we Christians would want to point to in the Advent and Christmas message. The Church does, though, have a great deal of work to do if it is to communicate this in a way that can be understood by the many whose lives have given them so little contact with anything that Christianity might say.
We face some difficult years ahead, and alongside that, there is much talk of rebalancing our economy into something that is based on firmer foundations and is more productive. As I said at the beginning, I want to say something about that in another post, but it seems to me, that there is also a need to rebalance our society both in terms of how the pain, but also the good is shared out, and into something where values that drive it are different. There is work to be done here by Christians if they want to connect more than by simply restating basic beliefs. It may be that a book by John Reader, a former colleague of mine, and some others from the William Temple Foundation, entitled 'Christianity and the New Social Order' might help with this. It is on my Christmas holiday reading list! Also on my reading list is a book called 'Debunking Economics: the naked emperor dethroned' by Steve Keen, which advances the theory of debt deflation. If the present orthodoxy isn't working and Keynesian expansion is difficult because of the level of debt (though not all Keynesians would agree with this), then perhaps we need to look to an alternative way out of the crisis.
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