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this dispensation found new sanction in a rich and dynamic amalgamation of civic republican, Protestant, Stoic, and democratic sensibilities, but it did so primarily as a private affair’ (2011:13). Liberated from providentialism, and the sense that one’s place in heaven (or not) was determined from birth, the practice of thrift, if in any sense religious, became a way to secure a place in heaven one had not yet been given, as opposed to merely keeping the place one already had. In the nineteenth century one worked (and thrifted) one’s way into heaven. However, on the
Introduction This chapter introduces economics as Keynes encountered it and then how his own work before the General Theory begins to break from orthodoxy. Keynes depicts almost all his predecessors, at least those he considered worth discussing, as ‘classical’ economists. He acknowledges that this stretches the concept, but it allows him to include not just ‘Ricardo and James Mill and their predecessors …[but also] the followers of Ricardo’ ( 1973 : footnote 3). His understanding therefore includes the later marginalist or ‘neo-classical’ writers
doors to all these foreign people, they're given houses, they're given furniture, they're given this that and the other. And then you've got someone that was born and bred here, I worked until I became ill, and now I have to basically beg for my little bit of money. They know exactly what they're doing! My mum's one of them pensioners that's looking at cuts. My mum is 77, she started working from the age of 10. I think she's entitled to her money, and I think if they took some of their own pay cuts they wouldn't have to tax us so much. Because, trust me, they could
intellectually as well as personally to several leading philosophers of the age. He was particularly strongly influenced by Moore, and wrote one major work, the Treatise on Probability , which operates at the intersection of mathematics, logic and philosophy. There is controversy about the influence of this early work, and of Keynes’s philosophical thought in general, but there are clearly connections between his philosophy, his politics and his mature economics (Fitzgibbons 1988 , O’Donnell 1991 , Tabb 1999 ). It will be argued that Keynes never develops an entirely
the late 1970s there has also been a presupposition in favour of competition and markets through structural reform which aims to make labour markets more flexible and introduces large-scale privatisation and outsourcing. In all of this, foundational services and the infrastructures that enable them to be provided are subordinate. It is assumed that income support must not interfere with work incentives, education should create workforce skills and health services are to be funded from taxes on incomes, even as tax rates are being cut and growth is increasingly hard
designed for practical purposes, as part of having goals to work to, accountability to comply with and learnings to be taken. But it suggests a rather narrow description of how people – in this instance Africans – live their lives. They have agency – things don't just happen to them. Adopting technologies only affects particular aspects of their lives and the choices they make, however circumscribed these might be. It has been suggested that ‘Appropriation is the process through which technology users go beyond mere adoption to make technology their own and to embed it
, psychological characteristics, the power of the nation-state, are at best partial and one-sided but become potentially useful once understood within the context of exploitation, accumulation and dynamic change: once put in their proper analytical place. Much of Keynes’s work can be reconceived in this light. One important implication, which will be emphasised in what follows, is that Keynes’s general theory is rather less general than he claims (Hodgson 2004 ). He bases this claim for generality primarily on the grounds that his theory incorporates the ‘special case’ of
in that restless purgatory between wakefulness and sleep. ‘The thing is’, he offers, slowly, ‘I get what you’re saying about privatisation – it hasn’t worked. But half the time, it’s not the train company that’s made me late, but the unions. The amount of times I’ve sat for hours on a replacement bus when the union’s called another bloody strike. You won’t fix the railways without sorting out the unions. We all want a pay rise, but it’s getting ridiculous.’ Ruth agrees. She works part-time in
proposes, although the calculations behind this figure have not been published. 3 But that sum is minuscule in the context of the railways’ financial crisis. As discussed in Chapter 1 , by the time of the Covid-19 outbreak, public subsidy paid to the railways was totalling £13 billion per year, around four times more than had been required by BR. The last thing the railways needed was the sudden loss of income caused by the social distancing and work-from-home requirements that dealing with the pandemic entailed. The
For a number of decades our economy has failed to work for ordinary citizens. Stagnant wages have been combined with underemployment and rising costs of basic goods like healthcare, education and housing. At the same time, a small minority of the population make obscene profits, while in the background we continue to hurtle headlong into an environmental emergency. However, despite there being no shortage of anger and anti-elite sentiment expressed in what is often referred to as the ‘culture wars’, no significant challenge to the dominant economic model has broken into the mainstream. The pound and the fury argues that behind this failure of imagination are a set of taken-for-granted myths about how the economy works – myths that stifle debate and block change. The book analyses these myths, explores their origin, how they circulate and how they might be dispelled at a time when, away from the public gaze, economic theory is opening up new possibilities of economic action. Possibilities that, as we emerge from the chaos of Covid-19, could lead to the radical structural changes we desperately need.