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users. The phones were about the size of a half-brick, with a long protruding antenna and large, awkward white buttons; their batteries could support only sixty minutes of talk time, and their memories stored only the last number dialled. Two hundred Zairean officials called each other at home and overseas over the next year without paying for a single call. Telecel covered all expenses. ‘You'd go in to a minister's office and you'd see a “Telecel” [as the phones became known] on his desk.’ 6
coincidence that these things are associated with the housewife of the 1940s; the scrimping and saving, head-scarfed and rosy-cheeked heroine of the home front. As Clarke and Newman argue, austerity in the UK today necessarily invites echoes of that earlier postwar austerity by dint of the existence of a collective memory of rationing, making do and mending, and a culture of restraint (2012). But there is more at play here than simple collective memory. There is also a wilful play upon that memory –a politically and ideologically charged intent to connect the two eras
responsible for over half of all party donations to the Conservatives, now in government. 24 What was equally concerning was the refusal to have a proper, public inquiry into what happened. The biggest financial crisis in living memory had just occurred, throwing the country into recession. Government had used hundreds of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to bail out the banking system. However, the Labour government refused to hold an investigation. Lord McFall, as chair of the
architecture of the leading enterprises were of the closed-system type.5 DEC’s components, for example, were hardwired to one another. The microprocessor, the motherboard, Resurgence of Route 128 161 the memory chips, the disk drive, the operating system, the display screen, the software programmes, the printer, the printer microprocessor, the printer engine software, all of the computer peripherals were designed according to a proprietary (and closed) architecture.6 Sub-contractors made peripheral parts but were not encouraged to develop independent design capabilities
and reduce excessive risk taking are captured and weakened. A second dimension is regulatory relapse. Regulators are human and, like investors, they are subject to memory loss and reinterpretation of history. Consequently, they too forget the lessons of the past and buy into rhetoric regarding the end of the business cycle. This results in a willingness to weaken regulation, on
. 2 Hopefully, this volume will fill some of this gap. The Treasury as an institution of contradictions I have never had an official tour of the Treasury buildings at 1 Horse Guards Road, but I have visited a few times and been led to various offices and meeting rooms. It is part of the Government Offices Great George Street (‘GOGGS’). From the front entrance it looks out on St James’ Park. As with much of Westminster, my memories of the place are of moving through security checkpoints and wandering
in the tradition of the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, who was one of the first economists to model the economy as a whole. He introduced the idea of the ‘animal spirits’ of investors driving booms and busts in financial markets; economists like Minsky built on and developed these ideas while neoclassical economists largely ignored the financial sector. 70 The econocracy Unfortunately, as the crisis has receded from memory the economics profession has been quick to reassert its authority. One of the more surprising responses has been to invoke a theory
1929, to 1939 and to 1946, reasonably marking stages in Keynes’s intellectual and political career. The belle époque and its demise (1883–1914) Keynes was born into a world of affluent complacency. British capitalism seemed unthreatened either at home – Chartism was a distant memory – or abroad – industrial and military superiority could see off resistance in the colonies with murderous efficiency. The British Navy, in particular, protected the Empire from European challengers. Keynes would later articulate this pre-war world with typical panache
, can be seen as important versions of ‘imperfectionist’ thinking. Minsky builds on the logic Keynes described, according to which it becomes entirely rational in financial markets to make decisions on the basis of other people’s decisions. Rising asset prices are often an incentive to buy rather than to sell. Money and financial assets do not obey laws of supply and demand. As discussed in Chapter 7 , money is not ‘produced’ by the private sector. Minsky ( 1986 ) depicts a scenario whereby stability breeds instability as past bubbles fade from the memory and
, Sage. Marquand, D (1988), The Unprincipled Society, London, Fontana. Marx, K. (1975), Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Misztal, B. A. (1996), Trust in Modern Societies, Cambridge, Polity. Offe, C. and Heinz, R. G. (1992), Beyond Employment, trans. A. Braley, Cambridge, Polity. O’Neill, J. (1994), Ecology, Policy and Politics, London, Routledge. Polanyi, K. (1944), The Great Transformation, New York, Beacon Press. Rothstein, B. (no date), ‘Trust, social dilemmas and collective memories’, mimeo. Sanghera, B. S. (1998), ‘The social embeddedness of markets: the