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The well-being of Europe’s citizens depends less on individual consumption and more on their social consumption of essential goods and services – from water and retail banking to schools and care homes – in what we call the foundational economy. Individual consumption depends on market income, while foundational consumption depends on social infrastructure and delivery systems of networks and branches, which are neither created nor renewed automatically, even as incomes increase. This historically created foundational economy has been wrecked in the last generation by privatisation, outsourcing, franchising and the widespread penetration of opportunistic and predatory business models. The distinctive, primary role of public policy should therefore be to secure the supply of basic services for all citizens (not a quantum of economic growth and jobs). Reconstructing the foundational has to start with a vision of citizenship that identifies foundational entitlements as the conditions for dignified human development, and likewise has to depend on treating the business enterprises central to the foundational economy as juridical persons with claims to entitlements but also with responsibilities and duties. If the aim is citizen well-being and flourishing for the many not the few, then European politics at regional, national and EU level needs to be refocused on foundational consumption and securing universal minimum access and quality. If/when government is unresponsive, the impetus for change has to come from engaging citizens locally and regionally in actions which break with the top down politics of ‘vote for us and we will do this for you’.
the EU to gain UK residency early in 2004. 46 In the 2010s, and despite tough talk from Cameron about limiting immigration, annual net migration into the UK continued to be in the hundreds of thousands. In fact, over the decade 2010–20, the UK population grew by 4.5 million, usually unevenly distributed and often concentrated in particular areas. Two-thirds of the new jobs in precarious work sectors created in the Coalition years went to such new immigrants. 47 Much
vastly unequal global economic system, which we have explored in earlier chapters. The effects of climate breakdown, including increased drought and increased extreme weather events, are already directly driving global flows of migration and causing conflicts that in turn cause migration. When climate migrants trek to the southern border of the United States or try to cross the
immigrant workforce in the state had a bachelor’s degree or higher (MTC, 1998).) In-migration has taken up much of the slack from the shortfall of engineering graduates of colleges and universities in the state. The number of foreign-born and, in most cases, foreign-educated technical workforce has accumulated to a sizeable fraction of the total pool. Furthermore, the figure suggests another source of increased technical labour supply in Massachusetts: graduates who remain in Massachusetts. Of the 6,000 graduates produced per year, a higher percentage stays in the state
murderous, reality of capitalism for many of the world’s poor (Benanav 2015 ). This also suggests it is no accident that Marx substantially defers a discussion of unemployment to a higher level of concreteness than in Capital . There may be long-run trends – for example underpinned by changing agricultural productivity, as Benanav ( 2015 ) suggests – but it also seems clear that associations between demographic changes, migration and levels of unemployment are weak. High levels of unemployment persist within rich-country economies, already thoroughly urbanised and with
this. Analytically, the identity of those who have entitlements and duties cannot be restricted to a set of humans at any particular historical moment, for to do so would be to deny the claims of future generations. Practically, many important policy problems – environmental protection, migration, capital flows, regulation of transnational enterprise – also involve cross-national interdependencies or temporal consequences, and therefore cannot defensibly only be conceived in a world of state delimited territorial boundaries in the here and now. In the foundational
that the international system remained essentially competitive undermined the Keynesian desire to achieve a more managed capitalism. Starting from a low base, the post-WWII regime facilitated a return to a more open, liberal order. Before looking at the post-WWII system, it is worth briefly sketching a few key elements of the earlier system and its demise, and of Keynes’s attitude to this. The world economy prior to WWI was generally understood to operate on laissez-faire principles. Levels of trade, foreign investment, capital movement and human migration were
changed even in the anti-immigrant, post-Brexit years: ‘Even now, and I saw it under George Osborne and I'm sure it's happening under Philip Hammond, it will be the Treasury which is arguing for the least restrictions on, say, skilled migration.’ From this perspective, those at the Treasury have thought relatively little about national identity and how that has evolved over centuries across the communities and regions of Britain. Citizens, like capital flows and corporations, are mobile entities. The most able of them gravitate to the countries with
,000 redundancies, raising the level of unemployment to 2.2 million as of June 1999. Real wages declined following the pre-crisis tightening of the labor market. Real wage growth, which stood at over 2 per cent per year in 1996, reversed itself. The real wage fell by more than 7 per cent in 1998 and by 1.5 per cent in 1999.”56 While the initial labor-force impacts were largely in urban areas, the effects were also felt in the countryside, through both return migration of urban workers and reduced remittances. Since Thailand does not have a well-developed formal social safety net
marshals. But that is the here and now. Everyday life was not like this for most of human history and it is not like this for many people in low-income countries today. Through most of history, cities were so unhealthy that they relied on inward migration to maintain population. That is what it was like before about 1880 in large West European cities plagued by high infant mortality and infectious diseases (Lenger 2012, pp. 38–40). Disease killed rich and poor alike because cities did not have urban systems which piped clean water and sanitation to every household and