Watch Milton Friedman visit the Berlin Wall @NaomiAKlein

@jeremycorbyn @johnmcdonnellMP People’s QE & 1st home buyer affordability in London, Scotland and the UK since 1983

Many of the Twitter Left who voted in Jeremy Corbyn to lead the British Labour Party into what will be a self-inflicted electoral oblivion have no adult memory of paying high mortgage payments when there was high inflation.

Source: House Prices Data Download | Nationwide.

Those who have escaped the overweening conceit of youth still have raw memories of high inflation and high mortgage payments and that was when housing was much, much cheaper.

Source: House Prices Data Download | Nationwide.

An excellent wedge issue for the Tories on the 2020 general election will be even under rock bottom interest rates housing affordability is in crisis.

Source: Interest rates in the UK since 1694. Download the data and see it visualised | Business | The Guardian

Imagine what will happen if even moderate inflation were to return. There is no buffer left in the budgets of middle class homebuyers to pay much more if there were to be a People’s quantitative easing.

Some very British creative destruction in telecommunications

https://twitter.com/amberleybooks/status/653168927996948480/photo/1

A rising majority of university students around the world are women

The Great Escape and #vegetarianism

@NaomiAKlein agrees with #MiltonFriedman on Mancur Olson’s theory of how nations escape institutional sclerosis

Source: quoted by Naomi Klein in “The Shock Doctrine”.

1. There will be no countries that attain symmetrical organization of all groups with a common interest and thereby attain optimal outcomes through comprehensive bargaining.

2. Stable societies with unchanged boundaries tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time.

3. Members of “small” groups have disproportionate organizational power for collective action, and this disproportion diminishes but does not disappear over time in stable societies.

4. On balance, special-interest organizations and collusions reduce efficiency and aggregate income in the societies in which they operate and make political life more divisive.

5. Encompassing organizations have some incentive to make the society in which they operate more prosperous, and an incentive to redistribute income to their members with as little excess burden as possible, and to cease such redistribution unless the amount redistributed is substantial in relation to the social cost of the redistribution.

6. Distributional coalitions make decisions more slowly than the individuals and firms of which they are comprised, tend to have crowded agendas and bargaining tables, and more often fix prices than quantities.

7. Distributional coalitions slow down a society’s capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions, and thereby to reduce the rate of economic growth.

8. Distributional coalitions, once big enough to succeed, are exclusive, and seek to limit the diversity of incomes and values of their membership.

9. The accumulation of distributional coalitions increases the complexity of regulation, the role of government, and the complexity of understandings, and changes the direction of social evolution.

image

Source: Obituary: Professor Mancur Olson | Obituaries | News | The Independent

@MaxCRoser the impact of the top 1% on Swedish economic growth

A fall in the share of the top 1% of total Swedish total incomes was in tune with the emergence of a new word in the English language which was Swedosclerosis. That was the long stagnation in the Swedish economy in the 1970s and the 1980s with Swedish economic growth well below that in the trend rate of growth in the USA. Only after an increase in the top 1% share in Sweden did economic growth start recovering to trend.

Source: Computed from OECD StatExtract and The Conference Board. 2015. The Conference Board Total Economy Database™, May 2015, http://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/

In the chart above, a flat-line in real GDP per working age Swede is growth at the trend rate of the US economy for the 20th century which was 1.9% per year. A falling line is Swedish growth below trend, a rising line is growth above that trend rate of 1.9% in Sweden. A trend rate of 1.9% is the trend rate of growth currently used by Edward Prescott for the USA in the 20th century.

@JamilAnderlini @ft @PickardJE British & Chinese real GDP PPP @urmyes1

Looks like it’s been another big day for breathless journalism at the Financial Times.

Source: The Conference Board. 2015. The Conference Board Total Economy Database™, May 2015, http://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/

Source: The Conference Board. 2015. The Conference Board Total Economy Database™, May 2015, http://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/

Creative destruction in telegraph messages

RT @NaomiAKlein what’s changed since you left high school?

South Korean gender pay gap for the 10th, 50th and 90th percentile since 1985

image

Source: OECD Employment Database.

The Japanese gender pay gap at the 10th, 50th and 90th percentile since 1975

The unadjusted gender pay gap is still large in Japan but is declining slowly.

image

Source: OECD Employment Database.

@zoesqwilliams has great timing on capitalism not doing enough on poverty @worstall

Source: Poverty goals? No, it’s extreme wealth we should be targeting | Zoe Williams | Comment is free | The Guardian

When Zoe Williams was born in 1973, 60% of humanity lived in extreme poverty. That has dropped to 1 in 10.

Just the other day, the World Bank estimated that extreme poverty has dropped below 10% of the world’s population for the first time in human history but some are still grumbling.

Zoe Williams is not grumbling about the failed states and predatory government responsible for the last pockets of extreme poverty, but about the inequality from economic progress under capitalism.

Zoe Williams honestly believes that extreme poverty could have been reduced faster if we had taken on the socialist road.

China and India escaped from extreme poverty by rejecting socialism.

China and India received next to no overseas development assistance in their Great Escape from extreme poverty.

There’s been some clear-cut natural experiments such as between Chile and Venezuela and Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and just about any other developing country in terms of capitalism as the only path to prosperity.

Results of past EU referenda

@oxfamnz 80% of the world lived in extreme poverty when my father was born

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