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Adam Tooze has some insights: "The most obvious common factor in explaining the UK’s miserable trajectory is that it represents the accumulated consequences of

Adam Tooze has some insights: "The most obvious common factor in explaining the UK’s miserable trajectory is that it represents the accumulated consequences of a sustained failure to invest." Maybe there are too many rent seekers in power. https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-184-nostalgia-for-decline https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-184-nostalgia-for...

ilikerashers 4y ago
That is an amazing article and thanks for sharing. I agree on investment failure and "cutting back" has resulted in a very divided and poor society in the UK. The country is now an inheritocracy (as written in the FT yesterday). Working to get ahead only applies to Finance, opportunity is vanishing for most other white-collar jobs. People are quitting teaching, medicine, and police work as they can make more stacking shelves in TESCO. Will take radical changes to change all this but I don't see anything novel on the horizon.
skippyboxedhero 4y ago
It is worth knowing that Tooze is a ultra-Marxist historian. So he sees every problem as simply applying enough capital, and the output will magically rise. If you consider the chart for two seconds, you realise that it also shows very high investment in Europe...and did Europe have a huge investment boom like the US over the past ten years? No. It is substantially more nuanced than this. You need to look at the structure of financial markets, how research is converted into revenue, and how this gets balanced politically. Investment is just capital balance + domestic savings, and the latter is just your trade balance. Investment in the US has held up despite running a huge deficit because they are importing capital. Comparing that situation with Europe, which cannot import capital on a large scale because of their banking situation, is misleading. Just generally, the UK has more than enough basic research and has always done so. The problem has been that we have no institution like Stanford that excels in applying this research, and we lack the financial structure to enable this even if we did. More public investment won't make the slightest difference, it didn't in the 60/70s and it won't now. Also, the productivity charts are classic. Everyone knows they are misleading, Richard Jones has said the chart is misleading (he also, suspiciously, uses 2009 as the break). Productivity growth has slowed globally, and (ironically as Tooze says later but doesn't connect to the above) we made the decision to destroy our own banking sector. There is no world in which productivity growth continued to be 2+%. It is all so silly.
- hackandthink 4y ago
  Did not know about it: "For Tooze, this Marx – the ‘empirical’ Marx – anticipates his own brand of grounded contemporary history" (1) But "Ultra-Marxist" surely doesn't fit. I see him as social democrat and as devoted Keynesian. I have not read his books, but think I should. He seems to be one of the most creative intellectuals and historians at the moment. (1) https://renewal.org.uk/archive/vol-30-2022/toozes-marx/ https://renewal.org.uk/archive/vol-30-2022/toozes-marx/
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    Yes it does fit. You may not understand that historical Marxism and political Marxism are not the same thing. Tooze is one of the most famous Marxist historians in the world. Iirc, he used to go to all the Marxist historian conferences (Historical Materialism, he writes for New Left Review, etc.) Wages of Destruction is one of the best economic history books of the 20th century. Everything after that isn't good. I would read more about what historical Marxists believe. If you actually read what he is saying very carefully, you would realise that his view of how economic growth occurs is significantly different to the one that exists in reality. Part of that is empiricism (Marxists were the arch empiricists, they viewed their theories as grounded in a deep understanding of statistics and data...this is obviously ridiculous in retrospect but this view of "scientific Marxism" was pervasive at the time). If you don't know much about economic history, I would read Mokyr/McCloskey, anything that has a vaguely coherent account of how economic growth actually occurs.
    - hackandthink 4y ago
      Thanks, I'll start with Wages of Destruction. Lately Adam Tooze has been writing too much, his Javelin Chartbook post on Substack for example is ridiculous. But probably everyone has bad days. I lived in West Berlin before and after the fall of the Wall and picked up quite a bit about Marxism / Historical Materialism. As far as I see, Tooze is miles away from orthodox Marxism. Tooze knows both Europe and the US well and he has the historical knowledge, so I take his analyses seriously, e.g. (1). But here I do not see a marxist anti-imperialist either. On the contrary, he seems to be enthusiastic about the war of the good West, however many human lives it may cost. (1) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/04/us-lend-lease-act-ukraine-1941-second-world-war https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/04/us-len...

ilikerashers 4y ago

That is an amazing article and thanks for sharing. I agree on investment failure and "cutting back" has resulted in a very divided and poor society in the UK. The country is now an inheritocracy (as written in the FT yesterday). Working to get ahead only applies to Finance, opportunity is vanishing for most other white-collar jobs. People are quitting teaching, medicine, and police work as they can make more stacking shelves in TESCO. Will take radical changes to change all this but I don't see anything novel on the horizon.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago

It is worth knowing that Tooze is a ultra-Marxist historian. So he sees every problem as simply applying enough capital, and the output will magically rise. If you consider the chart for two seconds, you realise that it also shows very high investment in Europe...and did Europe have a huge investment boom like the US over the past ten years? No. It is substantially more nuanced than this. You need to look at the structure of financial markets, how research is converted into revenue, and how this gets balanced politically. Investment is just capital balance + domestic savings, and the latter is just your trade balance. Investment in the US has held up despite running a huge deficit because they are importing capital. Comparing that situation with Europe, which cannot import capital on a large scale because of their banking situation, is misleading. Just generally, the UK has more than enough basic research and has always done so. The problem has been that we have no institution like Stanford that excels in applying this research, and we lack the financial structure to enable this even if we did. More public investment won't make the slightest difference, it didn't in the 60/70s and it won't now. Also, the productivity charts are classic. Everyone knows they are misleading, Richard Jones has said the chart is misleading (he also, suspiciously, uses 2009 as the break). Productivity growth has slowed globally, and (ironically as Tooze says later but doesn't connect to the above) we made the decision to destroy our own banking sector. There is no world in which productivity growth continued to be 2+%. It is all so silly.

hackandthink 4y ago
Did not know about it: "For Tooze, this Marx – the ‘empirical’ Marx – anticipates his own brand of grounded contemporary history" (1) But "Ultra-Marxist" surely doesn't fit. I see him as social democrat and as devoted Keynesian. I have not read his books, but think I should. He seems to be one of the most creative intellectuals and historians at the moment. (1) https://renewal.org.uk/archive/vol-30-2022/toozes-marx/ https://renewal.org.uk/archive/vol-30-2022/toozes-marx/
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  Yes it does fit. You may not understand that historical Marxism and political Marxism are not the same thing. Tooze is one of the most famous Marxist historians in the world. Iirc, he used to go to all the Marxist historian conferences (Historical Materialism, he writes for New Left Review, etc.) Wages of Destruction is one of the best economic history books of the 20th century. Everything after that isn't good. I would read more about what historical Marxists believe. If you actually read what he is saying very carefully, you would realise that his view of how economic growth occurs is significantly different to the one that exists in reality. Part of that is empiricism (Marxists were the arch empiricists, they viewed their theories as grounded in a deep understanding of statistics and data...this is obviously ridiculous in retrospect but this view of "scientific Marxism" was pervasive at the time). If you don't know much about economic history, I would read Mokyr/McCloskey, anything that has a vaguely coherent account of how economic growth actually occurs.
  - hackandthink 4y ago
    Thanks, I'll start with Wages of Destruction. Lately Adam Tooze has been writing too much, his Javelin Chartbook post on Substack for example is ridiculous. But probably everyone has bad days. I lived in West Berlin before and after the fall of the Wall and picked up quite a bit about Marxism / Historical Materialism. As far as I see, Tooze is miles away from orthodox Marxism. Tooze knows both Europe and the US well and he has the historical knowledge, so I take his analyses seriously, e.g. (1). But here I do not see a marxist anti-imperialist either. On the contrary, he seems to be enthusiastic about the war of the good West, however many human lives it may cost. (1) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/04/us-lend-lease-act-ukraine-1941-second-world-war https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/04/us-len...