The Washington Consensus was the notorious neoliberal prescription delivered to many developing countries by both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank from the late 1980s onwards.
My glossary entry on this subject is well worth noting. It explains how these two Bretton Woods agencies were captured by neoliberal economics to spread its evil around the world, and what it meant.
It was actually a list of 10 bad things that you shouldn’t do to an economy. And the astonishing fall in absolute poverty out there over the past 50 years shows that it was a pretty good list, a pretty good consensus, too.
neoliberal economics to spread its evil around the world,
Says the commie.
Has everyone else said NO to fucking DIGITAL ID now?
Maybe you need a better ad-blocker?
Aw, it’s just a click. It’s tiresome, and the code monkey, who seems to have enthusiasms for lost causes, will eventually remove it.
Codemonkey: fergeddaboutit. Digital ID is here already. Any company director or significant shareholder already has one, which means anyone who runs an SME. The idiotic app also has a function for storing “documents”, the first of which seems to be Armed Forces cards.
The job’s done. It’s built. Only Farage can stop it, given the chance, if he wants to.
I don’t use a smartphone so the ‘app’ was of no use to me. Nor the websites, in the end I had to verify the Companies House by going to the Post Office.
My fellow Director didn’t have the patience for all that, he just got our accountant to deal with it.
I ended up going to the Post Office too. I suspect my phone and home network are a little too strapped down for government work.
I’ve got a pretty good ad blocker setup (Ghostery + uBlock Origin on Firefox) and that doesn’t stop it. It comes from Timmy’s website anyway.
Yes, we’re now all convinced so switch it off please.
Sorry, should be a reply to Dan Souter
Firefox, Ghostery, and permanent clear cookies etc on exit
So how’s it working out in terms of donations? That bad, huh?
I donated a monthly donation. Time to stop it, I think…
Just say no to digital ID popups.
Naturally if there’s an economic justification like being paid per view, that would temper my animosity somewhat. Gotta pay the rent.
The unbearable shiteness of being.
The Joy of Tax
An independent review
“I give this well written seminal work 5 stars. The writer is clearly an expert in his field” Richard Murphy
My glossary entry on this subject is well worth noting. It explains how these two Bretton Woods agencies were captured by neoliberal economics to spread its evil around the world, and what it meant.
Says the man whose evil is without end – fortunately his penchant for starting fights in a phone booth means it hasn’t yet ‘gone global’
The kartoffel can’t even be internally consistent, he’d turn into a parsnip if roasted. The implication is that Bretton Woods were ok at creating agencies, but then those agencies got captured by the bad guys and things went evil. It’s an analogy to government starting out as the provider of common defence, criminal justice, maybe sanitation and that 19th century law about not spreading communicable diseases, but it’s now been captured by a leftist blob robbing peter to pay paul spreading evil around the world and always attracting the vote of the pauls.
Was it good for you, too?
The imposition of strict fiscal policy requiring the avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP. This restricted the size and role of government in these countries.
God forbid the size of government should be restricted – after all there have never been more ‘public servants’ and public expenditure in the UK and we have never been worse governed in history.
.
Redirection of public spending toward broad-based provision of basic services and infrastructure investment.
I thought he was in favour of infrastructure investment or was that on Monday
Tax reform, usually requiring the adoption of sales and other indirect taxation with low marginal tax rates.
Well in many cases the bulk of the populace were so poor that even with potentially ruinous tax rates the state failed to raise much in the way of revenue, and throughout both the second and third world, the rulers facilitated by what the late Lord Bauer (or the ‘Anti-Murphy – in that he was right about almost everything while Murphy is wrong,almost without fail) called the ‘politicisation of economic life’ had expensive tastes, along their often many wives.
I do think this response to digital ID is the wrong one. Far better to game & corrupt the system so it’s dysfunctional & they end up wishing they’d never introduced it. Everything has its vulnerabilities. Go look for them & exploit them.
Lovely idea.
In reality they’ll just introduce further crackdowns to try and compensate for their original failure.
And I think that’s where your lovely idea falls down: the people who do this shit to us themselves never pay the price.
If economics was anything approaching a science then the serious adults would point and laugh at people like Spud. Instead he and his ilk get listened to by those in authority. Its as if government policy were being designed on the basis the earth is flat. I therefore conclude economics is pointless bilge. Or as I prefer to call it, sociology with numbers.
It’s a useful historical subject. But the UK now has more economists than it’s ever had in its history. How’s that working out for you?
Jim, that is just what Tim does.
Spud is constantly irritated that he *doesn’t* get listened to by those in authority.Government policy is determined by politics not economics – Rachel from Customer Complaints has some economics training but ignores it: my ‘O’ level economics was enough to tell me that her budget would increase unemployment significantly.
I am *not* an Economist (gave it up after ‘O’ level) but I can see that economics *is* a science: unfortunately most politicians choose to ignore the results of scientific analysis when it doesn’t suit them.
Well yes & no.
Last week I asked Tim & simple question. “How much value is currently circulating in UK commerce”. He came back with something about Narrow Money & some letters. PQMV?
I discovered it’s quite simple to work out. Everything consumed has to be paid for. So you can take the annual total earnings figure. Both wages & invoices are generally on a monthly cycle, so divide by twelve to avoid multiple countings. Gives one a rough number. Comes out at around £100 billion (remember we’re talking about a flow, not something static. Maybe that’s V?)
Narrow money is £2.3 trillion. It really is a load of bollocks. The only thing in the economy is the value currently circulating in commerce. What else could there be?
Given that an economy is the production, exchange and consumption of goods and services, and everyone’s interest is in the consumption, not the production (we’d all have everything for free and not have to work, if we could), then you must be right. Production which isn’t consumed is of no value, whether it’s new or second hand.
The important thing, Norm, is the production is our dinner. So when the contributors to these comments want to cash in their pensions & savings & assets to eat, will there be sufficient value circulating in the economy to enable them to do so? I would say that’s not a given..
Entirely agree, and it’s not looking like it.
Production which isn’t consumed is of no value
It does have a value. What isn’t consumed creates a surplus. A surplus puts a downward pressure on prices & lower prices result in increased consumption absorbing the surplus.. It’s the mechanism by which the economy grows & we all get richer.
Or maybe that’s what used to happen before economists stuck their oar in.
Well, it’s potentially of value. As you say, its actual value is only revealed when you come to sell it, and even then all we find is what that person wanted to pay and you were prepared to accept. Someone else might have paid more.
My cheap video lights on eBay still work perfectly. Their fans are a bit noisy so they’re no much use for lighting interviews or reels, but for anything that doesn’t require sound they’re fine. But no takers, so they have no value. Negative, in fact: now I have to spend time and energy taking them to the dump.
What about the world’s best ever poet, starving in his garret, handing out manuscript copies of his poetry on the street corner for free?
He dies a few days later of consumption, etc. etc. and is buried in a pauper’s grave.
Meanwhile, 20 people swan off with manuscript – manuscript! – copies of the world’s best poems.
What is the value to them, quite aside from whether their descendants 100 years from now can sell these pamphlets for obscene sums of money?
I may well be missing the point, but this discussion of value and price does seem a bit Wildean (to me).
I mean, I don’t care. I’m too busy selling widgets to wazzocks and planning to emigrate.
But still, I felt curious …
Well, everything has potential value. Sea-coal had no value until someone figured out you could burn it, and then it became so valuable it was worth digging up. Something similar for oil, natural gas, uranium. Greenies are busily trying to legislate away its remaining value. Whale oil used to be valuable, and now it’s not.
People took a punt on Wilde. They could have been stuck with McGonagall. People buy modern “art” that is obvious shit and will be worthless and in landfill before long.
There’s a Heinlein story:
* Should we invest in putting used nuclear fuel into rockets and sending it into the sun?
* Good god, no madam president! We may not know what to do with that used fuel, but we have no idea what our descendants could do with it. The Romans knew of petroleum, but to them it was just a nuisance that prevented you farming a field.
Something may have no value to *us*, because *we* haven’t worked out the value in it.
The answer’s in transactions. if there hasn’t been a transaction to discover price, there’s no value in commerce..
Spud is constantly irritated that he *doesn’t* get listened to by those in authority.
News to me. Country’s been running on Spudanomics for the past two decades, at least. It’s not that he doesn’t get listened to. It’s that he doesn’t get the credit.
Rubbish: no country could survive one decade on Spudonomics. Weimar didn’t, Zimbabwe was a basket case in less than a decade.
We run on Spudonomics-lite. Same principles, just lacking the cojones to go full MMT retard. We spend money we don’t have, and try to convince those lending it we really really will pay it back, and not in Zimbabwe value money, honest injun. Spud just wants to take the existing system and rocket boost it to the moon. But the principle has already been accepted.
As the great BiS says – ‘it’s Murphy’s world – we just live in it’ almost every aspect of his thought has been taken as gospel and his main frustration is twofold. One- he isn’t I. Direct control. Two – the implementation (as the equally excellent ‘original Jim’ says) has been less than full throttle but Murphy, at least ideologically is directly responsible for the state of the UK, and that’s why he needs to be looking at a lengthy custodial sentence, in what for him would be a best case scenario!!
Jim, unfortunately I’m not sure it works like that any more.
Epidemiology is a serious subject, but hardly anyone pointed and laughed at Chris Whitty.
Chris Whitty believed the ‘epidemiologist’ Prof ‘Pantsdown’ Ferguson from Imperial. The same university that’s produced the “2,700 UK deaths from excess heat” nonsense.
Well quite. And who is responsible that?
Ah yes, the universities.
The answer always ends up being Pol Pot…….