Peter Breugel showed labour can have it’s own value – even if productivity is low.
Let’s build on the polluted greenbelt
A common argument in favour of greenbelt policy is that land is required for food production with a rising world population. However, Professor Cheshire points out horsey culture and golf courses on greenbelt land do not produce food. There is also the issue of food wastage and the destruction of food-value with the conversion of economically ‘inferior’ foods to ‘superior’ foods as discussed in It’s the poor that starve. Another post Pollution in the countryside discussed the destructive effects of modern farming methods on medium term soil fertility.
I have a series of posts on DontLookNow.org looking for solutions to the housing crisis. Solutions should be cheap, friendly and don’t screw the world up. A good solution is car-free estates of wooden prefabs: starter homes for £20,000.
Improve these prefabs with modern cross-ply timber…
‘If you drink half a litre of beer with a politician or scientist they will tell you how bad it is – but if you put a microphone there they will tell you some optimistic nonsense about climate change.’
The Carbon Budget Morality Index (CBMI) is an attempt to link the your effects on climate change with a score estimating your morality – so you can see how evil you are.
This outlines an old proposal of mine to modify VAT to create jobs.
The proposal gives extra flexibility to the management of the economy, making it easier to achieve full employment.
Below are two pieces I had published in the Computer Weekly in 1978. The first is an introduction from something that got rather technical and the second more concise description of the proposal I have been putting forward since the early 1970s.
The “mixed communities” paradigm for housing development aimed to mix poorer people with more affluent neighbours to avoid the problems of large sink estates. It has been central to housing policy for more than a decade. A Parliamentary Select Committee in 2003 reported:
90. Several witnesses drew attention to the mistakes of the 1950s and 1960s when large council estates were built which tended to include high concentrations of poorer households. In its new programme, the Government must avoid creating ghettos by ensuring that different tenures are integrated into new developments. New approaches are required by private developers and housing associations to create mixed tenure schemes.
In 1976, I wrote a note, “RSPCA News”, about developments for non-motorists, where they are separated from motorists. This outlined financial and legal mechanisms that could make non-motorist developments work.
Climate change & the fallacy of the lump of labour fallacy.
Janesville Assembly Plant is a former automobile factory owned by General Motors located in Janesville, Wisconsin. Opened in 1919, it was the oldest operating GM plant when it was largely idled in December 2008, and ceased all remaining production on April 23, 2009.
Listening to the BBC World Service Business Daily programme on Tuesday morning that old angry amateur feeling came back. The programme, Jobs for the World’s Young, was billed like this:
Young people make up 35% of the world’s unemployed, and it’s a global problem. Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Amy Goldstein, author of Janesville: An American Story, tells us how retraining doesn’t always work when it comes to finding people new jobs in the rust belt of America.
In the case of the many laid-off workers in the Janesville area, the outcomes are decidedly worse for those who have attended the local technical college to learn a new trade.
I hope readers will excuse the labourious details
but even I find the theme “The ODI censored me”
rather far fetched.
I reported in a Angry Amateur No 2 that most of my websites are banned in Morrisons supermarkets. Most other websites are available even protest sites like Making Workers Pay or The Canary, a left wing site which The Sun has accused of spreading fake news. With most of my other sites blocked, this looks personal – but why? I am a bit paranoid but there are some out there that want to censor my views (and, of course, other more important views) but imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Overseas Development Institute seems to have joined in.
At the Overseas Development Institute
Lord Adair Turner
Although the ODI are a bit too close to the UK Government, they strike me as good people. They invite me to their presentations and have publications like these:
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