It’s the last full day of our holiday in Sweden and the weather has turned a bit wet, so in between the detective novels (the latest – Jill Paton Walsh’s Dorothy Sayers update, Thrones, Dominations) I read Robert Peston’s WTF. It’s as well-informed and full of insight about the present state of the world as you’d expect from such a distinguished journalist (although written in a slightly matey style which didn’t appeal to me). The book is mainly about Brexity UK – with a brilliant chapter on our last general election and the respective characters of Mrs May and Mr Corbyn – though it touches on parallel trends in Trumpland. I agree with his diagnosis that the issues contributing to the anti-establishment anger date back well before the financial crisis, to the deindustrialisation of the 80s and 90s, and the chasm between London/SE and the rest of the country. The book’s fundamental point is that the economy stopped working for an ever-growing number of voters, vast numbers of whom have seen no significant rise in living standards for well over a decade, and even longer for too many.
Interestingly, in the light of the current fashion for saying the big economic problem is all about concentration and the exploitation of market power, Peston instead pins the blame for a dclining labour share of national income on the Reagan-Thatcher-led attack on union power from the mid-70s on. The press reports of the Jackson Hole discussions this year noted that debate there focused on the issue of concentration. When I expressed some doubt on Twitter that this was anything other than a US phenomenon (as the UK labour share looked from eyeballing an ONS chart to have been fairly stable), a couple of replies insisted I was wrong (one arguing I was looking at the wrong data, and the other claiming the IMF said it was a global phenomenon). Well, after my years on the Competition Commission, I’m a big fan of tough competition policy, and agree it has been lax in the US for some time. The US also has an issue with creeping occupation licensing as the Obama CEA pointed out. But, reading up on the IMF’s recent work on trends in the labour share makes plain the great diversity of national experiences – and indeed, they say the UK labour share has increased.
Well, whenever a phenomenon is so varied across countries, it tells you institutions are playing a big part. Combined with the fact that across countries the big decline in the labour share occurred from the mid-1970s to around 2000, surely labour market institutions played a key part – for all that it’s right to be concerned about concentration in some countries/sectors now. (And the IMF data goes only to 2014, so perhaps there has been a dramatic decline in the latest 3 years of data…)
Anyway, looking out at the rain, on now to proofs of the forthcoming book by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge, which I’m going to be reviewing in due course – a history of capitalism in America, which is going to be fascinating, as I’m anticipating a defence. There has also on Twitter been some discussion about what books to put on the syllabus for a history of capitalism course (really, a history of thought course), in which I didn’t participate (& can’t find now), but noted with interest that all the books were critiques, from The Great Transformation on. Maybe the Greenspan/Wooldridge book could balance it out.
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