A single fact says everything about what’s happened to the UK economy in the past 40 years. In 1978 aged 23, I purchased a two-bedroom flat in South Tottenham, an unfashionable suburb of London about five miles from Piccadilly Circus,…
Tag: services
Value challenge for health
The UK Labour Party is banking on health to win back voters. Its members and sympathisers will join the Keep our NHS Public demonstration to parliament on 4 March. But as the by-election in the Cumbrian constituency of Copeland last…
Kellner and capitalism
In a piece published on 28 September in the weekly New Statesman magazine, YouGov president and former journalist Peter Kellner said the Labour Party is at a historic turning point due to the election of Jeremy Corbyn as its leader.…
In economies dominated by services, GDP measures don’t work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNXoaIRL8CI GDP, the most popular way economists attempt to quantify economic activity, is a recent invention and one that won’t stand the challenge presented by measuring output when services are dominant as they are in the UK. The first attempt…
The market can’t solve the global infrastructure crisis
A new report by the IMF says that there is growing concern that low levels of infrastructure investment are hindering economic growth. “In many emerging market economies, infrastructure bottlenecks are not just a medium-term worry but have been flagged as…
Scotland’s No vote is neither good nor bad for value-creation
Scotland’s decision to reject independence could leave the country in the worst of all possible worlds in terms of developing policies to promote value creation in an economy where services are dominant. The consensus among conventional economists was that independence…
Cities are growing and price has little to do with it
Everyone knows that London is an expensive place to live, but how big’s the cost difference with other parts of the UK? The price of a London home is at least $600 a square foot. A house less than three miles…
Value creation versus price in university education
The cost of a university education in the US and the UK has risen sharply in the past four decades despite the rise of costless ways of sharing information on the internet. Why is this happening? Defenders of the status…