30 | New Scientist | 3 August 2019
Books
Not Working: Where have
all the good jobs gone?
David G. Blanchflower
Princeton University PressFully Automated Luxury
Communism: A manifesto
Aaron Bastani
VersoMeasuring Poverty
Around the World
Anthony B. Atkinson
Princeton University PressIN 2016, the UK voted to leave
the European Union. Since then,
the country has been in crisis.
Talk has been of virtually nothing
else. Then there is the talk about
the talk. “To say the present era
is one of crisis borders on cliché,”
writes Aaron Bastani in his
polemical manifesto Fully
Automated Luxury Communism.
What else could he say, given
the situation? This grim picture is
expanded on in two more books.
In Measuring Poverty Around the
World, Anthony Atkinson wrestles
with the fact that even as countries
become wealthier, poverty
remains entrenched. And David
Blanchflower’s central theme is
the crisis of underemployment
and underpayment, yet his title
Not Working expresses a more
general failure of the global
economy as well.
Since the end of the cold war,
Atkinson writes, “the attitude
of Western democracies has
been that their view of the
world’s political organisations
has triumphed”. Bastani calls
this “capitalist realism” – the
idea that capitalism is the only
plausible system – and cites
political scientist Francis
Fukuyama’s influential argumentA world gone bad
Utopian solutions and brutally realistic analyses reveal the same picture:
the global economy is broken and needs fixing, finds Joanna Kavennaabout reaching the end of history.
Yet, in 2008, history returned.
As Blanchflower puts it,
“something horrible happened”.
All three authors agree that the
current malaise derives from the
financial crisis of 2007-8, and the
cataclysmic mishandling of its
aftermath by those in power.
Blanchflower was among those
who were tasked with handling
the crisis. He was serving on the
Bank of England’s Monetary Policy
Committee and told everyone
that austerity would make things
worse. Nobody listened.
Instead, George Osborne,
then the UK’s chancellor of the
exchequer, “a reverse Robin
Hood”, seized a “unique political
opportunity... to reduce the size of
the state and never mind the social
and economic consequences”.
Internationally, a perverse illogic
prevailed, as US talk show host
Stephen Colbert pointed out
at the time: “We have to keep
cutting government budgets
and laying off people until
those people get jobs.”
More than a decade on, people
are still hurting. They often
can’t find employment, or the
scant work they can find offers
little security or pay. They have
no prospect that their living
conditions will be ameliorated.
Rightly, many of these people
blame the “learneds” who failed
to predict the crash. For example,
a limo driver told Blanchflower
that people voted Brexit because
“ordinary people had no hope”.
How can we have hope when
policy-makers haven’t learned
from their mistakes?
Worse, as Blanchflower says,
these policy-makers “now have
little firepower to deal with the
onset of the next economic crisis”.
If you are already despondent
about the situation, I guarantee
this book will make you feel worse.Views Culture
JULIE DERMANSKY/POLA RIS/EYEVINEAtkinson, too, refused to sugar-
coat his subject. Sadly, he died
before finishing this book, but it
has been brought to publication,
at his request, by his colleagues
John Micklewright and Andrea
Brandolini. With its unfinished
chapters explored in afterwords
by economists François
Bourguignon and Nicholas Stern,
it is at the very least a worthy
successor to Atkinson’s 2015 study
Inequality: What can be done?
Atkinson became an economist
in the 1960s after working with
deprived children in Hamburg,
Germany, and published major
works, beginning with The
Economics of Inequality in 1975.
Five decades on, says Atkinson,
poverty remains “one of the two
great challenges facing the world as
a whole today, along with climateThe global crash
closed many businesses
in New York (above).
Future robot deliveries
(below) will bring
further challenges
to the workforceWESTEND61/GETTY