Because at least the losses can’t get any worse. Even so, it’s sad to see that A Fistful of Euros, the racehorse, came in third in the 12.40 at Huntingdon.
Author Archives: Alex Harrowell
Of Gods and Men: non-premature evaluation
In my role as the AFOE occasional film critic, off to the Curzon Mayfair for Of Gods and Men/Des dieux et des hommes. After the DICKHEADS, we’re going to deal with some much more serious terrorism in this post.
Of Gods and Men is a classic peace movie, in the sense that there are classic war movies. In fact, it mirrors quite a lot of the structure and tropes you expect from a war movie – a neat trick. The film deals with the hostage-taking and eventual murder, by unidentified gunmen, of a group of French monks in the high Atlas mountains of Algeria in 1996, during the grim worst of the Algerian civil war. The monks, to begin with, are living at peace – in fact, as we learn from some of their conversations, their elected leader Brother Christian sees their mission (that word, already) as a project in deliberately waging peace, a continuation of the alternative-leftist dream of 1968. Every time the monks have a meeting, Christian takes his seat directly in front of an icon of 1980s internationalists, the world map redrawn to make the size of Africa and Latin America more obvious.
The monks tend their land, produce honey and wine, worship. Christian is writing a book. They practice social service – one of them, Luc, is a doctor, who holds a weekly surgery for the poor. They live in apparent harmony with the Algerian villagers across the valley in their structural-tile favela settlement.
Nobody wants to be involved with the war, but the war wants very much to be involved with them. A group of Croatian engineers working nearby are murdered by insurgents. Gradually, the violence infects everything else. They try to refuse it – Christian meets with the Algerian governor, who offers to post troops near the monastery, and he refuses as a matter of principle. As a result, the monks fall out among themselves, not so much about the troops but because he has acted without getting their approval first. The war draws progressively closer, and they debate endlessly whether to abandon the whole project and go back to France, to move temporarily to a place of safety, to go back on the governor’s offer, or to stick it out. One night, the insurgents appear and demand medical assistance. Christian persuades their leader to stay outside the monastery, and they accept drugs and dressings.
Things rapidly become more serious. It becomes obvious that one side, or another, wants them dead. The insurgent leader is killed in action with the army and Christian has to identify his body, thus becoming suspect to both the insurgents and the army. A succession of monks struggle with their fear and doubt, but Christian talks them around one by one. Eventually, gunmen kidnap all but two monks (who succeed in hiding) and march them off into the mountains. They ended up dead in reality; who killed them, and how, remains a mystery.
I liked the way this film showed people at work – the monks, the Algerians, like the village haji who they hire to bring his Polish tractor and plough their patch. We see him hit a sticky patch, carefully raise the hitch, reverse, and try again. The doomed Croats boom around the site with their Caterpillars and a sort of proud working-class confidence.
I also liked the role of time. The monks initially seem to be blessed with the gift of all the time in the world, but as the film progresses, the slow progress of time becomes a source of cranking suspense and maddening waiting.
That’s another war-movie trick, of course. Among other things, Brother Bruno makes a dangerous journey through the checkpoints and the debatable lands to bring in an urgent supply run, including cheese, medicines, and several hundred rounds of communion wafers. People write home illuminatingly. One of the monks demands of their leader “What are we doing here – trying to be heroes? Martyrs?”, and his leader talks him down reminding him of the importance of their mission and his obligations to his brothers (another telling word). The characters seek out their leader one by one to talk to him in confidence, and he pays out the big cheap words used on all such occasions. After they are captured, one after the other, the hostage-takers make them read out their name, age, and monastic affiliation. (Monks don’t have serial numbers.) In fact, it’s arguable that this is how the war seeps into the monastery – the monks get pressganged into a war movie.
As well as being a great war movie about peace, it’s a pretty good peace movie about war. The Algerian regional governor honestly doesn’t want the monks to get killed, but he also has political motives – it would be welcome if they were to simply leave, but he would prefer they stay, so he can install a detachment of troops in the village and establish the government’s authority there on the pretext of protecting them. He would like to make the monks part of his counter-insurgency plan. And if the insurgents were to butcher them, despite all he could do, that would make useful propaganda.
The insurgents would much rather have the monks in place – it’s always possible to slaughter them if a dose of revolutionary terror is required, and they are a source of medical assistance. Although the insurgent leader doesn’t give Brother Christian any assurances, he does let others believe that the monks are under his protection.
And the people, it turns out, are hoping that the presence of the monks will deter the insurgents from doing anything to them, for fear of committing an atrocity awful enough to wreck their reputation. They don’t want the insurgents and they want the government still less – they want, most of all, to survive and to avoid being governed. It is telling that the villagers and the monks are the only people in the movie who practice a sort of democracy – the Algerian military, of course, couldn’t care less, and the insurgents obey their leader. But this doesn’t mean they are passive. Part of the horror is that the relationship between the villagers and the monks subtly changes, from peace to something approaching a hostage situation. After all, the villagers are in a position to denounce them to the insurgents (or the army) and then carefully see nothing.
Obviously, this situation is intolerable to both the insurgents and the military. Neither the insurgent nor the counterinsurgent will put up with people who insist on escaping from their joint demand that they take sides. In a sense, the monks are wiped out by an unconscious conspiracy between two factions desperately competing to deliver their rival visions of government to people who want no part of either. Monks don’t have serial numbers, and all the killers of the Algerian war want to impose them.
Oddly enough, the Algerian governor, with his Ottoman title of Wali, is quite a sympathetic character. A curious feature of his role is that every time he appears on screen, he speaks the unvarnished truth as a sort of bureaucratic Greek chorus. Also, he always appears in a black suit, a uniform that marks him as a survival of civilian power. In his office, though, when he talks about the people and gestures out of the window, you can’t see any people.
Meet the DICKHEADS, and pity them
Anyone with any sense should mock this as hard as possible. The “shorter” seems to be that British (and probably other) counter-terrorism officials have convinced themselves that some of the constant false-positive results from baggage scanning are really deliberate reconnaissance by terrorists. The evidence presented is pathetically thin – apparently someone had both a BlackBerry and its USB charger in their bag, and the charger cable was wound round a bottle of gripe water. Who travels with a mobile device without bringing the battery charger?
This is worrying for all the obvious reasons – it shows that they are rationalising the false positive problem by defining-down the very idea of a suspect package, to the point where there is no real distinction between a suspect package and a non-suspect package. But the problem is broader than that. Consider the last few Al-Qa’ida incidents. All of them have been, objectively, pathetic. The common denominator has been failure mixed with futility. Terrorists who regularly and publicly fail to kill people or destroy artefacts are simply not terrifying. But the official narrative has been that this represents a “new form of terrorism”. For example:
Abdaly’s bombs may represent a new type of jihadist attack in the west. In terms of sophistication, it is at the opposite end of the scale from 9/11. But al-Qaida has failed to land a serious blow on western soil since the 2005 London bombings. Experts say they may be trying a new tack: calling on supporters to attack westerners at will, with whatever tools are at hand.
If this is a new form of terrorism, it’s nothing but good news, as it strongly suggests that the highly competent and ruthless agents of international Al-Qa’ida are a thing of the past, replaced by a new kind of terrorist I propose to call the DICKHEADS, for Desperate, Incompetent, Converts, Kids, Harmless, Economically insignificant, Aimless, Disconnected, and Suicidal.
Desperate – Recent terrorist plots show every sign of desperation. The Stockholm bomber had a bomb that probably wouldn’t go off properly, which he attempted to place somewhere where he realistically needed much more explosive and shrapnel to achieve a real massacre. The printer-cartridge plot amounted to sending some stuff off in air freight and blindly hoping it would explode in a passenger plane at some point. The underpants bomber…what can I say?
Hijacking a flight of fully fuelled Boeing 767s and crashing them into the New York skyline and the headquarters of the US defence establishment is a convincing and terrifying plot. Blowing up the Golden Mosque of Samarra in order to start a religious war in Iraq, in the hope of forcing one side to ally with you, is a convincing and deadly plot. Assassinating Abdel Aziz al-Hakim in order to forestall a stable political settlement in Iraq – that’s terrorism. Pants? No. Pathetic and desperate.
Incompetent – You thought the plans were poor, but that’s as nothing to the execution. Time after time, the DICKHEADS fail to explode. Even though the printer cartridges were well concealed, they failed the primary test of a bomb. They didn’t go bang. The pants bomber crazily attempted to mix his explosives at the point of use, set himself on fire, and made such a spectacle of himself he would have been restrained before doing anything even if he’d got the mixture right. The Stockholm bomber did actually have a nail bomb that worked, and he’d have done better simply to come on foot and chuck it into a crowd, but this apparently didn’t occur to him.
Converts – It is notable that in many cases, even the sources of ideological legitimacy now seem to be iffy converts, sort-of Muslims. The same goes for some of the terrorists. These people are no Sayyid Qutb.
Kids – It’s also notable that there don’t seem to be many Mohammed Attas or even Mohammed Sidique Khans these days. Instead, the DICKHEADS seem to include a lot of people of limited experience of the world, lacking in competence at anything much, without being obviously fit, energetic, or aggressive enough to start a good teenage riot. The nadir, so far, was the mentally ill not-really-a-Muslim who was persuaded to set fire to his trousers in a chain pub in Exeter. As Chris Morris says, Four Lions is very nearly a documentary.
Harmless – In the light of this, I’m quite convinced that the jihadi movement off its home turf is now essentially harmless. Its intentions are fantastic and its capability pathetic. The English Defence League for example, which has a well defined organisation, a support base willing to fight with cops, and members who know real honest-to-goodness criminals, is probably more worrying on a day to day basis. Terrorism is boring: let’s all go home and get on with life.
Economically insignificant – If they can’t get it together to blow up properly, we certainly shouldn’t let them affect our business decisions. The Stockholm bomber’s impact on GDP is certainly less by several orders of magnitude than one day’s heavy snowfall over London.
Aimless – If their operational plans are silly, and their technology and tactics pathetic, their target selection is hilariously awful. Outside the Middle East, they are still yet to even attempt a serious attack on infrastructure other than aircraft, or a single serious attempt to assassinate an individual politician. It can’t be that the security is so formidable – where are the arrests, then?
Disconnected – It does not seem that the proven technology or effective tactics that Al-Qa’ida’s allies in Iraq make use of has spread beyond the Middle East. The DICKHEADS develop in semi-isolation, living on an intellectual diet of rantings and jihad fanboy culture. They are just as effective as you’d expect from that.
Suicidal – In the light of all this, perhaps we should think of them more like those occasional Americans or Germans who go mad and shoot their classmates. There have been some cases where it has been difficult to distinguish the two. There has been some debate about what the social and psychiatric sources of this phenomenon are. I should like to see something similar.
But in general, the lesson here is that we should feel the emotion that the terrorists’ leaders would hate more than anything else: pity. These people are both pathetic, a word that derives from pity, and pitiful. This is worth reading.
Update: If you need help, start here.
Sunshine: at the IMF, of all places
So, here we are, after a 2010 of economic horrors. There is extensive debate as to whether the standard tools of economics are even valid – as Daniel Davies points out, even Paul Krugman now self-identifies as a heterodox economist – while on the other side, the discipline is coping with the financial crisis experience by clapping louder and imposing ideological censorship. But is anyone at least trying to do something original with the standard toolkit? The DSGE model may be one of John Quiggin’s zombies (buy now for Christmas and support Australian professors’ lifestyles – what’s not to love?), but zombies are notoriously resilient. (Head shots! as a well-known advocate of conservative austerity once said.)
The answer on this occasion is yes, at least as far as Michael Kumhof and Romain Ranciére, go. In a new paper, they present a DSGE model with the following parameters: the top 5% of the income distribution value wealth more than everyone else, for whatever reason, and specifically, they want AAA-rated assets. Further, these are intermediated through the financial sector. Then, they run a simulation of the macro-economy assuming that there is a negative shock to the bargaining power of labour resulting in a shift in the income distribution.
The simulation results were that the financial sector balloons in size, that total private debt in the economy expands hugely, and that credit acts as a substitute for rising average wages in the short run. Eventually, the model produced a massive financial crisis and a brutal recession, followed by a blow-out of the government budget.
Your keen and agile minds will not have missed that flat real wages, an increased share of national income going to the top 5%, enormous growth in the financial sector, and a credit-financed consumer boom are exactly what happened to the macroeconomy in the last 30 years. Also, it would appear that the economic situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage, to borrow the Emperor Hirohito’s remark on Japan’s surrender to the Allies.
So, what should we do about it? Kumhof and Ranciére have something to say about that as well. Specifically, they ran the model for several different scenarios representing different paths out of the crisis. They considered a scenario in which the government took the pain, accepting a large government deficit in order to minimise the impact of the crisis on the real economy. This had the advantage of reducing the fall in GDP, and therefore allowing growth to reduce households’ leverage. They also considered the option of just suffering, which actually increased leverage as incomes fell and the stock of debt remained.
Then they considered two more positive responses to the crisis. One was a debt restructuring, or to be brutal about it, widespread default and bankruptcy. This had the advantage that it does, indeed, reduce the leverage burden and does so cheaply. It also implies the end of the big banks, as they point out that a bank rescue doesn’t constitute a restructuring, just a transfer of debt from the private sector to the public sector. In a policy context, we could caricature this option as “stimulus plus cramdown”.
The other was to shift the labour share of income upwards. They found that this achieved a faster, bigger, and more lasting reduction in leverage and a reduced probability of crises. In their own words:
The main difference to Figure 14 however is observed following period 30, where under a loan restructuring leverage and default probability resume an upward trajectory for several additional decades, while under the bargaining power solution both immediately go onto a declining path. By year 50 leverage is around 20 percentage points lower under the bargaining power solution than under the loan restructuring solution. For long-run sustainability a permanent flow adjustment, giving workers the means to repay their obligations over time, is therefore much more successful than a stock adjustment, unless the latter is extremely large….But without the prospect of a recovery in the incomes of poor and middle income households over a reasonable time horizon, the inevitable result is that loans keep growing, and therefore so does leverage and the probability of a major crisis that, in the real world, typically also has severe implications for the real economy.
They also argue that the inequality-finance-lending transmission mechanism might also explain the global imbalances, with the emergence of a globalised rich elite driving the demand for AAA-rated assets, the growth of the financial sector, and the emergence of persistent large capital account surpluses and trade deficits. (We already know that imbalances in the balance of payments are intermediated through the financial sector.) However, they haven’t extended the model to include the international dimension yet, although it’s on their agenda for further research.
I’ve waited for this moment, 752 words on, to mention the key detail: this cell of dangerous subversive Bolsheviks is embedded in the International Monetary Fund, and their poisonous hate-writings were published as an IMF Working Paper. Perhaps DSK really has had an influence on the institution? In other optimistic news, both IFO and the German Chambers of Commerce expect significantly stronger internal demand next year and a smaller trade surplus, while Daimler Benz’s CEO is promising that this year’s profit share payments will be “attractive”.
It better be…
The EU’s crowning achievement
As relief from the gloom this weekend, it struck me recently that there was literally nothing that would shock me about Silvio Berlusconi. Really, I couldn’t imagine a revelation that I hadn’t already mentally priced-in. And then, I realised that this is one of the achievements of the European Union, NATO, and the post-war settlement of Europe. Possibly the most important one. Someone like him has been the leader of a significant power, a country that owns its own reconnaissance satellites and builds aircraft carriers and Eurofighters, for years on end, and what has he managed to do? What evil has he done that will last beyond him? Of course, in many ways he’s been lucky, but then that’s rather my point. The system was stronger than the man, as Kevin Drum put it. You could say the same about Italy.
paranoia is total awareness
A quick Woerth/Bettencourt note. The prosecutor-general for Versailles has intervened in the complex dispute between jurisdictions in the case, in which the prosecutor for Nanterre, Philippe Courroye, an old political chum of Nicolas Sarkozy’s, has been trying to prevent the case being sent to an investigating judge. As the Versailles prosecutor is Courroye’s official superior, they’re in a position to simply order the whole mess shifted out of his responsibility, which would trigger a judicial inquiry.
Meanwhile, just to add an extra something to the general atmosphere of paranoia and zizanie, journalists’ laptops keep disappearing, in a string of burglaries at Le Point, Le Monde, and Mediapart. There’s an interview with one of the journalists here, who turns out to be the same one who was being illegally wiretapped.
He says he doesn’t want to “wallow in paranoia”, but frankly, who’d pass up an opportunity like this?
…In Fact, It Has Never Been Tried
Everyone’s het up about Angela Merkel’s speech in which she said that multiculturalism had failed in Germany. Here’s the King’s College London War Studies blog, for example, being overheated. Here’s respected correspondent Tom Ricks being even more overheated.
There is one problem with this whole festival of Terribly Serious People stroking their beards about The Problems Of Integration. It is this: Multiculturalism is not German policy and never has been. It is true that Germany doesn’t have a policy of deliberate official racism. But the word “multiculturalism” doesn’t mean very much if you define it as the absence of apartheid, in much the same way that “peace” isn’t just the absence of war.
In fact, official Germany pretended for years that there were no immigrants in Germany, which is about as far from multiculturalism as you can get while remaining a liberal democracy. And it’s not as if it was hard for journalists and others to find this out:
“We kidded ourselves for a while that they wouldn’t stay, but that’s not the reality,” she told members of the youth group of her Christian Democratic Union party, referring to the influx of workers, known as guest workers, who helped fuel the country’s postwar economic boom. “Of course the tendency had been to say, ‘let’s adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side, and be happy to be living with each other’. But this concept has failed, and failed utterly,” she said.
Yes, she referred to it two sentences before the bit everyone freaked out about.
Of course, you could go on to ask in what way this concept has failed utterly – Germany had not, when I last checked, descended into race war – but that would be to lend the whole affair a dignity it does not deserve. Banging on about “christliche Leitkultur” is an utterly routine and tedious habit of right-wing German politicians. It’s depressing that Angela Merkel of all people should descend to this, but it’s of a piece with the generally crappy performance of the CDU-FDP government – her version of the special tax break for hoteliers.
Veteran journalist Michael Spreng‘s excellent blog has reasons why this has come up just now – basically, the coalition has lost its way and there is trouble in the ranks. Important people in the CDU (and even more so in the CSU) have become keen on the idea of Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, the aristocratic defence minister, as an alternative chancellor. You have to remember that large chunks of the party, and especially the Bavarians, have never been reconciled with Merkel to begin with – she has usually been significantly more liberal, more northern, more Protestant, and more female than the party.
So this should really be considered a bit of cynical fan service, intended to queer the rivals’ pitch. Now can you all calm down?
oil leaks continue
So, remember the 10 million francs in 500 franc notes, that were meant to have come from passing round the hat at campaign rallies? Sure you do. Those will be the ones Nicolas Sarkozy personally banked in his capacity of treasurer to Edouard Balladur’s presidential campaign in 1995. Well, back in April, it was alleged that they originated from a large kickback paid as part of the deal under which France sold three submarines to Pakistan. Not good. Thanks to Mediapart, you can consult the original receipts here, as issued by the Boulevard Haussmann branch of Crédit du Nord.
Now, you may also recall that in 2002, terrorists blew up a busload of French engineers in Karachi, working on one of the boats. Everyone took this for an Al-Qa’ida or related job at the time, not surprisingly, but some people later began to doubt this. The latest news is that the judge investigating the affair, Renaud Van Ruymbeke has decided to inquire into the possibility that considerable sums of money were paid both to Pakistani officials to achieve the sale, and that some of this money made its way back to France and into the Balladur campaign’s accounts.
When Jacques Chirac beat both Balladur and the Socialists to the presidency in 1995, he ordered a stop to all the commissions paid as part of the contract. This was almost certainly out of revenge on Balladur for running in the first place, which implies he knew about the campaign funding. The whole affair seems to have turned on the vicious rivalry between the circle around Chirac and that around Balladur (and Nicolas Sarkozy). It’s also well worth remembering that the tiny but then influential Parti Républicain’s leaders were heavily involved in a whole succession of arms contracts a few years before this, which also involved the payment of large commissions and resulted in some of the commissions being paid back to important people in France.
If you want to know more, Mediapart has a sort of bible of the issue. You’ll need it.
So the president is accused of having cleared the creation of a special shell company and having banked the money himself. As well as the newspapers wanting him prosecuted for illegal wiretapping. And they’re demonstrating all over France.
sunshinewatch
So-called warning strikes by steelworkers at ThyssenKrupp AG and Salzgitter AG that began yesterday will “definitely†continue unless employers meet demands for 6 percent more pay, Helga Schwitzer, an IG Metall board member responsible for wage negotiations said in a Sept. 21 interview in Frankfurt.
While exports give Germany a “very strong leg to stand on,†increases are justified because the recovery is at risk without consumer spending, Schwitzer said. “If you’re only standing on one leg, you start to limp,†she said. “The second leg, domestic spending, has to be strengthened.†..
“We could use a level of redistribution in this wage round, but we shouldn’t overdo it,†Andreas Scheuerle, an economist at Dekabank in Frankfurt, said by phone. “Pay increases would mean a win for the domestic economy, but it would come at the cost of exports.†..
The government should use its trade surplus, the European Union’s biggest, to “foster domestic demand and ease reliance on exports that are contributing a huge trade imbalance on the euro-zone’s periphery,†said Juergen Kroeger, a director in the EU Commission’s Economic and Financial Affairs department.
“Why aren’t we paying people higher wages in this country?†he said Sept. 13 in Berlin. “That might be a start.â€
Premature evaluation – The Spirit Level
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level is a vigorous polemic for social democracy, something we’re probably in need of as the neo-liberals recover from the 2008 experience.
Unlike most such, this one is based on data – specifically, a whole battery of socioeconomic indicators that turn out to be strongly correlated with income inequality. In fact, the paperback comes with a handy table of the R-squareds and p-values of all the indicators used, which range across life expectancy, imprisonment per capita, patents issued per capita and much else. Everywhere, it seems, more egalitarian societies tend to do better.
This observation is rather more impressive than quite a bit of the book – there’s too much back-of-a-fag-packet neuroscience of the sort that actual neuroscientists run a mile to avoid about mirror neurons and such, as well as a fair bit of 1970s-ish romanticisation of the supposedly ideal status of hunter-gatherer societies. Steven Pinker’s work on the history of violence hasn’t landed here; in places it’s almost nostalgically sweet.
The data, however, speaks for itself. It’s true that quite a few of the charts derive a lot of their correlation from a few outliers, but the outliers invariably point to the same results – specifically the United States, which reliably turns out to have truly awful results for many, many tests – and also very high inequality. Similarly, there are a whole string of statistics that are driven by a group of post-Soviet states that turn out to be dramatically unhappy, conflicted, violent, unhealthy, etc for their level of income; of course, these societies underwent a historic explosion of inequality.
Many of the results have been checked by carrying out the same analyses with the 51 US states, which gives rise to the same conclusion and another crop of interesting outliers. The states of the Deep South are reliably terrible. They are highly unequal, and they get the effects – but they are far off to the top right of the trendline. In a sense, their marginal productivity in terms of inequality is unusually high – for every extra point on the Gini coefficient, they manage to produce a sharply higher degree of suffering than the national average.
On the other hand, there’s the importance of being urban. The more metropolitan the state, the less it suffers from the impact of inequality – New York has the social problems of the average, despite being very unequal. And there’s the Alaskan question.
The Alaskan question? Many people on the left are keen on the idea of a citizens’ basic income, and oddly enough, there is one territory with one in this study. Alaska, famously, distributes its oil revenues equally among the citizenry, and is therefore the most equal society in the United States. However, it also succeeds in being reliably among the worst on every other measure you can think of. Clearly, the statecraft of Sarah Palin must have some impact, but it’s equally clear that it can’t be the whole explanation.
Unless there is some huge missing factor that invalidates the whole data set, we have to consider that this particular basic income experiment has failed to deliver the benefits of equality. Alaska is, of course, a very special and atypical place – but it’s not that different to, say, Norway, another sparsely populated, mountainous, northern territory bordering on Russia whose economy is heavily influenced by oil and gas, forestry, fishing, and metals and whose government decided to take a radical approach to the oil revenues, and where a lot of people own guns. And Norway is both very egalitarian and reliably in the very top of all the metrics in The Spirit Level.
Perhaps the answer is precisely that the Alaskan basic income is free money? Despite all the stuff about mirror neurons, etc, etc, it seems that the trade secret of equality is – equality. It takes a long time for Wilkinson and Pickett to get to this, but the difference between handing out oil windfalls and real egalitarianism is that only one of them is founded on a different balance of power between classes. A lasting reduction of income inequality must be founded in a lasting reduction in the inequality of political power – otherwise it may not last, and it may not even have much effect.
Another interesting point is that changes in relative economic success among nations seem to have little effect on human happiness or security. Obviously, a total crash will do it. But once a certain threshold level of per-capita GDP is passed, Wilkinson and Pickett argue, pushing into the G8 doesn’t change much. They therefore argue that economic growth is useless. However, they then note that a whole range of their metrics, like life expectancy, do seem to go up a percentage point or two a year in the rich nations anyway. Which sounds a lot like growth.
It might be more accurate to say that growth relative to other industrialised states is not particularly important within the normal range of variation, although in absolute terms it is. However, the chart in question is quite heavily driven by the US outlier – which suggests that the costs of enough inequality will essentially swallow all your economic growth.
Eventually, the upshot of TSL is that the world, and especially China, needs trade unions.