Skip to main content

Home/ economic crisis/ Group items tagged statistics

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Arabica Robusta

Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit - Political Economy Research Centre - 0 views

www.perc.org.uk/...hts-on-the-sociology-of-brexit

brexit neoliberalism britain eu

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • There is no reason to think that they would not stay red if an election were held in the autumn. But in the language of Marxist geographers, they have had no successful ‘spatial fix’ since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. Thatcherism gutted them with pit-closures and monetarism, but generated no private sector jobs to fill the space. The entrepreneurial investment that neoliberals always believe is just around the corner never materialised.
  • This cultural contradiction wasn’t sustainable and nor was the geographic one. Not only was the ‘spatial fix’ a relatively short-term one, seeing as it depended on rising tax receipts from the South East and a centre left government willing to spread money quite lavishly (albeit, discretely), it also failed to deliver what many Brexit-voters perhaps crave the most: the dignity of being self-sufficient, not necessarily in a neoliberal sense, but certainly in a communal, familial and fraternal sense
  • What was so clever about the language of the Leave campaign was that it spoke directly to this feeling of inadequacy and embarrassment, then promised to eradicate it. The promise had nothing to do with economics or policy, but everything to do with the psychological allure of autonomy and self-respect. Farrage’s political strategy was to take seriously communities who’d otherwise been taken for granted for much of the past 50 years.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I can’t help feeling that every smug, liberal, snobbish barb that Ian Hislop threw his way on that increasingly hateful programme was ensuring that revenge would be all the greater, once it arrived. The giggling, from which Boris Johnson also benefited handsomely, needs to stop.
  • Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences.
  • a new way of organising and perceiving the world came into existence at the end of the 15th century with the invention of double-entry book-keeping. This new style of knowledge is that of facts, representations that seem both context-independent, but also magically slot seamlessly into multiple contexts as and when they are needed. The basis for this magic is that measures and methodologies (such as accounting techniques) become standardised, but then treated as apolitical, thereby allowing numbers to move around freely in public discourse without difficulty or challenge. In order for this to work, the infrastructure that produces ‘facts’ needs careful policing, ideally through centralisation in the hands of statistics agencies or elite universities (the rise of commercial polling in the 1930s was already a challenge to the authority of ‘facts’ in this respect).
  • The attempt to reduce politics to a utilitarian science (most often, to neo-classical economics) eventually backfires, once the science in question then starts to become politicised. ‘Evidence-based policy’ is now far too long in the tooth to be treated entirely credulously, and people tacitly understand that it often involves a lot of ‘policy-based evidence’.
  • More absurdly, they seemed to imagine that the opinions of bodies such as the IMF might be viewed as ‘independent’. Unfortunately, economics has been such a crucial prop for political authority over the past 35 years that it is now anything but outside of the fray of politics.
  • This has been abandoned. Meanwhile, nations that might genuinely describe themselves as ‘shackled’, have suffered such serious threats to their democracy as to have unelected Prime Ministers imposed upon them by the Troika, and have had their future forcibly removed thanks to the European Union, might look at Brexit and wonder.
Arabica Robusta

IPS - With Egyptian Loan Request, Some Fear Loss of Revolution's Gains | Inter Press Se... - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/...fear-loss-of-revolutions-gains

movements social arab multinational corporations mncs intervention egypt mubarak telecom imf world bank neoliberalism structural adjustment debt

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Morsi’s government is clearly aware of its lack of economic expertise, and thus has chosen to keep around some important members of Mubarak’s government, including the governor of the central bank, Farouk Al-Okdah, and others. “These are the very members of the neoliberal team once in charge under Mubarak,” Adly says. “These bureaucrats and technocrats are quite conservative, and there is the idea that they have been kept in office in order to negotiate with the IMF and the World Bank.”
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 25 Aug 12
       
      Keep around the "technocrats" (read, evangelists of neoliberalism).
  • On Wednesday, Lagarde said that the IMF is “responding quickly” and sending a technical team in early September. That same day, Prime Minister Hisham Qandi said he would hope for an agreement by the end of the year. If an agreement happens, Egypt would be the 20th African country to be indebted to the IMF, according to 2011 statistics. If the final agreed amount is anywhere near the request, the Egyptian loan would be by far the largest on the continent.
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page