I note Mervyn King has promised us a ‘S.O.B.E.R.’ decade of savings, orderly budgets and equitable rebalancing.
He’s deluded.
What is equitable about 500,000 public sector job losses? And many more in the private sector?
What is equitable about cutting services for the poor, vulnerable, weak, disabled, the young and old?
What is equitable about cuts that hit women more than men?
What is equitable about cuts that hit racial minorities harder than the majority population?
What is equitable about cuts that increase division in society?
What is equitable about cuts that leave bankers — the people who caused this whole crisis — immune?
Only a banker could be so coldly indifferent.
But then, he is a banker.
A central banker maybe.
But a man wholly aligned with bankers, none the less.
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On the bright side, there is a good chance that some economic theories will be discredited by the end of the decade.
I’d also challenge the assumption that bankers caused this whole crisis. I think just as culpable was our whole consumerist culture and the general belief that we are all entitled to everything and entitled to it now. Yes, bankers threw fuel on the fire with the extension of easy credit. But ultimately, the cause was the desire of our culture to consume resources and to seek shallow experiences and (meaningless) material improvements regardless of the financial, environmental and even spiritual cost.
The big issue for me is whether we have, as a society, reached the dark night of the soul where we actually think about how to remake society in a new way. And funnily enough, both the big society and the new green deal are clearly part of what we need to move towards.
But I fear that the attachment to the old way of doing things and (paradoxically) an over-emphasis on economics is actually preventing us asking the political and exstential questions that we need to address in order to have a sustainable future.