I wrote this yesterday:
A vision has to address people's hopes and their fears. Everyone has both. The balance between them determines the public mood and in turn the priorities for an economic vision.
The predominant public sentiment in the 2020s is fear. The fear is of:
- insecure employment
- low pay
- of never being able to call a place home
- ill health and the inability of the NHS to deal with it
- old age and not being cared for
- that no one cares about your community
- climate change
- a lack of freedom to be yourself as you really are
- A lack of physical security.A vision must in that case tackle the fear that comes from relative poverty, isolation and the fear that comes from worrying about whether we might even have a future to enjoy, let alone one we can afford. We need freedom from fear.
Is that fair?
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It was January 1941 when FDR said that everyone around the world should enjoy four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs starts with basic needs at the bottom (physiological needs, ie want, then safety, ie fear), then psychological needs (love, then esteem) and finally self actualisation.
A vision for the future has to address each of these in turn, addressing wants and fears, and providing hope for the future.
How do we allocate (and reallocate) resources to address everyone’s physical needs (food, water, shelter, heat and light) and their fears (war, crime, disease, pollution, finances – that is, defence, justice, health, the environment, jobs, social security), to allow everyone to enjoy their life to its fullest potential and make the most of it.
That’s a manifesto though
I am looking at economic vision
I think I am agreeing with you 🙂 A manifesto sets out practical steps to achieve that vision.
Andrew – “How do we allocate (and reallocate) resources to address everyone’s physical needs (food, water, shelter, heat and light) and their fears (war, crime, disease, pollution, finances – that is, defence, justice, health, the environment, jobs, social security), to allow everyone to enjoy their life to its fullest potential and make the most of it.” What you say strikes me as a very good summary of what is being described as the “well being economy” is about. These are the issues that Scottish independence is about IMO.
I’ve long felt that our economic system should loosely, at least, follow Maslow’s hierarchy in that no one should be allowed to make money out of other people’s basic needs.
An end to financialisation then….
But Maslow ignores a more basic need: for a functioning ecosystem that provides air & clean water. And to maintain a stable ecosystem, we need sufficient biodiversity.
It’s easy to forget that, or to pretend that it’s not relevant to a working economy – but actually that’s how we’ve got into the mess we’re in today.
Definitely time for a rethink.
That is in what I wrote, I think
The Four Freedoms of Churchill and Roosevelt 1941
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of Religion
Freedom from Want
Freedom from Fear
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, said Thomas Jefferson, even earlier.
It isn’t a matter of establishing them and then just enjoying them.
They have to be strived for in each generation.
Agreed
We were vigilant but we were too busy looking East to see the Fascism still in existence right under our noses in the West.
If we are looking at Economics then we must address the neutering of values in the sphere of economic thought – or for want of a better word, the neutering of morality.
All that bollocks about ‘positive’ versus ‘normative’ economics? Fancy calling the supposedly objective economics ‘positive’ ? Which little Neo-liberal shit did that eh? Yet more Fascist division by the naming and indexing of the differences of things to exploit for malign reasons. Identity politics. gone mad.
Real economics is both, whether it is Neo-liberal of Marxist or even progressive (and I hope so for the latter).
Back to morality, care of Paul Spicker in ‘The Welfare State: a general theory’, (Sage, 2000, pp.180-181).
The Moral Community:
‘People and communities have to act morally’.
Moral Rules:
People are bound by moral rules.
Moral ideas form rules of action.
Moral rules are social norms.
The social construction of morality:
Moral rules are socially constructed.
Moral norms are complex, and sometimes contradictory
The morality of an action cannot be judged by its consequences
Morality is not rational.
Deviance and control:
Morals justify intervention in other people’s lives.
Societies control undesirable behaviour.
Deviance is a breach of social rules.
Deviance implies exclusion.
Moral approaches to social action:
Where there are social relationships, there are moral relationships.
Morals govern personal and social life.
The morality of collective action depends on the nature of that action.
The Moral Community:
Societies also have moral obligations.
Societies have obligations to their members.
Societies have obligations to their non-members.
Societies have obligations to other societies.
Societies have obligations to previous generations.
Societies have obligations to future generations.
Societies can be moral agents.
Spicker’s work above is to me a repudiation of Thatcherism not through political polemic but through diligent philosophy.
These are not answers in themselves but lines of enquiry. Considering the lack of morality in Government now I find it refreshing .
As for Labour, it makes their sticking to Tory spending plans (reducing public sector pensions) and adopting Clintonesque welfare policies (job seekers allowance) even more vindictive, mean and unacceptable.
Tell me Ms Reeve – just how different are you from the Tories? Because I remain unconvinced.
My fear is of the anointed having increasing power over our lives.
Not to be exploited.
Admittedly several on your list cover this.
I think your list is very much on the button. Fear is a peculiar thing, in that it can manifest on so many levels, from the immediate to the existential. We are currently caught between both of those two pillars, and it does not help at all that we are currently governed by a political party who rely almost totally on the promotion of fear in order to win elections – and I give no quarter in defending that point of view. They represent an affront to all that is decent.
I took note of what Pilgrim had to say yesterday, and, following his suggestionm found this:
http://www.spicker.uk/books/Paul%20Spicker%20-%20The%20welfare%20state%20a%20general%20theory.pdf
It looks very interesting, and at only 168 or so pages, commendably concise!
Prof. Spicker’s other writings on poverty and social welfare look to me, to be worth exploring.
Finally, it also seems to me that the cure for full spectrum societal fear is indeed a Courageous State. No doubt whatsoever.
What the ‘Courageous State’ and ‘The Welfare State; a general theory’ have in common is that they both put people at the centre of things? They both celebrate the value and existence of society.
That’s how it seemed to me and still does.
MMT – and its laying out of sovereign money power – is how you would fund a people centred economy; tax is how you would make it sustainable; looking after the environment that we all need to sustain human life is also part of that people centred approach.
As a housing developer I bring together different teams of expertise to get houses built. We must take the same approach to rebuild our economy and our polity.
We have learnt so much by doing wrong thing.
It is now time surely to do the right things.
I hope so
Beveridge got the list right with his ‘6 evils’. Tangible, deliverable impacts on peoples’ lives to which we would now add environment. Cutting through the philosophical debate to meet peoples’ basic needs. Others have come up with similar lists including Amartya Sen and more recently Minouche Shafik. They mirror all those areas that the current government has failed to deliver or actively undermined.
Arguably Keynes provided the economic vision, which enabled so much of what Beveridge had in mind to be delivered as part of the post-war welfare state along with the rebuilding of the economy post war. We lack that economic vision now along with the driving ambition to deliver. The components and options are there but few if any of the politicians and their economics advisors have broken out of the thinking that has got us into this mess. Even when their politics and values are in the right space. Simon Wren Lewis being a case in point. As others have suggested, maybe an example of what Thomas Kuhn wrote about.
I think Beveridge out of date
We have made progress since then, I think
I’d agree with what you say about Beveridge but we do need something updated now to deal with matters.
At the root of this needs to be a new constitutional objective of the State.
It is needed because what has emerged after all the Neo-liberal cow dung we’ve had to deal with is the real intent:
For a rich minority cadre of people to make money out of the lives of the multitudes of others.
To feed off our lives, deaths, successes and disappointments.
We are nothing but to be exploited for a profit percentage for an investor seeking to maintain his/her store of wealth.
Like the Sackler family as detailed in ‘Empire of Pain’ by Patrick Keefe (2021) who knew that opiates were addictive but let their addiction to wealth overthrow their duty of care to the end users and society.
In all my years of reading science fiction let alone technical books on state finance and economics, it looks as if that dystopian future is actually going to happen if we don’t pull back.
Despite progress since 1942, I think Beveridge still has quite a lot to tell us – if only to gauge how far we have (or haven’t) come, and to stop backsliding.
His “five giants” were Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. That is, poverty, ill health, bad education, poor housing, and unemployment. It would be a mistake to think that all of those evils were slayed forever. The poor may always be with is; the NHS is always under threat; educational outcomes are still too correlated with social class and other markers of deprivation; there is still too much very poor housing stock in the UK – especially if we take the threat of global warming seriously, a sixth “evil” not known in Beveridge’s day; and employment is imperiled by a return to casualised labour in the “gig” economy, let alone the threat of AI.
Good interpretation
I’m with Andrew
One can have more philosophical discussions but Beveridge’s list cuts to the chase of what constitutes the basics of what people need. A platform if you like from which they can make what they wish of their lives. That list has not changed fundamentally as Andrew suggests:
– A safety net to keep people from poverty
– A health service that protects people from ill health
– A decent education system, accessible to all
– Affordable housing, not least social housing at affordable rents
– Access to properly paid, secure employment
To which one might add:
– Environment and climate change
and perhaps
– A democratic voice in decisions
These are all subjects that people will understand on the ‘doorstep’. Debates about fairness or wellbeing are much more open to interpretation, however one much support them. Its why I personally am a fan of Universal Basic Services which ticks most of those boxes.
Its still leaves us with the economic debate and vision – how to build a productive economy that benefits all, and fund the services and infrastructure that we need.
And Im sure there are other items that Ive missed out, but these are the basics
Noted
But I am not sure my list is so very different, barring perhaps education, which I need to boost