{"id":63950,"date":"2022-07-22T06:55:19","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T05:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=63950"},"modified":"2022-07-22T06:55:19","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T05:55:19","slug":"useless-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2022\/07\/22\/useless-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"Useless jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter May wrote this on Progressive Pulse,<\/a> which is the other blog I direct. I thought it worth sharing:<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

This is a quote from Richard Murphy\u2019s blog on Sunday<\/a>, which I\u2019ve been mulling over:<\/p>\n

That, in a nutshell, is why we\u2019re a relatively poor country. We refuse to employ people to do desperately needed value-added work in the state sector to guarantee a supply of labour to those doing shit jobs with zero social value in the private sector.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m beginning to conclude that this must be in fact why the UK, is so \u2018unproductive\u2019.<\/p>\n

It is not because the workers are so lazy as our \u2018Britannia Unchained\u2019 <\/a>if not actually decidedly \u2018Unhinged\u2019 government would tell us, but it suggests to me that it is simply because we do not properly invest in the state.<\/p>\n

All major European countries have a bigger state sector than the UK (something which is quite unaccountably disapproved of in the UK and the US), but in fact a properly functioning state sector gets things done.<\/p>\n

I suggest that actually the \u2018Productivity Question\u2019 is in fact a \u2018Neoliberal Question\u2019.<\/p>\n

Almost everywhere in the UK the private sector is involved in what is the \u2018state\u2019 provision. But of course there are necessary inefficiencies in their involvement. Things have to be quoted for and contracted. Contracts are for a specific period and then change. There have to be administrators to organise and regulators to ensure fair play.<\/p>\n

All these requirements need people. But they are people doing useless jobs.<\/p>\n

Useless in the sense that, when we now know that government creates money as it spends, there is actually no possible point in requiring people to do useless jobs \u2013 such as refereeing a panoply of providers to do a job you could do yourself.<\/p>\n

All the more important when post Brexit Britain is so short of labour.<\/p>\n

The system simply puts money into private hands \u2013 not a bad thing in and of itself. But the private hands are not actually our people, they are private corporations \u2013 and ever so frequently they are structured to funnel money upwards and outwards in those corporations \u2013 and to pay as little as possible to our people \u2013 or their \u2018labour\u2019.<\/p>\n

I find it difficult to conclude other than productivity would actually be much improved by the state ridding itself of its private contracting\u2026<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s why I suggest Neoliberalism is at the core of the UK\u2019s productivity problem\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter May wrote this on Progressive Pulse, which is the other blog I direct. I thought it worth sharing: This is a quote from Richard
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}