Rarely a week goes by when I don't wonder at how weak and diffuse the pro business pro markets Tory voice has become. Compare that to the concerted pressure and debate from the currently unseated left in the Labour Party.
Where are those pushing for free trade with Europe? Arguing against levelling up and invasive industrial policy? Reducing bureacracy and regulatory barriers at our EU border? Many of the individuals have nothing more to lose, yet seem to have given up.
In the late C19th early C20th when labour felt that no Parliamentary group adequately represented its interests, sufficient pressure built up to organise one that would, the 'Labour Party'.
The current Tory Party has been operating against business interests in the most extraordinary way, so far with no response from those interests.
This antagonism has taken many forms:
by generating maximal business uncertainty around how Brexit would be concluded, prepared to threaten No Deal.
obvs by erecting high barriers to doing business with the EU, after decades of UK supply chains merging into and adapting to the Single Market.
by corroding the institutional quality of the UK with repeated departures from truth telling about goverment plans, Brexit or the consequences of it, which, aside from the moral and political abhorrence, is bad for business.
by ending free movement of labour, of course; by ending the single market in the UK; pursuit of a hard Brexit against the wishes of Scotland, creating uncertainty about the status of the border between England and Scotland, and the Scottish monetary and fiscal order.
by the regime of apparent cronyism in awarding government contracts; penalizing companies critical of govt [eg Deloittes]
As @CJFDillow points out in a reply it's possible that the Tory Party were never sincere in their adoption of business interests. But that still leaves the q why those interests do not produce voices / pressure / an organization that forcefully articulates them.
A story during the indyref, and EUref was that business felt that its interests were in appearing to stay out of politics, for fear of provoking culturally based boycotts of their brands and products. Is that the explanation for the continued silence and weakness?
Is the story instead about the failure of UK capitalism to properly align the interests of managers and shareholders? So controllers express their own cultural preferences for nationalism at shareholders' expense?
Of course there are business organzations, like CBI and IoD, but either 1) they were directed by members not to articulate where business interests lie [seems to me the case] or 2) completely failed to articulate those interests despite being pressed?
Is this a 'collective action' problem? So businesses individually [apart from those run against profit lines by those with a taste for nationalism, like Dyson/Martin] recognizes where its interests lie but fear speaking out alone?
...Which I should have tweeted before the CBI/IoD tweet as this returns us to the q of why organizations there to press interests collectively to resolve those problems have not in fact resolved them.
Another explanation might be that business has this in hand, and has its eyes on the longer term. This is a short run, harmful, nativist blip, which the gravitational forces of capitalism will squash eventually.
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File under - remember the risk budget. Risk of transmission may be the same in food as book shops, but we need food more than books. And to keep the virus from spreading, contacts between people have to be limited. (The limit growing as the vaccinated pop grows.)
'This is similar to that; that is allowed; therefore this is allowed.' It's been a persistent difficulty with the regulations that the virus control measures don't spring from the same ethical/moral sources as other laws where we demand consistency.
Lockdown sceptics have, variously, failed to understand the notion of the risk budget, or just sought to exoloit the fact that lay people don't, and played on the expectation that virus control measures will adhere to non-pandemic norms of consistency...
Taking the 10 year view this is ten lots of one year costs coming from the fact that because of trade gravity we can’t replace EU trade with that from farther away countries. Thanks.
This article doesn't quite make the point clearly enough IMO. The contention is that if you get close enough to the best policy, you can improve both economic and health outcomes. theguardian.com/world/2021/feb…
In which case the 'price of a life' - while an interesting and difficult convsersation we have all the time - is not relevant.
What the article does not dwell on is the counterfactual path for the *economy* if the virus were to be let loose. Much of the econometric research shows that the major portion of the 'damage' is done by the virus, not lockdown restrictions.
Moments like that tilt me towards the ‘stupid, not lying’ theory.
There are a lot of subtleties in mastering the formal techniques used to study the control of large systems. Optimal control with imperfect lagged data, with sentient agents forming expectations over your actions, with blunt, partially responsive instruments....
Any health economists there know the best discussion of the optimality or otherwise of the NICE valuations for a life year?
As an outsider, I'd view these as uninformative for decisions about the resources to spend on a new health challenge.
A new condition, one that threatens our ability to treat existing conditions, might raise the point at which marginal benefits and marginal costs are equated.
1. I don't have a clear view yet a) how permanent a feature the actual disease will be in our lives, and, even if it is basically tamed, b) what the legacy would be anyway.
2. One question is 'what is a rational and just response to the challenge posed by the post covid era, whatever that turns out to be?'. Another is: how do you win elections?