Martin Meenagh blog

The Eurozone ought to break up The euro is on the face of it, an undemocratic project. This is in the sense that a largely unaccountable international bank has been handed nominal control of interest rates and money in a huge swathe of continental Europe. This co-ordination of monetary policy has been tied to a relatively strict regime of floating exchange rates with no allowed exchange controls or intervention, no zone-wide tax system to redistribute money from richer to poorer areas, and no flexibility to allow inflation to edge up if growth or unemployment are worries. Initially, the programme was invested with a certain amount of democratic accountability in theory in that fiscal policy, and the issuing of government debt was to be coordinated by governments that considered themselves responsible to their peoples. Quite how a political elite elected largely by forms of proportional representation that keep the same people and attitudes in charge all the time could come to view itse...

What powers global growth? The picture is Guercino' s Et in Arcadia Ego, which is often sidelined in the popular bourgeois mind by Poussin's picture of sheperds which Dan Brown, Henry Lincoln, and others have turned into a travesty of art-as-something-useful in recent years. Guercino's painting is about the contrast of opposites, and has been seen as a play between harsh reality and dreamy innocence. I live in a decaying, if not undead, part of the west, which is nevertheless used to high standards of living. In it, students of macroeconomic policy are told that their heritage of economic domination has emerged in one of three ways, though economists are divided on and, frankly, disinterested as to, which one. A line emerging from a theorist of business and an imperialist holds that the accumulation of capital, and its association with population, technology, and productivity, is the key to growth. This ideological strain can be traced over the years in the economics of th...