"May 24 (Reuters) - Britain's Communities Minister #MichaelGove said on Friday he will step down as a member of parliament ahead of the July 4 general election."
#Austerity#Populism#Europe#Globalization#Inequality: "Governments have repeatedly adjusted fiscal policy in recent decades. We examine the political effects of these adjustments in Europe since the 1990s using both district-level election outcomes and individual-level voting data. We expect austerity to increase populist votes, but only among economically vulnerable voters, who are hit the hardest by austerity. We identify economically vulnerable regions as those with a high share of low-skilled workers, workers in manufacturing and in jobs with a high routine-task intensity. The analysis of district-level elections demonstrates that austerity increases support for populist parties in economically vulnerable regions, but has little effect in less vulnerable regions. The individual-level analysis confirms these findings. Our results suggest that the success of populist parties hinges on the government's failure to protect the losers of structural economic change. The economic origins of populism are thus not purely external; the populist backlash is triggered by internal factors, notably public policies."
Power is like a gigantic milk providing machinery,for a democracy in process society,once the politicians become ravenously,all forms of attention can be used as a ploy to satisfy one's need until whole society faint from hunger,and constant attention seeking is how populism and extremism have been benefited in the age of digital,..
Two blog posts today, going into deep dependencies in our political discourse and the dangers lurking for democracy within them.
In this first post I explore how political polarisation is the most efficient tool of malicious governments like Russia and China to influence our western democracies to make them weaker at resisting their imperial push
In this second blog post, I explore how the populist right deals in trafficking ideas from the critical left and reinterpreting them in a different framework.
I end on a positive note that perhaps we should at least recognise the need for solutions on the problem of multinational corporations wielding too much power as unifying the left & right here.
Friends I have absolutely had enough of the far-left Pro-Gaza Protesters that is masquerading as pro-Palestinians activist who continue to follow the #President of the United States across the country just to scream lie disrespect and attack his character and encouraging voters not to vote, HOW DARE YOU" My family here in the US are Even more important then the narrative you're selling about the Palestinian ppl when it's just a movement to hurt Biden and elect Trump. these groups are frauds #FP
Nobel Laureate economist #Angus#Deaton has delivered a ferocious rebuke to his own profession, saying economists have failed to understand that ⭐️capitalism is about power.⭐️
Deaton lobs a series of truth bombs at his own profession, the result, he says, of “changing my mind, a discomfiting process for someone who has been a practising economist for more than half a century”.
These include:
🔸“We have largely stopped thinking about #ethics and about what constitutes human #well-#being”.
🔸If “economists should focus on efficiency and leave equity to others, to politicians or administrators… 🔹the others regularly fail to materialise🔹, so that when efficiency comes with upward redistribution
— frequently though not inevitably
— our recommendations become little more than a #license for #plunder”.
🔸“#Historians, who understand about contingency and about multiple and multidirectional causality, often do a better job than economists of identifying important mechanisms…”
🔸Far from being “a nuisance that interfered with economic (and often personal) efficiency”, #unions “once raised wages for members and nonmembers, they were an important part of social capital in many places, and they brought political power to working people in the workplace and in local, state, and federal governments.
🔸Their decline is contributing to the falling wage share, to the widening #gap between executives and workers, to community #destruction, and to rising #populism.”
🔸“I am much more sceptical of the benefits of free trade to American workers and am even sceptical of the claim, which I and others have made in the past, that globalisation was responsible for the vast reduction in global poverty over the past 30 years”.
🔸Immigration contributes to inequality.
But Deaton’s main point is a recognition of how #power distorts #policy:
“Our emphasis on the virtues of free, competitive markets and exogenous technical change can distract us from the importance of power in setting prices and wages, in choosing the direction of technical change, and in influencing politics to change the rules of the game.”
If we live in a "solutionist age" (remember: E. Morozov), why are technological solutions to the climate issue ( #geoengineering e.g. direct air capture) so unpopular (meaning: at least in Germany, I don't see any significant public support)?