Au Revoir

I haven’t written anything here for eight months and therefore think I should officially label this blog abandoned. Although I have had ideas for posts and even begun the odd draft, nothing has materialised for a few reasons.

Firstly, the original impetus for this blog has gone. When I was working in the public sector and constantly horrified by the ill-considered and counterproductive policy changes the coalition was forcing through, I wanted an outlet. Whilst in a local government organisation, the work I produced had to be politically neutral and acceptable to local councillors. When I found this intellectually frustrating, the blog provided a space to say what I really thought. Since being made redundant nearly 14 months ago, I’ve been a postgraduate student and have had all the intellectual freedom I could want. That need for an outlet is no longer there.

Secondly, writing variations on, “I told you so,” would be tedious, as well as boring for you to read. The issues my colleagues and I raised with housing, economic, and planning policy changes are all manifesting, and being brushed aside by the government. (Keep up with this via The Guardian and Telegraph.) There seems no value in constantly repeating the same points when doing so will change nothing about the situation.

Thirdly, my focus is now on in-depth research of a specific area of environmental policy. Although I still try and keep up more broadly with planning, housing, and economic issues, the idea of the PhD is that I become an absolute bore about one very narrow area. Although I sometimes toy with the idea of blogging about that process, I think it would be very onerous to read and have only a tangential relationship to the Age of Austerity.

Lastly, I did begin a series of posts on climate change, but am disinclined to continue them mostly because contemplating carbon emissions at the moment is deeply depressing. Even today, PWC released a report reiterating how far we are from a relatively safe emissions trajectory. The frequently-quoted target of two degrees is now essentially impossible and we are heading instead for six. Human civilisation as we have come to know it wouldn’t survive that for long. I don’t think the blogosphere needs another person ranting angrily about how humanity is failing as a species and should probably save the more constructive comments for my studies.

I might pick up this blog again at some point, but it’s hard to say when. I am not the public sector worker I was when I started it and I both think and write differently as a result of being back in the academic world. For instance, I have a saved list of potential blog post topics, some of which I thought up years ago, such as state capitalism in China, what the fall of the USSR can tell us about the US, path dependency, what fairness means, and infrastructure in the UK. When I was a public servant I would have felt qualified to write something on such subjects, on the strength of having read one or two books about each, kept up with the Economist’s commentary, and thought a bit about them. Now my standards have changed, and from an academic perspective I don’t have anywhere near the background knowledge and depth of understanding to comment to a satisfactory standard. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have opinions, of course, they are just qualified with, “As far as I know”.

There is something I heard at an economics seminar recently and would like to share, though. It would seem that the macroeconomics establishment is currently trying to integrate banking into their models. Incredible as it may now seem, when I was taught macro the banking sector wasn’t considered worth making a variable in long term economic growth. Anyway, a professor demonstrated his new model, which was immensely complex and I didn’t follow all of. What struck me was in the Q&A at the end, when he commented that the growth prospects of the UK economy in the short and medium term depend on our current output gap. This is the currently unused capacity of the economy, which is just waiting to be used again when demand/confidence/both rise. Government economic forecasts rely on the existence of a significant output gap, which would allow economic growth to pick up rapidly. The interesting thing about the output gap as a variable in a complex macroeconomic model is where the data on it comes from; a qualitative survey of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). That’s a lot flimsier than it initially appears from the seemingly authoritative graphs and tables.

This isn’t the final entry, however, as I’ve unearthed a silly thing called, ‘Alice in the Age of Austerity’ that I wrote years ago in honour of Lewis Carroll’s birthday. I will post that soon. Moreover, don’t expect me to shut up on twitter. Indeed, perhaps I’m just being lazy? 140 characters are far less effort than a detailed blogpost. But I am expected to be lazy now, being a student.

I hope that something I’ve written here has interested you at some point. Thank you for reading Welcome to the Age of Austerity.