Will Hutton’s book continues to impress me; greatly.

On 28tTh October, I wrote an article about Will Hutton‘s impressive book, Them and Us.  I had got to page 120 or thereabouts and could resist no longer the urge of reading the book to the end before commenting on Learning from Dogs.

Now I am reading through page 260 and, again, find myself incapable of waiting until the book is completed before offering further thoughts!

Despite being very optimistic about the long-term future, I sense that the period that we have been in since 2008 may turn out to be one of the darkest in recent history – I touched on this aspect in a recent post called Faith in a (new) future.

One of the things that strikes me is the complete lack of openness from the British Government about the likely growth scenarios over the next decade.  Here was how the latest ‘growth’ figures were presented a couple of weeks ago, “The economy grew by 0.8% in the three months to September – double the rate that had been predicted by analysts.”

But here’s Will Hutton,

Britain is going to be much poorer than it anticipated just a few years ago.

and a couple of sentences later talking about economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff,

They paint a sober picture of prolonged loss of output, high unemployment and depressed asset prices, and warn that there is no precedent for what happens after the kind of global crisis through which we have just lived. (My italics)

Hutton says that growth would need to accelerate to 3.25 per cent in order for output to reach its predicted level if the recession had not taken place.

He then says that a more plausible scenario if growth remains at 2.75 per cent (average level in recent years leading up to the credit crunch) “then it might never recover sufficiently to converge with the old trajectory.”

Hutton continues,

However, even that may be optimistic.  The reality is that between the economic growth troughs of 1991 and 2009, growth in Britain actually averaged just over 2 per cent.

That would lead to a cumulative loss of output of more than £5 trillion!

It could be even worse.  The economics team at Barclays believe that is it perfectly plausible for growth to average just 1.75 per cent for the first half of the current decade.

And all of this before the huge budget cuts announced by the UK Coalition Government start to bite!

So the reality is that we are a long way away from any form of real recovery, despite what the politicians are saying!

What is so impressive about the book is that Will Hutton is meticulous in his research (there are 23 pages of referenced notes at the end of the book) and from Chapter 9 starts setting out how Britain “has the opportunity to put things right fast.”  So this is a book from a well-respected author that sets out carefully and logically the cause of the recession and then presents some powerful options for change.

The bottom line is that Britain has to be a much more fairer society. Not just Britain.  Here’s an extract from a recent posting on Tom Engelhardt’s Blog. Tom is the author of the book, The American Way of War.

I’m no expert on elections, but sometimes all you need is a little common sense.  So let’s start with a simple principle: what goes up must come down.

For at least 30 years now, what’s gone up is income disparity in this country.  Paul Krugman called this period “the Great Divergence.” After all, between 1980 and 2005, “more than 80% of total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1%” of Americans in terms of wealth, and today that 1% controls 24% of the nation’s income.  Or put another way, after three decades of ”trickle-down” economics, what’s gone up are the bank accounts of the rich.

In 2009, for instance, as Americans generally scrambled and suffered, lost jobs, watched pensions, IRAs, or savings shrink and houses go into foreclosure, millionaires actually increased.  According to the latest figures, the combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans (all billionaires) has risen by 8% this year, even as, in the second quarter of 2010, the net worth of American households plunged 2.8%

Change is definitely overdue.

By Paul Handover

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