This was salient for a number of reasons: for a start, that month followed one of the worst quarters on record for new private sector jobs, with just 5,000 posts filled between June and September 2011. From an economist’s perspective, that is as good as standing still.

Err, no, from an economist’s perspective that would be an unmitigated disaster. For the economy chews through about 10% of all jobs each year. 3 million or so disappear, 3 million or so are created. Unemployment rises when the disappearing (which tends to be a fairly constant rate, it’s the creation which tends to vary) is higher than the creation, fall when vice versa.

Call it 750k a quarter, just as a round number. If there were only 5k jobs created then this would indeed be terrible. What Zoe is looking at is not job creation though. She’s looking at the net number between destriuction and creation, a very, very, different thing indeed.

You might call me a pendant for saying this: but I mention it precisely because I think that Zoe is ignorant of this point.

If Reliance can do Ordnance Survey’s admin and catering for less money than OS did it themselves, or Boeing can do IT for the Ministry of Defence, and that’s cheaper, it seems like an obvious boon. But, especially in low-skilled work, you have to wonder how it comes to be cheaper. Nobody’s invented a quicker way to do cleaning; it’s more likely that wages are forced down, job security is destroyed, pensions are axed.

Well, there’s specialisation, division of labour, these sorts of things. And as to no one inventing a quicker way of doing cleaning.

Umm, Zoe is indeed female? One who does her own housework? Has, say, a mop, a broom, a vacuum cleaner? All of which are quicker ways of doing cleaning than a damp rag and a carpet beater?

And might we, just possible, postulate that a team of cleaners who spicialise in nothing but cleaning, say, offices, might have high value, high performance, specialist, such machines in a way that an individual directly employed cleaner might not?

No, of course, I don’t know and I don’t insist that it is true but it is possible, no?

While both countries had the same sorts of export surplus in the early 1990s, they have diverged massively since the D-Mark and franc were fixed in perpetuity. Germany has a current account surplus of 5pc of GDP: France has a deficit of 2.7pc, anathema for Colbertistes.

You can see from IMF data that the silent coup took place in the fat years of the global boom when Germany forced down unit labour costs; -1.7pc in 2003, -4.0pc in 2004, -3.3pc in 2005, -1.8pc in 2006.

Just a little note for the various lefties insisting that as Germany has been a successful economy we should therefore do what Germany has been doing.

I’ve no problem with the idea of looking at what works then copying it. Seems like a very sensible thing to do in fact. But you do have to identify what it is that has been working.

And in Germany it hasn’t been apprenticeships, nor unions on boards, it isn’t manufacturing and it’s not a bank rather than stock market financing system.

It’s been screwing down the workers’ wages.

So, when you start advocating screwing down the workers’ wages so that we can copy Germany I’ll be all ears. Until then, perhaps you could continue to work on that analysis of what did go right in Germany?

An especially interesting comparison is between the United States and the United Kingdom, which implemented a package of austerity measures in 2010.

That’s interesting, don’t you think? For I’m rather wondering, just where is that austerity. As far as I know the budget deficit is still about 10% of GDP isn’t it?

The lab experiment that has been conducted in the UK,

Yes, the UK’s budget deficit has been as large if not larger than that of the US. And yet the outcome with respect to unemployment is worse….so this is an argument in favour of fiscal stimulus how?

austerity has demonstrably failed in the UK – and with more than 90% of the proposed cuts yet to come.

Correct, we’ve not in fact had any austerity yet.

I don’t mind people having different ideas about how to make the world a better place. I do rather mind people having different facts about how the world is.

He’s getting shouty about this, saying that I’m a racist neoliberal who knows nothing about the issue and therefore I should shut up.

Or something.

Just as a little stylistic note:

We have no idea what the actual suicide rate is at Foxconn—we only know a large number of people were throwing themselves off of the roof of the workplace, again and again.

People who throw themselves off a roof again and again are not commiting suicide, they are bungee jumping. Suicide by leap is a one time deal not something repeated: perhaps this is why I have not heard of Mr. Daisey as an author or playright.

Now let us take his arguments in order:

Yes, conditions are terrible across the entire Special Economic Zone.

Are they? Isn’t that something that has to be proven, not asserted? And terrible compared to what?

I do love that he said it, because it makes it so clear to refute: these are not just “poor people living in a poor country”. This is the economic engine in which all of our devices are made—we created that revolution over there, and we exported and created those jobs.

No, not quite: the Chinese themselves stopped having an economic system which denied the possibility of creating those jobs. They abandoned Maoist idiocy back in 1978 or so.

When we look at what the conditions are in the SEZ we need to look at, well, compared to what? Compared to China outside the SEZ? Compared to China before the SEZ?

At which point we might want to have a look at the figures of Angus Maddison. GDP per capita is the appropriate one.

In 2008 China’s GDP per capita (and yes, of course, all of these figures take acount of inflation) was $6,725. This makes the place developing, almost middle income.

In 1978, before the SEZ, it was $978 (recall, these are already adjusted for inflation). So we’ve a 6 or 7 times improvement (GDP per capita is not a perfect measure of this but it is the one we’ve got, the only one which is really of any accuracy at all over long periods of time) in living standards not just in one lifetime: this is in the time between my sitting my O levels and my writing now, the time between the Sex Pistols and Katy Perry.

Just as an example of how fast this growth is, the UK was at $974 in 1600 AD: we didn’t get to $6700 odd until 1948. What took us 450 years in economic development has taken China some 45.

Someone, somewhere, is doing the right thing in terms of improving Chinese life, aren’t they? Might actually be something to this don’t have Maoist stupidity and embrace neoliberal global capitalism maybe?

Just to make it quite clear and plain to our actor here: I do not say that everything is peachy: I say that things are getting better. Getting better the only way the human race has ever found to make things better. Economic development. And the other thing I’d say about this. He’s complaining that things are getting better for more people faster than has ever happened before in human history.

Woes eh? Oh Woes.

Well, yes, they’re poor people living in a poor country. That’s what being poor means, having to work extremely hard to make very little. Yes, that is a harsh thing to say but then reality can indeed be harsh.(He’s quoting from Tim here)

First—may I say—daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn. It is refreshing to see the neoliberal model laid out so glaringly.

Yes, that is the neoliberal model laid bare. Hmm, I wonder if we know anything at all about how people can get richer? Umm, gosh, is there anything we can see in history about this? How about this as a plan: industrialisation in something vaguely approaching a market economy? It has, after all, worked everywhere it has been tried. It’s what took our forbears from the idiocy of rural life to three squares and the leisure to consider the morality of factory work.

It’s also what took the poor of Germany, of the US, Italy, France and so on to being the richest generation ever to belch on the wealth of the planet.

You know, there might just be something to this industrial development shite. Worth pondering, surely? And it’s not even neoliberal this idea: straight classical economics. Smith, Ricardo, yes, Marx himself, all pointed out that the division and specialisation of labour and the resultant trade of product would lead to an increase in that wealth that can be enjoyed.

And of course, what bastards we neoliberals must be for advocating that others do what made us all so stinking rich. It just beggars the imagination that anyone proposing public policy might propose something that actually works, doesn’t it?

What’s disgusting here is the underbelly. The clear implication is that because these are “poor people living in a poor country” they don’t deserve safe working conditions, or working hours that don’t result in people dying on the production line, or factories that don’t have explosions that could be prevented. Because they are Chinese they deserve less working protection that we would afford Americans. It’s a nasty streak of thinly-veiled racism that underlies a lot of the neoliberal arguments: that the people who suffer in other parts of the world are less human than we are in the first world, and this ameliorates our responsibility to give these jobs the basic protections we believe in for American workers.

Yes, quite, it’s racist to suggest a method by which the poor can get rich. Racist to suggest a method which we know works. Racist to suggest that Chinee, Muslim and Hindoo might indeed be both worthy of and able to enjoy the levels of wealth and leisure that we pinkish people have. Racist even to suggest the method by which all of this can happen: division and specialisation of labour and trade in the resultant product. You know, something so well known that it’s actually on the back of the £20 note?

A couple of little details:

Those numbers aren’t comprehensive. We have no idea what the actual suicide rate is at Foxconn

Excellent, then we have two alternatives here. We know that the recorded rate, the one that is being campaigned about, is one tenth of the rate in the general Chinese population. Our alternatives are thus that we note that, according to the figures we have, conditions at Foxconn are less likely to lead to suicide than conditions in China in general. That’s one way of putting it certainly.

The other is to say: Ah, well, yes, I know I was making lots of noise about 18 suicides in 2010. But that was bollocks, yes, sorry, don’t know what came over me.

The argument that is actually being tried, we don’t know the number of suicides, no idea whether it’s high or low, but it’s a damning indictement all the same: that’s not wholly and entirely convincing, is it?

On industrial safety he says:

and this ameliorates our responsibility to give these jobs the basic protections we believe in for American workers.

To which the answer is that, at least as far as the figures being used by our actor inform us, Foxconn seems to be safer than the average American workplace. The US fatal workplace accident rate is 3.5 per 100,000 full time equivalents. We’re being told to look at four (or is it five?) deaths among Foxconn’s 1 million workers and thus conclude that they must, therefore, have appalling working conditions. Are bereft of the safety we offer to the average American.

This could be of course but again it’s something that needs to be proven, not asserted. If our actor has the numbers that show this then be delighted to revise my views: as JMK pointed out, changed facts should lead to changed minds.

But in the end so far we’ve just had the usual shouty from a luvvie who has had his preconceptions challenged. What do you mean that I’m not a knight on a white charger saving Johnny Foreigner from exploitation?

It’s this last where the thespian falls off the edge into gibbering madness:

It is instead all about wages, which as I have argued for years do not have to be coupled to safe working conditions

No, sorry matey, you do not get to violate the basic law of economics. There are no solutions, there are only trade offs. We have no magic wands, we cannot all have a pony and unicorns do not poop rainbows.

This again is not new: Adam Smith points out that all jobs are in fact paid the same when we adjust for how difficult they are, how dangerous, how noisesome, the skills required to do them and so on.

Safety in a factory, paid vacation time, the quality of the food in the cafeteria, the wages paid, these are all traded off against each other. For they all come out of the same pot: that portion of the value added by labour which is to be paid to labour.

We see it in our rich, western world. Trawlermen, loggers, divers, they have more dangerous jobs than the rest of us. And yes, they do get higher wages (in regard of skill levels) than those of us who do not face such dangers in our working lives.

It is from exactly this that we are able to calculate the statistical value of a life. Around $5 million currently in the US. And that’s why we tend to introduce safety measures which cost less than that per life saved and do not introduce safety measures that cost more than that. Do note, this is not what we, the neoliberals, decide that someone’s life is worth. Rather, this is what we observe people value a life at through their actions.

And we also note that poorer people value lives less highly than rich people. The trade off is different (for a detailed discussion have a look at either the IPCC reports or the Stern Review. This calculation is crucial to the assumptions about the damages to be wrought by climate change).

This isn’t a surprise either. Someone on $4,500 a year is going to view a one in 100,000 risk of death for an extra $1,500 a year (general Chinese manufacturing wages as opposed to Foxconn such) differently from someone on $50,000 viewing the same decision.

Which is why the value of that statistical life rises as the country generally gets richer, for it’s just a corollary of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We all of us trade off such risks all the time. I think I’m right in saying that the risk of death in an auto accident is around 1 in 100 over a lifetime. Yet many of us still drive cars given the benefits we derive at such risk. We take showers despite the fact that people really do die falling over in them. We have sex despite the risks. We trade off safety for what can be gained by that extra risk.

Which is, as I say, where our speech declaimer really goes off the rails. Of course safety standards are lower in poor places. This is because people are poor, see, and they take different decisions about the trade off between risk and income that we plump pink people do.

For us to insist upon greater safety than those exposed to the risks insist upon is, well, colonialism, isn’t it? For we are imposing our risk/income desires on others who have a different set of desires.

So, to recap. Campaigners say that we exploit the Chinee because of low wages. When challenged, oooooh, no, it’s not about wages. Campaigners say that it’s about suicides: when challenged, actually, we don’t know the suicide numbers. But we’ll insist that it’s exploitation anyway. But lookee here! Workplace safety is lower, exploitation! Umm, but it seems the death rate is lower than the US…..ah, well, yes, but we don’t have the full figures see, exploitation! Plus that complete and total ignorance of the necessary trade offs involved.

And as to neoliberalism laid bare. Yes, the industrial revolution is the only way we humans have found of improving the living standards of the average guy in the street. I, as a liberal (even if neo) would like the living standards of the average guy to increase. Thus I support the industrial revolution. Yes, in all its mess and clamour: for it is making things better.

I’m out and I’m proud. As a neoliberal I buy things made by poor people in poor countries. For that’s how poor people and poor countries get rich. Which is, I hope at least, what we all agree we’d like to see happen? So, do tell, what are you doing to make the poor richer?

BERKELEY – Neville Chamberlain is remembered today as the British prime minister who, as an avatar of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s, helped to usher Europe into World War II. But, earlier in that fateful decade, relatively soon after the start of the Great Depression, the British economy was rapidly returning to its previous level of output, thanks to Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain’s reliance on fiscal stimulus to restore the price level to its pre-depression trajectory.

What?

Our Neville became Chancellor in 1931.

Whereupon he got us off the gold standard and cut government expenditure.

It was a couple of years later, when the currency devaluation thing had done its stuff that he started to expand spending again.

I’ve not got the numbers for the deficit or national debt in those years. But the idea that Our Nev did “fiscal expansion” in 31, 32, seems very strange indeed. Anyone know?

But Labour will adopt one good policy. They will bring back rent controls.

Facepalm.

Second only to aerial bombing in a major war as a successful method of reducing the available housing stock.

Doesn’t anyone actually remember? The 70s, early 80s? When it was near impossible to find rental property anywhere in the country?

Who has proposed this and tell me, are they really this stupid?

Update

I’ve found out from Polly. Liam Byrne is about to propose it.

 

So is Tidjane Thiam right about minimum wage rules? The chief executive of the Prudential was outspoken in his criticism of minimum wage legislation at a high profile debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

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Government must therefore set a policy framework that forces the close collaboration of monetary, financial and fiscal policy to induce a sustained rise in credit from our very wounded and risk-averse financial system. The British government, along with other western governments, must replace its redundant inflation target with a target for the growth of the value of the goods and services we produce – the growth of GDP in cash terms. It should say that every instrument of policy – quantitative easing, interest rates, government borrowing, guarantees for new bank lending – will be used to sustain the growth of money GDP by 7% a year for the next five years.

This is NGDP targetting.

Of course, Willy being Willy he doesn’t understand that this is a direct outgrowth of Friedmanite monetarism.

Nor does he understand that it’s all about money, the money supply, the monetary stance. None of the rest of his blather about government subsidies and direction of investment is necessary at all.

But then if Willy understood the genesis of his pronouncements, the implications of them, then he wouldn’t be Willy, would he?

It is a tradition of redistribution, intervention and socialism equally as compelling as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (which, one should remember, was a satirical attack on laissez-faire morality, drawn from Shakespeare’s Macbeth).

It’s got bugger all to do with laissez faire morality. It’s about how the merchant (read, capitalist, for the word had not been invented in Smith’s time) will, despite the greater profits of the foreign trade, find himself still likely to invest at home.

The most important modern result of which is that even if we have perfect theoretical capital mobility it still isn’t true that labour bears all of the incidence of corporate taxation.

Senior bankers, private equity moguls and hedge fund managers appear cut off from the rest of us. They often pay little or no tax,

Eh?

What is this little or no tax? Is this some distand memory of the hedgie paying less tax than his cleaner? Which is really he pays a lower marginal rate than his cleaner, not less tax?

Romney made a fortune of an estimated $250 million dollars out of financial engineering and private equity, while benefiting from tax breaks, during his business career. He paid a reported 15 per cent tax on his profits – a rate considerably lower than most Americans.

Err, no. He paid and pays the capital gains tax rate on his capital gains. Exactly the same as all other Americans.

Economists say that the super-rich in the United States are now seven times better off than they were 30 years ago. Troublingly, this massive growth of wealth and power has come directly at the expense of ordinary people. Statistics show that the income of the average working male in the United States has flatlined since the 1970s.

Look at that logic. The rich have got richer, the middle have not got richer. So, how is the increase at the top at the expense of the not rich? The only way it could be is if the proceeds of economic growth have been asymmetrically divided. But that’s not the same as taking stuff off ordinary people, is it?

Further, it’s not actually true that average male wages have flatlined since the 1970s. It’s that median household wage incomes have: and that just ain’t the same thing at all. For households have got smaller (meraning higher incomes per capita) and household compensation has risen strongly. Much of that compensation coming in the form of better health care which, as it is employer provided compensation but not wages does not get included in the wages numbers.

But now we come to a real problem.

Murray exposes how the new United States upper class, which he labels a “cognitive elite”, has developed an hereditary stranglehold over the top professions and management positions. The brightest people tend to marry each other, then ensure that their offspring get to the best schools and universities, with the result that, to quote Murray: “The parents of the upper-middle class now produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.”

Assortative mating. One of the things that is seriously driving household income inequality is the way in which marriage is increasingly taking place between people with similar education levels, working in similar type jobs. This is a result of the entry of women into the workforce as equals and the subsequent later age of marriage.

Quite simply, time was, marriage came from those around you, the family’s friends etc. And upon marriage most women became housewives. Now marriage is contracted later, from among those one meets at university or at work. Or in hte social circles associated with work. Graduates thus marry graduates, professionals professionals, non-professionals non-professionals and so on.

Yes, there is an increasing stratification of household incomes, as we get one group over here, of two professional income households and another group over here of two non-professional incomes. Even if one of those incomes might be put on hiatus for some years, or part time. Two 50k plus professional incomes is going to lead to very different household incomes than two 25k median incomes.

Yes, this is a rise in inequality of household incomes. But to stop it you’ll have to do one of two things. Change who people marry (and good luck with that one). Or return to taxation of households. That is, remove women’s tax independence. Which should really go down well with the sisters. Not to say, how do you define a household when marriage isn’t the defining attribute of a household any more?

I say this is a problem: it is if inequality of household income is something you worry about. But I cannot see any solution to this inequality that isn’t a horrible retrograde step in terms of individual liberty. Men and women should be treated equally by the tax system. Taxed on their incomes/property, not changeably dependent upon who they shag regularly (to the extent that that happens in marriage tee hee). And we certainly don’t want any system whereby who you can marry (or shag regularly, have children by) is determined in any manner by the State.

So I don’t think there’s a solution to that, is there?

Who wins, when the government makes up the shortfall, between the poverty pay a shelf-packer earns and what he or she needs to live on? Not the worker, evidently; not the taxpayer, who may get a certain empathy boost from the fact that nobody’s starving, but reaps no economic advantage from this bizarre system; not the supplier to the supermarket, who often has his or her own case to make about deals so bad they often amount to a mugging.

The only winners are the chains themselves….

What?

How has anyone managed to get themselves so 180 degrees the wrong way around?

OK, so let us take it as being true in each and every particular. The solution is thus very simple. Stop all in work benefits , the supermarkets will pay their workers more and their profits will fall.

Is anyone actually suggesting this? No.

Therefore they obviously don’t believe their own diagnosis.

Which is correct: the diagnosis is wrong. In work benefits are not a subsidy to the supermarkets (or any other employers). They are a subsidy to our own consciences.

Here is the market value of labour. It is what it is. We don’t have monoposony at this end of the labour market. Retailers aren’t able to deliberately hold down wages. However, we as a nation, a culture, say that (however hard some of us scream that it shouldn’t be so etc, this is the general view) to be left to live on that market value of labour is unfair. So, we’ve a system by which we all chip in a bit from our higher earnings to send money to those with a low value to their labour.

This comes in gradations of course: no one at all objects to the subsidy of the short bus riders whose labour value is near zero, who would be starving in the streets without some subsidy. Many object to the excesses of the other end of the spectrum, where some people gain more than the median income in purely housing subsidies.

But these transfers, these benefits, are subsidies to our sense of what is right and wrong, not subsidies to the profits of the corporations. It’s compensation from those of us who have a high value assigned to our labour by the market system to those who have a low value so assigned. We might well argue about how much compensation is due, about the effects on incentives, about marginal tax and benefit withdrawal rates, but you’ve got to get well over into Ayn Rand style stuff before you find anyone who thinks that there shouldn’t be any such compensation flowing at all.

Thing is though, you can see many people nodding their heads when this “benefits are subsidies to corporations” line being trotted out. And what’s needed is some punchy point to show the absurdity of it. Which I’ve not really found yet.

If in work benefits are a subsidy to employers, then out of work benefits must be a subsidy to unemployment?

Alternatively we could note that GDP per capita (at PPP) in the US is $47,200 a year, in China $7,600 a year.

Catching up after decades of insane economic policy is generally thought to be easier than growing when you’re already at the technological production frontier.

If you add together nonfinance executives, “financial professions”, real estate, and lawyers, you’ve got more than 70 percent of the total; plus some of the other categories are probably essentially business executives too. Basically, the top 0.1 percent is the corporate suits, with a few token sports and film stars thrown in.

And having had a look around the area of this cheapo hotel (now’t wrong w’i't, just cheapo) nothing really appeals as a dining venue. Or even a drinking one.

However, there’s a Lidl on the corner. Rye bread, sliced sausage (hey, this is Germany), packet of crispy things and a jar of hot dip, bottle of some odd end of bin red wine.

The red is a whole two years old now, a 2010, from SE Australia. Not prize worthy, no, but entirely drinkable (the hot dip helps).

All of this for under €5.

And as I’m sipping I’ve talked to my wife in Portugal about her and my days, when I’ll arrive so she can pick me up, what we’re going to do tomorrow evening (cost of call on roaming, maybe another €5). And I’m clearly and obviously blogging on my €40 a month German Vodafone mobile access stick.

On a €300 computer.

It’s possible to take this all different ways.

I’m sitting in a foreign city, no previous knowledge of the place, eating a dinner which costs me less than 1 hour of minimum wage labour, a dinner which these days is regarded as hardship, a dinner which 200 years ago would have been exotically expensive (the wine, specifically) for the average Englishman. Bread and meat….it was around but not everyone was eating it.

I’ve had an international phone call where the price, even on a mobile, makes the casual keeping in touch something that you’re weird if you don’t do. I’m old enough to recall when an international phone call was something you thought about. I still work with people of my own age for whom an international phone call was something that the government specifically forbade. And for my parent’s generation, it was something that you saved for and really, really, did not expect to do for mere trivialities like “How are you?”

And this blogging thing? Even mobile telecomms. They’re both younger than I am (as is of course true of an increasing portion of the world).

I’m afraid that, given that I can now do things for trivial cost that I did not dream would be possible in my youth. Heck, things that I did not think would be possible when I met my wife (being with someone for decades, sure, I knew that was possible, being able to chat to them while you’re away at a price you can afford I didn’t).

Given all of that….umm, what is this Great Stagnation that is being talked about?

The problem being that pollution affects property so therefore libertarians should be very much against pollution because of property rights but they’re not. In fact, they go all denialist over pollution precisely because they can’t bear to be confronted with the conflict between pollution and property rights.

Well, yes. Perhaps. Good enough for a bit of GCSE reasoning I suppose.

It does however betray a certain lack of knowledge about libertarianism, right wing loons generally and even such trivial matters as economics.

For, you see, exactly this argument, this point, has been made before. That there is indeed a conflict between property rights and pollution and so whadda we gonna do about it?

A point made in The Problem of Social Cost published in 1960. The answer being, to keep it short, that where transactions costs are low then private property rights will solve pollution problems and where they are high then regulation is needed.

So it isn’t that this conundrum is a new one for libertarians and right wing loons generally. It’s one that has been raised, assessed and answered: answered sufficiently that the man who raised, considered and answered the point was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991.

Jeez, if you’re going to wibble about pollution and property rights you really ought to be aware of the seminal work on the point, no? And it’s not as if the UK has so many Economics Laureates that you could overlook Ronald Coase, is it?

Her government’s savage deflation destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in two years, hollowed out manufacturing, and delivered a “productivity miracle” that never was, and we’re living with the consequences today.

Strange that manufacturing output was higher when she left office than before she took it really.

What she did succeed in doing was to restore class privilege, boosting profitability while slashing employees’ share of national income from 65% to 53% through her assault on unions.

And you don’t know your economic statistics, do you?

GDP does not split into labour income and capital income.

A goodly part of that fall in labour income is in fact the introduction of VAT, the raising of VAT, the raising of employers’ national insurance payments and the rise in self-employment.

One day, if I get bored enough to work out how to use Excel, I’ll prove it too.

Made from bronze and smaller than a ten pence piece, the coin depicts a man and a woman engaged in an intimate act.

Experts believe it is the first example of its kind to be found in Britain. It lay preserved in mud for almost 2,000 years until it was unearthed by an amateur archaeologist with a metal detector.

On the reverse of the token is the numeral XIIII, which historians say could indicate that the holder handed over 14 small Roman coins called asses to buy it. This would have been the equivalent of one day’s pay for a labourer in the first century AD.

We face the same challenge today – to develop a morally acceptable form of capitalism. As Keynes feared might happen, much business is now seen as no more than profiteering. Many people object to the bonus culture of the banking system because they don’t believe those bonuses are earned. We have also learned that inequality not only undermines the legitimacy of capitalism (that was Keynes’s concern) but it has corrosive effects: unequal societies are unhappier, less healthy, and have more crime.

So it’s the lies that have been told about contemporary capitalism which lead to our having to change contemporary capitalism.

Bonuses are simply flexible wages, The Spirit Level is lies from start to finish (sorry, that should read “carefully crafted yet inaccurate statistics”). And yet because the populace believes these lies therefore we must change capitalism?

Wouldn’t it be simpler to not lie about contemporary capitalism?