Socialdem. 21st Century

That is, youth unemployment defined as the number of unemployed people from 15 to 24 years old as a percentage of the youth labour force.Have a look at the figures for European nations in 2015:Greece | 49.8% Italy | 40.3% Spain | 48.4% Portugal | 31.9% Slovak Republic | 26.4% France | 24.7% Belgium | 22.1% Finland | 22.0% Ireland | 20.9% Poland | 20.8% Sweden | 20.3% Hungary | 17.3% Luxembourg | 17.3% Slovenia | 16.4% Latvia | 16.3% Austria | 10.6% United Kingdom | 14.6% United States |...

Here is one called John Wright in 1785:“The minister cannot be ignorant that an alleviation of duties on India muslins and callicos, or giving encouragement to them by laying a heavier tax upon the cotton goods of this country, especially upon the infant manufacture of muslins and fine callicos, must depress and discourage the industry and ingenuity of our manufacturers at home, and have the strongest tendency to promote the sale of such foreign fabrics, in preference to those of Britain;...

From the late 17th century, Indian cotton textile imports – such as white calicoes, muslins, printed and striped cotton goods – flowed into Europe in ever larger volumes.Local manufacturers, seeing the lightness and superior nature of cotton, started to create new cotton textile industries.But they faced a serious problem: they could not compete with the Indian imports in terms of price or even quality (Parthasarathi 2011: 89). The centre of the world’s cotton textile production was in India...

Here he is talking before the UK general election of 23 February 1950:[embedded content]In this election the Labour party won 1.5 million more votes than the Conservatives and received more votes than in the 1945 election, but owing to the first past the post system only won a majority of 5 seats.A priceless anecdote from David Hunt, Private Secretary to Attlee:[embedded content]

It was undoubtedly Enoch Powell’s hateful, race-baiting “Rivers of Blood” speech, delivered on 20 April, 1968 to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham, as spoken in full below (but not by Powell):[embedded content]To be perfectly clear: I don’t like Enoch Powell or the politics he represented, but surely people on the left can look carefully at this piece of history and learn something from it.It seems pretty clear that to me that the...

I find this fascinating, and important for studying the Old Left:[embedded content]

The Norwegian heterodox economist Erik S. Reinert, author of the excellent book How Rich Countries Got Rich, and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor (New York, 2007), talks about his career and about heterodox development economics in the videos below. Informal but very enjoyable discussion.One point, however: in the first video Reinert says that Ricardo’s comparative advantage argument assumes diminishing returns. Surely, he made a slight mistake here: the argument assumes constant...

TheIllusionist challenges me in a cutting comment here, which deserves a response. First, what do I mean by the “Old Left”? I mean the pre-1960s Left dominated by trade unions, socialist organisations, and the labour-based political parties like the British Labour party, Continental Social Democrats or other Christian labour-based parties of the Left.I happen to think the historical role of Christian socialism has been grossly underestimated by the modern secular Left. For example, on the...

Things to ponder on:(1) Classical liberalism of the 19th century was a left-wing movement, when placed on the political spectrum of that era. It follows that a major strand of the left was strongly in favour of laissez faire capitalism in the 19th century. (2) 19th century Conservatism had a strong protectionist and anti-laissez faire capitalist strand: think of the British Tory Paternalists, Tory Radicals and High Tories, some of whom led the Parliamentary reforms that regulated working...

I include the odd useful and relevant neoclassical work too. I will update on a regular basis:Baiman, R. 2010. “The Infeasibility of Free Trade in Classical Theory: Ricardo’s Comparative Advantage Parable has No Solution,” Review of Political Economy 22.3: 419–437.Bairoch, Paul. 1993. Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes. Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York and London.Brewer, A. 1985. “Trade with Fixed Real Wages and Mobile Capital,” Journal of International Economics 18:...