1 The Great Recession and Wellbeing    ‘public spending’

[2473; health here & in US, NHS?; title?; citations from tearsheets; update of course;  final style check?; usages?; anticipations of subsequent language policy/policies – immiseration, feeding-on; ; more phil content?; moral?; book’s unique recommendation? – some, all, anticipation? ; more passing judgement/implication on economics?;  if working onscreen, relation of book paras to screen paras]; ‘emotional’ content?; ‘I can’t breathe’ – relation to.

        The Great Recession, that name of it taken by some economists as justified by the recession’s relation to The Great Depression of the 1930’s, began in 2007. It was, if you join economists in accepting that now it is past, first a matter of business or commerce – a matter of the making, providing, buying and selling of resources, products and other things, including loans. So it was, secondly, a matter for ordinary people of work and pay or the lack of them – being unemployed. The Great Recession, thirdly, was a matter of governments’ income from taxes, variously related to business or commerce, and a deficit or excess of expenditure over income, and thus a matter of the governments’ extent of borrowing or debt – the national debt and the interest paid on it.

 

Fourthly and finally, the recession was a matter of governments’ austerity or severity or strictness, what were taken or said by them to be necessary cuts and other alterations in government spending. This was a society’s reduction of help to people in need, [a reduction in] of its effective concern or support for them. It was a reduction in the provision of welfare or wellbeing, correctly understood as in the dictionary definitions as the health, happiness and fortunes of persons or groups, their faring well, their doing well or badly. These cuts were regarded by some, notably the governments or some of them, as the simple and obvious policy of fitting expenditure to income, living within government’s or our means, making ends meet, balancing the books, being like a careful family in dealing with incomings and outgoings. That these cuts were necessary was [? presented] taken as truistic.

 

The Great Recession, then, in particular with respect to work and pay or the lack or deprivation of them, and with respect to the cuts in help to people in need, has patently not been an economic history that can be narrowly concentrated on. It is a history that you can well call a human one. That is, it has primarily and fundamentally been about what we all want, what we are together in wanting – both the badly-off and the well-off financially. It has been about what money has always been only a kind of good indicator.

 

        2007-8. It was in these years that the recession is taken by many as having begun -- in an American house-price increase or bubble and then in the effect people losing their homes as a result of being unable to make the payments on mortgage loans they had made, some of them loans they had carelessly or dangerously been led into. The recession is sometimes also spoken of as having had an earlier necessary condition, as indeed everything has -- causes and whole causal circumstances themselves never come out of nowhere.

 

Thus the recession is said to have been owed earlier in some large part to an ascendancy of an attitude having to do with business or commerce. This is what is called neo-liberalism -- an  ideology and practice with respect to the regulation and in particular the deregulation by governments of markets, notably the business of finance including the selling of mortgages. This is a policy of deregulation within the larger ideology of conservatism, whatever that is or comes to.

 

        2010. In [month?] as what was of course said or implied to be only a result of government income and debt in the United Kingdom, the Conservative and Liberal coalition's finance minister, produced an austerity budget.  It was calculated or judged by others that  a third of the government economies or cuts in spending, £11bn in sum, would come from reducing welfare payments -- reducing the society's financial support to persons in need. The budget also included an increase in government income, a rise in Value Added Tax, taken by some to be controversial since it is a tax on financial transactions that unlike other taxes affects the poor, those less able to pay tax, no less than it affects the rich. Also in the budget, banks in their business and commerce were affected less than had been contemplated. The government's continued privatization of the National Health Service, quite as reasonably called profitization, which certainly is one of my inclinations or resistances, continued.

 

The budget was presented and defended repeatedly by the coalition government as fair, as were its subsequent budgets and related measures.

 

         In August 2010, in America, as reported in The New York Times, the American poor were getting poorer, but the rich, despite stock-market setbacks, were still comparatively rich. The most devastating losses in household wealth over the past two years, it was reported, had been suffered by what was called the middle class as against those above them, presumably both defined in terms of income.

 

        In September, in Britain, it became clear to the newspapers The Guardian and The Independent that poor families were bearing the  brunt of the austerity drive, despite repetitive declarations to the contrary by the government. It was accepted that according to trustable research the cuts would hit the poor 10 times harder than rich. Later on in 2010 it was reported that the axe of economy falls on the poor, and that this was being justified as what would pull Britain back from the brink of a national financial disaster, having to do with national debt. In November it was reported that critics said that the  most vulnerable people in society were those who were hardest hit.

 

        2011. There was the judgement [in what? in month?] that you can't cut £18 billion from support to the poorest in the United Kingdom without pain to them.  Later one heading in The Guardian, was 'Forget Cuts and Austerity -- For the Rich it's like the Recession Never Happened'. Another heading [where? find] : 'Jobless Total Soars to 2.5 Million as Cuts Bite'. There was also repetition of the proposition that the  public sector was to foot the bill in the plan for economic growth -- this growth, an economic total, being taken by the government and its supporters as unquestionably rightly the fundamental means of dealing with the recession and all its effects, human and otherwise.

 

In December, in The Independent, there was more along the same lines. 'The Rich Get Richer and The Poor Get Poorer'. In the next month: 'Britain's Poorest Hit by £2.5bn 'Stealth Tax' [what tax?]. There were more billionaires than before and there were more children in poverty as officially defined, 300,000 more. In America as well as Britain, the best economic plan continued to be taken to be help for the poor by securing total growth of the economy. [gross national product; Google growth etc.]

 

        2012. In March, there was more government policy and action of the same sort. In Britain, the tax reduction for the elderly was cut, and a further £10bn in cuts to welfare support was signalled. Income tax for rich, however, was not increased or left as it was, but instead cut from 50 pence in the pound to 45 pence. What was maintained again was that this would stimulate growth and hence would benefit those in need.

 

In November, in the medical journal The Lancet, there was evidence from European countries of a significant rise in suicides owed to the economic recession and government responses, with more than 1000 excess deaths in Britain alone. Also in November, there was what was hardly news to many of us: [source?] 'We're NOT All in This Together -- Only 27 per cent of British Public Think Pain of Cuts Is Being Shared Equally'.

 

        In America it was reported that  unemployment was 7.9 percent, and, at the rate of growth being managed, there was little reason to expect it to come down much anytime soon. (Washington Post). Not since the Great Depression had so many Americans been unable to find work for so long. (New York Times). In England it became clear that financial support for the National Health Service had been cut in real terms -- in terms of what matters, taking into account the cost to the service of its purchases, the effect of inflation.

 

The poverty percentage in America remained at 15% -- 46.5 million people in poverty. Yes, 46.5.

 

        2013. February news in England: the government's new 'bedroom tax', affecting families and persons in need support but disputably deemed to have an extra room, would of course affect the poor. April: [check:] 'The day Britain changed ... A  new world heaves into view this week with a raft of cuts and reforms taking effect in the fields of welfare, justice, health, and tax'. Many American and British economists, notably a leader of them, Paul Krugman, maintained that the austerity policy was not working.

 

May: [check:] More than 500,000 Britons were depending on charity-food. September: it was alleged that  on account of the bedroom tax, 50,000 people at least worried about eviction. November: In America, [quote? check:] a cut in the food-stamp programme was reported as making life even tougher for America's poor. Also November: The Republican Party make the poor pay to balance the budget.

 

        December: It was recorded in Britain [source?], that this had been the year when government cuts changed the face of the welfare state. In the States, in December: A child shares a crowded, mouse-infested room with her parents and seven siblings, who sleep doubled up on torn mattresses. A room in the decrepit Auburn Family Residence, a shelter for homeless New Yorkers, (US News and World Report).  Also December: Millions of households across Britain struggling to survive. Again in the States: Updated top income in the United States—including new estimates through 2010 -- a strong rebound of the top 1 percent income share, following the 2008–09 sharp fall. (IMF Economic Review) [check?].

 

        2014. In England in January, perhaps for the first time in the history of a dignified profession, English lawyers marched in protest against cuts in the government’s legal aid budget – enabling the poor to enable them to use the system of justice. Few readers thought they were concerned only with their personal incomes. America in May: [?] The poor are better off, but further behind. In England again, [?] a collapse in pay lies behind Britain's return to work.  June: Vast majority left behind in Britain's uneven recovery. America in August: A 60-year-old single woman says 'I Don't Know What's Going To Happen If I Lose The House'. [source?]

 

        [when? source?] One in three Americans faces a daily crisis of poverty or low-wage jobs -- barely a topic of conversation in Congress or the media. [?]The richest 1 percent of the US population has more aggregate wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. (?  month? Oxfam America, 2014)   A new study [when?] links the Great Recession to at least 10,000 more suicides in Europe and North America. The suicides are explained in terms of  job loss, home repossessions and debt. [?] (Washington Post)

 

        2014, October: Millions Face Years on Breadline (The Independent).  November. Insecure, low-paid jobs are leaving record numbers of working families in poverty, with two-thirds of people who found work in the past year taking jobs for  less than the living wage (The Guardian).

 

        Do you, being in what may be the smallish group of readers of actual books among Conservatives and Republicans, certainly such books as this, draw in your breath and then declare that my informal summary of the Great Recession is biased, tendentious, maybe worse? Perhaps because of my sources of information and judgement? Are you, being less ideological, but a Liberal Democrat in support of your country’s coalition government, too superior to accept the summary? My sources include, as you have gathered,  the four newspapers The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. They also include the perhaps equally questionable books on the subject of the Great Recession by Will Hutton, Paul Mason, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, Robert Peston, Robert Skidelsky, Robert and Edward Skidelsky, and [1st name] Binder -- of which, I further confess, I have not read every word. See the reading list at the end of this book. They are in my estimation good histories at least consistent with what I have reported to you -- if not always histories that a mainline philosopher may incline to, certainly not all of them histories so explicit about human existence as an empathetic inquirer might prefer.

 

        My present reply to your charge of bias or worse, however, or rather my anticipation of one part of a reply, is something else. I have no embarrassment but rather the satisfaction of truth-seeing and truth-telling in saying that my informal summary is also owed in part to an attitude [but problem of ‘attitude’ in here here]on my part and of course those whose news and views I have chosen. I am indeed a member of the human race. An attitude is a matter somehow of desire, say inclination or hope or intention -- a matter of what elsewhere in a large book on the nature of consciousness, is called by me affective rather than cognitive or perceptual consciousness.

 

There are no other informal summaries, indeed no other summaries at all, of whatever politics or ethics or extent of factuality, that are untouched by attitude. I have not the slightest intention of joining those who add up our piece of history in what they pretend to be a simply factual way. Life, the thinking life, is harder than supposed by at least most of the public adversaries of the likes of me [? or anyone else], maybe nearly all.

 

        This brief chronology of The Great Recession, certainly, has hardly ventured into the dismal science of economics, memorably so described by the 19th Century Scot Thomas Carlyle. He gave as one reason for its dismalness that economics has to do with just supply of and demand for things, rather than the value of them in some higher or deeper sense. His reasons for the dismalness of economics were therefore not those heard of since. These are that economics is a matter of more disagreement and dispute than are the other sciences, certainly the physical sciences. It is such, to me and others, because it also is at least significantly attitudinal, that it is significantly a matter of politics, reassuring assumptions, inclination, class or personal commitment, employment by banks and the like.

 

Nor, by the way, do all of us take economics to rank higher than those other kinds of inquiry that fall under the name of being the humanities. It is my view, which of course will need some support, that economics, say in its principal use, its use in politics, is in a way inferior to mainstream philosophy, as certainly you would expect it to be, as certainly you would expect philosophy as in a way inferior to economics, or indeed any long-running discipline inferior to another. discipline. Philosophy is a certain greater concentration than that of science generally, and certainly economics if it is admitted to the company of physics or even psychology. Philosophy is a concentration on the logic of ordinary intelligence: clarity usually by way of analysis, consistency and validity, completeness, and a certain generality. As for the assumption that anything like all of economics really is a science at all, is that in line with thinking subsequent to Carlyle about the sciences themselves, and in particular the scientific method? If you are more into reading than some others readers of this book, have a look at [sci meth bk in AC]. It’s in libraries in universities.