Twitteretter

It’s that time of the year when the Hay Festival is on. This festival represents a unique opportunity to partake in inspiring and thought provoking debates in an atmosphere of tolerance and open mindedness. I strongly recommend it. Yesterday, one of the sessions was a talk with Rutger Bregman, the brilliant Dutch historian, one of the most exciting social thinkers of our time. Bregman changes the frame of reference by starting from the premise that humans are, in the most part, good and intrinsically motivated. And this is not just a hopeful opinion. In his work, he provides plenty of evidence for this. Modern economy and policy making are based on the central idea that humans are selfish. This premise is crippling. National social policy, trade agreements and employment conditions are designed to control for abuse and cheating and fundamentally limited in their scope. It is high time we change the World and, to do so, we must shake off the Mean World syndrome and believe in us, humans...

The biggest economic risk of the coronavirus pandemic, which no trader has so far factored in, is a permanent change in consumption habits. After having been obliged to try it for a while, consumers may actually stop buying products and services they don’t need. This would be catastrophic for the economy, or at least for GDP, the useless, coarse measure of how our economy is doing. GDP would be permanently affected and there would be no recovery. Of course, the economy only makes sense as a construct to improve human lives and, therefore, in real terms this may not be a disaster at all, after a period of adjustment to pivot jobs, develop new industries, etc. The big fly in the ointment, and there is always one, is that our tax system generates its revenue from middle income work and consumption, and tax revenues may not suffice to sustain, let alone develop, the welfare state. We may come to a point where we finally have to tax corporations and wealth fairly, perish the thought Leng...