Great Britain?
How We Get Our Future Back
Torsten Bell
Having read it
★★★★☆
Full of interesting facts and legitimate views and opinions, despite some being slightly wrapped up in existing ways that would potentially just perpetuate the same issues and not really challenge or solve the real ones.
However, latterly the book coalesces around some good, effective and somewhat, ‘Why aren’t we doing that anyway?’ methods and approaches that allow and enable genuine, relevant and long-term economic and political changes to be made.
Radical incrementalism would be a productive start and way forward and if our electoral cycle is shortened, politics decentralised and more collaboratively owned and enacted with less emphasis and reality placed on (pointless party) political colours and competitiveness and rigmarole, good things (like real and effective investment for worthwhile and environmentally-sound growth) for Britain is more likely to occur.
Still, like is mentioned and the data proves, most of British society hasn’t been and isn’t really politically engaged...
[...] research across 166 elections since 1980 has found that austerity has driven citizens either to give up on voting, or towards voting for non-mainstream parties.15
...proving that the first-past-the-post system really does need to go, first and foremost
(Yes, proportional representation potentially (and quite likely) opens up the field to even more voices and opinions, good and bad, in the short-term as change always comes with risk(s), but over the mid- to long-term evens the political and economic playing fields and shows and proves extremes are not helpful to or for a productive, collaborative, healthy and involved society.)
A good passage
The Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf worries that ‘the UK has become accustomed to managing stagnation’ and ‘this frog is being boiled too slowly’ for politicians to do what is required.’26 I am more optimistic, precisely because so many of us now recognise the hole Britain is in. It’s a damning indictment of where we are, but also the basis for a coalition for comfort zones, to get growth up and inequality down. If that doesn’t happen, we aren’t just risking our economy, but the health of our society.
A second good passage
Some see concerns over living standards as individualistic or petty, just telling us about what particular people can consume. The idea that we shouldn?t be worried about ordinary families’ living standards is odd, but the concern goes beyond that. Britain’s stagnation is so dangerous because it reflects failures not of individual effort, but of collective progress – of how we respond as a nation to the changing world. It’s the financial manifestation of us not taking the opportunities this era offers, to build new industries and stronger places, to name goals and accomplish them together. I believe it also lies behind our shared sense that we are not moving forward, or worse, are actively heading in the wrong direction. Even if you are doing well, you care that your wider family and community aren’t. Rising, shared prosperity is a central promise of democracies, and it is not a promise we are keeping. And it is contributing to our failure to keep other promises, ones we owe to every generation.
A third good passage
If we all come to think one group can progress only if another regresses, our attention will focus on individually protecting what we already have, not what we can collectively create. This is what’s going on when voters prioritise planning restrictions to preserve the value of existing properties over the building of new homes. When the value of wealth has increased so much more rapidly than earnings from hard work, some will deduce that protecting wealth is preferable to the harder slog of raising growth. Such thinking also drives resentment towards progress for women and ethnic minorities – and reinforces anti-migrant attitudes – because anyone else’s advancement is something to be anxious about, not to celebrate. [...]
The problem is that not only can zero-sum thinking condemn us to low growth, but low growth also breeds such thinking: a doom loop. A low-growth world is more zero-sum – if the economic pie does not grow, one person’s gain is another’s loss. Worse, new research, from a team including Stefanie Stantcheva, professor of political economy at Harvard, reveals that living in that weak-growth world, as we have done, makes people see things in more zero-sum terms.11 Such thinking is also stronger among those who miss out on another major form of progress, upward intergenerational mobility, by ‘doing worse than their parents’ – something that has become more common in Britain.12 A slow-growth, zero-sum environment risks creating a stagnation trap.