george magnus

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Reindustrialisation

I’ve talked a lot recently about reindustrialisation. Now, I’m fairly certain David Cameron hasn’t been reading what I write. But I’m also fairly certain we have been looking at the same statistics: Manufacturing has shrunk from nearly 40 percent of Britain’s gross domestic product in the late 1950s to not much more than 10 percent now. And while Cameron might not put it this way, that has left Britain as a shrivelled husk of an economy: overly reliant on services, foreign oil, Chinese manufacturing, junk food, corporate handouts, and too-big-to-fail-too-big-not-to-fail financials. So it’s no surprise that Cameron has been talking up manufacturing. From Bloomberg:

Prime Minister David Cameron has latched on to manufacturing as a cure for Britain’s economic hangover and its 7.9 percent jobless rate. U.K. Business Secretary Vince Cable says that for sustainable, long-term growth, “manufacturing is where we need to be.”

“One of the main growth sectors of the economy in recent years has been banking,” Cable said in an interview. “For reasons that are blindingly obvious, that’s not going to be so important in future.”

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The Great Hunger

What is the real problem with the global economy? The traditional academic position, espoused by Paul Krugman, Christina Romer and most the White House and Federal Reserve is that this ever since 2007 we have experienced a series of severe negative demand shocks — starting with the bursting of the housing bubble, the sub-prime bubble, the implosion of AIG, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns, and continuing through the European debt crisis, various natural disasters and geopolitical upheavals — which first brought us into crisis, and have since imperilled any nascent recovery. The staunchest view – pushed especially by Krugman — is that the only way to reverse the effects of these demand shocks is through massive stimulus, to create a multiplier effect and raise aggregate demand.

But I believe that simply juicing the wheels of the economy with more money is simplistic, frivolous and mechanistic. We have to understand that the negative demand shocks are not simply bad luck or statistical noise, but instead reflect the reality of severe underlying structural problems. And without solving the underlying problems, a stimulus will keep things ticking over for months or years, until the same problems rear their head again down the road.

So the dissenting view, as posited by myself among others, is as follows:

Those troubles are non-monetary — they are systemic and infrastructural: military overspending, political corruption, public indebtedness, withering infrastructure, oil dependence, deindustrialisation, the withered remains of multiple bubbles, bailout culture, the derivatives-industrial complex, food and fuel inflation and so forth.

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