Tim Worstall

The True Colours of the nef

You can just hear it, can’t you? The lip smacking, the relish with which this figures are trotted out:

The gradual introduction of luxury taxes and schemes to promote war
savings was a huge struggle, constantly agonised over. The government
employed the best creative artists of the day to persuade people. It
worked. Together with rationing, that six-year period saw a 95% drop in
use of motor vehicles; use of household electrical appliances fell by
82%; and consumption of all goods and services fell by 16% (much higher
at household level).

That’s Andrew Simms from the new economics foundation (who suffer dreadfully from the Great Capitals Shortage). It is indeed "new economics" for he’s praising the drop in consumption of all goods and services.

That is, when translated into everyday speak, a supposed economist praising the fact that everyone has just got poorer. By 16% no less.

But then, for Simms and his buddies, that’s actually the point. Climate change is only the cover, the excuse. They do actually believe that making people poorer is the right thing to do.

They are, remember, the people who said that Vanuatu is the best place on the planet to live.  This is many things but it isn’t economics: maybe they are in fact simply the High Priests of the Prince Phillip Movement? 

In

4 responses

  1. sortapundit Avatar
    sortapundit

    And there were surprising benefits. People spent more of their disposable income on amusements and, unsurprisingly, public transport. Staggeringly, a nation consuming less, but more efficiently, saw infant mortality drop by nearly a quarter in the same period.
    You’ll go bowling more often – once a week, perhaps, just as soon as you’ve finished queueing three hours for a loaf of bread and the last pair of nylons in the country. Hooray for poverty!
    And here’s some more good news. Worrying about imminent ecological collapse is stressful, but so is being on the consumption treadmill, chasing the bigger house and better car. Get off one and you help get off the other.
    We’ll all be happier when we’re forced to sleep four to a bedroom and share the bath with next door. Hooray for low blood pressure!
    Research by the New Economics Foundation shows that in the UK, whether you are at two- or six-planet living, there is no connection between your level of consumption and your life satisfaction.
    I don’t care too much for money… Hooray for the Beatles!
    The massive practical and cultural shift we need won’t happen until they step out of the phone box

    Reply
  2. sortapundit Avatar
    sortapundit

    Oops…
    The massive practical and cultural shift we need won’t happen until they step out of the phone box.
    I’d suggest that anyone who uses a phrase like that – the kind of phrase you rarely find outside a Tony Robbins seminar – can be safely ignored.

    Reply
  3. MikeinAppalachia Avatar
    MikeinAppalachia

    “that six-year period saw a 95% drop in use of motor vehicles; use of household electrical appliances fell by 82%; and consumption of all goods and services fell by 16% (much higher at household level).”
    So, all that is needed is to dispatch an equivalent % of the British population overseas as in ’38-’44, have some foreign power routinely bomb London, and don’t include in the accounting all the fuel,”services”, “health care”, and other consumption that the dispatched personnel are expending and the UK could be back to the glorious lifestyle of that period?

    Reply
  4. David Gillies Avatar
    David Gillies

    “don’t include in the accounting all the fuel,”services”, “health care”, and other consumption that the dispatched personnel are expending…”
    …or, presumably, the hundred thousand or so people killed every year.
    Hair-shirted millenarian flummery dressed up as ecologically sound wisdom. Never was a body more inaptly named: this isn’t new, and as Tim says it certainly isn’t economics.

    Reply

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