lavendersparkle

I think I may be becoming a Post Keynesian, or rather a Keynesian, as I've been won over by his own writings rather than those of his followers. I've never previously had much of an interest in macroeconomics. I think this may be because the macroeconomics I was taught tended to be tosh. It would be an insult to the intelligence of a small child to try to get them to buy the idea that the economy is always efficient and all unemployment is voluntary, so trying to convince Cambridge undergraduates of such things is ridiculous. Of course we need to know of such theories so that we can accurately mock critique them.* One of the thing which annoys me is how badly the few ideas of Keynes we were allowed to hear were distorted in the retelling. I clearly remember a lecturer claiming that Keynesian economics were silly because it claimed that people always saved a fixed proportion of their income. This is completely false. Having just finished reading The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money I can tell you that he doesn't claim that. He makes the quite reasonable claims that a) people tend to consume more when their income is higher and b) richer people tend to save a larger proportion of their income than poorer people. He also includes a complex of analysis of what factors, economic, cultural, social, influence people's decisions to consume and save. I'm not sure whether they just simplify everything because all economics has to be in terms of equations to be allowed in an undergraduate lecture course or they are purposely misrepresenting Keynesian economics to provide a straw man.

*One of the most amusing things about these models is the ways they try to find 'empirical evidence' for their theories. Not put off by the argument "but there is such a thing as involuntary unemployment", a fact which is felt particularly pertinently by my third year undergraduates, they tend to do this thing where they set up a stochastic mathematical model, run it a shit load of times, and then proudly declare that, once they calibrate their variable correctly, that the mean and standard deviation of various economic variables is the same as that for the real economy. If I were a journal editor I would publish their paper next to one in which a stochastic mathematical model of how the flying spaghetti monster controls the economy manages to come up with the same mean and standard deviation for pertinent economic variables.

I keep on getting confused with some of the rhetoric I hear about the place about poverty and healthy life style. So, first of all, I'll explain some ways in which poverty obviously does impact upon one's ability to have a healthy lifestyle. Firstly, access to healthcare. In the US healthcare actually costs money. In the UK healthcare is free at the point of demand for most services but there are still costs to obtaining healthcare, such as travel expenses and topping up NHS care from the private sector. Housing is another big thing. Housing which is cold or damp or contaminated with toxins is cheaper and likely to cause health problems. There's also the problem of work hazards, as if you are poorer you have less opportunity to avoid dangerous work environments or demand appropriate health and safety practice.

With that on board, I want to talk more specifically about areas of health which are usually closely related in public dialogue: diet and fitness. Poverty is associated poor diet, or at least this is what I have heard from t'internets. There are some possible good reasons for this. The first is accommodation. If you are living in very poor quality accommodation you may not have any cooking facilities. You may not have a fridge or a freezer. This makes it very difficult to eat anything which requires cooking or cool storage. Crisps, biscuits, take-aways can be eaten in these circumstances. This leads to another of the 'can't afford to be poor' situations, because these types of food are more expensive than home cooked food, so buying some cooking equipment would work out cheaper in the long run, but if there's nothing left of the pay cheque each week there's no way you can make that investment.

Another issue, which I suspect is more of an issue in the US, is time poverty. I get the impression that because of differences in the tax and benefit system, single parents working three jobs to make ends meet is more common in the US. If you're time poor and get home exhausted, it's much harder to cook. Similarly, if one has not been taught to cook before leaving home, the risk of experimenting with an unfamiliar recipe to gain the skills and confidence to cook, is too much if you will have to go without dinner if the cooking goes wrong.

Access to shops is something I've heard a lot about. Mainstream supermarkets aren't so keen to open in council estates and even when they do they tend to open smaller shops with higher prices and more restricted range. I get that. The thing that confuses me is that in the past when I've talked about eating more vegetables and wholemeal bread I've heard people say that they'd like to but they don't have an organic store near them or the organic store is so expensive. There definitely seems to be a big meme, at least of LJ, that eating healthy food requires access to an organic shop. This completely flummoxes me. I eat a pretty healthy diet, and it is almost entirely bought from Tesco. Do US supermarkets not sell vegetables or wholemeal bread? Does the US allow such noxious chemicals to be sprayed on their crops that it's really better to eat ready meals than non-organic veg? Please explain because every time I ask I'm told that I'm an evil privileged middle-class vegan who should STFU.

On a related not, what's the deal with the whole "I can't exercise because I can't afford to join a gym" meme. I can see the advantages of belonging to a gym for some people. If you want to build particular muscles or train for a particular activity then the gym can provide expert advise and machinery. If, on the other hand, you just want to improve your general level of fitness, you can get most of the benefits of the gym for free. You could turn on the radio and dance around your apartment for half an hour. You could run up and down the stairs, if you have stairs. You could even just make small lifestyle changes to be a bit more active: walk rather than drive on short errands, take the stairs, get off the subway a stop early and walk the rest. These things aren't going to get you ready to run a marathon but they will get you a bit fitter and healthier. Of course, as with preparing food, time poverty will put a big spanner in the works.

A thing I've noticed in common between both diet and exercise is that in both these cases unnecessary purchases have become necessary in the mind of the public. I'm increasingly coming to think that this is a central feature of consumerist capitalism. Activities which don't require much stuff, such as sex, or are initially carved out as a space separate from consumerism, are very quickly colonised with consumer goods, the purchase of which we are convinced is essential to the activity. A healthy lifestyle is relatively cheap and easy if one is not impeded by the issues I've mentioned above: less salt, sugar, fat, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine; more vegetables, fruit, complex carbohydrates, movement, water. However there is a multi billion dollar industry trying to sell us the 'secret' to all this. At its best it's just a waste of money and resources to, for example, drive to a gym, walk on a tread mill, and drive home. At its worst, the effort to make profit from those who can afford it requires convincing those who can't that they therefore can't afford to participate in activities which shouldn't cost anything.

Increasingly lately I've been thinking that what we really need to do is work less. What I mean by this is that, given that developed countries have reached a level of wealth where we can afford to fill our bellies many times over, and that climate change seems to be one of the greatest threats facing us, wouldn't it be better if we all worked a bit less on average. We can fit renewable light bulbs and turn our televisions of standby but the best way to reduce our carbon foot print is to reduce our consumption and if we're going to buy less stuff, surely it makes sense to earn less money and make less stuff. I know the protestant work ethics retort to this argument. It goes "How could you advocate a life of leisure when there are starving babies in Africa?" but we don't spend very much of our money of feeding the starving in Africa, we spend it on iPods and shoes and other shinies. Maybe if we got out of the cycle of earning more money to buy more shinies we'd take more seriously the idea of actually having a serious crack at alleviating poverty.

I've always felt a bit out of sink with the rest of the world for thinking this way. It always struck me as really odd that per capita GDP was so much higher than it had been in the past but people kept on claiming that we couldn't afford things. I always found it odd that during the 20th century hours of employment have increased even though hourly wages have increased. Last week I mentioned it to a fellow Cambridge economist and he mentioned a paper written by Keynes nearly 80 years ago about what the world would be like in 100 years time. Luckily some nice person put it on the internet.

Maybe it'll inspire you to take part in a very quiet revolution. Think about whether the shinies are really worth the hours of your life it takes to buy them. If they aren't, work less and enjoy life more.

People who did not do undergraduate economics at Cambridge will not get the significance of this but I just saw Tony 'grumpy' Lawson smiling. This was because instead of trying to lecture to a bunch of first years who still don't get the t test he was giving a seminar on his baby, critical realism. This is a branch of methodology that seems to consist of him and a few other people from Cambridge who meet sometimes at CRASSH and more often at the pub.

I went along because I'm interested in doing his paper in methodology in economics. I've been reading one of his books, Reorienting Economics that is the core text for the course and it's rather exciting. It speaks to the niggling feeling I've been having that, whilst I enjoy mainstream economics, it has about as much practical application as a Sudoku puzzle and, were it for the fact that I can't get government funding to solve Sudoku but I can get funding to construct hugely complex mathematical models with random assumptions and absolutely no explanatory power, I may as well do that.