Back in the first week of the virus lockdown, before “non-essential” businesses were closed, I went to my local bookshop. Business, they said, was as good as Christmas with one important difference: rather than Boring Postcards-style toilet funnies and gifts for relatives you don’t actually know, people were buying serious literature they actually intended to…
Read More BoooksFollowing Dan Davies’ tracers here. The guy who the care-home industry pushed out to pick a row with the prime minister this week, hoping it would divert attention from their atrocious labour practices and how they helped their customers catch COVID-19, turns out to be the very same whose £100m-big operation got caught perpetrating £20k…
Read More Alternative, Terrible Models of OwnershipThere has been quite some concern about what policy Labour can pursue in the context of a Conservative government that has essentially abandoned fiscal austerity as a goal. The good news is that there’s been a natural experiment on this in the United States, as this salty tweet points out – the $1200 emergency aid…
Read More Can’t Buy a Thrill: Keep the Furlough SchemeVia Adam Tooze on Twitter I saw this piece by His Seriousness, Martin Wolf, in the Financial Times. There’s a way to start a blog post, no? Anyway I was interested by this chart: I think this is an example of what I called, years ago, the North Atlantic Bullshit Conveyor, taking inspiration from the…
Read More From the Atlantic Bullshit Conveyor to the Anglospheric Bullshit Conveyor