Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
All these things which at the moment we're saying are going to be terrible were far, far worse in 1948.
The magnitudes of the change were bigger looking ahead in 1948 than they are looking ahead now.
And now we're saying that this is terribly austere.
Now, the top line of the Office for Budget Responsibility's projections was GDP.
Didn't get reported much, the projections for GDP.
We reported all the costs, healthcare and so on, and education and pensions and the rest.
We didn't report the GDP.
The implication of the GDP projections are that in 50 years' time, we'll be four times richer.
Than we are now.
Doesn't sound particularly austere, does it?
And then there's the interesting consequence of being four times richer is that do you want to spend everything the same ways that you spend it now?
And all our experience in modern economies is that we change the pattern of our spending as we get richer and we start to want to spend more on things like healthcare and education and a longer retirement where we're funded by bigger pensions or at least pensions that have to last a lot longer at least and so on.
So these are choices that result from wealth partly and the things that wealth does like allow us to live longer and so on.
And to regard them simply as costs, A, without taking into account the other side of the balance sheet, the income, and B, without taking account of the way that our choices change as our income grows, seems to me to be slightly potty.
And then to call it all austere when we're four times richer, I mean, when I read that, something in me snapped, I think.
I thought we're enjoying the pessimism a little bit too much.
Michael Blastland.
Allow me to introduce myself.
I am Economic Man, or Homo Economica, straight from the economics textbook and out for a spot of shopping.
So I have what economists call my very own scale of preferences.
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