p. xi “In the UK, the government outsourced health contracts worth £9/2bn in 2018 alone. Over 84% of care home beds are in privately owned homes, and 50,000 are in homes run by private equity companies..The total value of the public health grant in the UK – which enables local authorities to provide vital health care and preventative services – has been declining in real terms, from £4 billion in 2015-6 to £3.2 bn in 2020/1.”
p. 11 “Between 1995 and 2013, real median wgaes in the OECD countries grew at an annual average rate of 0.8% versus 1.5% growth in labour productivity.”
p. 16 “Fire (finance, investment, real estate) is burning the foundation on which economic growth rests. In the USA and the UK only about a fifth of finance goes into the productive economy… 10% of all UK bank lending helps non-financial firms; the rest supports real estate and financial assets. In 1970 real estate lending constituted about 35% of all beank lending in advanced economies; by 2007 the figure had risen to about 60%. .. fuels a debt-driven system and speculative bubbles which, when they burst, bring banks and others begging for government bailouts. … if they failed, the entire system would come crashing down with them. So the banks got the bailouts: FIRE profits are private; FIRE losses are public. … Business itself has become financialised. … within non-finance sectors, financial activities and their accompanying attitudes have come to dominate business. An ever greater share of corporate profits have been used to boost sort-term gains in stock prices rather than provide long-term investment in areas like new capital equipment, R&D and worker training”
p. 34 if a government dares do anything ambitious, it risks being accused of crowding out private investment… Lurking deeper is the familiar conviction that only the private sector creates calue and – by extension – that government investment may destroy it. … Government investment often has the opposite effect. When structured strategically it can crowd in private investment, stimulating funding that might not have happened otherwise and expanding national outpur, which benefits public and private investors alike…. Relatively small government stakes in Airbus have helped build the world’s biggest aircrat comapny, with operations and suppliers across Europe. The history of technological breakthroughs shows that public investment, particularly when made early in the innovation process, absorbs major uncertainties and long-term risks that private investors can be reluctant to take on.”
p. 38 New Public Management “NPM led to proposals to a) privatise publicly owned companies b) decentralise and/or break up big public organisations and c) introduce metrics such as performance pay. One way to reduce the risk of government ‘doing harm’ was to outsource and privatise public services. In theory, outsourcing and privatisation would ameliorate the principal-agent problem in the relationship between government and xitiens, save money and improve services. The practice turned out to be quite different… accompanied by centralisation of the state machine, for example by weakening the pwoer of local government over housing.. Between 1980 and 1996 the UK accounted for 40% of the total value of all assets privatised acorss the OECD.”
p. 39 In total, there have been over 700 projects financed through PFI in the UK since 1998, with a capital value of around £60 billion. Under the current paymnet arrangements, these will cost the public purse a cumulative total of nearly £310 billion by 2047-8 – more than five times the original capital outlay. The UK’s National Audit Office estimates the cost of a PFI project is typically 40% higher than an identical project financed by government borrowing.”
p. 42 “Carillon’s failure led to accusations by Blackrock, the giant fund managed that was one of the company’sinvestors, that the company thought about ‘how to renumerate executives rather than what was actually going on in the business’. The institute for Government said the government had created a “corporate monster” with “low-margin, high-risk” projects – an endemic weakness of the outsourcing model of procurement, particularly for longterm projects, where contractors are tempted to underbid to increase market share and hope they can increase their margins as the prject progresses.”
p. 46 In 1970 the public sector employed 47% of arhcitects in the UK, mostly with local authorities. Today it is less than 1%. This partly reflects the sharp fall in the provision of new public housing by local authorities but it is also consistent with the outsourcing trend across government.”
p. 55 Warren Buffett once said – quite rightly – that “society is responsible for a very signfiicant percentage of what I’ve earned”.
p. 109 SDGs “the perfect starting point for considering the challenges that missions might address…. engage diverse stakeholders across the world. The idneitfy internationally agreed grand challenges that have been chosen by broad and comprehensive consultation around the world. They offer huge opporuntities to direct innovation at multiple social and technological problems to create societies that are just, inclusive and sustainable.”
p. 123 “DArPA took enormous risks in funding the invention of the internet – and it did so with a problem in mind: so that satellites could communicate. Similarly, the US Navy funded the invetion of GPS in an effort to target missiles better… recently funded two pharmaceutical companies, Merderna Inc and Inovio Pharmaceutical Inc to create RNA and DNA vaccines – technologies that many scientists and inevtors considered speculative and high-risk.”
p. 163 “When they built the cathedrals that are among Europe’s most magnificent cultural achievements, the medieval master builders took chances that would drive a modern architect out of business. Nobody knew how much it would cost to build a cathedral or how long it would take. But these were missions with a purpose – to demonstrate the glory of God through creativity – and they brought together many different sectors of society: clergy, craftsmen, nobles, rulers and ordinary people.”
p. 169 “the ancient Greeks used the term ‘idiotes’ to debote those who did not operate in the public sphere; to put it harshly, if you were only concerned with the private sector, you were an idiot.So if you were a wealthy Athenian and you didn’t want to be seen as an idiot, you funded public arts like threate festivals (as told by Xenophon, perhaps the first economist, in Hiero. Later the ancient Romans spoke of the ‘pro bono publico’, based on ethical considerations of working for the common good, not the pursuit a profit”.
p. 182 Alan Greenspan 2005 “There is nothing to prevent the government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The question is, how do you set up a system which ensures the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purcahse… It’s a question of the structure of a financial system which assured that the real reosources are created.”… in other words, the key question is whether the economy has the productive capacity to make good use of the money that is created and placed in private hands.”
p. 183 economists such as Stephanie Kelton, who belong to the economic school called modern money theory (MMT), have been trying to get gvoernments to realise that the idea they have to come up with money before they spend it is reverse logical In reality, spending itself creates money.”
p. 184 “If the government spends £10 and taxes £4m, it can be said to be in deficit by £6. But that £6 is also in the hands of people and businesses… The other side of a government deficit is a private surplus. In other words, the government’s and private sector’s balance sheets must be mirror images of each other,, a government surplus ‘sucks’ pounds off balance sheets. A sustained fiscal surplus means constant sucking, which means that he private sector is losing financial assets, as maturing bonds are not reissued. Thus, fiscal surpluses weaken private-sector balance sheets.”
p. 185 “What happens to the money government is spending when it gets into private hands. Much of it is invested in government bonds… the lynchpin of the financial system and the core of many portfolios: pensioners, who complain about government profligacy are probabli living off income partly derived from government bonds. The national debt, which so exercises many politicians and citizens, is actually the historical accumulation of money spent by government, not taxed back, and now a privately held asset. Government red ink equals private sector black ink.”
p. 199 The Philosopher Hannah Arendt developed the concept of the common good and public value – into an active participatory one with her concept of viva activa. Her idea was that citizens should engage in public affairs, as this is the only way to escape totalitarianism and alienationin mass-production capitalism: here the idea of commmon good is relctec in the idea of an active citizen … also means the need for society to be open to real debate, the contestation of ideas and explicit conflicts over values… Participation is not a silent, harmonious process.”
p. 205 “Capitalist markets are an outcome of how each actor in the system is organised and governed, and how the different actors relate to one another.. No particular kind of market behaviour is inevitable. For example, the market pressure often cited as forcing a business to neglect the long term in favour of the short term, as too many companies do today, is the product of a particualr organisation of the market. Nor is there anything inevitable in government bureaucracies being too slow to react to challenges such as digital platforms and climate change. Rather, both are outcomes of agency, actions and governance structures that are chosen inside organisations, as well as the legal and institutional relationships between them, as well as the legal and institutional relationships between them”.
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