On Thursday the Residential Landlords Association (RLA) released a brief story in which it: warned that the sector faces “gross regulatory overload” that serves only to drive up rents at a time when tenants can least afford it. The RLA is conducting an exercise on the costs of […]
I was considering blogging in detail about David Cameron’s speech yesterday on welfare. But I decided against it. There are already several very good critiques of the substance of the speech. Plenty of people, including IPPR’s Nick Pearce, have pointed out that the speech was primarily about politics […]
A few days ago I blogged some thoughts on Seeking the limits of the market, having just read Michael Sandel’s recent book What money can’t buy. One of Sandel’s key points is that the logic of the market is slowly and insidiously colonising more and more areas of […]
Calling someone a neoliberal is rarely a sign of agreement or a term of endearment. It is one of those terms that’s only ever used pejoratively. It’s hard to think of anyone who would choose to classify themselves as a neoliberal. The definition of neoliberalism is quite fluid […]
I’ve just finished reading Michael Sandel’s What money can’t buy: The moral limits of markets, a book which has attracted quite a bit of media attention. It is an important book. Its importance does not lie in its originality: many of its arguments already exist in the literature. […]
Last Wednesday Suzanne Moore posted a Guardian comment piece entitled Why do we take economists so seriously? which takes a rather scatter-gun approach to some familiar themes. The argument, in outline, is that the economy is in a mess and this is primarily because we have been hoodwinked […]
One of most interesting dimensions of current developments in the housing market is the way in which global economic events are being refracted through housing policy: how a problem created in the private sector is being used to reconfigure the social rented sector and advance some long-standing objectives […]
What a shocking week for the Government. We’re well past the odd mishap. As the Government careers from one problem to another we’re now shading into something rather more embarrassing. With the exception of some über-loyalists with an eye to preferment, excoriating comment is emerging from all points […]
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