Coates - Flawed capitalism: the Anglo-American condition and its resolution

Also by David Coates and published by Agenda Publishing
Reflections on the Future of the Left (editor)

David Coates 2018

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2018 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

The Core

Science Central

Bath Lane

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE4 5TF

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-911116-33-2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset in Nocturne by Patty Rennie

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International

For Eileen and Jonathan,
Emma, Ben and Anna, Tom and Ed
With love and thanks!

Contents

Acknowledgements

As even a cursory glance at the many footnotes to each chapter must make abundantly clear, volumes of this kind depend entirely on the fine work of others. In this instance, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to a vast list of research academics in both the US and the UK, to the members of research teams at a myriad of progressive think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic, and to a seemingly endless supply of fine investigatory journalists based in each national capital an enormous debt owed, that is, to a large set of people without whose skills, dedication and courage a volume of the kind that follows here could simply never have been written. Those debts are particularly huge to the research teams at the Economic Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, and the Brookings Institution in the United States, and to their equivalents at the Resolution Foundation, the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, and the Centre for Economic Performance in the UK plus, of course, to the gifted journalists working at The Washington Post and The New York Times in the US and at The Guardian and Financial Times in London. Then in addition, I owe a set of more personal debts: primarily to Alison Howson, Matthew Watson, and Agenda Publishing for supporting this venture, to Tony Payne at SPERI for his guidance throughout, to colleagues at Wake Forest University who read and commented on parts of what now follows, and to my magnificent children both in the UK and in America who did the same. The book is dedicated to them, and to Eileen, my wonderful partner in all of this: partly in gratitude certainly in love and partly in the hope that by acting together, we can still yet make a better world than that foreshadowed by the arrival in office of Donald J. Trump and Theresa May.

DAVID COATES

Wake Forest University, November 2017

Abbreviations

Introduction

Every book has its moment of conception and its period of drafting. This book has been a long time in the making, but its drafting began only very recently and at a particularly awesome moment. Drafting began in the interregnum between two US Administrations, just as Donald Trump was poised to become the forty-fifth president of the United States; and on the day in which, in the United Kingdom, the new Conservative Government led by Theresa May lost its first by-election in a strong Tory seat, as buyers remorse about the Brexit vote began belatedly to surface. Because of developments of this kind, early 2017 seemed to be both a good and a bad time to begin to write. Given all that was happening around us, it seemed a particularly appropriate moment to put together a systematic reflection on the future of both societies, and on the likely strength of the economies on which those societies rest. But it was also a moment at which such a reflection was bound to be difficult to deliver, because there was suddenly so much political novelty and uncertainty in both London and Washington, DC. Any reflection written to illuminate the times would, therefore, need to explain that novelty and uncertainty, as well as throw light on the continuities that make the novelty so disturbing.

For just twelve months earlier, when Barack Obama gave his last State of the Union Address and David Cameron returned from Brussels with his renegotiated settlement with the European Union, neither Donald J. Trumps occupancy of the White House, nor Theresa Mays of No. 10, was visible on the political radar of any serious public commentator. But here we were, facing 2017 with both newly in charge: the one poised to substantially reconfigure Americas already inadequate welfare net (and to do an additional set of entirely unclear things to make America great again); the other poised to somehow negotiate the UKs route out of the European Union without damaging still further the already vulnerable UK economy. Of course, neither of these political figures will necessarily be with us for long May, if her weakened condition after her unsuccessful general election continues, Trump if he is eventually impeached but even if either/both fall from power as sharply as they rose, the political volatility from which they both benefited will undoubtedly persist.