A recent post caught my eye (and is well worth reading in full, as it touches on many of the questions that ET mulls over about the future) but the following excerpt hit right at something I've wondered about a lot:

What are the jobs in a "post-industrial" or "financialised" or "Anglo-Disease" economy?

And what is the relationship between employment in large firms and small ones?

Diary rescue by afew

I'd urge you to read it in full, as it puts some numbers around some key questions about neoliberalism:

naked capitalism: Hoisted From Comments: Has Neo-Liberalism Failed to Deliver the Goods?

Reader Juan provided a well-argued and provocatively-worded critique of so-called market fundamentalism yesterday that I thought would provide grist for thought and discussion. The main argument in favor of less regulated commerce, both domestically, in the form of deregulation, and internationally, via more liberal trade regimes, is that it generates higher growth. Juan argues that the results have been the reverse.

Promoted by Colman

The 2008 theme logo: it was inspired by Belgrade's situation at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers [added by DoDo]

Final Results

1. Russia
2. Ukraine
3. Greece

Top of the betting so far seems to be jointly:

Russia - Dima Bilan - Believing

and

Ukraine - Ani Lorak - Shady Lady

I added a special section (like in the Salon) for Eurovision comments. I don't know if I'll have time to liveblog. So anyone who has time, please keep us up to date! If you're not at a TV, it appears you can watch online if you go to the Eurovision Belgrade 2008 site.

Usual chart roundups follow below. As always, post a chart that interests you and a couple of youtubes and comments on songs!

Event starts at 21h CET. Promoted by DoDo

As usual please post a chart from a country you have an interest in, along with any commentary.

Remember no more than a couple of Youtube embeds each to keep the diary loading time down!

It's also only a week until that festival of top down European popular culture - Eurovision. This week saw the vaguely related Eurovision Young Musicians competition.

More below:

Things I would like to see are diaries about social/cultural/political trends that are occuring not just in one country, but across Europe. Diaries about the emerging 'European space', as it were, above the national, but below the global.

linca said:

Is there knowledge about EU-wide trends in sociology/culture ? I read a bit of sociology, but pretty much all of it is France-centered. There are EU-wide stats, but stats don't make political and social analysis all by themselves.

The advantage of ET is that each could bring knowledge about his own country ; and that sometimes happen in some diaries. But is that enough to identify EU-wide trends ?

Now in serious questions of sociology and culture we don't have many resources. But if ET is a building block of a future European public sphere then popular culture is important too.

Couple of interesting articles connecting to this theme:

Radical solutions | Comment is free

Radical solutions

Progressives do have answers to the current economic crisis, they just haven't been given the attention they deserve

Mark Braund

Aditya Chakrabortty is right to lament the poor contribution of progressives to the debate about the economic crisis. The only option advanced by contributors to Cif's Economies in Crisis series is a return to Keynesian demand management and tougher market regulation. While this strategy helped the western economies to rebuild after 1945, Keynesian thinking suited the special circumstances of the postwar period, circumstances that hardly apply today. There is no permanent solution to the crisis, and certainly no path to widespread economic justice, in Keynes' prescription.

The problem with economics, whether practised by academics, journalists, politicians or the wonks that staff the thinktanks to which we look for guidance, is that taking sufficiently radical a position to force new thinking onto the mainstream agenda usually constitutes career suicide.

It's not as if there are no alternatives on offer. But the establishment has become adept at keeping ideas that challenge the status quo firmly out of public view. This process is partly directed by the vested interests of minority wealth and privilege, but has also become embedded in the institutions and long-held assumptions which shape today's economic landscape. Perhaps the best example is the concerted campaign against the ideas of Henry George.

Frank and ChrisCook should both read the above one in particular.

Diary rescue by Migeru

Diary rescue by afew - original post March 26

So the latest article by Malcolm Gladwell for the New Yorker is the usual combination of "story hook," verbose description and narrative and the obligatory musings on "normal distributions" vs "power laws". I happen to like his style, so I'd highly recommend you read the whole article, right now, but even if you don't, he addresses a very interesting issue.

In essence: we conceive of social safety-net provision in the form of helping those who are "down on their luck."

However, we're slowly recognising that some of the people who most persistently require various emergency interventions (and thus get the most money spent on them) can only be helped by very targeted (and much more expensive) actions. They are also often, to some degree the authors of their own demise.

This can be philosophically problematic, as Gladwell illustrates:

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Taiwan victor promises China ties

Taiwan's newly-elected president has pledged to establish better economic and political ties with China. Ma Ying-jeou said he would like to work towards a peace treaty with Beijing, but would only do so if China removed missiles pointed at Taiwan. He said he had no immediate plans to visit the mainland, but wanted to work on "substantive issues". Mr Ma won a comfortable victory over Frank Hsieh of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party on Saturday. Official results gave Mr Ma 58.45% of the vote - an advantage of nearly 17 percentage points over Mr Hsieh. Mr Ma, of the Kuomintang party, had stood on a platform of economic reform and improving relations with China.

Taiwan nationalists in huge win
Taiwan's opposition nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party has won a landslide victory in parliamentary polls, official results show.

The KMT, which wants closer ties with China, secured 72% of the seats in the 113-seat chamber, beating President Chen Shui-bian's party, the DPP.

The independence-leaning president said he was "shamed", resigning as chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party.

The elections are seen as a barometer for the presidential poll on 22 March.

China regards Taiwan as a renegade province that should be reunified.

Nevada schmevada - Diary rescue by Migeru

FT.com / Markets / Investor's notebook - Insight: Equities hold up against the crunch

In our view, the consensus still fails to grasp the enormity of what is at stake, in essence a threat to the global credit creation mechanism. The process of "securitisation" is too big, too integral to fail. That may be true, but by the time this crisis is over, it is going to be a lot more tightly regulated - not least as pro-cyclical Basel II capital adequacy rules are implemented. That could change the supply of credit. The big issue next year is not going to be the cost of credit; it is going to be the availability of credit. Companies face a shock as they realise they can no longer boost return on equity simply by issuing debt to buy back stock. They will have to learn to run themselves "for growth", and not just "for cash".

Article in Slate here.

You should go read the whole article, but here's a "key excerpt":

About a third of jobs in developed economies like Britain may be lost to globalisation. That is the conclusion not of opponents of globalisation but of an increasing number of economists who are enthusiasts for globalisation.

Indeed, said Laura Tyson, business professor from California, former dean of the London Business School, and adviser to one of the Democratic presidential candidates (almost certainly Hillary), at a lecture in the Treasury last night, it remains true that globalisation cannot be stopped and protectionism will not work. But this is little comfort to the losers. Her main message was that job losses are inevitable and governments need to develop policies now to help people and the economy adapt. Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, was sat in the front row and praised Tyson for her terrifyingly smart lecture.

One the one hand, it's refreshing to hear someone in the "economics advisor mainstream" admit what looks pretty obvious. Jobs are being exported and the invisible hand won't replace them.

On the other hand, it's rather worrying. Sure, the market system may fix itself eventually, but examples of regional unemployment (North of England, East Germany) suggest that it takes on the order of 20-30 years for the market to begin to return employment to depressed areas. Add in the complications of international job transfers and we could easily be looking at 50 years or more of increased unemployment here in developed economies.

That said, this is a useful article:

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A friend of feudalism

A friend of feudalism

Pakistan has long been ruled by an elite. Benazir Bhutto's return would perpetuate the old order

Not far from the ruins of the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro, lies Benazir Bhutto's feudal estate of Larkhana. In this backward and arid region amid the dry salt flats of the Indus plain, Bhutto's family have long been the most prominent land owners, and the area is witness to many of the Borgia-like feuds that distinguish the lives of Pakistan's feudal elite.

The last time I visited the estate, in 1994, a convoy from the house of Begum Bhutto - Benazir's mother - to her husband's grave had just been shot at by police, leading to the deaths of three of the family's retainers. Begum was in no doubt that the police were acting to support Benazir. Soon afterwards, there was the funeral of Benazir's brother Murtaza, who had just returned to Pakistan to try to oust his sister from control of the family's political wing, the Pakistan People's party. He died, along with six of his supporters, in a hail of police bullets, yards from his front door. Many pointed the finger of suspicion at Benazir, and her husband was later charged with complicity in the murder.

How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves

A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects

For the first time the UK's consumer debt exceeds the total of its gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion. Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.

These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common. They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our contemporary crises.

From the diaries ~ whataboutbob

What happens when the Boomer generation wants their pension money from various funds?

Presumably, this all depends on the size of the generations putting money in at the moment and the near future, but the bear in the book suggested that we'd see a structural decline in equity prices, because there would be a net outflow of money from equity to cash.

From the diaries - afew

Alpha.Sources blog - The End of the Road In Lithuania?

I am sorry for the rather dramatic headline deployed above but I really don't think that any of this should be taken lightly. I will begin with this short yet very telling note from Bloomberg which informs us that unemployment in Lithuania dropped to a staggering 2.7% in June. This of course signifies an extremely tight labour market and quite simply this cannot go on for much longer. The clear evidence of this is first and foremost to be found in the quarterly y-o-y GDP figures which demonstrate Lithunia's sizzling growth rates much alike the other Baltic countries. As such, Q1 2007 saw an annual growth rate of 8.3% and on average the last five quarters saw a growth rate of GDP of 7.8%. This is of course putting strains of capacity in Lithunia and like in the rest of the Baltic countries the short term cyclical indicators point to very brisk growth in labour costs.

(My emphasis.)

The article goes on to speculate about a coming hard landing for Lithuania and possibly some other countries as well.

BBC NEWS | Business | Saga and AA enjoy zero tax bill

Saga and the AA, the private-equity owned businesses that are merging, incurred no liability for corporation tax last year, the BBC can disclose.

And in their two-and-a-half years of ownership by private equity, they paid almost zero corporation tax.

In the same period, the private equity owners of these businesses - Permira, CVC and Charterhouse - generated gains for themselves of £2.5bn.

This is about three-and-a-half times the value of their initial investment.

From the rec list - afew

The question is:

Name a large economy that made a transition from poor/agricultural to prosperous/industrial without the use of protectionism to first build an industrial base.

From the diaries ~ whataboutbob

I haven't seen the film, it's not yet out here in the backwaters of England, but they were playing a trailer in a shop to show off the virtues of some new-fangled television and I've been waiting for someone else to notice the overtones of this production.