I have trouble with this because the foundations of such arguments are based on trends that presume some kind of physics, when economies are structurally, if not also actually, more like whims. A panic over something can send prices spinning in one or another direction. There is no structural requirement that yesterday relates to tomorrow.
And by these things, I include even things like Steven Pinker going on about the world getting better by studying what amount to almanacs. Truly, the betterness he describes is built on surplus, and surplus is a product of structural integrity, which is not always a visible thing. Pinker has done interesting work in other areas, but his predictions and assurances on the goodness of the world rely on really no structure at all. They have zero predictive value in my book. The moment the world has no surplus (and that is what climate change is setting us up for), all "betterness" that Pinker speaks of will evaporate like so much cotton candy.
To turn the conversation back by way of climate metaphor, it can look like the ice in, say, Antarctica has not changed as seen from a satellite, only to find that it's been melting from below due to heating oceans or some sort of volcanic effect or other effects we just haven't discovered, and things can just fall in.
The economy is the same. For a hopefully-entertaining brief parable on the matter, see my 2009 essay "Hollow Support" (http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/03/hollow-support.html). In it, I offer a metaphor for thinking about the economy and its fragility, which I was pondering after what was then a recent crash.
A lot of what we are doing with the economy these days has been aptly, I think, described as a "sugar high". It locally seems good, but it's not improving structure, so doom must follow.
And so back to this actual piece: High rent is something hard to sustain in hard times, so becomes a weight that weighs one down. And while I'm a big advocate of things like community kitchens, they are rarely publicly funded, and the importance of that is critical to understand.
Public funding is eschewed by many as some kind of socialism, but another way to think of it is a public commitment to making sure a process is there no matter the economy. In tough times, donations to private matters dry up, and that cascades down to hard times for our most vulnerable. To make something like this, or social security, or medicare, be publicly funded to a proper degree is to say we have no higher priority in society than the survival of our citizens. We are either committed to them or we are not, but privatization basically says we are not, that they will somehow manage to survive tough times by means we aren't willing to think through.
So there is no real backstop there. There is just the illusion of continuity from good times. And it is terrible policy, public or private, to tell people to reason about the future based on the artifacts of the past. Those artifacts can inform intuitions, but what must really inform thought is an understanding of what is changing, including the hearts of the public.
Any suggestion I can offer is unsatisfying. Some would say this is why people should be preppers, but prepperism is really only useful for temporary problems. The climate problem is so structural that no basement full of food will get anyone through it. At best it will help people survive a brief glitch or give people a chance to endure climate pain for longer before it is too much to endure.
The solution is to care about climate, and also social justice, and make structural changes there. But there seems little public appetite for that, in part because the people likely to be most affected are mindlessly backing the people who would do the worst to them.
There may be no national policy of renationalising the railways, but that's where we're headed; by this year around 40% of passenger rail-KMs were being managed by the state.
This would be so much better if it were a clear & well managed policy, not the political result of fire-fighting as subsidy-hungry operators still fail to provide an acceptable service.
Like other privatisations, its time to conclude there are some 'natural monopolies' that should be state-run!
This is the classic scam. Privatise an essential service. Load it with masses of debt, while investing the minimum it can get away with. Pay shareholders as much as it can get away with. When it collapses, walk away so the state has to pick up the pieces until it becomes viable again. Rinse and repeat.
Great news for NHS privatisers this morning. The Tories' policy is working.
"That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital"
Noam Chomsky
A brand new Oxford University analysis has debunked #NHS privatisation.
Oxford researchers looked at studies of healthcare #privatisation and found they agreed on one thing: privatisation leads to poorer quality care for patients.
Here's a podcast on New Books Network where I talk about (surprise surprise) my new book, 'Visions of a Digital Nation', and why Margaret Thatcher's 1984 #privatisation of British Telecom was a pivotal moment for both #neoliberalism and #digitalisation.