Two Guardian Things

The Guardian Weekly has been one of my favourite newspapers since we were first introduced a decade ago. Last weeks print edition was particularly good if only for Madeleine Bunting's article entitled "Institutions share same delusion". It is perhaps one of the shortest and enjoyable analyses of the financial crisis I have read. I tried to find it online but to no avail (but she does have a blog), so I summarize:

In it she tackles the collapse of banking and of the British MP's expense controversy pointing to an endemic culture of entitlement which manifests itself as:

1. If everyone is getting a piece of the cake, I want it too, and
2. The (executive) cultural consensus of the L'Oréal's ad slogan "because you're worth it".

That second point is just a little piece of op-ed wonderfulness. This leads her to ask who decided your worth? and more importantly, at whose expense? She outlines the culture of entitlement which stems from governments as a function of growth (read GDP) and it is clear that continual growth in unsustainable. That results in future state interventions to curbs individual habits. Quote: "Leaving individuals to find the moral strength to resist the cultural pressures will simply not be effective. Our lives will have to be regulated in ways that we can't imagine." Wow. Does it make me a right-wing nut if I think there's some truth in that? The problem: more personal control is advocated, but we are living in an age where personal responsibility is only diminishing. I read this post over at Marginal Revolution where Alex Tabarrock asks who is more irrational, the fat kid who doesn't care that he is fat because by the time he is old enough to suffer the consequences there are going to be enough drugs to cure what ails him, or the people who think this will happen (or me, who thinks what a depressing place to live that is going to be, but I digress). The point is there is less pressure to take more responsibility, so Bunting pointing out the coming personal regulation is probably spot-on.

Bunting quotes two sources (which I haven't looked at):

• "Prosperity Without Growth", by the SDC economist Tim Jackson (can we imagine a capitalism without economic growth?)
• "The Politics of Climate Change", by Anthony Giddens (the huge role of state intervention)

Another interesting quote:

But these are times of unprecedented political exhaustion with the mainstream and with that comes a fast-growing appetite for radicalism and an abrupt break with the status quo.

In another article (Brussels braces for big protest vote) about the up-coming European Parliment elections:

The extreme right and hard left could do well in varying degrees in different countries. In the Netherlands, the Islam-baiting populist Geert Wilders, is soaring in opinion polls... Austrias'a extreme-right Freedom party is playing to antisemitism and could also do well. The British National party and Jobbik in Hungary, both often described as neo-fascist, could gain their first seats. In both France and Germany the big peripheral vote should be on the hard left: Die Linke (The Left) in Germany and the anti-capitalist movement of Olivier Besancenot in France.