This is a pretty awesome article in the Guardian by Stewart Lansley, Why economic inequality lead to collapse. He’s the author of The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the Economy, published by Gibson Square, which sounds like something I should read. This is the sort of thing that always fascinates me – the economic bug that I’ve had to scratch at all my life.

It reminds me of when I was working in a deli in a shopping centre foodhall, my part time job while I did my economics degree. Exhausted on a 15 minute break, I doodled on a piece of paper trying to draw the appropriate graph for the relationship between hours worked and consumption demand. I figured I was spending so much time either at uni or working part time that despite earning money I didn’t get the time and didn’t have the energy to spend it. It was a curiously shaped curve I reasoned. To a point, working more hours and earning more money rapidly increased how much you would buy, but then I reasoned the curve would flattened out. If you’re spending all your time working, you just can’t spend. You need leisure to buy. An economy needs people to have time off. Money should buy that, but it wasn’t happening. Continue reading →