Simon wren-lewis biography
Above Public Opinion
The UK is experiencing levels of strike action not seen in decades. Postal workers, train drivers and guards, nurses and ambulance workers are contemplating their second, third or fourth round of strikes this winter. Court officials, teachers, NHS physiotherapists, civil servants and university staff have balloted to walk out in the coming weeks. The simple explanation for many of the strikes is that they are the result of government policy. Even where the government is not the employer, as with the rail companies, it has a big say over what employers can offer. Both the RMT union and the Rail Delivery Group blamed the failure of negotiations before Christmas on the interference of the transport minister, Mark Harper.
Public sector pay has increased at a lower rate than private sector pay almost every year since 2011. At the end of last year, private sector wages were increasing by just under 7 per cent, while public sector wages were rising by less than 3 per cent. This growing disparity has led to increased vacancies in public sector jobs. The latest data show a 25 per cent increase in the numbers of NHS nurses leaving their role; 40 per cent of junior doctors plan to leave the NHS as soon as they can, and trainee numbers for secondary school teaching are at only 59 per cent of the targets. It is clearly unsustainable for the government to continue to reduce public pay while job shortages in the public sector increase, so why is it picking these fights? With railworkers, the suspicion is that it thinks opposing the strikes will be popular. Poll results vary, but a YouGov poll from 16 January found that 51 per cent of the public opposed the rail strikes compared to 42 per cent who supported them – 51 per cent is well above the Conservatives’ current position in the polls. But if political advantage were the only consideration, you would expect the government to quickly settle disputes where the strikers have public su British economist Simon Wren-Lewis is a British economist. He is a professor of economic policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University and a Fellow of Merton College. Wren-Lewis was educated at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith; Clare College, Cambridge (MA Economics); and Birkbeck College, London (MSc Economics). Wren-Lewis worked for Her Majesty's Treasury as a budget-team member from 1974 to 1981. From 1976 to 1980, he worked for the National Income Forecasting Team as a senior economic assistant. From 1986 to 1990, he was a Senior Research Officer and Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. From 1990 to 1995, Wren-Lewis was chair in macroeconomic modelling at the University of Strathclyde. Wren-Lewis is currently an Oxford University professor of economics, teaching undergraduate and Masters of Philosophy (MPhil) students. He conducts research in economic methodology, macroeconomic theory and policy, and internationalmacroeconomics. On 27 September 2015, it was announced that he had been appointed to the British Labour Party'sEconomic Advisory Committee, convened by Shadow ChancellorJohn McDonnell and reporting to Labour Party LeaderJeremy Corbyn. Wren-Lewis writes a regular blog mainly macro. A common theme on the blog is his concept of "mediamacro", the way the media talks about economics, and how it differs from what academic economist actually think. In particular the need to focus in Government debt as a top priority. The last decade in the UK has been extraordinary. Professor Simon Wren-Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Oxford University and member of the PEF Council, posits that it has been shaped by three big lies in which the mainstream media were complicit. The first was austerity, where most of the media ignored mainstream economics and pushed the nonsensical idea that we should reduce the deficit in the middle of a recession. The second was the 2015 election, where the slowest recovery for centuries and unprecedented falling real wages were sold as a strong economy. The third was Brexit, where one part of the media acted as propagandists and the other part balanced truth with lies. In this special public lecture, hosted by the Progressive Economy Forum, Professor Wren-Lewis will explore the phenomena behind these lies, building on the themes in his most recent book The Lies We Were Told(Bristol University Press). He argues that much can by explained by the idea of ‘neoliberal overreach’: attempts to pursue neoliberal goals that are no longer popular by deceiving the public, e.g. by lying about the need to eliminate the deficit and/or reduce immigration. These deceptions influenced the result of the EU referendum, which itself involved a split between neoliberals who wanted to be free to trade and those who wanted trade free from regulations they did not like. But contemporary accounts of neoliberal overreach typically underestimate the causal role of the media in all these events: how it has involved a culture of lying which the media either participates in or tolerates. Simon will be joined by renowned writer and commentator Rachel Shabi, contributor at the Guardian and Professor Aeron Davis, Deputy Head of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London alongside other speakers TBC. For more information, please contact Adam Peggs at apeggs@progressiveeconomyforum.com. We ‘The government cannot go on living beyond its means.’ This seems common sense, so when someone puts forward the view that just now austerity is harmful, and should wait until times are better, it appears fanciful and too good to be true. Why would the government be putting us through all this if it didn’t have to? By insisting on cuts in government spending and higher taxes that could easily have been postponed until the recovery from recession was assured, the government delayed the recovery by two years. And with the election drawing nearer, it allowed the pace of austerity to slow, while pretending that it hadn’t. Now George Osborne is promising, should the Tories win the election in May, to put the country through the same painful and unnecessary process all over again. Why? Why did the government take decisions that were bound to put the recovery at risk, when those decisions weren’t required even according to its own rules? How did a policy that makes so little sense to economists come to be seen by so many people as inevitable? The place to begin is 2009. By then the full extent of the financial crisis had become apparent. Although the crisis originated in the US, it had spread around the world, leaving no country unscathed. The major UK banks had to be bailed out, not so much as a result of excessive lending to UK borrowers, but because of their unwise overseas investments. The main weapon used to fight recessions is interest rate cuts – lower interest rates encourage consumers to spend rather than save, and business to invest – and by 2009 interest rates had been reduced to nearly zero in all the advanced countries. Yet output continued to decline. The response of governments and central banks was twofold. First, the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve embarked on a programme of ‘quantitative easing’, which involves the temporary creation of money, thereby mak Simon Wren-Lewis
Education
Career
Selected bibliography
The Lies We Were Told: A Lecture by Simon Wren-Lewis
The Austerity Con