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A look at the economic and social impact of Mrs Thatcher’s economic policies

(Nicholas Kaldor, 1908-1986, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge)

…“One is reminded of Tacitus who, when writing about the devastation of the outlying parts of Britain by the Romans said:

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant

which is translated as”They create a desert and call it stability

I think that is a very apt epitaph for Mrs Thatcher’s Government.-Lord Kaldor

The other day I was doing a bit of spring cleaning, rearranging my bookshelves, dusting-off and more. Then, suddenly, I came across a little gem, a short book. A book I had bought in 1983, the time I was doing my PhD in Economics at Birmingham.

Let me share this gem with you, very relevant to today’s economic and socio-political policies and development: The Economic Consequences of Mrs Thatcher, by Lord Kaldor, Edited by Nick Butler, and published by Duckworh in 1983.

With hindsight, this book is prophetic, depicting Lord Kaldor's humane approach to economic policy-making and his powerful critiques of both monetarism and neoclassical economics.  Written only after one term of Mrs. Thatcher’s long period of government, it had foreseen the consequences of the dogmatic, inhumane, and ideologically-driven market-fundamentalism, privatisation, de-regulation, feral/crony capitalism, de-industrialisation and the rise of the financial sector and banks as the engine of growth at the expense of the real economy, the economy of making things, rather than consuming imported things with borrowed money and credit cards.

I very much recommend this book for your further study.

You can read Chapter 19, “An Epitaph” at the link below:

https://artsonline.uwaterloo.ca/rneedham/sites/ca.rneedham/files/needhdata/KaldorN.pdf