ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialism, No.56, March 1973, p.25.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Incomes Policy and Inflation
Michael Parkin and Mike Sumner
Manchester University Press, £3.60.
The recent rash of books by bourgeois economists on the effects of incomes policy is clearly likely to become of epidemic proportions. It is always useful to know ‘what the other side thinks’, so some of these books may be of interest to us – provided we remember that the people who write the books and get ulcers from these learned debates are not the people who actually have to cope directly with the problems of the economic crisis. Incomes Policy and Inflation is a collection of essays written wholly by academic economists, some of which were ‘presented at a conference ... attended by research workers in the field together with Bank of England and government officials’. So presumably the idea was to give some guidelines for policy.
These ‘guidelines’ were mainly mathematical constructions, with controversy raging round the ‘Lipsey-Parkin regression formula,’ which tries to relate prices and wages to import prices, the percentage of the labour force unionised, output per head and unemployment. I doubt if the question of the validity of this formula greatly influenced the government officials concerned, in solving what is above all a political problem: as Mr Bispham of the National Institute of Economic Research points out, referring to the miners’ 1972 settlement, it would be much better if one could also quantify militancy!
The most interesting contribution to this myopic collection of essays comes from Mr Smith of Queens University. He directly links the question of incomes policy with that of productivity deals, saying that ‘prod’ clauses in incomes policies aren’t there because increases in pay and productivity should be equal, but because an examination of productivity is a step towards getting rid of ‘restrictive practices’.
If you can get the book from a library, Smith’s article is worth reading. Otherwise I don’t think it is much use as a guide to Tory or civil service thinking. It is interesting to note that Mrs Thatcher’s latest proposals will actually cut down on this type of research, so rent-an-academic can’t have proved very useful to them either!
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 29.6.2008