Edwards’ call to action should be familiar to followers of his work, recommending drastic changes to fix what he perceives as massive failures in how capitalism is working in the 2020s. Edwards, who is British himself, commented that Burn-Murdoch’s research on how incomes and government spending are higher for both countries’ post-65 populations shows how “politicians in France and the UK (in particular) are cowed into political submission by already wealthy, Baby Boomers.” Edwards’ recommendation: “We ‘need’ a fiscal crisis for politicians to be able to act.”
Blanchflower and Bryson note young worker despair is not driven by a decline in wages, as the ratio of the youth wage to older workers has increased and real wages have also been on the rise. Other findings do fit with Burn-Murdoch’s research, as other costs have added to despair such as the relative prices of housing, healthcare, and student debt. Blanchflower told Fortune that the research shows a worsening of reported mental health since the mid-2010s. Once you rule out wages or unemployment as causes for despair, Blanchflower said he thinks young workers are basically saying “this job sucks.” Maybe, Edwards’ and Burn-Murdoch observe, there’s justified anger about government spending on the older and wealthier.
Edwards wrote at the time that corporations, particularly in developed economies like the U.S. and UK, had been using rising raw material costs amid the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as an “excuse” to raise prices. After four decades of working in finance, he added, he had never seen anything resembling the “unprecedented” and “astonishing” levels of corporate Greedflation in that economic cycle.
Just as he called for a fiscal crisis to focus minds on the intergenerational warfare taking place in government spending patterns, in 2023 he called for a controversial solution to fix greedflation, as he had “weakening confidence” in how capitalism was working. “Those of us who lived through the failed prices and incomes policies of the 1970s” would hesitate to embrace price controls, Edwards wrote, but that is exactly the tool to solve this kind of problem.
