Abstract
This chapter describes the planning and partnership between business and government that is needed to address the big five problems. We need to plan as a response to the opportunities and threats of automation, for example so that there is demand for goods and services that cannot be produced by robots and professionals on their own. The market will not deliver this, so we have to plan. We also have to plan the training that will deliver these skills and we have to plan to ensure an adequate supply of affordable housing. Finally, we have to plan to ensure that the technology and infrastructure to address climate change is developed in time. Crucially, all this planning will only succeed if government and business work together. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why planning, as opposed to regulation and incentives, is needed and can work.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that the impact of this ‘hollowing-out’ of the workforce is on the level of the median wage and not on the shape of the wage distribution: the proportion of workers paid within 25% of the median wage has not changed significantly since 2001 (Good Work: The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices, 2017). Reference is sometimes made to the ‘hourglass’ shape of the labour market, with the numbers of those with mid-level skills reduced relative to those at the top and the bottom—but it is the skills curve not the incomes curve that has become hourglass-shaped.
- 2.
The situation was made even worse by a rule which prohibited planning conditions threatening the ‘viability’ of a development. Viability was assessed using the price paid for the land, but since this normally assumed minimal conditions, the rule was circular and made it difficult for councils to increase the share of affordable housing. A classic example of legislation in the interests of vested interests and no one else.
- 3.
Admittedly, both companies make premium products. It may also be significant that both are owned by Asian holding companies: Zhejiang Geely Holding Group and Tata Motors respectively.
- 4.
The prices of certain items that buyers can expect to re-sell—items bought and sold in capital markets and some liquid commodity markets—will reflect expectations of future prices, but typically these expectations are distillations of calculations about future prices of items whose current prices do not reflect the future in this way. These calculations are not simply based on current price signals but on the kind of planning described below.
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Seaford, C. (2019). Planning. In: Why Capitalists Need Communists. Wellbeing in Politics and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98755-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98755-2_7
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