In all the reasons I gave I didn’t connect it directly productivity: reducing stress on the lower middle-class and poor will indirectly increase productivity.

Assuming that all the lower middle-class and poor are somehow deserving of their plight and that they’re all skivers is little different than the racist bigotry spouted by US southerners until a few years ago.

daphne I’m an anarchist at heart to your liberal/libertarian. If you read about the Spanish Civil war, the anarchists and unionists were at loggerheads with the communists. The latter were continually trying to hijack the republican effort to impose their totalitarian views and control from Moscow. Thus weakening the war effort and giving Mr Blair fuel for his anti-communist/totalitarian literature… I abhor totalitarianism in all its forms as it rarely (as in never?) represents the people and is easily corrupted.

Regarding the difference in culture with our neighbour across the pond, I say it depends. Popular culture is heavily influenced by the prodigious publication effort in the US both in print, cinema and TV. I read a lot of US publications. Britain has lost the oomph a long time ago and is just stuttering along on the people financed BBC and the commonwealth. The latter will die an anonymous death with this recession. Even the economist has become a sort of wolf in sheep’s clothing…

Please accept that my family background includes my father living in a shared bedroom in a shared house. Sleeping on hay mattresses that needed to be emptied once a year to control bed lice and freshen them up a bit. I barely remember one grandparent and my peeps actively ignored their roots as they seemed to be ashamed of where they came from… so much so that I never learned the hamallu local dialect. But times have changed. I am who I am and expect to be a full participant in society like every other citizen so I’m not ashamed of my roots.

I am not so tied to british culture and the past of maltese aristocracy or the middle-class in colonial Malta. Your social experience, as you already admitted somewhere else in your excellent blog is not the same as the majority of Maltese and does not represent all maltese.

We are living in 2010 and we have to judge on current zeitgeist… a german word right? Those pesky german and austrian philosophers… why didn’t they coin english (or better still maltese) words instead?

sorry for the long rant… now back to work

The *latest* juicy news? I thought you were living at the centre of the universe. Is this the first time you heard of global cooling? It’s never too late to learn, you know. You may yet discover there was an ice age once.

I assume you mean the critic. Apologies but I am not sure if it was someone with the surname Klien (Prof) writing on the New York Times some months back.

oh I understand productivity. let me list you many ways the lower wage earners; productivity can increase:

1: proper and efficient public transport. the number of cars on the road is a testament to the PN’s failure in this regard. That’s an invisible tax right there paid to car importers.

2: proper and efficient kinder care for working mothers

3: better education support for children at risk. You’d be reducing the number of morons in the very near future. Children whose parents have no education are wasting time at school because most of them cannot understand the magic in maths, the beauty of proper language etc…

4: these can be financed with a poll tax on property that gives discounts to extreme social cases and families with children.

Shall I continue? the €10 example has immediate effect and shows that when the economy is under stress the last thing the govt should do is pressure the weaker section of society, the section that has no leverage and few tools to counter the pressure put on it by the wealthy. You guys sometimes come through as idolising greed. That is dangerous. We are reaping the fruit of that with the current recession.

ciccio I was referring to the “threat to the middle class”. In the US they don’t seem to be burdened with Old Europe’s class distinctions that daphne seems to relish.

[Daphne – That’s because it’s a new society, Joseph. It’s the same in Canada and Australia. But they have class distinctions all the same, ones based entirely on money and personal achievement. I can’t see how that’s any better to you. After all, the old class distinctions of Europe are based on just those origins: money and personal achievement, entrenched over centuries. It’s human nature to form hierarchies and groups; you can’t stop it with idealism or communism. The Soviets and the Red Chinese had their own hierarchies of privilege.]

It seems to be acceptable in the US to use the term middle class also for blue collar workers that have a decent wage (a rarer species by the day it seems).

[Daphne – You can’t compare the US to Europe because it’s an alien culture. It only seems familiar because the language is comprehensible, but really, it is no more similar to Europe than Russia or China are. Americans don’t understand Europeans and Europeans don’t understand Americans. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just an observation.]

if you have time to read Krugman’s article and have counter arguments I’d be glad to hear them…

Bob G’s invisible quote:

Fl-2003, Joseph Muscat gie nnominat bhala parti minn grupp ta’ hidma, immexxi minn Dr George Vella u Evarist Bartolo, li fassal il-politika gdida Laburista dwar l-Unjoni Ewropea.

interesting post Mr Micallef, would you care to name your source please?

Did not use silly in demeaning sense. As yourself my knowledge is based on the continuous eradication of silly mistakes.

Obviously I have not yet corrected enough of these be able to contradict Krugman whose work, particularly about economic geography and economies of scale, I follow as part of my interest in evaluating the relevance of adapting Marketing, Creativity and Innovation theories to SMEs and small states.

Apart form this negligibly financed personal quest, one aspect which with all due respect bothers me about Krugman is his political bias that at times shadows his otherwise insightful work.

As for the 1% claim, I tend to share the view of one of Krugman’s critic, who writing on the New York Times stated that, if that claim is true than the distribution of world wealth has improved over the last century because until the early 20th century the owners of global wealth were far less than that. Was the improvement enough, well not really.

If it was, I would probably have more resources to fund my research!

Joseph, I suppose you are referring to Krugman, not to yourself, as the messenger.

I do not think I have attacked the messenger.
I just supplied facts, asked questions and made one supposition.

The point is, how is the article to which you refer related to the living wage?

I really do not believe that Krugman – who I understand presents himself as a middle class American – would ever give us a message to introduce a living wage for the middle class. So I am not sure what message you refer to.