Peter Day’s excellent In Business is back on Radio 4 – and, now that they’ve got a podcast, I don’t need to steal the episodes any more. The first in the new series is about Britain’s stubbornly low rate of productivity. Some fascinating and surprising conclusions… Like, for instance, one way to increase our effective productivity rate would be to fire a couple of million people to get our unemployment rate up to French and German levels. In those countries they achieve higher levels of productivity by keeping unskilled and unproductive people out of the workforce and on the dole.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.