{"id":2288,"date":"2011-09-07T20:07:05","date_gmt":"2011-09-07T20:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-2288.html"},"modified":"2011-09-08T05:43:47","modified_gmt":"2011-09-08T05:43:47","slug":"the-non-scenic-route","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2011\/09\/07\/the-non-scenic-route\/","title":{"rendered":"The Non-Scenic Route"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Brilliant article by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books: &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v33\/n17\/john-lanchester\/the-non-scenic-route-to-the-place-were-going-anyway\">The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We\u2019re Going Anyway<\/a>&#8220;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Quarterly GDP data don\u2019t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved and spreading economic gloom. Instead of the surge of rebounding growth which historically accompanies successful exit from a recession, we have the UK\u2019s disappointing 0.2 per cent growth, the US\u2019s anaemic 0.3 per cent and the glum eurozone average figure of 0.2 per cent. That number includes the surprising and alarming German 0.1 per cent, the desperately poor French 0 per cent and then, wait for it, the agreeably frisky Belgian 0.7 per cent. Why is that, if you\u2019ve been following the story, laugh-aloud funny? Because Belgium doesn\u2019t have a government. Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn\u2019t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no \u2018austerity\u2019 packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government \u2013 any existing government.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brilliant article by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books: &#8220;The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We\u2019re Going Anyway&#8220; Quarterly GDP data don\u2019t, on the whole, tend to make the person studying them laugh out loud. The most recent set, however, are an exception, despite the fact that the general picture is of unrelieved &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2011\/09\/07\/the-non-scenic-route\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Non-Scenic Route&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}