A Problem of Politics

I don’t have children. I’ll be honest – I don’t like them very much. Many of my friends however, hold the opposing view and over the past four or five years, I have seen many of them pair off and then unfortunately, find out what happens when they combine their DNA with one another.

Before Christmas, I was out with a few such couples and their resultant chimera and at some point during the meal, two of the latter had a minor disagreement over toy-ownership and proceeded to attack one another. Their parents quickly broke up the melee and each offspring was separately told that if they behaved in such a way, Father Christmas would not bring them any presents. The threat had the desired effect and good behaviour was quickly restored.

Sometimes I wonder how future generations will look back on how we dealt with the current economic crisis. As I have mentioned on here before, I don’t think we are now dealing with an economic problem – the economics that would have engineered a recovery long ago are well understood – what we are dealing with now is purely a political problem.

At the moment we have a right-wing government whose political ideals are to seek a smaller government sector. In certain economic circumstances that kind of ideal is easier to achieve than it is in others. At the moment, as we have seen, achieving it is very difficult. When the economy has high unemployment, low demand and interest rates at the zero lower bound, cuts to public spending will not be offset, in the short-term by increases in private spending. That is, if the government makes a bunch of civil servants redundant, the private sector won’t immediately expand and give them jobs. The private sector will probably eventually adjust and take them on but that could take (and has already taken) years  to happen. While we wait for that adjustment to occur people remain unnecessarily unemployed and long term damage is done to both the well-being of those people and the economy as a whole.

As I’ve mentioned more than a few times in the past, cutting government spending under such circumstances is nothing other than negligent but if the economics says one thing, how can the government continually get away with doing the opposite? It’s not an easy question but I think I have an answer. My answer is simply the difference between economics and politics:

• Economics is a discipline that helps us to understand the best policies to pursue in order to improve the economy
• Politics is a discipline that helps its proponents win the next general election

But surely they would align themselves? Surely the easiest way to get elected at the next election would be to fix the economy? Right?

Wrong.

Let’s take ourselves back to the story with which I started this post. My friends could have dealt with it by explaining to each of their spawn, the importance of sharing and two individuals working together to achieve the best overall outcome for both parties. Or they could just say that Father Christmas wouldn’t turn up.

The former is a harder message to convey. The latter was much less effort to explain and much less effort for their audience to understand.

It’s the same with the economy. Explaining to people why cutting spending leads to more debt is a hard sell because it involves giving the public a basic understanding of macroeconomics and while it is only a basic one they need, it is still far easier to do this:

• The previous government went on a spending binge that caused all of this!
• Our country is just like an indebted household!
• We need to immediately pay off our debts in order to recover!

And that’s an easy sell. None of those things are actually true but the truth is harder for people to understand.

Democracy has a lot going for it but never for a moment believe it’s perfect. Look at the range of subjects over which a voter has to preside. The economy, education, foreign policy, immigration, the environment, health, crime. The list goes on and on. These are not simple things to understand and yet we are all asked to decide on them every time we vote.

Politicians could spend lots of time explaining these things to people and honestly giving the pros and cons of a particular policy but it’s much easier to just go ahead and do what they want and then give us a few simple, misleading soundbites as to why it is right. When you look at it in these terms it isn’t hard to understand why politics continually fails us so badly.

It’s not just the government though. A big part of UKIP’s recent successes is because they understand this and do it better than anyone else. They say that climate change is all made up. That’s much easier than explaining that driving an SUV burns a lot of petrol and that when petrol is burnt one of the consequences is releasing carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere and that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes a reduction in the amount of the sun’s energy that is reflected away from the Earth and that such a reduction causes the temperature of the planet to increase. And even if you got that far, you haven’t even started on the consequences of that temperature increase.

Immigration is another example. An easy sell is telling the electorate that the economy is broken because there are hoards of foreigners arriving on our shores every day and stealing our jobs or sitting around claiming benefits. Although that isn’t true, it is much harder to educate the public on all of the very real economic benefits of immigration and so the xenophobic soundbites win and such policies become popular and everyone loses out because of them.

Our politicians owe us more than this. They should appreciate the weaknesses in the democratic system and make it their absolute duty to clearly explain the realities of the situations that we face. They should not, as they do currently, exploit the weaknesses in the democratic system for their own gains.

So anyway, what then became of my friends’ recently-created miscreants? Well they took onboard the threat, behaved as they were told and got their Christmas presents (none from me, I might add). That said, three years after the country chose to go along with the current government’s economic plan, our Christmas presents still haven’t shown up.

And when we look at what politicians are all about, should we really be surprised?

RedEaredRabbit