Taking it on the Chin

11/05/2012 1 Comment

…when the facts change, the responsible thing to do is to examine the decisions you have made and to be willing to change your mind, however inconvenient that may be…not burying your head in the sand and ploughing on regardless…

So said Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond this week.

What was he changing his mind about? I don’t know, something about ordering the wrong type of aeroplane; the details are not material to my point. My point is that whether or not he made a bad decision previously, no matter how terrible his judgment at the time was, it is still a good thing to be able to adapt his policy now based on how things are going. The alternative would be, as he said, ploughing on regardless with a strategy that he knew wasn’t working. He may have made a bad decision in the past but this week he made the right choice.

Shadow Defence Secretary, Jim Murphy was not impressed though, gleefully calling it a U-turn and finding another occasion to use Labour’s new favourite word, omnishambles.

Omnishambles was very funny when Malcolm Tucker used it and still a bit funny when Labour used it the first time but (shambolic as the government is) it won’t be funny if we have to hear it every week until the next general election. Perhaps they should steal another Malcolm Tucker quote to keep things fresh. For example when David Cameron and George Osborne next take their seats in the House of Commons, Ed Miliband could shout:

Laurel and fucking Hardy! Glad you could join us. Did you manage to get that piano up the stairs ok, yeah?

Or they could just think of their own jokes.

Where was I? Oh yes. It is an unreasonable expectation that the government should get every policy perfect in the very beginning and never have to change it. If they implement a policy that later turns out not to be delivering the benefits that they predicted and they change it, not only should they not be ridiculed, I would say that they should be praised.

A more reasonable expectation would be that the government should continually monitor their policies, keep them if they are working and adapt them if they aren’t.

I wrote a whole post on this subject last year, Creationist Economics and in it I was fairly scathing of politicians’ ability to admit when they were pursuing a bad strategy and adapt it into a better one.

So could it be that politicians have learned their lesson and have abandoned Creationist Economics in favour of Evolutionary Economics? Let’s recap on what Philip said:

…when the facts change, the responsible thing to do is to examine the decisions you have made and to be willing to change your mind, however inconvenient that may be…not burying your head in the sand and ploughing on regardless…

And let’s have a look at how the government has applied these words of wisdom to their economic policy.

Last week, the government got a fairly massive kicking at the local elections and therefore had the perfect opportunity to review the policies that weren’t working and adapt them. The early signs were good:

George Osborne:

The government understands your message. We take it on the chin and we have got to learn from what you are saying.

David Cameron:

The message people are sending is this: focus on what matters, deliver what you promise – and prove yourself in the process. I get it.

But does he really “get it”? David Cameron a couple of days later:

…we can’t let up on the difficult decisions we have made to cut public spending…

David and George say they understand exactly why they lost loads of votes and it was because, although their economic policy was really popular, they lost votes because they were focusing on other things too – people were worried they would reform the House of Lords or legalise gay marriage rather than purely focusing on their excellent work on the economy. In other words, this seems to be the government’s interpretation of the message the electorate were sending:

Dear David and George,

We love what you are doing with the economy, high five! Absolutely love this economic depression and always thought that having a job was overrated.

But, (and this is a big but) we have to let you know that we are voting for someone else because of your evil attempts to have a discussion about whether all of your unelected posh mates should be responsible for deciding the laws of the land. Additionally we are all intrinsically homophobic and hate the fact that you might consider treating homosexuals as equal citizens.

And in any case, it’s not like the government can possibly do more than one thing at once.

Kind regards,

The Electorate

P.S. In addition to the above, this vote is definitely in no way influenced by your NHS reform, which was also really popular.

David and George say they “get it” and want to “take it on the chin” but in reality all they are doing is trying to market a disastrous election result as support of a failed economic strategy, and opportunistically trying to bin some other proposals that don’t fit in with their own idealism.

Since I don’t think they did “get it” I’ll offer an alternative interpretation of the message from the electorate:

Dear David and George,

You said that you could revive the economy through spending cuts. You said that in 2011 we would have 2.6% economic growth but we had none and now we are in a recession again. You said that your spending cuts in a depressed economy would bring growth through “confidence” but two years later there is still no growth. We are in the worst depression in recent history, worse than The Great Depression of the 1930s – and your continual refusal to change course has put us here. Your policy is not working and while the opposition’s is at best vague, we need to send you a message to let you know that we think you have no idea what you are doing.

Kind Regards,

The Electorate

P.S. Don’t try to get out of this by saying something pathetic like we want you to put House of Lords reform or gay marriage on the back burner – you should be able to do more than one thing at once.

David and George’s public interpretation of the electorate’s message is so ridiculous that it’s funny. What is less funny though is that two years after promising growth and prosperity through spending cuts all we have is economic depression. But what exactly should they do about it? Let’s ask Philip Hammond:

…when the facts change, the responsible thing to do is to examine the decisions you have made and to be willing to change your mind, however inconvenient that may be…not burying your head in the sand and ploughing on regardless…

Well said, Philip. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

RedEaredRabbit

Advertisement

Filed under Economics, Politics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Depression

25/04/2012 4 Comments

Do you remember that time that Alistair Darling did that terribly apolitical thing of trying to tell the truth and said there was a recession coming that would be the worst since the Great Depression? And then Gordon Brown “unleashed the forces of hell” on him? I think in hindsight, there are a couple of interesting points to make about this event.

The first one, which is important to Christians, is that the forces of hell are clearly far weaker than we were taught at school. As we can see from this recent interview, Darling is alive and well, having suffered little more than a minor singeing of the eyebrows.

Secondly, we can say that Alistair was wrong. The Office for National Statistics published their quarterly Economic Review today and conveniently it contained some figures comparing the current economic cow-pat with that of the Great Depression. The below graph shows their results of comparing quarterly GDP against the pre-crisis peaks. The red line shows how GDP has changed since Q1 2008. The blue line shows how GDP changed for the equivalent period in the Great Depression (starting at Q1 1930).

(I have added a green dot to show when David Cameron came to power.)

Darling got it wrong because the current depression is actually worse than the Great Depression. By this stage in the Great Depression, the UK was going through a period of significant economic growth and had already passed the pre-crisis peak. The UK’s current GDP is still 4.3% lower than it was at the start of 2008.

The report said also, as you have probably heard today, that the UK economy has now contracted in two consecutive quarters and therefore, by the government’s definition, we are once more in recession.

If the government had achieved 0% growth as opposed to -0.2% in the first quarter they would have avoided recession and the media would be reporting it as such. The media, I feel, often puts so much weight on whether we are in or out of recession that we are essentially missing the big picture. Look at the red line on the graph above since David Cameron was elected and you see the real picture. We might be technically sometimes in growth and technically sometimes in recession but what we are actually in is a sustained period of economic stagnation.

Predictably, Cameron and Osborne have each made statements today saying that they will be strong in the face of the recession and stick with their current policy of reducing government spending. It makes me want to weep. Recession, stagnation, whatever you want to call it, this situation was caused by them. The government’s fiscal policy since they took office has been the exact opposite of what was needed to create growth in the economy and the effects are there for all to see.

When proposing a stimulus, I am often told that spending more would send us into a recession! Well, without spending more we’re now back in one but nevertheless I will explain my stimulus thoughts in a bit more detail.

Let’s take a look at say, renewable energy. By 2020 we are legally obliged to have 20% of our energy consumption coming from renewable energy. How’s that going to happen? Well it won’t happen without investing a lot of money building wind farms, tidal power stations and the like. This is money we need to spend anyway – we have agreed to be legally bound to the target. Why not bring the investment forward and spend the money now? The difference in government debt between spending the money now or in a couple of years is nigh on nothing and believe me, we won’t even get close to that target if we don’t get our arses in gear.

Or how about schools? I find it hard to believe that there are not thousands of state-funded schools not needing their ailing buildings, classrooms, gymnasiums fixing and rebuilding.

As you can see, I am not promoting the idea of spending money on things we don’t need – we need to do these things anyway so this money has to be spent sooner or later. All I am proposing is spending it now, at a time that we have economic stagnation and lots of people waiting for the jobs that such spending will create.

The government chose to implement a policy that opposed basic macroeconomic theory and that policy has had exactly the effect that basic economic theory predicts – depression. So how could they have got it so wrong? How could they not see that the fiscal policy they were pursuing was not just erroneous, it was completely irresponsible and entirely negligent?

One may as well ask, how could they not see that cutting tax on the rich at the expense of the poor was a terrible idea? Or, how could they not see that selling places at the Prime Minister’s dinner table in return for influence over government policy, was both morally and democratically abhorrent?

The answer is both surprisingly simple and hugely depressing. This government, (as with many other governments throughout history and throughout the world), did not come into power, assess the circumstances and devise the best possible policies to benefit the population and the country as a whole. They came into power with a particular idea of how they wanted the country to be. It involved private health care, lower taxes on the rich and yes, low government spending.

The fact that basic economics said that cutting spending would screw the economy was totally irrelevant. They probably knew it would. Their efforts have not gone into putting good policies into being but have instead gone into trying to make the country into their Etonian Utopia. They have cleverly coupled this with a massive campaign of bad marketing to mislead the electorate into thinking that all of these things are necessary. They know that economics is not a subject that is easily understood by the majority of the public and know they can use this to their advantage.

In forcing through the changes they wanted to make anyway, they have unnecessarily caused a depression on a scale not seen in recent history. As a direct result of these policies, people have lost their jobs and people have lost their houses.

If the 1930s was the Great Depression, then our current day situation will surely be looked on in history as the Even Greater Depression.

And the most depressing thing of all is that this was completely avoidable.

RedEaredRabbit

Filed under 10 Posts You Should Read, Economics, Politics Tagged with , , , , ,