The relationship between economists and politicians is often strained. It’s easy to think that economists are taking a detached view of public policy and its long term effects, while politicians simply jockey for advantage at the next election. But, strangely, that doesn’t seem to be the pattern right now. It’s the politicians who are urging short term pain for long term gain, while the economists say it can all be left for another day. It is the politicians who have a better grip on reality.
The nature of the relationship between political leaders and economists has changed as economics has evolved. I think it was President Truman in the late 1940s who said he wanted to find a one-handed economist, so fed up was he with his economic advisers saying: “One the one hand this, but on the other hand that”. He wouldn’t have that problem today: there is no species of public policy commentator that is more one-handed than an economist nowadays, so confident do they seem about what they are saying.
In the late 20th century supply-side economics took hold, after the economic traumas and stagflation of the 1970s. This held that the route to economic success was in making sure that markets worked efficiently and government expenditure kept on a tight reign. Economists bewailed the fact that their advice was so often ignored by politicians, who found their prescriptions unpalatable. Only the unelected President Pinochet seemed to take economists at their word, as he implemented a series of reforms in Chile. The expression “politically impossible” was frequently used in discussions of economics. In fact politicians, starting with Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, largely implemented the supply-side economists’ advice, but this was only really acknowledged by most economists after the event.
But things seem to have moved on again. Politicians in Europe, including Britain, are grappling with the size of government in the wider economy, and pushing ahead with supply side reforms. This is hard political work, with scant reward on offer at the ballot box. But do politicians get credit from professional economists? Not a bit of it. Instead austerity policies are blamed for anaemic growth and high unemployment. Scarcely a day goes by without some economist, like Paul Krugman, Martin Wolf or Samuel Brittan thundering away that all this is foolish and bound to end badly: looser fiscal and monetary policies are needed, and the problems of government deficits can be sorted out another day.
What accounts for this? It is tempting to conclude that there is simply a time lag in economic thinking between the academics and the politicians. In academic circles the supply-side mania has run its course. It was always incomplete, and too often, not least during the great economic crisis of 2007-09, it had very little of value to say. Neo-Keynesianism had taken hold, with an updated series of macroeconomic models designed to deal with the issues that arose in the 1970s. The politicians, perhaps, haven’t moved on.
But I think there is a different explanation. It is that the politicians are much more aware of what is really happening in our economies, and the changes that are needed, while the macroeconomists are blinded by their use of aggregate statistics. The politicians can see that there are some fundamental problems with the way their economies are functioning, especially here in Europe. The first problem is that the state has become too large and inefficient. A second is that the progressive aging of populations is progressively weakening economies. A third is that globalisation has changed the rules of economic management. I could add a fourth issue, which is that the world’s financial systems have become dysfunctional, except that I think this is confusing politicians and economists alike, and is not a driver of tension between the two.
Economists agree with this analysis of problems by and large, of course, except that I don’t think that most have woken up to the implications of globalisation, and its profound implications for the way prices and wages rates are set. What the politicians appreciate is that these problems are desperately hard to fix, and that putting off the evil day is not going to help. In particular the central problem is to shrink the state. Politically it is much easier to put through tough changes in hard times, and not when things seem to be ticking along nicely. And if you look at the political forces that seize on what the economists are saying, you will find that they are mainly those that do not see the need to shrink the state at all.
Alongside this disagreement about the best time to reform is an economic judgement. Politicians are sceptical that sustainable economic growth is at all easy to find. Many economists think back to the decade before 2007, when 2% annual growth was more or less taken for granted, and assume with a wave of the magic confidence wand, this growth will come back – and that we might even be able to make up some of the lost ground. Even now I have seen some economists who should know better projecting trend growth before the crisis, to estimate the true cost of the recession. So in the five years since the crisis, the economy should have grown by 10%, they say; in fact it has shrunk by 4% (I haven’t checked that number), so the crisis and bad economic management has cost the economy 14%! But what if that 2% tend growth wasn’t for real? What if it was simply pumped up by borrowing and trade deficits? And what if the progressive aging of the population makes sustainable growth of 2%, or even 1%, unreachable? Blinded by their aggregate statistics, not enough economists are asking these questions, and still less following through their implications. But it is all too obvious to most politicians, and businessmen, come to that.
The gap between politicians and economists isn’t helped by the fact that the former keep using government debt as the main driving force of their argument. This is politically convenient, but the economists rightly spot that it is insufficient of itself. If the economy could readily be kicked back into a 2% growth trend with a bit of fiscal pump-priming, then the debt argument would not hold water. In today’s FT Samuel Brittan accuses politicians of falling for the fallacy of composition: that whole economies work like family budgets. In fact there are deeper reasons for what politicians are doing.
There is further disagreement over investment spending. Many economists think that they have found the magic bullet. Government funded infrastructure investment can both act as a short-term fiscal stimulus while delivering longer term benefits to the economy. So why are the politicians so reluctant to spend more on capital projects, and even cut them back? And yet this is another blinded by aggregates issue. The economists’ argument only holds water if the investment projects actually deliver economic benefits. This is much more difficult in practice than it is in theory. Under the last government investing in hospitals must have looked a sure-fire winner, given the ever rising demand for healthcare services. But we are now finding, as hospitals are collapsing under unaffordable PFI debts, that it wasn’t so easy. Too often they built the wrong sort of facilities. This is situation normal. The usual result of a public sector infrastructure project is to end badly. Japan’s investment splurge in the 1990s, in similar economic circumstances, simply caused many “bridges to nowhere” to be built.
And so, in this debate, my sympathies are with our political leaders.