Hyperbole is the enemy

People exaggerate the problem and their agency in solving it, no wonder the voters are repelled

In the past few weeks I have slogged through a book of Marxist thought that critiques, well, the whole modern state of things. If it was the only text to survive a meteor hit, future archeologists would think we lived at a time of unprecedented misery: every transaction an act of exploitation, the last hundred years a continuous round of savage austerity, with only the tiniest elite enjoying the fruits of the economy.

For a year I have also immersed myself in various attempts at growth literature, from the casual Sunday Op-ed through think tank reviews and reports and serious Colon Books with subtitles telling us how to fix everything. They, too, tend to go big on how awful everything is. Half the material from centre-left writers take for granted that inequality is rising pretty much every hour; there is always a statistic to justify this, often indirectly linked to the level of the Nasdaq. Those on the right portray a state so gummed up by its own inventions that literally nothing can ever happen. We have “banned investment”, according to some. We do not make anything whatsoever, according to others. And all think kids have never had it worse, oppressed by their smartphones, miserably never ever expecting to own a home.

Worse is a similar breathless excitement about how easily this might be fixed. This comes in a few varieties. Just scrap a few planning laws or the pointless concern for bats, newts and snails, and we will have nuclear power too cheap to meter! Simply screw up the courage to tax wealth properly, and we can afford all the public services we might ever want! Just stop banning investment/smoothly re-enter the Single Market/introduce an entirely costless financial transactions tax/end net zero/allow fracking and ensure cheap energy, and our economic problems will quickly melt away! Everyone can win, as David writes in the NS. Just reject the politics of scarcity, as the autors of Abundance demand.

Savage condemnation of the state of things, alongside glib confidence about how to fix it, can be found in government communcations too. Any attempt to address a problem is portrayed as the first serious try: the officials writing the press release wryly daming their former selves. Businesses, with memories that outlast most ministerial tenures, have to play along: “yes, minister, you ARE the first politician to spot that technology is marvellous/SMEs hate regulation/big companies exploit payment terms/economies vary scandalously with place/etc”.

Of course the miserabilism is largely misplaced, despite the disappointments of the past few years. Some of it is simple level vs rate-of-change confusion. Too many people like to imagine the postwar decades as Golden, in spite of the pollution, sexism and squalor, because growth was a bit higher. Read John Cochrane on why none of us should feel nostalgic for the higher-growth 1950s. Houses were cheaper but also horrible and often small. The cars were rust buckets.

But I think hyperbole is more damaging on the normative side: the part setting out how easily we might improve everything. I suppose this is the most consistent thread in my piece on growth: easy, obviously good ideas are not just waiting around to be picked up, and any strategy worth the name had better look for them at the outset. Precisely because the country is not a complete basket case, the opportunities to improve it are not low-hanging.

Grandiose language has a cost. I am an experienced observer of cabinet ministers grappling with the language of industrial strategy, and my most persistent irritation is a presumed sense of agency, as if they can smoothly redirect resources and change the kind of economy we have, to the voters’ satisfaction. Both the fans and detractors of industrial strategy grotesquely exaggerate its footprint. I will never tire of telling people that the money we heroically found for Aerospace in 2012 was less fiscally weighty than the beer duty cut announced the day after. Yet industrial strategy ministers will talk as if the economy is something they can mould to the voters’ needs, flinging out promises and guarantees. All you need is belief.

This is the serious point behind my bad-tempered swipe at foolish metaphor in political economy: when politicians use language that pretends to some level of agency that they don’t possess, the voters will become even more cynical, and believe even less of what they hear. The irony is that the politician appears fooled by their use of economic imagery, while the voter sees through it. Excitable language gulls an incoming government into expecting things to be easier than it will be. The image I cited in the growth report - which I took from Richard Rumelt - is of a locker-room pep talk, as if emotional speechifying is enough to push through obstacles. Maybe it works in the NFL, but not in government. The more grandiose and hyperbolic the language, the bigger the disappointment.

Anyway, I put out these late Monday polemics to encourage more reading of the longer report. Hope you like it!