The Eternal Sunshine of the Wattless Mind?

The Eternal Sunshine of the Wattless Mind?

In a forbearing profile of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Sunday Telegraph (18 March 2012) records,

‘George Osborne is probably the first chancellor in modern history to take a two-day holiday a week before the budget. His decision to do so speaks eloquently about his approach to the job … his predecessors are amazed at his ability to spend so little time on the job’.

Osborne returned from holiday to appear on the BBC in order to promise a ‘crackdown’ on foreigners not paying enough stamp duty on the real estate they buy in London; stamp duty on purchases over £5m will be raised from 5 to 7 percent.  Big deal. My back of the envelope calculation suggests this will raise at best £40m over 12 months, compared to forecast revenues last year of £589B. This is a made-for-television policy.

The Telegraph unwittingly put their finger on it when it concluded  ‘… we can see the outlines of Osbornism. It is not an economic doctrine: it is the absence of economic doctrine’. That captures it: the Chancellor’s mind is perfectly unsullied by any economic principle.

Of course, we get the politicians that we deserve. And their minds, too. In 1936 Keynes, in the last paragraph of General Theory, judged that his contemporary public was ‘impatient … for fundamental diagnosis’. (The completely unheralded success of the launch of Penguin books that year is one corroboration Keynes’ contention).  Did not that ‘impatience’ exert an influence on the character of the body politic? In that year a future a Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, was head of the Department of Economics at University College, London, spending a good part of his energies mastering Hayekian trade cycle theory, and arguing against quasi-Keynesian remedies that appealed to his Labour colleagues. We cannot imagine any politician today taking difficult economic thought so seriously. But, correspondingly, we cannot imagine the public having any hunger for ‘fundamental diagnosis’. In the midst of our listing economic system, we have suddenly burgeoning not Penguin books, but Twitter.