October 28, 2010
Ideology vs. Fantasy
It’s been frequently suggested that our current Lords and Masters – messrs Cameron, Osborne, Clegg et. al. – are pursuing a hyper-ideological agenda. How else to explain a government cutting public spending at a pace and depth that might make Old Maggie weep?
Some suggest that this ideology is forefront in the Lords and Masters’ minds; that they know exactly what they are doing. I’ve flirted with that explanation myself. Others, like John Gray, suggest that any ideology is deep and thereby virtually subconscious. That Cameron, Clegg et. al. are so wedded to a state-minimalist right-wing worldview that they do not see this to be ideological any more than fish see water to be wet.
In general there is a consensus (at least on the left) that our Lords and Masters must have some underlying coherent purpose. After all, it’s generally acknowledged that what is being done to the economy is – at best – astonishingly cavalier. Quick re-cap: economic theory and history indicate that Boy George’s cuts are more likely to slow down or reverse recovery than aid it, whilst suggestions that bond markets will punish Sovereign Britain if her deficit is not immediately and drastically reduced appear both false and incoherent.
But assuming that our Lords and Masters know this, the puzzle correspondingly emerges: why carry out the cuts regardless? “Ideological agenda” slips-in as the obvious explanation.
Yet it’s always important to guard against inadvertent projection (or at least recognise it when it’s happening). By that I mean: we must be careful about not reading ourselves into the world around us, then mistakenly believing we have found something new.
Right-thinking people look at the assault on the economy – including many measures which will save miniscule sums but have dramatic effects on the lives of thousands – and conclude that it must be motivated by something coherent, i.e. something like an ideological agenda. After all, that’s what might motivate them, if they were in equivalent positions of power.
But what if this is a mistake? What if our leaders are actually not motivated by anything coherent at all? What if they are actually…mad?
Hypothesise with me: what if our Lords and Masters are conducting this savage economic assault because they talked-up deficit reduction so hard in the run up to the last election that they now believe their own strategic rhetoric, and have forgotten that it was precisely that. Accordingly, they may have lost their grips on what the rest of us would class as reality.
We have evidence that this sort of stuff happens, after all. For a start, intense high-level politics apparently requires a certain level of insanity in order to function on a daily basis. Indeed, look at recent case studies. Gordon Brown is by some accounts a pretty deranged individual. Tony Blair appears to have taken a long vacation from reality. His wife appears to have joined him, as evinced by her mad-cap schemes to auction off Blair’s autograph for a tenner a pop.
It’s thus very possible that our current Lords and Masters are not crafty ideological head-bangers, but individuals who’ve become dangerously detached from reality. And that need not be because there is anything especially wrong with them; that would be to commit the fundamental attribution error. It may simply be that life at the top of politics pre-requires and necessitates a certain level of delusion. Mixed with the present context, however, this may have very unfortunate consequences.
But here comes the twist: does this alternative possibility actually matter?
We will probably never know whether Cameron, Osborne, Clegg et. al. are really ideological Thatcherite crusaders, or just delusional rightist fantasists. And one key reason we may never know is, precisely, because the outcome may well be the same either way.
Luis Enrique said,
October 28, 2010 at 11:54 am
I think it’s worth reading this, mainly as a reminder that the economics isn’t as cut and dried as people imagine, so I guess it’s quite possible for our masters to believe what you regard as economic illiteracy.
I think I side with Wolf, Krugman et al. on the likely effects of austerity, but economists have been wrong before and what seems obvious proved false. Although I probably shouldn’t regard the fate of millions as an object of academic interest, I’m waiting to see what’ll happen with interest. There’s a chance (if not a probability >0.5) that lots of people are going to have to reconsider everything they think they know about economics.
I’d love to extract from Wolf, Krugman et al. an explicit statement of what would force them to admit everything they think was wrong, and what forms of “things turning out surprisingly well” could be accommodated by their existing view (i.e. if the UK was to grow because our currency depreciates and we experience surprisingly elastic export demand).
Richard said,
October 28, 2010 at 1:04 pm
A policy of cuts and refusing to run a deficit was adopted during the American recession of 1920-21. The American economy recovered swiftly. Similarly orthodox economics got Britain out of the Great Depression (which isn’t to say that there weren’t severe social problems in some regions in the 1930s).
Krugman and co always point to the Roosevelt recession of 1937 as evidence that withdrawing spending during a recovery is dangerous. That argument is demolished here: http://mises.org/daily/4039 but even if it were true, it simply proves that an economic recovery should not be based on state spending because there is no guarantee that when the government money is finally cut off, private investment will flow into the same avenues.
Nick said,
October 28, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Richard: in what way did orthodox economic policies get Britain (or the US, where they were also pursued for several years) out of the Great Depression? THE WAR, and consequent explosions in industrial demand, were key.
Paul – I would question your use of Paul Krugman alone to support your economic arguments (although I realise that they were tangential to the point of the post).
As to the insanity of power, I query whether Thatcher was ideological in a true sense of the word: she was motivated by certain goals and believed in certain actions to achieve them. She did not subscribe to a coherent view of how the world “should” be/work. The coalition appear to have an ideological attachment to small government as more than merely a solution to current problems. I don’t think it represents “insanity” but it may be borne of a particular upbringing which has bred in certain assumptions. I also think the form of madness necessary for politics has less to do with detachment from reality than a particularly single-minded pyschologically make-up.
NemesisTheWarlock said,
October 28, 2010 at 7:07 pm
Yes, of course people who disagree with you must be literally insane. And when right-wingers wish to shrink the State to 40% of the economy, they are ideologically motivated (and mad, natch), whereas when left-wingers boost it to 50% and beyond in order to further their own goals and view of the world, they are merely sound and right-thinking people.
I shudder to think what kind of brain damage must be required for people to internalize this kind of hypocrisy.
Mark said,
October 29, 2010 at 12:50 am
I don’t understand how anyone can claim to have a scientifically proven, logical economic policy, which is fundamentally based upon the fact that people are irrational. Everything depends on peoples reactions and there is no way we can be certain about that.
Also, any economic theory which has the mass slaughter of millions of people as it’s one shining success story, strikes me as rather dubious.
MarinaS said,
October 29, 2010 at 4:43 pm
I’m not sure the two hypotheses – they’re hell-bent vs. they’re mad – are mutually exclusive. After all, who you are plays a big part not in the likelihood of you going mad, but in the ways in which your madness expresses itself.
You can’t start thinking you’re Jesus if you’ve never heard of Christianity, and obsessive hand-washing is unlikely in the absence of germ theory awareness. That sort of thing.
Yes I think politicians are all, by definition, a bit bonkers; but how they apply their insanity to policy is largely determined by their background, beliefs, experiences,influences, and, yes, ideology.