Economics is too important to leave to the experts

Citizens may be able to see the world more clearly than narrowly focused professional economists

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 30 April 2014 17.30 BST

'Thatcher's big bang in 1986 laid the ground for freewheeling financial capitalism, whose destructive nature is at the heart of the current mess.' Photograph: PA Archive

You wouldn't have guessed it, given the fanfare surrounding the 0.8% growth figure for the first quarter of 2014, but people in the United Kingdom have been living through a period worse than Japan's infamous "lost decade" of the 1990s.

During that time, Japan's per capita GDP grew at 1% per year. This means that in 2000, Japan's per capita GDP was 10.5% higher than in 1990. In the UK, per capita GDP at the end of 2013 was 6.6% lower than that in 2007. This means that, unless the UK economy miraculously grows at around 5% a year for the next four years (factoring in population growth rate of around 0.7% a year), it is going to have a decade that is even more "lost" than Japan's 1990s.

The costs of the 2008 crisis in terms of human welfare have been even greater than the growth figures suggest. Unemployment is still nearly 7%, or at 2.24 million, depriving people of dignity and putting them under huge stress. Real wages have had some of the biggest falls in the OECD bloc of 34 countries and have a long way to go before they can recover to pre-crisis levels.

Steep cuts in welfare spending have hit many of the poorest hard. Increasing job insecurity, symbolised by the rise of zero-hours contracts, has been making workers' lives more stressful. The spread of food banks, the popularity of "poverty recipes" in cookery, and the advance of German discount supermarket chains, such as Aldi and Lidl, are the more visible manifestations of this pressure on the living standards of citizens.

What is more, even this sorry achievement has been made on the reversion to the economic model whose bankruptcy was laid bare by the 2008 crisis. That model was predicated on the deregulated financial system fuelling unsustainable growth by creating asset bubbles, one of the highest household debts in the world (as a proportion of GDP), and a large current account deficit.

How has this mess been created? The mismanagement of the crisis by the coalition government means it has to bear significant blame, but the main cause lies in the nature of the economic model that the UK has pursued for three decades.

This model started, as is well known, with Margaret Thatcher. She ripped up the post-second world war consensus on the mixed economy and started establishing one of the most deregulated economies in the rich world. Full employment was ditched as a goal and worker rights were weakened. State-owned enterprises were privatised, often with very negative consequences, as in the railways, water, and energy. Most importantly, her big bang financial deregulation laid the ground for the development of freewheeling financial capitalism, whose destructive nature is at the heart of the current mess.

Subsequent Labour governments took the roughest edges off Thatcherism by, for example, increasing social welfare spending and introducing the minimum wage. However, the underlying economic model remained intact; the New Labour thinking was that we should let the City maximise its profits by minimising regulation, and then help the poor with the taxes on those profits. There was no realisation that the financial system itself may be a problem.

After a brief period when it made noises about rebalancing the economy and the "big society", the coalition government has made a headlong dash for Thatcherism-plus. True, it has somewhat strengthened financial regulation, but in the meantime it has also subsidised the banks to the gills, both explicitly (bailouts) and implicitly (quantitative easing). Pursuing the doctrine of the balanced budget, it has cut spending in the middle of a recession, seriously delaying the recovery. It has made cuts to the welfare state that Thatcher herself would have found radical, while privatising "the Queen's head" (the Royal Mail), which even she refused to sell off.

Of course, all of these policies are supposed to have been backed up by scientifically proved economic theories – saying that markets are best left alone, that making the rich richer makes everyone richer, that welfare spending and protection of worker rights only make people lazy and dependent, and so on. Most people have accepted these theories without much questioning because they are based on "expert" advice.

However, all these economic theories are at least debatable and often highly questionable. Contrary to what professional economists will typically tell you, economics is not a science. All economic theories have underlying political and ethical assumptions, which make it impossible to prove them right or wrong in the way we can with theories in physics or chemistry. This is why there are a dozen or so schools in economics, with their respective strengths and weaknesses, with three varieties for free-market economics alone – classical, neoclassical, and the Austrian.

Given this, it is entirely possible for people who are not professional economists to have sound judgments on economic issues, based on some knowledge of key economic theories and appreciation of the political and ethical assumptions underlying various theories. Very often, the judgments by ordinary citizens may be better than those by professional economists, being more rooted in reality and less narrowly focused.

Indeed, willingness to challenge professional economists and other experts is a foundation stone of democracy. If all we have to do is to listen to the experts, what is the point of having democracy?

What this means is that, as citizens in a democracy, all of us have the duty to learn at least some economics and engage in economic debates. This is not as difficult as it may seem. As I try to show in my new book, Economics: The User's Guide, most of economics can be understood by anyone with a secondary education, if it is explained accessibly.

The economy is too important to be left to professional economists (and that includes me). As citizens, we should all learn economics and challenge what the professionals tell us to believe.

Marijuana shoppers flock to Colorado for first legal recreational sales

'This is going to be a turning point in the drug war,' says one customer at a cannabis dispensary, 'a beginning of the peace'

• Rory Carroll in Denver
• theguardian.com, Wednesday 1 January 2014 20.23 GMT

Sean Azzariti, an Iraq war veteran, makes the first legal recreational marijuana purchase in Colorado from Betty Aldworth. Photograph: Theo Stroomer/Getty

The debut of the world's first legal recreational marijuana got off to a smooth and celebratory start with stores across Colorado selling joints, buds and other pot-infused products to customers from across the United States.

Throngs lined up from before dawn on Wednesday to be among the first to buy legal recreational marijuana at about three-dozen licensed stores, with cheers erupting when doors opened at 8am local time.

“It's a historical event. Everyone should be here,” said Darren Austin, 44, who drove from Georgia and joined a festive crowd gathered in falling snow outside Denver's 3-D Cannabis store. “This is going to be a turning point in the drug war. A beginning of the peace.”

His son Tyler, 21, held a sign saying “It's about time”. Like his father, he painted his face green. “I'm going to move to Colorado. Seriously,” said Darren.

Behind them waited Savannah Edwards, 21, a substitute teacher who drove overnight from Lubbock, Texas. “I'm here not so much for the marijuana as the history.” Just as people reminisced about Woodstock, she would be telling this story half a century from now, she said. “I've never been to a dispensary before. I don't even know what I'll buy.”

Colorado became the first jurisdiction in the world – beating Washington state and Uruguay by several months – to legalise recreational cannabis sales. Voters approved the measure in a ballot initiative in the November 2012 general election – a landmark challenge to decades of “drug war” dogma which could herald a shift as radical as the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933.

JD Leadam, 24, a bioplastics producer from Los Angeles, flew in just for the day. “This is the first time in the whole of the world that the process is completely legal. It's something that I can tell my kids about.”

After Washington, Alaska may follow suit later this year, with activists then targeting Arizona, California, Nevada and Maine, said Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project. “Making marijuana legal for adults is not an experiment. Prohibition was the experiment and the results were abysmal,” he told a press conference.

Activists, customers and media gathered at the 3D Cannabis store for the first ceremonial sale. "It's 8am. I'm going to do it," said Toni Fox, the owner.

Tyler Austin, 21, who travelled from Georgia, held a sign saying 'It's about time'. 'I'm going to move to Colorado,' he said. Photograph: Ed Endicott/Demotix/Corbis

The first customer was Sean Azzariti, an Iraq war veteran who featured in pro-legalisation campaign ads. He bought an eighth of an ounce of an Indica strain called Bubba Kush and some marijuana-infused truffles. Total price, $59.74, including 21.22% sales tax.

State regulations insist every marijuana plant must be tracked from seed to sale but about 400,000 of the 2m tags sent in the post did not reach all stores in time. Authorities allowed licensed stores to sell regardless. The Denver Post called the glitch disappointing.

The three dozen stores that sold recreational pot on Wednesday will multiply in coming weeks. Regulators have issued 348 recreational pot licences: 136 for retail stores, 178 for cultivation, 31 for infused edibles and other spin-off products, and three for testing.

Cynthia Johnston, 69, bought two pre-rolled joints ($10 each) and an eighth of an ounce of Sour Diesel. “I've been working towards this moment since 1979,” she grinned. “Now, where can I smoke?”

Not in public spaces and not, according to notices which sprouted overnight, in many hotels. Pot must be consumed in private and cannot be transported over state lines, putting some restraints on the expected pot tourism boom.

Fears of joint-toking throngs in the street did not materialise by midday. Police said crowds were orderly and respectful. Denver City councilman Albus Brooks hailed their diversity and peacefulness.

As the first customers left the stores clutching their purchases jokes rippled across Twitter. “Curious if there has been a spike in Funyuns, Doritos and Taco Bell sales across Colorado today?” asked one.

Brazil is saying what we could not: we don't want these costly World Cup and Olympic extravaganzas

 

From the World Cup to the G8, many countries are paying an extortionate price for hosting these pointless displays

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Thursday 20 June 2013 19.40 BST

A protester in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph: Imago / Barcroft Media

On Tuesday evening a loud noise engulfed Parliament Square: a demonstration of flag-waving Brazilians. I asked one of them what he was protesting. It was, he said, the waste of money on the Olympics. I told him he was in the right city but the wrong year.

Here we go again. Brazil has been bamboozled into blowing $13bn on next year's football World Cup, and then on a similar sum to be later extorted by the International Olympic Committee to host the 2016 Games. Brazil's leftwing leader, Dilma Rousseff, was bequeathed the games by her populist predecessor, Lula da Silva. She has desperately tried to side with the protesters, but she is trapped by the oligarchs of Fifa and the IOC.

Brazil's citizens are being hit with higher bus fares and massive claims on health and welfare budgets. Up to half a million people may take to the streets this weekend to complain of "first world stadiums, third world schools". What is impressive about the demonstrators is that they appear not to be against sport as such, but against the extravagance of their staging. They are talking the language of priorities.

The World Cup is an ongoing scandal run by Fifa's unsackable boss, Sepp Blatter, on the back of ticket and television sales and soccer hysteria. Having bled the Brazilian exchequer of billions for new stadiums, he has the cheek to plead with demonstrators that "they should not use football to make their demands heard". Why not? Blatter uses football to make his demands heard.

The Olympics are likewise sold by the IOC to star-struck national leaders as offering glory for political gain. Their purpose-built stadiums, luxurious facilities, lunatic security and lavish hospitality are senseless, yet are backed by construction and security lobbies and a chorus of chauvinist public relations. If the cost is bankruptcy, as in Montreal and Athens, too bad. The golden caravan can move on to trap some new victim.

The World Cup and the Olympics are television events that could be held at much less expense and ballyhoo in one place. As it is, host nations are deluged with promises of "legacy return" that everyone knows are rubbish. Costs escalate to an extent that would see most managers in handcuffs, but gain bonuses and knighthoods for Olympic organisers.

Sport is not alone in this addiction to the jamboree. The London Olympics last year morphed into politics, as diplomacy, culture and trade were conflated in an outpouring of nonsensical rhetoric about £13bn in contracts. A summit used to be a meeting ad hoc to resolve a crisis in world affairs. It is now a Field of Cloth of Gold, a continuous round of hospitality, rest and recuperation, flattering the vanity of world leaders.

This week's G8 shindig in Northern Ireland was pointless – a night and two days on a bleak Irish lough at a cost to taxpayer of £60m and a deployment of 1,000 policemen per delegate. It was held in Fermanagh to be as far as possible from demonstrators and "real people". The sole outcome was modest progress on tax avoidance, but that cannot have required two days in Fermanagh. Could they not have used Skype?

The survival of the G8 is extraordinary, based on the pretence that the second world war protagonists are still major world powers. When Vladimir Putin refused to attend the 2012 summit in Washington, there were hopes that it might disappear. Putin was back this week, though his face suggested he regrets it.

In his iconoclastic study of postwar summits, David Reynolds remarked that they are based on hope over experience. Most are either pointless or disastrous. Reynolds compared Tony Blair's Iraq meeting with George Bush in January 2003 with Chamberlain and Munich. Their high point was during the cold war, yet it is only since then that summits have become fixed in the political year. David Cameron's diary is crammed with G8s, G20s, UN, EU and Commonwealth conclaves. The elephantine G20 has become a carnival of obsessive security. The 2012 gathering in Toronto was newsworthy only for apolicing bill close to $1bn for two days. It did nothing for the poor but devastated the local economy for a year.

Power craves authenticity. On his way back from the G8 to America, President Obama stood in Berlin at (or near) the Brandenburg Gate where Kennedy delivered his freedom address 50 years ago. A special stadium had to be built for him, and a wall of bullet-proof glass. He gave a hand-picked audience a welter of platitudes and went home.

Technology has moved on since 1963. Obama could have copied Kennedy on Facebook. Yet he had to be in Berlin in person, as he was in Ulster in person. The whole thing could have been staged for television, but television needs some contact with reality. Electronics can create these events and disseminate them. But nothing can replace the chemistry of the live presence.

Futurologists of the internet used to claim that electronics would render obsolete such sporting, political, even musical events. Human avatars would cruise cyberspace and engage with their audiences at the touch of a button. Leaders would communicate with each other from their desks in real time on giant screens. Contact would be digitised. We could experience each other's presence without the need for flesh-and-blood exchange. There would be huge savings in plane tickets.

This ignores the yearning of all people, leaders and led, rich and poor, to feel involved, to participate in some degree in a live experience. Nations want to be visited by political, sporting or artistic celebrities. They want football heroes, racing cars and three tenors on their soil. Leaders crave the status of "hosting" fellow leaders, of standing side-by-side with power. It is not the same on the web.

To this quest for authenticity Brazil's demonstrators offer a corrective. They point to its cost. The addiction to "eventism" can be so potent, so demanding of security and so expensive as to defy restraint. London's £9bn extravaganza was not necessary to host an international athletics show. It should have been the last such display of conspicuous consumption by the rich in the face of the poor. Yet Rio de Janeiro is now saddled with not one extravaganza but two.

So congratulations to Brazilians for saying what Britain last year lacked the guts to say: that sometimes enough is enough. If I were Blatter and his henchmen, I would get out of town fast.

Big Farmer The poorest taxpayers are subsidising the richest people in Europe: and this spending will remain uncut until at least 2020.

by  George Monbiot

What would you do with £245? Would you (a) use it to buy food for the next five weeks?, (b) put it towards a family holiday?, (c) use it to double your annual savings?, or (d) give it to the Duke of Westminster?

Let me make the case for option (d). This year he was plunged into relative poverty. Relative, that is, to the three parvenus who have displaced him from the top of the UK rich list(1). (Admittedly he’s not so badly off in absolute terms: the value of his properties rose last year, to £7bn). He’s the highest ranked of the British-born people on the list, and we surely have a patriotic duty to keep him there. And he’s a splendid example of British enterprise, being enterprising enough to have inherited his land and income from his father.

Well there must be a reason, mustn’t there? Why else would households be paying this money – equivalent to five weeks’ average spending on food and almost their average annual savings (£296)(2) – to some of the richest men and women in the UK? Why else would this 21st Century tithe, this back-to-front Robin Hood tax, be levied?

I’m talking about the payments we make to Big Farmer through the Common Agricultural Policy. They swallow €55bn (£47bn) a year, or 43% of the European budget(3). Despite the spending crisis raging through Europe, the policy remains intact. Worse, governments intend to sustain this level of spending throughout the next budget period, from 2014-2020(4).

Of all perverse public spending in the rich nations, farm subsidies must be among the most regressive. In the European Union you are paid according to the size of your lands: the greater the area, the more you get. Except in Spain, nowhere is the subsidy system more injust than in the United Kingdom. According to Kevin Cahill, author of Who Owns Britain, 69% of the land here is owned by 0.6% of the population(5). It is this group which takes the major pay-outs. The entire budget, according to the government’s database, is shared between just 16,000 people or businesses(6)*. Let me give you some examples, beginning with a few old friends.

As chairman of Northern Rock, Matt Ridley oversaw the first run on a British bank since 1878, and helped precipitate the economic crisis which has impoverished so many. This champion of free market economics and his family received £205,000 from the taxpayer last year for owning their appropriately-named Blagdon Estate(7). That falls a little shy of the public beneficence extended to Prince Bandar, the Saudi Arabian fixer at the centre of the Al-Yamamah corruption scandal. In 2007 the Guardian discovered that he had received a payment of up to £1bn from the weapons manufacturer BAE(8). He used his hard-earned wealth to buy the Glympton Estate in Oxfordshire(9). For this public service we pay him £270,000 a year(10). Much obliged to you guv’nor, I’m sure.

But it’s the true captains of British enterprise – the aristocrats and the utility companies, equally deserving of their good fortune – who really clean up. The Duke of Devonshire gets £390,000(11), the Duke of Buucleuch £405,000(12), the Earl of Plymouth £560,000(13), the Earl of Moray £770,000(14), the Duke of Westminster £820,000(15). The Vestey family takes £1.2m(16). You’ll be pleased to hear that the previous owner of their Thurlow estate, Edmund Vestey, who died in 2008, managed his tax affairs so efficiently that in one year his businesses paid just £10. Asked to comment on his contribution to the public good, he explained, “we’re all tax dodgers, aren’t we?”(17).

British households, who try so hard to keep the water companies in the style to which they’re accustomed, have been blessed with another means of supporting this deserving cause. Yorkshire water takes £290,000 in farm subsidies, Welsh Water £330,000, Severn Trent, £650,000, United Utilities, £1.3m. Serco, one of the largest recipients of another form of corporate welfare – the private finance initiative – gets a further £2m for owning farmland(18).

Among the top blaggers are some voluntary bodies. The RSPB gets £4.8m, the National Trust £8m, the various wildlife trusts a total of £8.5m(19). I don’t have a problem with these bodies receiving public money. I do have a problem with their receipt of public money through a channel as undemocratic and unaccountable as this. I have an even bigger problem with their use of money with these strings attached. For the past year, while researching my book about rewilding, I’ve been puzzling over why these bodies fetishise degraded farmland ecosystems and are so reluctant to allow their estates to revert to nature. Now it seems obvious. To receive these subsidies, you must farm the land(20).

As for the biggest beneficiary, it is shrouded in mystery. It’s a company based in France called Syral UK Ltd. Its website describes it as a producer of industrial starch, alcohol and proteins, but says nothing about owning or farming any land(21). Yet it receives £18.7m from the taxpayer. It has not yet answered my questions about how this has happened, but my guess is that the money might take the form of export subsidies: the kind of payments which have done so much to damage the livelihoods of poor farmers in the developing world.

In one respect the government of this country has got it right. It has lobbied the European Commission, so far unsuccessfully, for “a very substantial cut to the CAP budget”(22). But hold the enthusiasm. It has also demanded that the EC drop the only sensible proposal in the draft now being negotiated by member states: that there should be a limit to the amount that a landowner can receive(23). Our government warns that capping the payments “would impede consolidation” of landholdings(24). It seems that 0.6% of the population owning 69% of the land isn’t inequitable enough.

If subsidies have any remaining purpose it is surely to protect the smallest, most vulnerable farmers. The UK government’s proposals would ensure that the budget continues to be hogged by the biggest landlords. As for payments for protecting the environment, this looks to me like the option you’re left with when you refuse to regulate. The rest of us don’t get paid for not mugging old ladies. Why should farmers be paid for not trashing the biosphere? Why should they not be legally bound to protect it, as other businesses are?

In the midst of economic crisis, European governments intend to keep the ultra-rich in vintage port and racehorses at least until 2020. While inflicting the harshest of free market economics upon everyone else, they will oblige us to support a parasitic class of tax avoiders and hedgerow-grubbers, who engorge themselves on the benefactions of the poor.

www.monbiot.com

*UPDATE: It’s just dawned on me that the government’s list must be incomplete. It says it covers all “legal persons”, but it seems that legal persons excludes actual persons, as opposed to companies, partnerships, trusts etc. It would be fascinating to discover whose subsidies have not being listed.

References:

1. http://www.therichest.org/nation/sunday-times-rich-list-2011/

2. The average UK household contribution to the CAP is £245 (DEFRA, by email). Average household weekly expenditure on food and drink is £52.20. Average household weekly savings and investments is £5.70.
Office of National Statistics, 2010. Family Spending 2010 Edition. Table A1: Components of Household Expenditure 2009. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-225698

3. DEFRA, by email.

4. European Commission, 19th October 2011. Regulation Establishing Rules for Direct Payments to Farmers Under Support Schemes Within the Framework of the Common Agricultural Policy. COM(2011) 625 final/2 2011/0280 (COD). http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/cap-post-2013/legal-proposals/com625/625_en.pdf

5. I wanted to go to source on this, but the copies available online are amazingly expensive (there’s an irony here, but I can’t quite put my finger on it). So I’ve relied on a report of the contents of his book: http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2010/10/land-tax-labour-britain

6. The database is here: http://www.cap-payments.defra.gov.uk/Download.aspx DEFRA’s database search facility isn’t working – http://www.cap-payments.defra.gov.uk/Search.aspx – so you’ll have to go through the spreadsheets yourself.

7. The entry in the database is for Blagdon Farming Ltd. I checked online: this is one of the properties of the Blagdon Estate. http://www.blagdonestate.co.uk/theblagdonhomefarm.htm , http://www.192.com/atoz/business/newcastle-upon-tyne-ne13/farming-mixed/blagdon-farming-ltd/292e5a6d3883fe2f4a207c94d6c41e61747a8b50/ml/ and http://www.misterwhat.co.uk/company/384132-blagdon-farming-ltd-newcastle-upon-tyne

8. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/07/bae1

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/09/bae.foreignpolicy

9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/page/0,,2095831,00.html

10. The payment is listed as Glympton Farms Ltd. I rang them – they confirmed that Glympton Farms belongs to the estate.

11. Listed as Chatsworth Settlement Trustees. This page identifies the owners: http://www.boltonabbey.com/welcome_trustees.htm

12. Listed as Buccleuch Estates Ltd

13. Listed as Earl of Plymouth Estates Ltd.

14. Listed as Moray Estates Development Co.

15. Listed as Grosvenor Farms Limited. See http://www.grosvenorestate.com/Business/Grosvenor+Farms.htm

16. Listed as Thurlow Estate Farms Ltd. See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1570710/Edmund-Vestey.html and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fat-cats-benefit-from-eu-farming-subsidies-780192.html

17. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/07/edmund-vestey-tax-will

18. All these utility companies are listed under their own names.

19. I stopped adding the wildlife trust payments shortly after getting down to the £100,000 level, so it is probably a little more than this.

20. The CAP’s Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition rules (an Orwellian term if ever there was one) forbid what they disparagingly call “land abandonment”.

21. http://www.tereos-syral.com/web/syral_web.nsf/Home/index.htm

22. DEFRA, January 2011. UK response to the Commission communication and consultation:
“The CAP towards 2020: Meeting the food, natural resources and territorial challenges of the future”. http://archive.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/policy/capreform/documents/110128-uk-cap-response.pdf

23. European Commission, 19th October 2011, as above.

24. DEFRA, January 2011, as above.

What's it costing British taxpayers to bomb Libya?

The UK government has shrouded the financial cost of bombing Gaddafi in secrecy and obfuscation

Ian Katz

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 19 June 2011 22.00 BST



This weekend provided sobering reminders of the human and financial cost of the three-month bombing campaign against Muammar Gaddafi's regime: in Tripoli several civilians appeared to have been killed by a Nato strike; while in London the Treasury chief secretary, Danny Alexander, admitted that the bill for Britain's contribution could run to "hundreds of millions of pounds".

Until now the UK government has shrouded the issue of how much taxpayers are spending on bombing Libya in the sort of secrecy and obfuscation you'd expect if you asked the current location of all its Trident submarines.

By contrast, here are a few things I can tell you about how much the US's contribution to the preposterously named Operation Unified Protector is costing: as of 3 June, Washington had spent $715.9m on its military operation and associated humanitarian assistance, $398.3m on bombs and missiles alone. The Pentagon sent 120,000 halal meals ready to eat (MREs) to Benghazi at a cost of $1.3m. And by 30 September it reckons its Libya bill will have risen to $1.1bn. I know all this because it was laid out in a document produced by the Obama administration for Congress last week.

On Friday I tried to find out some equivalent figures for Britain's involvement. I called the Ministry of Defence, where a spokeswoman told me the Treasury was "doing an assessment", but no "actual figures" were available yet. She mentioned a month-old estimate "sort of within the region of £100m", but conceded that since the deployment of Apache helicopters the figure was probably significantly higher.

She thought the Treasury might be able to provide more detail, which did not amuse the Treasury spokesman I reached: "It is currently not possible to pull together real-time figures. Apparently the MoD are working on a breakdown but that's not ready to be released."

Perhaps the Foreign Office could help? Not likely: "The foreign secretary has made clear that we will present accurate costings to parliament in due course. We will not be providing a running commentary."

This from the government that trumpets its commitment on the Downing Street website to being "the most open and transparent in the world".

Fortunately, we do know a little more about the likely bill for Britain's part in the conflict from other sources. This month Nick Harvey, the armed forces minister, said in answer to a parliamentary question that Britain was targeting Libya with £6m worth of munitions a week. A Guardian report in May quoted defence experts who suggested the total bill by autumn is likely to be £400m-£1bn.

Public spending comparisons can be glib, but in times of slashed budgets and brutal choices it is hard – perhaps even irresponsible – to avoid making them. So here are a few striking ones: taking the most conservative estimate, the cost to the UK taxpayer of bombing Gaddafi for six months is four times the cut to the arts budget; three times the sum saved by Ken Clark's controversial sentencing reforms; more than the proposed cuts to the legal aid budget; about the same as the savings from ending the education maintenance allowance (EMA); or three times the amount saved by scrapping the disability living allowance.

Are these reasons to conclude Britain should stop bombing Gaddafi? Of course not: any decision to go to war is a complex equation of morality, risk and national interest, in which financial cost is just one, frequently trumped, consideration. But are they relevant to forming an intelligent view on whether Britain should be involved? Surely.

Yet when it comes to military action there is a curious reluctance to apply the same scrutiny to the bottom line as we do to every other area of public spending. As the New Yorker's Amy Davidson puts it: "There is something almost pathological about the way we don't talk about budgets when we talk about war … as if brave men don't think about things like money."

Anyone who has the temerity to ask how much Britain's Libya campaign is costing is reassured that it is all being paid for from Treasury reserves, so we needn't worry our pretty little heads. But anyone who has lost their EMA or disability living allowance could quite justifiably wonder why cash can be found for bombs but not for them.

At the very least, a democracy ought to ventilate the choices it is making. Ed Miliband has been reluctant to rock the boat over Libya, perhaps because the Labour leader can see no better option. But it's time his party started asking difficult questions about our third war in a decade. And if David Cameron is serious about transparency, he needs to show he can be as open about inconvenient facts as he has been about inconsequential ones.