This Conservative budget is Keynesian economics reborn

Will Hutton in The Guardian

Britain’s national debt over the past decade has always been a non-problem. For most of the last 300 years, it has been very much higher as a share of national output. Our public debt has been well-managed by the Bank of England, so that the average duration of government bonds is 15 years: there is close to zero chance of a crisis of refinancing or of confidence in public debt. At current rates of interest the overall cost of debt service is among the lowest in our history.

Britain has thus plenty of room to spend and borrow, and there was no need for the draconian Cameron-Osborne austerity squeeze in which cumulative cuts in public spending in many areas of government exceeded 40%. Deficit reduction could have been more measured and the pain mitigated. It was baloney from top to bottom – a cruel hoax that was one of the reasons for the Brexit vote, imposing wanton and needless suffering. I and other Keynesian economists have made these arguments in vain for more than a decade – indeed for most of my working life. So Wednesday’s budget was an extraordinary moment.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak repudiated the entire discourse and accepted core Keynesian propositions. He delivered the biggest fiscal boost for nearly 30 years, coordinating it with an interest-rate reduction by the Bank of England – exactly the Keynesian stimulus a flagging economy needed. Public investment was on target to become the highest since 1955, he declared – actually understating the coming public investment boom because in 1955 the comparable figures included investment by the nationalised industries, now nonexistent. The coming wave of investment in roads, rail, housing, schools, further education and ports is unparalleled. It was not just that the investment is needed: he accepted it was part of the government’s role in raising parlously low levels of productivity. Right again.


Yet a rubicon has been crossed. Keynesianism has been restored to its proper place in British public life

Alongside it current public spending is going to rise again, with an additional £12bn package to alleviate the impact of Covid-19. The government would do everything it could to alleviate the spread and impact of the virus. The larger point was that fiscal policy – excusing his party’s volte-face by trying to position it as part of the new international consensus – has got to shoulder its responsibility for driving the economy forward. Amen to that.


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On the Today programme the following morning my jaw dropped as Sunak informed his audience that reasons for confidence in his package included Britain’s public debt averaging 15 years in duration and debt service costs being extraordinarily low. To make the same argument during the Blair, Cameron and May years was to ensure you wore the mark of Cain – an outlandish Keynesian perspective that branded you as ignorant of the basic laws of economics and public finance. But if a Tory chancellor backed by his press makes the same argument, suddenly it becomes the new economic common sense. To be on the liberal left, as Neil Kinnock once remarked, is to be made to feel an alien outsider – even if reason and a majority of the electorate are with you.

Of course cruel truths remain. The colossal errors of the past decade, Brexit and austerity especially, cannot be expunged at a stroke. Britain’s long-run growth rate is barely above 1% as the Office for Budget Responsibility recorded. The impact of Brexit, it declared, would be to lower output over the next 15 years by 5.2% below what it would have been. The much-vaunted US trade deal, if it ever happens, will raise output by a mere 0.16%. Over the next decade exports and imports will be 15% lower. Britain, tragically, is closing – and becoming more intolerant and anti-foreigner in the process.

Nor can the social carnage of the past decade be quickly corrected. Sunak did little or nothing to address child poverty, the desperate plight of the court and criminal justice system or a host of other casualties. This was government from the centre for the centre: local government remained a neglected Cinderella. The increase in current public spending will redress only about a quarter of the cumulative loss in health and education spending since 2010.

Yet a Rubicon has been crossed. Keynesianism has been restored to its proper place in British public life. The Conservatives have once again shown their breathtaking and shameless capacity for reinvention. If Labour wants to trump them, it will need to take Keynesianism even further – into the wholesale Keynesian recasting of the way the financial system intersects with the real economy.

In the meantime it’s a big moment. Perhaps in this respect – and this only – Labour did win an argument at the last election. At the very least a new and beneficial consensus has been born.

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150 years of data proves it: Strongmen are bad for the economy

By Annalisa Merelli in QZ.com

As governments around the world gravitate toward rightwing populist and authoritarian leaders, many have pointed to the 2008 global recession and the economic hardship that followed as the reason.

Take America, for instance: According to many analysts, the rise of US president Donald Trump has to be seen in relation to the great recession, and was aided by a frustrated working and middle class that saw in his election the promise of new economic wellbeing.

This repeats a historical pattern: When facing dire straits, populations tend to delegate responsibility and look for a leader who can (or at least promise to) get them back to better times.

It’s a bad idea, however, and not just for democracy: It’s terrible for the economy, too.

A study by researchers of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Victoria University in Melbourne published in Leadership Quarterly looked at economic data in relation to the performances of authoritarian leaders versus democratic governments.

The authors analyzed the governments of 133 countries between 1858 to 2010, and found that autocrats were either damaging or inconsequential for the economy of their countries. Besides showing the poor economic outcomes of oppressive regimes, the study calls into question the idea of “benevolent dictators”—for instance Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew or Rwanda’s Paul Kagame—who are commonly believed to be good for the economy.

“Autocrats with positive effects are found at best as frequently as predicted by chance, while autocrats with negative effects are found in abundance,” wrote Stephanie Rizio and Ahmed Skali, the authors of the paper. Strongmen mostly leave a county’s economy worse than they found it, or simply “ride the wave” of an economic growth that would have happened regardless of their rule.

The researchers used data from the Archigos dataset of leaders, which lists both the leaders of countries and the person with the most power in a country at any given time. The official head of state might sometimes be no more than a figurehead, while someone else holds the actual power. For instance, the paper notes that Septimus Rameau was the de-facto ruler of Haiti between 1874 and 1876, while his uncle Michel Domingue was the official leader; or Ziaur Rahman, who was actually in charge of Bangladesh between 1975 and 1977, while Abu Sadat Mohammad Sayem was the country’s official leader.

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The data was then cross-referenced with the Polity IV dataset, which establishes the kind of political government in place for 185 countries every year, defining whether the country is a democracy or an autocracy. For each year, countries are scored from 1 to 10. Scores below 6 indicate an autocratic regime, while democracies stand above six.

To analyze the economic outcome of a strongman’s rule, the researches looked at per capita GDP. The researchers then compared economic growth in countries with autocratic regimes to economic growth in democracies, looking at whether the impact of the autocrats (and the democratic leaders) was relevant—or if the results were ascribable simply to chance.

In the large majority of cases, countries led by autocrats—whether benevolent or otherwise—were found to have worse economic outcomes in terms of growth than democracies. And not just in the short term: The researchers also looked at delayed growth, testing the hypothesis that reforms put in place by a dictator might take time to bear fruit. They found no demonstrable growth to connect with autocratic rule.

Growth isn’t the only economic metric on which autocrats failed to deliver. They also fell short on employment, health and education spending, and government debt.

But—in what is possibly good news for Trump, who is facing the threat of another recession—while it seems people are inclined to vote a strongman into power to fix their economic woes, they aren’t as quick to get rid of him if the economy doesn’t improve. The paper found that while authoritarians do pay for their bad economic performances, it takes much longer for them to lose popular support and be deposed from power than they do in a democracy under comparable economic circumstances.

Skali told Quartz the research didn’t look into the relation between economic hardship and the rise of autocracies, and why distressed populations gravitate towards strongmen. But he did share a speculation: In times of hardship, primates tend to accept, and follow, the authority of an alpha male.

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