What you will learn this year...

So you chose economics, and you've arrived at university.  If your A-level economics was anything like mine, you may have been given a stylised history of the UK with some brief treatment of the 1970s before moving on to the 1980s and Margaret Thatcher.  You probably got the impression from how the material was presented to you that Labour had a reputation for being unable to manage the economy - something that bedeviled them in 1992, but something New Labour managed to overcome in 1997.

One thing though has become remarkably clear since the May General Election this year - the Conservatives are remarkably good at rewriting economic history, and unfathomly good at getting people (who don't necessarily even vote Tory) to believe what they say about the economy.

You will learn this year and in your three years studying economics that politicians generally are not folk to be trusted when they open their mouths about the economy.  You'll learn about incentives, and how incentive structures influence perverse outcomes (e.g. see page 19 of this newsletter about this).  You probably already knew this, but the incentives in play for politicians influence the things they utter on the economy - they are party political first, and truthful a distant second.

An example of this was William Hague on Radio 4 yesterday morning.  Cuts will harm defence, yet as with any Tory comment on anything related to cuts, they try and paint a picture of how shambolic Labour was, the mess they left, etc., in order to (1) score some political points (who would ever vote that lot in again after this?!) and (2) excuse themselves from the blame for the adverse effects of the cuts they intend to make.

The fundamental underlying matter here though is that people do actually seem to believe cuts are unavoidable.  You would almost think, given this, that the economics profession was in consensus about this: Cuts are necessary and unavoidable.  It may, then, come as some surprise to find that a lot of prominent economists actually don't believe this.  Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz (both Nobel prizewinners), Brad DeLong, Martin Wolf (writer at the FT), Robert Skidelsky to name but a few, dissent.

Stay tuned then: Don't skip lectures, listen in them, attempt the assignments you get for each class and attend each class, and you'll learn a lot more about why these economists think the way they do, and why you should treat with scepticism every economic utterance from a politician...

Robert Skidelsky on Deficit Cutting

Robert Skidelsky is a very prominent economist, not least for his biographies of Keynes.  As you can imagine, he is more Keynesian in his leaning as an economist than some.  Right now, with the austerity of the Coalition and others the flavour of the moment, people are much less inclined towards Keynesian arguments.

The feel now is that we need to cut the deficit - this is the big problem, not the fact we're stuck in an anemic recovery from the recession of 2008-9.  Skidelsky has written this article in Project Syndicate on the issue, and I think the punchline has to be:

Events and common sense drove them to deficit finance in 2009-2010, but they have not abandoned the theory that depressions cannot happen, and that deficits are therefore always harmful (except in war!). So now they vie with each other in their haste to cut off the lifeline that they themselves extended.

100 Days of the Coalition

Today marks 100 days since the Tories and the Lib-Dems agreed to join forces in a coalition government in the aftermath of the inconclusive election back in May.

Naturally, the Coalition is trying to put a positive spin on what it has achieved in 100 days.  Most of this is journalists trying to fill space - August is a nororiously dry time for news stories.

Econ101b teaches about monetary and fiscal policy having time lags for implementation, and we learn that the UK government actually has little power over monetary policy these days, having granted the Bank of England independence in 1997.  Given these long time lags, it is probably quite unrealistic to expect that the Coalition can have had any impact thus far on economic outcomes - at least at the macroeconomic level.

It's trying hard though - and another argument we come across in econ101b can give them some credence for trying to argue they've had an impact thus far: Expectations.

Expectations are powerful things.  Investors decide whether to invest or not based on their expectations.  Expect a downturn, and they won't invest - at least not in physical projects.  Why build a new office block if you expect a prolonged downturn?  Can you know you'll fill it?

A central emphasis when the Coalition began was that bond markets were soon likely to turn on the UK - our debt is too high, and our deficit is too high - as high as Greece!  Such talk is based on expectations: Expectations that the expectations of investors are that the UK will default like Greece.

Much has passed under the water since.  Not least, interest rates on long-term government debt have been falling - i.e. it's been getting cheaper for the UK government to borrow.  Kind of runs against what the Coalition had asserted.  The voices of austerity such as the Coalition have been mocked by various sources, not least Nobel Prizewinner Paul Krugman.  Another Nobel Prizewinner, Joseph Stiglitz, has attacked this panic in the face of financial markets: Who is governing, Robert Skidelsky has asked, is it the government, or is it the financial markets?

Of course it's far too soon to judge the coalition; even if I say bond market rates have fallen, there's no reason why they won't rise in the future.  Other unexpected events may mean that despite the austerity, the UK escapes a recession, and unemployment doesn't rise above 3m - something that looks odds on currently.  And even if we have a recession, it still will be too early to judge the coalition - it may be that the cuts are necessary to secure a longer term prosperity for the UK.  I have my doubts, but this may well be the case...