On not being politically partisan

This may seem a little introspective, but there are some general points here about how economists deal with the political implications of what they say.

I guess it is inevitable that as the UK election gets closer more comments on this blog accuse me of being partisan and writing propaganda. Let me start by saying what I think a partisan economist would do, and then contrast that with what I try to do. [1]

Suppose a government does some economic related things well and some things badly. A partisan opponent of the government (in a party political sense) would focus on the bad things, and hardly mention the good things. They would do the opposite for the opposition. I can think of one or two UK academic economists who appear partisan in this sense, on both sides (pro or anti-government), but they are very much the minority. Among the US macroeconomists I know the same is true.

Part of the motivation for writing this blog in the first place was a belief that the UK, along with the US and Eurozone, where making a fundamental mistake in turning to fiscal austerity in 2010. It happens to be the case that this move is associated with the political right, and it is inevitable that I would speculate on the reasons for that. However the IFS has recently reminded us that Labour’s plans for fiscal policy from 2010 were not so very different from what the Coalition actually enacted. If Labour had remained in power and if (a big if) they had stuck to their plans I would be writing much the same critical stuff about the Labour government. (See this post on the European left, for example.) In my NIER piece on the Coalition government’s record, I praise two out of their three major innovations: it’s just unfortunate that their third (fiscal austerity in 2010) is a mistake which dwarfs the other two. 

When I first started the blog at the end of 2011, I always knew I would occasionally stray beyond macroeconomics. I have always had an interest in poverty and inequality, but my first post on that was hardly political - indeed it started off praising the UK Prime Minister. At the end of March 2013 that changed. I wrote “Surely it should now be clear that this is a government with at least as strong an anti-state, anti-poor ideology as Mrs Thatcher, but with rather less honesty about what it is doing.” The first ‘anti-state’ claim came from a realisation by that stage that the drive for austerity was about more than reducing deficits. The second ‘anti-poor’ claim was justified in two following posts: the first documented work by the IFS showing how government policies would lead to a steady increase in poverty, and that and a second talked about how sections of the press went out of their way to denigrate welfare recipients, and how some (not all) politicians went along with this. [2]

Is this partisan propaganda? I certainly think it would be good to reduce both poverty and the incomes of the top 1%: the latter view can come from understanding that recent growth represents a huge market distortion, which economists naturally abhor. I also believe in treating those unfortunate enough to be claiming benefit with respect, so what I write follows naturally from those positions. As the chronology makes clear, I did not choose to write about poverty because it allowed me to be negative about the government, which is what a partisan would do. Another issue I feel very strongly about is climate change, and again I cannot help it if the current government contains many who deny the proposition and acts with - to put it mildly - some ambivalence towards the problem.

So this blog is not partisan. However it is also not ‘balanced’, in the sense of framing everything in ‘shape of the earth views differ’ style, or avoiding saying the obvious because it has political implications, as in this classic BBC headline. If the logic of a position or argument is that one political party has it right and another wrong, why avoid saying this? Nor will I avoid expressing an opinion on voting behaviour: it seems abundantly clear to me that a future Labour government would produce outcomes that are closer to the views expressed in this blog than a future Conservative government, and that those on the left who argue that ‘they are both the same’ are seriously misguided. This is issue based politics, and we need more of it.   

So I do not worry too much about accusations of being partisan or too political, but as ever I'm open to criticism that I'm failing in my objectives. I do worry more about something related, however, but not for the reason you might think. In May 2013 I wrote something I had not imagined I would do when I started the blog, which was a post essentially just about politics. It compared UKIP and the Tea Party, in part because the dominant narrative seemed to be that the rise of UKIP represented the consequences of the Conservatives abandoning right wing views, which apart from certain ‘social’ issues seemed simply wrong and analogous to arguing that the Tea party had arisen because the Republicans had moved to the left! I have subsequently written a few other ‘political’ posts in this sense. In each case I try to write them as any good social scientist should, which is trying to explain political developments, rather than to give an evaluation of whether they are good or bad given my own views. This can be difficult, and you have to choose your language with particular care, as I note in this post. But my main worry when I write these posts is that I will be displaying my ignorance of political science.

So what do you do if you want to read this blog for the macroeconomics, but do not like some of the political implications that I draw? There are hundreds of reasons to vote for a particular political party, and I would hope there are many Conservative voters out there who nevertheless worry that this government’s macroeconomic policy is misguided, and who are also concerned about some other directions of travel. I wrote this post for those Conservative voters, and I want them to keep reading.

[1] Propaganda is information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view. I have never written anything that I know to be biased or misleading.

[2] Here is a more recent IFS assessment of the impact of past policies. At about the same time Margaret Thatcher died, and I wrote this short evaluation of her macroeconomic record, which I do not think anyone can read as partisan.