Falling confidence in vaccination illustrates how the media’s obsession with balance and impartiality, and its aversion to regulation, can kill.

 

In the United States it is easy to view falling rates of vaccination for diseases like measles as a simple consequence of a right wing populist Republican party that has become anti-science. However I suspect that may be confusing an effect (the promotion of anti-vax views by members of the Republican party) with a cause, albeit a very important amplifying effect.

My reason for thinking this goes back to the MMR vaccine and autism scare that was begun by a then physician, Andrew Wakefield, who published in 1998 a paper in the Lancet suggesting a link between the former and the latter. Although that paper has since been discredited, it is important that medical science, or indeed any science, remains open to unconventional ideas. Although ideally a paper using dubious methods might be rejected by peer review, in practice that often does not happen. The way science progresses is by allowing such ideas to be expressed, which then generates a scientific debate and if necessary leads to further studies to refute or confirm unconventional ideas or results.

So studies like Wakefield’s are bound to, and should, occur from time to time. What turns the normal operation of a science into an unwarranted panic is the involvement of the media. This has two aspects. The first is that scare stories about health sell newspapers. This is hardly surprising. The problem is that the scarier the story is, which invariably means the more one-sided it is, the more it will be read and talked about. The paper that did most to ensure that people knew about Wakefield’s hypothesis was the Daily Mail, but as Roy Greenslade points out here it was far from alone in producing alarmist coverage.

The second aspect involves the media’s promotion of impartiality or balance over seeking the truth. In the UK readers are aware that even their own newspaper’s reporting may often be exaggerated, alarmist or biased, and often look to the main TV channels for more objective coverage. However the default format for such coverage, particularly but not only if the story has a political aspect, is to present both sides of any argument in an impartial way. With the MMR vaccination, the overwhelming consensus of the medical profession was highly skeptical of Wakefied’s results and advocated continued use of the vaccine pending further research, but that consensus was not conveyed in much of the media’s coverage. We know that from research that was done at the time. About half the people surveyed in this research thought that because both sides of the argument were given equal coverage, then there must be equal evidence and backing for each side. Only a quarter of those surveyed knew what the medical consensus was.

As a result of this particular scare story and its coverage, uptake of the MMR vaccine declined in many countries and cases of measles increased, in some cases ending in deaths. It is too easy to put this all down to Wakefield himself, but whatever his motives it is both right and proper that unconventional ideas and pieces of evidence are debated and examined within any science. Indeed it is dangerous for medical science to self-repress ideas that are awkward for consensus views. The problem, in my view, lies with how these ideas are reported by the media.

When parts of the media have every incentive to exaggerate and scare, and the remaining parts of the media promote impartiality over and above the scientific consensus, then we are in danger of creating a deadly cycle in the uptake of vaccinations. Even if we start with almost complete uptake and a disease that has been largely eliminated as a result, newspapers or social media will occasionally find studies or data that form the basis of scare stories. Those stories will be amplified because they help sell newspapers or generate clicks, and more objective media sources will fail to counteract such stories, and indeed will give them false credence, because they insist on being impartial and ‘balanced’. Faced with the choice of getting a disease which, as a result of almost universal vaccination is both rare and largely harmless, and taking a vaccine which it has been suggested could have serious side effects, many will choose not to be vaccinated. As a result vaccination rates drop, and the disease occurs much more often, sometimes with serious or fatal consequences. When this gets media coverage vaccination rates climb again. We get a deadly cycle in vaccination uptake rather than the ideal of permanently high rates of vaccination.

The Wakefield paper and its coverage in the media produced one of these cycles. The indications are that stories around the Covid vaccine are starting to generate another for vaccination in general, not just in the US (where Republican skepticism about the Covid vaccine led to higher death rates in Republican states) but also in the UK and other European countries. In the US things will get a lot worse as a result of Trump’s victory (for example see here, or here, or here, or here), but it should be noted that Reform’s position in the UK is not much better.

To avoid such cycles in the future, two things need to happen. First, there has to be a media regulator with teeth prepared to sanction media outlets that publish scare stories that fail to give due weight to the scientific consensus and evidence. If media outlets and social media platforms just have an incentive to scare people, some if not all will do so. Second, media organisations that you would hope would behave in a more responsible fashion need to put promotion of the scientific consensus over and above the need to be impartial. Rather than just report both sides they need to explain and promote the scientific consensus. .

Opponents of media regulation love to talk about censorship and state interference, because both terms are emotive. But the regulation I propose involves neither. Media outlets would not be prevented from reporting stories, but only incentivised to not report them in a misleading way designed to unnecessarily scare people into doing things that would do them or others harm. The regulator would not look to the state to assess such things but to science and the scientific community.

Proponents of impartiality say that it embodies a democratic implementation of free speech, and as long as coverage is balanced then consumers of media can make up their own minds as to which side is correct. With issues like the wisdom or otherwise of vaccination, a moment’s thought shows why this idea is absurd. To make a judgement about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines requires detailed, peer reviewed studies, and trained medics to interpret and assess them. A non-expert consumer of a few moments of media comes nowhere near duplicating that process.

I discuss these issues further here. As Trump’s regime illustrates, the loudest proponents of free speech are sometimes those prepared to enact severe penalties on their opponents for saying things they don’t like. More generally free speech proponents like the status quo where money gives you a voice while the majority are rarely heard. But whoever gets a voice, for whatever reason, should use it responsibly. Shouting fire in a crowded space for no good reason is potentially a criminal act in the UK, because it can lead to public disorder and could even be fatal. Reporting health scare stories in a very partial, misleading and alarmist way could and has caused harm and death, and should be regarded in a similar way. The most effective way of providing an incentive not to do this is through regulation.

Once journalists were taught that their job was to get the facts and truth and inform their readers or viewers what that is. With issues like vaccination that is what medical research is all about, so the journalist looking for the truth should reflect the scientific consensus (when one exists). If a significant number of people outside the medical profession don’t know or believe the consensus, a good journalist should both explain why the medical consensus is what it is and why that consensus rejects/refutes alternative views.

Nowadays it seems that journalists are being told to simply report views or opinions about facts and the truth, and to give no judgement about whether some opinions are more valid than others. The most blatant example of that is Vox-Pop reporting. As David Jordan, head of editorial policy at the BBC, put it: “It’s critical to the BBC that we represent all points of view and give them due weight.” For him, it appears that ‘due weight’ reflects the number of people who hold that view.

Under this approach, the media would be giving much more airtime right now to those who were skeptical about using vaccines. Now if that airtime involved listening to their concerns and then explaining why those concerns were misguided, that would be a debatable approach. However in practice impartiality just means giving them airtime to explain and promote their views. While impartiality may be appropriate in contests between political parties, when it comes to matters of fact and science it is not. Indeed such an approach is effectively anti-science, and as the example of vaccination shows it is dangerous and can kill.

The moves to weaken Germany’s debt brake are welcome, but ultimately higher defense spending should be matched by higher taxes. Public spending cuts will promote right wing populists.

 

To say I have never been a fan of the way Germany views government debt is an understatement. Here I asked whether Germany’s debt brake mechanism, foolishly enshrined in the country’s constitution, was the worst ever fiscal rule. The answer was not quite, but it came close. The root cause of why it’s such a bad rule is that much of the German policy making community sees the main goal of fiscal policy as the control of government debt, rather than seeing debt as a means of having better fiscal policy (I discuss this here.)

So the serious moves in Germany to exempt defense spending (beyond 1% of GDP) from that mechanism are very welcome. So is the recognition (at last!) that Germany is in urgent need of renewing its infrastructure through additional public investment. If there was ever an issue that might make politicians realise that sometimes debt needs to rise significantly it would be a war. If you look at the time series for US or UK government debt, the major fluctuations occur during wartime. Governments typically pay for wars by, at least in part, issuing debt. There are good economic and political reasons why this happens.

As I have argued elsewhere, debt (or money) financing makes economic sense when expenditure is temporary and where the benefits of that expenditure accrue to future generations. Debt financing for one-off increases in spending allows tax smoothing, and if the spending benefits future generations then it makes sense for future generations to contribute something towards it, which paying interest on debt or slowly paying back the debt allows. The political reasons for wanting to minimise tax increases while fighting a war are obvious.

However, as Keynes set out in 1940, even in the case of a temporary major war there is a case for raising taxes to prevent an increase in inflation. If productive resources (labour and capital) need to be used to produce armaments (and perhaps some labour diverted into the army), then if the economy is at ‘full employment’ there will be less resources available to produce other goods. If the demand for those other goods doesn’t fall to match lower supply, this will be inflationary. Demand can be reduced by either raising interest rates to encourage saving, or by raising taxes to reduce incomes.

The problem Europe faces is knowing whether it is increasing military spending on a temporary basis or whether this increase is permanent. The answer is probably both. The short term need to replace what the US provided (where Europe can) to Ukraine is clear, and ideally this additional spending will lead to a peace deal which gives Ukraine the longer term security it needs. To that extent the extra military spending is temporary.

However it also seems realistic to think that Europe needs to spend more on defense permanently. There seem to be two future states of the world where this isn’t necessary. The first is that Putin is quickly replaced by a Russian leader who has no expansionary ambitions and who doesn’t see Europe as a threat. The second is that Trump 2 is so bad that in elections (if they happen on a fair basis) the Republicans are heavily defeated, and the party rethinks its attitude to Russia. Only then could the US go back to being the primary defender of the West. Neither option seems at all likely, so it does look like defense spending in Europe will need to be permanently higher.

So while additional deficit spending makes sense to cover some of the increased military production heading to Ukraine, it should not from an economic point of view cover the permanent increase in defense spending designed to fill the gap left by the US. However raising taxes, or cutting public spending, to match additional defense spending is always difficult politically. I would therefore not be surprised if European countries cover most of the additional military spending by increasing government deficits in the short term.

As John Springford notes here, one of the reasons that using deficit financing alone to pay for additional military expenditure is not sustainable (at least spending that is not all imports from outside Europe) is that most European countries are reasonably close to operating at normal capacity at the moment. So producing goods for the military will have to replace goods that would otherwise have gone to private sector spending. As I have already noted that requires either tax cuts or higher interest rates. It is this, rather than any change in risk, which was behind the large rise in longer term interest rates on European government debt after Germany’s announcement on potentially easing the debt brake. If governments take their time in raising taxes, then higher military spending will be accompanied by significantly higher short term interest rates to prevent higher inflation. That in turn implies higher longer term interest rates now.

In contrast in the UK additional defense spending has so far been financed by cutting spending on overseas aid. Could permanent cuts to public spending be an alternative to tax increases as a way of financing (and creating the resources for) military spending? The problem many European governments have is that they are fighting a battle on two fronts, where the second front is political and is against right wing populism. To win on this second front it is a very bad idea to ration the provision of government services. I think this point is just not understood by most mainstream commentators, so it’s worth spelling it out in detail here.

Right wing populists main and most effective appeal comes on the issue of immigration. It is important to differentiate why this issue appeals to voters. For some voters it simply appeals to their racism. To others it appeals to their xenophobia. But a third group is influenced by economic arguments, particularly around the rationing of public services. Racism and xenophobia is not generally enough to bring victory to the populists. So those swayed or otherwise by arguments linking economic problems to immigration are where most of the key marginal voters are.

This group sees immigrants as demanders of public services, and therefore for them more immigration means it is more difficult for the group to access these services. This feeling is irrational in that it ignores the immigrants working in these services and as taxpayers helping to provide these services, but it is understandable irrationality given how infrequently this misconception is corrected by politicians and the media. The more difficult access to good public services becomes, the more voters will see immigration as a cause.

So the more public services are rationed, the more it provides ammunition for populists. The evidence for this effect is strong, as I outline here. The idea that immigration is responsible for shortages in public services is frequently used by populist and right wing politicians. Tax increases are of course unpopular as well, but they do not play into the hands of right wing populists the way rationing public services does.

This is one of the ways the traditional political right, obsessed with tax cuts and reducing the size of the state, lays the ground for right wing populists to thrive. It is why Cameron’s austerity helped achieve Brexit, and why European austerity after 2010 encouraged the populist vote. It is why it would be so dangerous for European governments to pay for higher military spending by cutting public services.

This is also true for the Labour government in the UK. Cutting overseas aid to fund the additional UK defense spending announced so far is a very socially conservative thing to do. It makes it yet clearer that Labour are aiming to stay a socially conservative party in government under Starmer/McFadden. But if immigration remains a major issue for enough voters at the next election, and much of the media will aim to ensure it does, it will not be the governing party that gains from its socially conservative stance, but the socially conservative parties in opposition.

The most effective way the Labour government can reduce the threat from the populist right is to ensure the economic arguments made by populists against immigration have as little purchase as possible. That means providing more money for public services, not keeping taxes low. That Labour keep pursuing [1] the opposite approach, at a time when the two right wing populist parties in the UK attract nearly half of all voters in opinion polls, is very worrying.

[1] Quick note to Faisal Islam, one of the better economic journalists. Mediamacro may believe that fiscal rules “are designed to maintain credibility with financial markets”. However in reality fiscal rules were originally, and continue to be, formulated to influence fiscal policy. The markets do not need rules to decide whether fiscal statements are credible.

Current UK stagnation may have many causes, but one we know about is the UK media. Plus why the UK definition of a recession is no longer fit for purpose.

 

In the UK the definition of recession used by most people is two successive quarters of falling GDP. This definition always involved a knife edge problem. If GDP fell by 0.1% in two successive quarters we were officially in recession, but if output fell by 1% in one quarter and grew by 0.1% in the next there was no official recession. If a recession is meant to indicate periods in which output growth is particularly poor, then in this example it fails. The knife edge problems also means that mild recessions can easily disappear after data revisions.

A second problem has only become significant since immigration flows have been large and variable. The UK’s definition of a recession refers to GDP rather than GDP per capita (total output per head of population). GDP per head is much the more relevant number for most people, because it is a better indication of average personal prosperity. So the definition of recession should really relate to GDP per head. As the chart below shows, on that basis we have had two recessions since the end of the pandemic recovery.

A much more relevant way of putting it is that GDP per capita has still not recovered its pre-pandemic position.

The third and most important reason why our current definition of recession is not fit for purpose is that it only makes sense when underlying growth is significantly positive. Since WWII but before the financial crisis, when UK GDP per capita grew on average by over 2%, a recession indicated a lack of demand in the economy. The way to get out of recession (inflation permitting) was to boost demand by cutting interest rates or with a fiscal stimulus (tax cuts or increases in government spending). The pandemic was different of course, but it was so different there was little risk of confusion.

In contrast, the recessions since 2022 have had nothing to do with deficient demand in the economy. We know that because the Bank of England started raising interest rates over that period to stop a rise in domestically generated inflation. The labour market remained tight over this period, with unemployment at historic lows by recent standards. The economy wasn’t growing because of a lack of demand, but because the supply of goods was not increasing.

The reason for this can be seen in the following chart.

Labour productivity (here measured by output per hour) has remained close to the level achieved just before the pandemic, so GDP per head has failed to rise above pre-pandemic levels. [1] For more detail on this and some of the measurement issues involved, see Chris Giles here.

This ‘supply side’ stagnation is very different from the recessions of the early 80s, early 90s or late 2010s. Because of the latter, most people think of a recession as a short-lived demand side problem, whereas what we are seeing today is supply stagnation that has lasted nearly five years. The problems and their solutions are very different. Either we need to start referring to what used to be the normal type of recession as ‘demand deficient recessions’, or we need an alternative definition of a recession. [2]

Why has UK productivity growth been so poor since the pandemic? As we don’t have a good handle on the causes of productivity growth at the best of times, any answer is speculative. However, looking at other countries may be helpful. The UK is not alone in seeing stagnant productivity over this period. The situation in Japan, France and Germany is just as bad or worse. The major economy that seems to have done best by far over this period is the US.

US policy during the pandemic stands out from major European countries in two ways. First, the US did not have a furlough scheme financed by the government. As a result, unemployment rose much more during the pandemic, but that might have allowed efficiency gains that otherwise would have been more difficult. Second, the US gave a substantial boost to the economic recovery from the pandemic through a large fiscal stimulus.

In all countries investment fell substantially in 2020 as the pandemic hit. This lost investment would have depleted the capital stock, and also reduced the scope for innovations to be embodied in new equipment. It would be surprising if this large drop in investment didn’t have negative consequences for future productivity growth. It is also true that investment in the US during the pandemic stood up better than elsewhere, but the correlation between investment growth over the pandemic period and subsequent productivity growth is not perfect: investment in Sweden and France remained strong but their productivity growth has been weaker than in the US. It could also be the case that poor performance in some European countries is due to domestic issues rather than any common cause.

We know with some degree of certainty that this is true for the UK. Brexit reduces output permanently (eventually by a total of 4% according to the OBR) by reducing labour productivity. So part of the current stagnation in UK output and productivity is highly likely to be a consequence of Brexit. The chart below, of UK business investment compared to other major economies, comes from the FT here. 

Yet a decline in output of the order of magnitude estimated by the OBR was predicted by all the independent economists in this field who looked at this before the referendum, so it is hardly a surprise that it has come to pass. Did voters just ignore these warnings?

Not really. Most of the print media effectively ignored them, and pushed Brexit with as much propaganda as they could. The broadcast media ‘balanced’ the expert advice with counter claims from the tiny number of economists that wanted to push Brexit, giving the impression to all but the most savvy voters that expert opinion was divided. I have little doubt that with a media more committed to telling the truth Brexit would never have happened.

As I have said before, politicians find it hard to increase growth but can quite easily reduce it, and Brexit is a clear example of that. That is particularly true if the media actively promotes politicians likely to damage growth. That happened with Brexit, but the media environment has not significantly changed since then. If anything, right wing newspapers have become even more extreme, and the BBC still promotes ‘balance’ over knowledge.

Opinion polls today show the consequences of that. Reform, the party led and entirely controlled by Nigel Farage, is often ahead of the Conservatives and sometimes ahead of Labour. Farage made his name leading another party whose chief purpose was to advocate for Brexit. With Johnson out of the picture, Farage is effectively Mr. Brexit in the UK right now. So why is a politician who advocated for such a disastrous policy doing so well?

One response is to say voters are stupid, but that is not my view. The print media that gave us Brexit still fill their pages with propaganda designed to promote Farage and like-minded politicians, and will of course never admit how they lied to achieve Brexit. In the broadcast media, every interview with Farage should start and end by asking him why he made such a huge mistake in championing Brexit, and how can voters trust someone with such poor judgement. [3] After all, if any other politician had cost the average voter 4% of their income this would be the media’s approach. But it hardly ever happens with Farage.

Explaining the continuing popularity of Farage as ‘just about immigration’ hardly absolves the UK media. They as much as politicians are ultimately responsible for concealing basic truths about immigration from voters. The right wing press remorselessly pushes anti-immigration propaganda, and the broadcast media hardly ever asks about the cost of reducing immigration, or why refugees are forced to cross the channel in small boats. It never asks why most voters want lower immigration but at the same time want more overseas workers for most occupations.

Which is why I think it is possible for Farage to top some opinion polls despite being responsible for a large part of current UK stagnation and poor UK living standards.

[1] There are two stories behind why GDP per capita has fared slightly worse than productivity. The first reflects a decline in the measured level participation in the workforce since the pandemic, an issue I and others have talked about before [ref]. The second is that the measure of the workforce is too low because people have stopped answering the labour force survey since the pandemic, so the productivity series is too high (see here, section 3, for an alternative series.)

[2] An alternative would be to measure GDP per capita relative to some trend. That makes more sense to me for demand deficient recessions anyway, because then recessions would only be over once GDP per capita had regained its trend level. We would avoid the nonsense of journalists describing 0.1% growth after a large fall in output as the economy coming ‘out of recession’.

[3] Farage’s claim that the ‘opportunity of Brexit has been mismanaged by the Conservatives’ should be torn apart. The Brexit he campaigned for has set up barriers to trading with the EU, which is the ultimate reason why output is lower.

A New World Order

 

I don’t write about international power politics because normally I just don’t know enough about the countries and actors involved, even though it often seems as if this is also true of many of those who do talk about such things. If there was ever going to be an exception to this self-imposed rule, it would have to be now. But in reality this post is about the same battle between right wing populists and those supporting pluralist democracy that I have been writing about for some time. It is also inspired by this excellent discussion between Paul Krugman and Phillips O’Brien.

When I was a teenager I used to fantasise about a future where the world was divided into three main tyrannical blocks, with islands of social democratic resistance within Europe and the Far East. That the US was one of these blocs (Russia and China being the other two) was probably due to a combination of the Cold War and McCarthyism being recent history at the time. Luckily for all of us that future took rather a long while to emerge. I mention this only to address the first issue any discussion of a New World Order has to address. Is this all an over reaction to one individual, Donald Trump, and after he has gone we will return to the Old World Order.

Unfortunately, there are good reasons for not trusting this outcome. First, there is a strong chance that Trump will defy the US Constitution and stay as President for more than his second four year term, and that he will ensure that he is elected when he does so. He does, after all, have form on this, and he also knows that once he stops being POTUS there is a significant risk he may spend the rest of his life trying to avoid going to jail. Second, while the Republican party is now almost completely under the thumb of Trump, the MAGA movement will outlast him and may easily find another figure that can take his place. The structural factors that allowed a majority of voters to make a known fascist the President are not going away. Even if they did, it is not clear whether it is wise or possible for Europe to continue to rely on the US for its military defense.

The same question applies to Europe except in reverse. All European countries have right wing populist political parties, a few of which are already in power and some with a reasonable chance of achieving power. Most are either aligned with or sympathetic towards Trump and in some cases Russia. It is conceivable that what has happened in the US may also happen in a sufficient number of other European states, so that the ‘West’ effectively reforms as a collection of right wing populist plutocratic nations.

There is no doubt that Russia has been doing what it can to achieve this outcome for some time, and now Trump will do much the same. However, Trump’s election may also make this outcome less likely for two main reasons. The first is Ukraine, and the second is a demonstration effect that we have already seen with Brexit.

It seems likely that European countries will try to do what they can to fill the gap left by Trump’s withdrawal of support for Ukraine. Voters in Europe generally believe Russian is mainly responsible for the war, and either want Ukraine to win or achieve a peace that includes Nato membership. Exceptions tend to be in countries closer to Russia and/or with populist governments. That support may falter when taxes have to rise to pay for additional defence spending across Europe, but if politicians frame that as not just being for Ukraine in the short term but also to secure Europe’s defence in the longer term that effect may be small. The danger of Trump’s indifference or antagonism towards Nato combined with an aggressive Russia is pretty clear.

In most cases it should be higher taxes paying for additional defence spending. Deficit spending might be justified if the additional expenditure was temporary, but as I have already noted, hoping that the Old World Order quickly returns may be wishful thinking. Paying for additional defence spending by cutting public spending would be politically dumb, given the clear positive correlation between austerity and rising support for right wing populists that I note here. (Cutting foreign aid onlly works at the margin, and is counterproductive because it reduces Europe's influence overseas.)

In this respect the UK is better placed than other major European countries, for two reasons. First, dislike of Trump and support for Ukraine are particularly strong in the UK. Second, taxes are relatively low in the UK compared to France or Germany for example. Surely even those advising Starmer and Reeves will see that recent developments provide a solid case for breaking existing commitments on tax, and in particular taxes on higher incomes. In contrast Germany will find it much harder to adapt, because of its crumbling public sector infrastructure (see Adam Tooze on German railways) and its obsessive aversion to public sector borrowing, of which the debt brake is just an example.

In the short term at least heightened European solidarity towards Ukraine may make life more difficult for populist political parties that support Trump. We are already seeing that in the UK, with Farage suggesting that it is inevitable that Ukraine will join NATO in contradiction to Trump appearing to rule that out. The kind of socially conservative voters that tend to vote for right wing populist parties also tend to be patriotic, so if other political parties are smart they can use this to diminish support for these populist parties. [1]

The demonstration effect is when voters actually observe the consequences of the policies and actions of right wing populist parties. Many right wing populist parties get a lot of support because they can lie a great deal about the benefits they would bring voters. The difficulties that Brexit has caused the UK in economic and political terms seems to have had a notable impact on EU countries, with voters becoming more rather than less supportive of EU membership. Partly as a result, some right wing populist parties that previously were openly antagonistic to EU membership have since Brexit toned down their anti-EU sentiments.

At present voters in European countries are divided in their views about Trump, with again those with right wing populist governments or in Eastern Europe being more supportive than remaining Western European electorates. Antagonism against Trump, and therefore any political parties that support him or emulate his policies, may increase if Trump’s actions create difficulties for European countries (through tariffs, for example). It definitely will if his statements on wanting to take over Greenland turn into actions.

Antagonism towards Trump will also increase as Trump is increasingly seen as a chaotic and destructive leader. Like Brexit, many voters who might otherwise support a populist party may see what the reality of populist government entails and decide that is not to their liking. For all these reasons, Trump’s recent behaviour may be bad news for the right wing populists of Europe. [2]

The other silver lining is that Trump, for the moment at least, prefers to do business with the other two superpowers rather than engage in a new cold war. His primary interest is making money for himself and his plutocratic ruling elite. There is no great ideological divide between Trump and Putin as there once was between Russia and the USA. There is also a much more parochial point that Trump will in all likelihood speed Starmer’s moves to realign the UK with the EU.

The bad news may not just be limited to Ukraine, European defence and the disaster Trump will be for US governance, health and democracy. I have already noted that the last thing you want when the world is worrying about a H5N1 (bird flu) pandemic that has already started infecting US citizens is a US government that is cutting medical research, laying off workers monitoring the spread of H5N1, and which has appointed a Health secretary who has campaigned against vaccines. Equally in a country where the 2008 global Financial Crisis began, the last thing the world needs is for Trump and his appointees to start ripping up regulations put in place after the last financial crisis, or more. As Paul Krugman notes, the new Commerce secretary as well as Trump have close ties to the cryptocurrency world. It really is like putting arsonists in charge of fire prevention. And as Paul might say, Oh wait.

[1] A politically astute leader of the Conservative party would have already grabbed this opportunity to put some distance between themselves and Farage. That Badenoch has instead focused on speaking to the latest far right political jamboree says a lot.

[2] It may also discourage more mainstream right wing parties from following the UK Conservative party in embracing populism. Annette Dittert writes: “Vance may have inadvertently pushed Merz’s CDU away from the AfD – and potentially galvanised Berlin’s political centre into installing a functioning government without excessive delay.”

Is Trump a Populist or a Fascist?

 

Answering questions of this type inevitably involves a discussion of definitions, in this case about what populism and fascism actually mean. It is perfectly reasonable to therefore ask whether the answer matters, if by making reasonable changes in definition we can get a different answer. After all we know what Trump is and what he is doing, so why is an answer to this kind of question interesting? My answer would be that such a discussion can help sort out ideas and help distinguish underlying causes from symptoms.

Your answer may depend on how happy you are with lists. As an economist I’m not so keen on lists. If a politician or party ticked 6 of the 7 (say) listed attributes of being a populist, what does that mean? Do some things in the list matter more than others, and do some items follow pretty automatically from others? My criticism of one definition of populism I discuss here is that the elements of the list seem to be rather disconnected from each other, and appear instead to be drawn up to encompass a group of politicians/parties rather than describe them.

For me, the key characteristic of populists is how they treat those opposed to them. Normal politicians respect the institutions of government, the law and media, and generally those who occupy them, even when those institutions and individuals work against them. Populists do not, describing their own views as ‘the will of the people’ and dismissing opposing views and institutions as the work of an undefined elite. A pluralist democracy, where power lies not with one man but with institutions like a parliament and the law, is anathema to populists. A pluralist democracy is likely to reflect the variety of views and interests among voters, while populists are authoritarians that aim for total power.

Context matters here. It could be the case that, because of the power of money for example, most or all the parts of a pluralistic democracy have in reality been captured by an elite. We used to call this elite the ‘Establishment’ after all. Sometimes this elite could work against the interests of the rest of the country. I wouldn’t call a politician that simply described this reality as a populist. I would if they wanted to turn this pluralist democracy into one where only they had ultimate power.

The authoritarian nature of populists make it more likely that populists within existing democracies will appeal to social conservatives rather than liberals, and in that sense will generally be on the political right. Appealing to social conservatives means right wing populists will attempt to create both division (culture wars) and emphasise threats from minorities or overseas. As these threats are largely imagined, right wing populists will tend to lie far more than normal politicians. For similar reasons, and because they hate the idea that others can have any authority over themselves, they will also reject knowledge coming from experts in favour of instincts and ‘common sense’.

Trump’s actions since regaining power have been typically populist. By issuing declarations over issues that normally are the prerogative of Congress to decide, and allowing Musk to effectively close down parts of government which only Congress has the legal power to do, he is showing a contempt for pluralist democracy and contempt for the law. The crunch will come when courts find against him and if he ignores those courts. Will those required to enforce a court's judgements obey the court or Trump? Will enough Republicans in Congress reject what Trump is doing or will they change the laws to make what Trump is doing retrospectively legal, or worse still give him absolute power in law? Will the Republican dominated Supreme Court side with Trump or the rule of law? Will the law operate with enough speed to mean that any of these questions matter at all?

Equally Boris Johnson was being a typical populist when he suspended parliament. The right wing newspapers that were so important in achieving the small majority for leaving the EU were being populist when they attacked judges for going ‘against the will of the people’. [1]

Federico Finchelstein, who has written a great deal about populism and fascism (most recently here) suggests four key pillars of fascism: violence for political ends, lying, xenophobia/racism, and a rejection of democracy. According to my description above the middle two are shared with all right wing populists, but violence and a rejection of democracy are not. Finchelstein defines three waves of populism. The first is the fascism of the 1930s, the second is the populism of Latin America (e.g. Peronism) and the third current populism which can amount to what he calls Wannabe Fascism.

These four pillars are of course a list, albeit short. I have already described why right wing populists encourage xenophobia and are chronic liars. Their authoritarianism puts respecting democracy at risk, but both this and the use of violence are barriers that they may or may not chose to cross. Whether they do will of course depend on the historical context, including how entrenched democracy has previously been [2].  

The second wave of populism in Latin America suggests that populism, unlike fascism, can live with democracy in the sense that populists can be ejected from power. That remains true today: Boris Johnson is no longer UK Prime Minister, and more significantly Poland is no longer run by populists. However my description of populism suggests why the relationship between democracy and populism is ambiguous. Populists are authoritarian, yet they proclaim to represent the will of the people so should respect the results of general elections.

A result of this ambiguity is that populists will tend to favour the appearance of democracy over its reality. An extreme case is where elections are rigged, but the same result can be achieved by ensuring the media is controlled by those acting in the populist’s interest (as in Hungary, for example). Trump is currently threatening to take away mainstream broadcaster’s operating licenses because he doesn’t like them reporting reality rather than the fantasy Trump proclaims.

In today’s mature democracies populists cannot gain power by using violence or paramilitary groups, so they will achieve power via the ballot box. As more recent examples of post-war populist governments show, once they obtain power they do not need to use the degree of violence displayed under fascism to maintain it, although they may be happy to use threats of violence from outside government as useful intimidation of their opponents (as well as using violence against minorities). I therefore think Finchelstein is right to see fascism as a form of populism, but not its only form.

Using the key tests of violence and respect for election results, is Trump a fascist or just a populist? Trump did not respect the result of the 2020 election, and did everything in his power to ignore it and stay in office. That included inciting a mob that included paramilitaries (“Stand down and stand by”) to invade Congress. It was this event in particular that has led Finchelstein to suggest that Trump was crossing a line from populism towards fascism. During his first period of office Trump showed no sign of displaying the hunger for conquest and expansionist violence characteristic of 1930s fascism, but his recent comments refusing to rule out using the military in making Greenland part of the US suggests rejecting the fascist label on those grounds is problematic.

If Trump is a fascist does that mean Trump is as bad as Hitler? Of course not. Hitler was unique, as is Trump. There were other fascists in the 1930s, like Mussolini and Franco, with Franco surviving WWII and relaxing some of his initially totalitarian policies. In addition, none of the analysis above suggests fascists need to be smart, and they can equally sow the seeds of their own downfall. Indeed, as Noah Berlatsky points out, what makes someone a populist or fascist also makes them prone to overreach and sometimes self-destruction. Equally it is often their incompetence that does so much harm. Nor are fascists necessarily all powerful at all times, although because they are populists they will gain power as they dismantle a pluralist democracy and to the extent that they make it impossible to be defeated in elections.

I can understand why some prefer not to call Trump a fascist for tactical reasons. With so much of the political and media world reluctant to give up the old ideas of special relationships and a united West, using such language about the POTUS and his appointees can make you seem extreme and over the top. But the use of the term populist instead is also problematic, because not all populists want to ignore election results and are prepared to use violence to stay in power. Calling Trump a populist alongside people like Johnson or Farage grossly underestimates the threat he represents. Right now we need to be very realistic about the danger Trump’s government poses, and also how we should regard those outside the US who continue to support him. How we describe Trump and his regime may help us do that.

[1] I have described populism in the US and UK as plutocratic, because the populist leaders involved either are very rich or relied on funding from the very rich. This has a big influence on the particular policies they adopt when in power. However, as I have also noted, this is not populism representing domestic capital as a whole. Brexit was certainly not in the interests of capital, and likewise the actions of Trump. Instead they are better seen as regimes that favour some parts of domestic capital over others.  

[2] I can understand why this may lead some historians to want to restrict the term fascism to the particular circumstances of the 1930s. It will also become clear why I prefer not to.  

Quantifying the continuing UK public spending squeeze

 

In her October budget the Chancellor raised total government spending by 1.8% of GDP compared to the plans of her predecessors, which means that total public spending as a ratio to GDP stays pretty flat over the 5 year forecast period. (Anyone who calls this the share of government spending in GDP is either being sloppy or deliberately misleading. [1]) As a result, that ratio is planned in 2029/30 to be roughly where it was in 2022/3, the penultimate financial year of the Conservative government.

Just before the budget, I calculated that spending to GDP needed to be about 3% higher than this to ‘end austerity’, by which I meant return public service provision to a level similar to the final years of the last Labour government. However the method I used to get to that figure was based on some unfamiliar data sources, so I thought it might be useful to redo that calculation using more familiar definitions. This post does that.

What you cannot do, but which so many do, is look at the total ratio of government spending to GDP and draw conclusions from that alone. Invariably such exercises equate a constant level of this ratio over time with a constant provision of public services, but this is completely wrong. For example, total government spending includes the interest the government pays on its debt, but it would be silly to suggest that the public services have improved since the pandemic because interest rates on that debt have significantly increased. The ratio of total public spending to GDP was unchanged between 2007/8 and 2016/17, and as a result I still get some people telling me that therefore austerity over this period was a myth. Clearly we need to look at some level of disaggregation.

Before I do so, it is worth noting that it isn’t easy to get hold of historical time series that break down the public spending total into its components, including how much each department has received over time. The ONS do publish a quite detailed breakdown by spending function, but for individual years rather than as a time series. Thankfully the IFS has done much of the legwork here, and I’ll draw on this source extensively. Those who want to avoid my analysis and jump to my conclusions can skip to the text after the final table.

Even if we disaggregate total spending into its major components, it is still true that keeping some part of public spending as a proportion of GDP constant over time is not necessarily keeping the level of public provision constant. This point can perhaps be made most clearly by noting that as GDP grows the share of food purchases in total GDP tends to fall, but it would be daft to report this as implying that as economies grow people are getting hungrier. The two items of UK public spending that have shown the clearest trends in the past are health and defence. Here, from the IFS document referenced above, are those shares over time.

Defence spending is now almost a quarter of what it was in 1955, reflecting both the abandonment of the UK’s imperial role and the end of the cold war. Obviously this does not mean people feel less secure than they used to. Health spending as a share of GDP has been steadily going up over time for a number of reasons. To the extent that this is because the population is getting older and therefore needs more care, it does not imply that we are on average healthier but just that life expectancy has increased. A clear example of this point is that during the decade after 2010 the share of health spending in GDP only fell slightly, but waiting times for treatment increased much more dramatically, correctly suggesting the level of public provision of health services had deteriorated substantially.

The chart below compares the public spending ratio with and without health and defence spending, and they look quite similar. However this is largely a coincidence, and critically the future looks very different, because probably both ratios will need to rise in the future. As a result, since the start of the century when defence spending stopped falling, and for the foreseeable future, we should expect to see the total public spending ratio (and therefore for the share of total taxes in GDP) to rise over time. I apologise for going on about this, but this basic point is hardly ever made in mediamacro commentary.

Total UK public spending as a ratio of GDP including and excluding health and defence

Of course health and defence are not the only areas of public spending where spending as a share of GDP may rise or fall over time even though public provision remains the same. Another example would be the implications of baby booms for education spending. However the upward trend in health spending is so substantial that some analysis is required. We cannot just fit a trend line through the data, because for much of this period health provision has been too low. Health spending is unlikely to be too high very often because raising taxes to finance it is painful, but Conservative governments since 1979 have squeezed spending. For this blog post I’ve tried to get a handle on this by looking at total (public and private) health spending in other countries using OECD data.

In almost every OECD country where data is available from the early 1970s there is a pronounced upward trend in the GDP share. The trend varies across countries as we would expect, but an average across 19 OECD countries implies that health spending to GDP rose by 0.11% each year, with roughly an equal number of countries above and below this figure. (The UK number is 0.145%.) As the pressures leading to this ratio rising are common across most countries, it seems reasonable to use this 0.11% figure as a measure of the underlying trend in the health to GDP share..

All that remains to decide is when UK health spending was sufficient. I have chosen 2010, because waiting times for treatment at this point were tolerably low. This allows us to measure the spending gap in other years, and also to project this trend forward in assessing the adequacy of future plans. Of course this approach is very rough and ready. It may also be possible to reduce this trend in the future by increasing the amount of preventative care (see the discussion here), but that is not going to happen when health is underfunded because treatment will always get prioritised.

Finally I have used data from the IFS to compare GDP shares and ratios across categories of spending between 2007/8 and 2022/3. [2] The earlier year is a useful reference point because it is before the recession that followed the financial crisis (recessions tend to raise spending in some areas) and is not affected by subsequent austerity. As I have already noted, the current planned total spending ratio for 2029/30 is similar to 2022/3.

Components of public spending as a share of GDP

Category	2007/8	2022/3
Health	6.5	8.4
Education	5.0	4.2
Defence	2.2	2.2
Pensioners	6.0	5.6
Other social security	5.3	4.7
Public order & safety	2.0	1.7
Transport	1.3	1.7
Housing and Community	0.8	0.7
Overseas Aid	0.3	0.5
Long Term care	1.2	1.1
Net debt interest	1.8	3.8

The chart above suggests health spending in 2022/3 was around 0.5% of GDP below what it needs to be to replicate 2007/8 levels of provision. Actual provision was undoubtedly worse in 2022/3 because of the hangover from the pandemic. Hopefully that will have dissipated by 2029/30, but equally the underlying upward trend in health spending will mean that spending will need to rise by just over 0.5% between 2022/3 and 2029/30. On this account the total public spending total needs to be 1% higher in 2029/30 to replicate 2007/8 levels of spending on health grounds alone.

Turning to education, allowing for changing student numbers still suggests that public provision in 2022/3 was significantly below 2007/8 levels. This assessment seems to roughly correspond with media reports of inadequate provision (see here for example). Turning to other social security, levels of deep poverty in 2022/3 were similar to 2007/8, but spending has fallen, suggesting another significant fall in public provision here. (The two child limit needs to end, for example.) Current problems in the provision of public order and long term care have been well documented. (Here is a very recent IFS report on justice.) If we allow for a public spending gap worth around 0.5% of GDP in each of these four sectors, then adding in health implies we need the total public spending ratio to be 3% higher in 2029/30 than current plans to replicate the level of public spending provision seen in the final years of the last Labour government. [4]

A 3% gap just happens to be the same number I calculated before the Budget using a rather different approach. Any increase in the defence spending share needs to be added to that. This analysis confirms that Labour’s spending plans remain substantially inadequate if the aim is to return public provision to levels seen in the final years of the last Labour government.

Of course current plans only go five years ahead, and Labour may be in power for longer than that. It was only in the second term of the previous Labour government that public spending increased substantially. There are various reasons why the political situation is similar and different to then. My more substantive concern is that the Chancellor shows no sign of having done the kind of analysis shown above, but I am happy to be corrected (in confidence) if I am wrong about this. [5]

My analysis suggests that repeating Labour’s commitments on the main areas of tax going into the next election would be very foolish, but I fear the political pressures to do so will be great, and that this government will succumb to those pressures. There is a nasty feedback loop here. The more public service provision fails to noticeably improve over the next few years the more Labour will feel it needs to make unrealistic pledges on tax to win the next election. One way of avoiding that was to have increased taxes by more in the last Budget.

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[1] Calling this ratio a share implies that the rest of GDP is the non-government share, but it’s not because total government spending includes transfer payments.

[2] Data for overseas aid is for 2021/2 rather than 2022/3.

[3] There are many areas of public spending not included in this list. For example summing each column gives 32.4% for 2007/8 compared to 40.3% for total public spending. The total public spending ratio in 2022/3 was 44.8%. Compared to 2007/8 debt interest explains about half this increase, but I would really like to know what explains the rest.

[4] The level of debt interest in 2029/30 is expected to be only a little below 2022/3 levels, reflecting an assumption that interest rates will not fall back to levels seen in the 2010s. If this does turn out to be the case, higher debt interest should imply higher taxation rather than lower public spending. There is no reason why higher interest rates should shift voters preferences between publicly and privately provided goods, so saying that other public spending should fall to match higher debt interest is as absurd as saying spending on food should fall by this amount. Higher taxes allows the cost of additional debt interest to be spread across all areas of consumer spending.

[5] Attitudes within the Treasury, and in particular a belief that it is up to departments to make the case for higher spending, do not help here. Such an approach often precludes a common overall framework and leads to outcomes that can have more to do with the character of individual politicians than social needs and preferences.