Relearning old ideas in macroeconomics after the New Classical Counter Revolution

 

This post is a follow up to a post by Chris Dillow. He makes two claims about macroeconomics. To understand this you need to know about the distinction between mainstream and heterodox economics. It is difficult to define what divides the two groups (papers/chapters are written trying to do so), but we can make some observations. Most economists in academic departments are mainstream, and heterodox economists fall into lots of different schools. Another observation is that mainstream economists almost completely ignore what heterodox economists do. What is not true is that all heterodox economists are left wing and all mainstream economists are not. 

Chris’s first claim is that much of heterodox economics is the macro that was fashionable many years ago. The second is about the mainstream. He suggests there was a ‘great forgetting’ in the 1980s, such that apparently new ideas today are just rehashed old ideas that seem to have been forgotten. I think there is some validity to both these points, and I hope to explain here why this has happened and how they are related.

The great forgetting happened because of a methodological revolution in macro, the New Classical Counter Revolution (NCCR). Many at the time focused on one aspect of that revolution - an attack on the mainstream Keynesian macroeconomics of the time. That failed fairly quickly, but what lasted was a methodological revolution, which is often called the microfoundation of macroeconomics. I have written about the NCCR here.

Before the NCCR, macro was almost a different subject to microeconomics. Macro’s main theory, Keynesian economics, could be written in aggregate equations and could be estimated using aggregate data, but it was sometimes hard to relate it to microeconomic theory. Partly for that reason, macro contained different schools of thought, where it was hard to relate one ‘school’ to another.

The NCCR insisted that any macro model should not only be derived from microeconomic theory, but also that the theory was used in a consistent manner. By unifying macro and micro economics, it appealed to young economists in particular. Very quickly academics realised you could also formalise aspects of pre-NCCR Keynesian economics in a microfounded way, and the microfoundations hegemony within mainstream economics became complete. As all macroeconomists within the mainstream talked the same language (microeconomics), to the extent there existed schools of thought, these related to beliefs about parameter values within a common theoretical framework (which in turn those beliefs might reflect ideological preferences).

This reduction in the fragmentation in mainstream macro is an important unifying force. Pre-NCCR you could go to a macro seminar given by someone from a different school of thought and have little idea what they were talking about. Post-NCCR you could do the same and know exactly what they are talking about, and even make comments on their work, but just think it was not very relevant to the real world.

One of the negative aspects of the NCCR was it led to the ‘great forgetting’ Dillow talks about. For some the NCCR was year zero in macroeconomics, with everything that had gone before (that was outside the microfoundations hegemony) of little interest. The example that is close to home for me is described here. I had done a lot of work applying the John Williamson’s FEER model of equilibrium exchange rates, which uses pre-microfoundations techniques. The approach was rediscovered by Obstfeld and Rogoff who used a microfounded model (the ‘New Open Economy’ approach, which applied the microfoundations of imperfect competition to international trade). Which was fine, but as far as I know Obstfeld and Rogoff never acknowledged that earlier literature started by John Williamson. It was a perfect example of a great forgetting.

Having year zeros in any discipline is a bad idea. My view reflects an argument I have often made: microfoundations are fine, but the microfoundations hegemony is not. By hegemony I mean seeing other macro as old fashioned and not.worthy of publication in top journals. Some economists had a stronger reaction and chose to be heterodox economists outside the mainstream. They felt microeconomics didn’t deserve this central role in macroeconomics, or felt it made no sense microfounding macro. I think it’s fair to say that after the NCCR it was more difficult if not impossible for those economists to get on the mainstream train.

The analogue to this is the point Dillow makes, that a lot of heterodox economics is what he remembers learning before the NCCR. That observation isn't a slur on heterodox economists, but rather to note that some of what they do is a continuation of pre-NCCR macro.

A good example of that comes from MMT, where a key idea is that we should use fiscal policy rather than monetary policy for macroeconomic stabilisation at all times (and not just when rates are at the lower bound). That reflects how macro policy was done in the UK in the 1960s and mid 1970s. It is quite possible to argue that case within the mainstream (although most mainstream economists would disagree), but I don’t believe MMT economists would wish to do that.

However the NCCR didn't create heterodox macroeconomics. The heterodox economics I remember from studying at Cambridge in the early 1970s was a rejection of ‘neo-classical economics’. At its simplest, neoclassical economics is how producers who maximise profits interact with consumers who maximise utility in perfect markets (where perfect means there are a large number of producers and consumers for the same product so everyone is a price taker). As Chris notes, the theory implies people are paid their ‘marginal products’.

If you asked most mainstream economists today if what they do assumes the validity of neo-classical economics, they would probably laugh. As I repeatedly say, much of economics today is about studying markets that are far from perfect. (We can debate endlessly whether having perfect markets (and associated optimality conditions) is a useful or misleading reference point.) Economics has also grown well beyond the study of markets and their imperfections, to include game theory and behavioural economics for example. None of this stops right wing economists using ideas from neoclassical economics when it suits them.

Another feature of microeconomics today is that it is dominated by empirical analysis. The days when the heights of the subject were highly mathematical proofs about the nature of general equilibrium are long gone.

However we now need to go back to the NCCR in macro. The microeconomics the proponents of the NCCR took to remake macroeconomics was essentially the neoclassical economics that microeconomists were simultaneously moving beyond. New Keynesian economists brought a form of imperfect competition into DSGE models to enable a formalisation of price or wage rigidity, but it remains the case that the basic DSGE model is based on pretty neoclassical microfoundations. (The clearest exposition of this is a book by Athreya.)

We can now see an additional reason for the barrier between heterodox and mainstream macroeconomists. Macroeconomics has adopted the neoclassical economics that heterodox economists had objected to over decades before the NCCR.

While I personally regard post-NCCR macro as progressive in a Lakatos sense, I believe its hegemony is unwarranted. I learnt a great deal about the world working in pre-NCCR macro, and this has been complemented rather than duplicated by what I learnt from microfounded macro. (I have published plenty of papers in both.) Mainstream macroeconomics now needs to follow micro in becoming more empirical, and one of the ways it can do this is by resurrecting the pre-NCCR style of modelling. This involves both econometric studies of individual relationships or sub-systems, and the use of structural econometric models (what Blanchard calls policy models) that Chris mentions in his post. These models are an eclectic mix of theory and econometric studies of individual relationships or sub-systems.

As I note in this paper, it should be worrying that policy institutions like the IMF and Fed still do a great deal of this kind of analysis, but mainstream macro in the top journals does almost none. The time has passed when we can excuse this fact as reflecting old-fashioned policy institutions, or that such analysis is flawed because of identification problems or the Lucas critique. If mainstream academic macro will not venture into these directions, perhaps some heterodox economists can take their place.

Quantitative Easing (creating money) is fine during a recession, as long as it goes alongside effective fiscal stimulus

 

Everyone knows that central banks, like the Bank of England, create money. We often talk about this as central banks printing more money, but in reality when central banks want to create money they do so by creating a kind of electronic money held by commercial banks called ‘reserves’. Quantitative Easing is when a central bank creates reserves to buy its own government’s debt.

Central banks do this in a recession when the short term interest rate set by the central bank is so low that it does not want to reduce it further (the lower bound for interest rates), but it still wants to stimulate the economy. They cannot reduce short term interest rates any further, but can they reduce long term interest rates (the interest rate on assets held for many years)? The idea is that if the central bank buys government debt, there is less government debt for the private sector to buy, so the private sector is willing to accept a slightly lower interest rate on government debt. That in turn will put downward pressure on other longer term interest rates, stimulating the economy.

There is an extensive literature on how effective this Quantitative Easing (QE) is in stimulating the economy, but that is not my concern here. All I need to assume is that it has some limited effect in stimulating the economy. The question is whether this is something the central bank should be doing during recessionary periods. [1] For example, in a recent report by the Lords Economic Affairs Committee, the chairman said the Bank of England had become addicted to QE.

The problem with a great deal of public discourse on QE is that it takes QE as an alternative to fiscal stimulus, rather than a complement to it. There is a good reason for this confusion. During the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) many governments failed to enact fiscal stimulus and instead enacted austerity, saying that monetary policy could do the job. As interest rates were stuck at their lower bound, unconventional monetary was used, and QE was a key component of that. In the event the prolonged recession showed clearly that QE could not take the place of fiscal stimulus. But the problem was the lack of fiscal stimulus (and its replacement by the opposite, austerity), not QE itself.

The most common charge against QE is that it worsens inequality. As explained earlier, one aim of QE is to slightly lower long term interest rates. A fall in long term interest rates tends to raise asset prices, which includes the market value of existing government debt, stock prices and house prices. [2]

As the wealthy rather than the poor hold these assets, QE tends to raise the wealth of the wealthy, and so increases wealth inequality. However QE is not the most important influence on long term interest rates. Long term interest rates change mainly because expectations of future short term interest rates change. [3]

The best way to reduce inequality in a recession, therefore, is enact a large fiscal stimulus. This raises demand and inflation tends to rise. As a result, central banks will raise short term interest rates, which in turn will increase long term rates and lower asset prices. We can immediately see that, if you are concerned about wealth inequality, it’s the lack of fiscal stimulus that is the real problem, not QE.

Another, more primitive, argument against QE is that it causes inflation. This is primitive because it’s simple monetarism, which for most macroeconomists died a death in the 1980s. I could go through the theoretical reasons why it is nonsense, but it’s easier to note that the same people made the same claim last time there was a lot of QE (after the GFC) and there was no significant increase in domestically generated inflation.

Is it better to have a fiscal expansion combined with QE, rather than just a fiscal expansion? The only difference is that in the first case the central bank buys some government debt for some undefined period, and in the second case it doesn’t. The two options are often referred to by economists as money and bond financed fiscal expansion. [4] In very simple textbook models money financing involves greater stimulus, but often in those textbooks this is because the government is imagined to target the money supply, and that stopped happening in the early 1980s.

A more modern response would be that QE still has some impact in reducing long term interest rates , and that extra stimulus is worth having. On the other hand you could just increase the size of fiscal stimulus to compensate, and not do any QE at all. So the question remains whether there is any point in doing QE alongside fiscal expansion.

One significant positive point in favour of doing so is that money financing (fiscal stimulus plus QE) is cheaper than bond financing. Instead of the government paying interest on its debt, it gets paid to the central bank instead, and the central bank passes that money on to the Treasury. However there is currently a cost to QE in the UK and US, which is that the central bank pays its short term interest rate on the reserves held by commercial banks. Nevertheless, as short term interest rates are lower than the interest on longer term government debt, QE still reduces the borrowing cost of a fiscal stimulus. The OBR estimates that QE will save the government just under £18 billion in 2021/2.

However this has led some, including the OBR, to suggest that the financing costs of government debt are now much more sensitive to interest rates than they would be without QE. Without QE, if the Bank raised short term interest rates this would have a very limited immediate impact on the cost of UK government debt because of its long maturity. However with QE, if the Bank continued to pay its short term interest rate on reserves, the overall cost to the public sector would rise much more quickly.

This logic is based on a very unlikely assumption. It assumes that if short term interest rates rose the Bank would continue its practice of paying that rate on all its reserves. If nothing else that would be a large fiscal transfer from the Bank to commercial banks. As Karl Whelan sets out very clearly, it is far more likely the Bank would follow Japan and the ECB and adopt a tiering system, which would mean that most reserves would pay nothing. The scare about how vulnerable QE makes the government to higher rates is simply something the Bank can make disappear.

Occasionally you hear people say that QE (or monetary financing) is dangerous because it damages central bank independence. The idea is that governments will pressurise central banks to continue to issue new QE, after a recovery from recession is complete, because it makes its debt cheaper. Again we can discount that fear because we saw none of that after the GFC. [5]

I would add a final reason why expanding QE is a good idea in recessions. It prevents panics in the government debt market. If the market suddenly decides it doesn’t want to buy any debt, the Bank can step in. This happened at the start of the global COVID pandemic, and central banks did just that. More generally, it kills the argument that we cannot have fiscal stimulus in a recession because of the bond market, a point I made in one of my first posts. My own view, therefore, is that QE is worth doing, and it only has a bad name because in the past it has been used instead of fiscal stimulus.

Unfortunately there is a real danger that situation will happen again in the UK, as the Chancellor finds it more and more difficult to meet his deficit and debt targets and so asks for greater austerity. Once the latest COVID wave is over, our aim should be to use fiscal stimulus to expand the economy, as they are doing in the US. Instead it looks like we will have austerity trying to hit some arbitrary target for debt or the deficit.

There are many differences between austerity now and the austerity that began in 2010. In 2010 the Bank had a Governor who believed he could continue to effectively stabilise the economy with Quantitative Easing. Now central bankers are increasingly acknowledging the need for fiscal stimulus to end recessions. The US fiscal stimulus is forecast to return the US economy to where it would have been without any pandemic, and any failure of the UK economy to do the same may be largely down to our current Chancellor’s obsession with debt targets. Once again we will see QE without the necessary fiscal stimulus that should go with it. 

[1] By recessionary periods, I mean the whole period between when output starts growing less than normal (or falling), and when output has completely recovered. This has nothing to do with the ‘technical’ definition of a recession (two periods of falling output), which I find can be misleading and unhelpful.

[2] The reason for this is simple. Ignoring any capital gains, the pay out from these assets are a fixed interest rate (or coupon) for most government debt, dividends for stock prices and rents (actual or implicit) for house prices. If interest rates fall and these payouts remain unchanged, all these assets become more attractive to hold (their pay out becomes more attractive relative to lower long term interest rates), so the price of these assets rise.

[3] If traders start expecting short term interest rates to go up in the future, and long term interest rates are low, it’s more attractive to short term assets rather than long term debt. If people are still going to hold long term debt, long term interest rates need to rise to compensate for higher expected future short term interest rates.

[4] There is some confusion about whether QE is monetary financing. This site, for example, says it’s not because QE is only a temporary creation of money, as central banks intend to sell the government debt it bought with the new money at some future date. However most examples of fiscal stimulus are temporary, so it seems perfectly sensible to compare money finance stimulus with debt financed stimulus, where the difference between the two is QE.

[5] A government that did this is what I call a government of central bank nightmares, and such a government is equally likely to just end central bank independence. I see no reason to believe that QE encourages governments to turn into this nightmare state.

Will the Trump/Johnson base lead to its destruction?

 

Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul have said they will not get vaccinated. They are the tip of an anti-vax iceberg in the Republican party. Many Republican governors and legislators are repeating far-right messages denying the safety and effectiveness of coronavirus vaccines. Seventeen out of the 18 states with the lowest vaccination rates voted for Trump. This is one reason why the Delta variant could have a large impact on some parts of the US. The Republican party has become a kind of Russian roulette cult when it comes to the pandemic.

Needless to say this is a minority movement in the US. Most people say they have or will get vaccinated. So why are some prominent Republican politicians associating themselves with what will become a very unpopular position as Delta variant cases increase? In one sense this is nothing new, as we saw when most Republican politicians refused to disassociate themselves from Trump’s claim that he had won in 2020 and acknowledge Biden as the winner. Republican politicians that stood against Trump’s nonsense claims were condemned by the Republican base, and subsequently by the party.

This example shows how a minority view that is pretty unpopular in the country can gain influence on the right in the US. Most Republican politicians are scared of their base because of primary elections, and so to be elected (or nominated in presidential elections) they have to pander to this minority view. While appealing to the majority may be the ultimate step, they need to appeal to a minority to take the first step, and they hope that appeal is effectively forgotten or ignored when they face the electorate at large. It’s a risky strategy, but they have no choice if they want to succeed.

Of course it shouldn’t be this way. Leaders should try and educate their party that anti-vax is nonsense and (in a pandemic especially) very harmful. I don’t think this is an example of what Timothy Snyder calls sado-populism. Instead it seems to me to be an example of something more organic and bottom-up. In 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. It was at the time that Barry Goldwater became the Republican nominee for president, beating the more moderate Rockefeller, and what he saw as the influence of conspiracy theory and "movements of suspicious discontent" throughout American history. His attempt to portray movements on the left as well as the right in this way has been criticised, but a lot rings true of the parts of the right in the US which has produced both McCarthy and Trump.

The danger is greater if this rule by a minority can elect true believers to positions of power. That is what happened with Trump. An open question is how long those true believers can stay in power, as their beliefs are gradually revealed to the voting public. The question of the moment is whether an ever more extreme right wing minority, once their views are exposed, can ever be re-elected, or whether they will drive their party to ever greater electoral losses. In other words does the extreme right inevitably self-destruct by becoming yet more extreme.

A crucial difference between the UK and US is that the UK does not hold primaries either for MPs or general elections. This greatly reduces the power of the extreme right. However both the national party and members get to influence who gets chosen as an MP. It is possible that party members can be radicalised (by Brexit for example) and select MPs with similar views to them. Most importantly, it is possible that owners and editors of the right wing press can begin to push more extreme right wing ideas that influence MPs and ministers. However will the party leadership, and more particularly the Prime Minister, ever adopt ideas from the right that are both extreme and unpopular among all voters?

Two recent developments shed some light on that question. The first is taking the knee. One MP said they would refuse to watch the England football team play in the recent Euros competition because players took the knee. One prominent minister failed to condemn a minority of fans booing the team while they took the knee. A new television channel designed to appeal to those on the right faced a mass boycott when one presenter took the knee. In the end the channel decided taking the knee was an “unacceptable breach of [their] standards”!

This all reached a critical point after England lost the final to Italy, and three of their black players missed penalties. The racist attacks on social media were horrendous, but they reflected a minority. Throughout the country as a whole the England team, including its black players, is very popular and most supported them taking the knee. As a result, the Prime Minister Johnson changed his previous stance and swung behind the team, condemning those fans who booed taking the knee and pretending he had never said anything different. In this case popularity won out over supporting some of his base.

The second is about removing most restrictions, including wearing a mask, on 19th July. As the number of Delta variant cases, and with a lag hospitalisations and deaths, continue to rise, the policy of abandoning the last checks on spread seems more and more foolish. Experts from around the world have condemned it, and it could produce the ultimate horror - a variant against which vaccines are ineffective.

Johnson and other members of government say ‘if not now, then when?’. The obvious response to this is when everyone, including school children, have been double vaccinated. The government, in response, shows analysis from SAGE that suggests opening up when all adults (not children) have been vaccinated may produce a worse outcome because it will happen before winter. The obvious response to that is why leave children as virus spreaders who have a chance of getting long covid, rather than vaccinating them?

We know the government is wrong on masks because they are now in the position of saying that continuing to wear a mask is the responsible thing to do. They want to rely on individual responsibility rather than ‘government diktat’. If people follow this advice, then by logical deduction the only people who don’t wear masks will be the irresponsible, so ending government compulsion is simply a license for the irresponsible.

As I noted here, most people want restrictions to continue. Those that don’t include a number of journalists who work for the right wing press and many Tory MPs, Both groups go on about ‘freedom’. Here again we have the right pushing an unpopular (and unsafe) policy, but in this case Johnson is siding with the right, either out of inclination or because he will find himself on the wrong side of a majority in his party. In this case Johnson has chosen supporting his base over popularity. How this will influence his popularity we shall see. [1]

The fate of the Republican party in the US will depend on how much voters will ignore the dangerous nonsense that Republican leaders have said and done in the past, and whether there is any chance that they will re-elect a president who helped inspire an attempted insurrection when he lost last time. In either case there is a real chance that the current Republican party will self-destruct. The fate of Johnson’s government may depend on how he chooses between following the views of his base or following the views of most of the country. But either way, with the total support of half the print media and a tame BBC influenced by this press, the chances of this government's self-destruction seem remote.

[1] It may seem ironic that English footballers seem to carry more weight for Johnson than countless COVID experts, but less so once you recognise that celebrity carries much more impact among the voters Johnson is targeting than expertise coming from academics and medics. One of these footballers, Rashford, has forced the government’s hand before.

An independent BBC is the last defence against Johnson’s fake world, and it is disappearing fast

 

Johnson’s popularity relies on the existence of a fantasy world. In this fantasy world ending all defences against COVID is freedom, our vaccination programme would not have been possible if we had remained in the EU, the economy is strong and so on. It is a fantasy world that many believe - enough at least to safely keep this government in power. You will discover this fantasy world if you read the following newspapers: the Sun, Mail, Express and Telegraph.

In terms of total reach (print and on-line) that is just over half of the total reach of the major newspapers. That means that just over half of the newspaper reading population (print or online) are fed this fantasy created by this media and the Conservative government. With FPTP biased in favour of the socially conservative Conservatives, that alone would ensure the Conservative party always wins.

That fits our past experience since the moment Mrs Thatcher won. The only time Labour has won is when one member of this newspaper group, the Sun, started supporting Labour. However that probably overstates the influence of the print media. A paper suggest that Murdoch’s flip to Labour before 1997 was not decisive (Blair would have probably won without it), which in turn motivated Murdoch to support Labour.

So it is possible to overcome this bias in the print media if you have a failing government and an attractive opposition. A key reason this remains a possibility is the BBC. The BBC is by far the most widely used source of news in the UK. Unlike the right wing press, it is not ideologically tied to the government, and so for the readers of the right wing press it is an alternative source of information. For most uninterested in politics it is the only alternative source of information about political issues. 

As Tom Mills points out, the BBC is not fully independent in the sense that it depends on the government for its form of financing and the government makes key appointments. However for the most part (but not always) the BBC generally has editorial autonomy. In particular, those appointments that are not formally chosen by the government are made by the BBC alone.

This is the context in which to see the recent delay in the appointment of Jess Brammar, former editor of HuffPost and BBC Newsnight, to a new post to oversee the BBC’s entire news output. According to both the FT and Guardian this delay is because a BBC Board member, Robbie Gibb (who was director of communications for Theresa May), said the appointment would shatter relations with the government. According to the FT, one of the problems is that Brammar filed a formal complaint to the Cabinet Office after a Treasury minister described a HuffPost journalist’s questions as ‘creepy and bizarre’ and that led to the journalist receiving abuse on social media. (The question the journalist asked was straightforward, not ‘creepy and bizarre’.)

Normally the BBC Board is meant to protect the BBC from politicians, and stand up to ministerial pressure. One of their responsibilities involves “upholding and protecting” the BBC’s independence. Robbie Gibb has turned it into a conduit for government interference in BBC appointments. This is “highly unorthodox”, to quote the FT, but hardly surprising from this government.

Needless to say the current Director-General of the BBC is Tim Davie, a former Chairman of a Conservative Association who once stood to be a Tory councillor. Davie criticised BBC comedy output for "constantly aiming jokes at the Tories", and the Mash report is no more. The recently appointed BBC Chairman is Richard Sharp, a former advisor to Boris Johnson as London Mayor and Rishi Sunak as Chancellor, who has also donated £400,000 to the Conservative Party.

There are three reactions to all this which miss the point. The first is to say this boat sailed a long time ago, and the BBC is already a propaganda arm of this government. I think this goes too far, and partly reflects the antagonism towards Corbyn’s Labour seen across the mainstream media. If you want to argue that the BBC has become propaganda I really suggest watching Fox News.

A second reaction is to say what’s new. Governments always appoint their own to key posts, and they often make their views known to the BBC. What is unusual in this case is that we have heard about it. But this issue isn’t about conventional left and right. It is about whether the fantasy world constructed by the government and right wing media is taken as real by the BBC or not.

Which brings us to the third view, which is that the BBC should not appoint people to senior posts who are political. An example of this attitude is a reported response from a government source which says in effect that HuffPost was a “borderline fake news lefty clickbait website”. There are at least two problems with this take. One is that Gibbs himself previously worked at the BBC. The more serious is to equate investigative reporting with ‘fake news’, when the real fake news is produced elsewhere.

There is a very real danger that the UK will become like the US under Trump, where reality is called by the government and its supporters ‘Fake News’, and the BBC feels reluctant to deviate from the real fake news produced by the government. Any discussion of reality and how it differs from the government’s fake news will be called ‘lefty’ by the government and its supporters.

There are plenty of signs that the BBC is already losing its objectivity. There was leaving Brexit lies unchallenged in 2016, Maitlis being reprimanded by the BBC for telling the truth about that trip to Barnards Castle, or Laura Kuenssberg gushing about the deal Johnson did with the EU which was the EU’s first choice deal, and much more. If the BBC is to avoid going further down that slippery slope, it has to ignore Gibb's intervention and ignore pressure from the government when making internal appointments. Not confirming Brammer because of some other spurious reason will fool no one. This will really be a test case about how bad things really are at the BBC.

The reason this is so important is that a completely subservient BBC that fails to challenge Johnson’s fake world when it deviates from reality will probably [1] end democracy in the UK. It is a cop out to suggest this is the opposition's job if the opposition gets a fraction of the airtime the government has. A democracy where only one party gets elected because enough of the population believes a fake version of reality is not a true democracy. Right now the BBC is our main defence against that, and if it falls democracy in the UK will probably fall with it. .

[1] I say probably because there remains one possible route to end a government which has sufficient propaganda resources pushing its fantasy, and that is a public event that has to be reported which allows reality to shatter the government’s fake world. One example from the past was Sterling being thrown out of the ERM in 1992. The government’s reputation for economic management never recovered. However events like this and of this magnitude are very rare.

Masks and freedom

 

The government on 19th July intends to no longer make it compulsory to wear masks that protect people from catching COVID. Instead what people do to protect themselves from COVID will become a matter of personal responsibility. It is a ludicrous decision, almost beyond belief, when cases and hospitalisations are rising and millions of people are waiting to have their second vaccine dose. (One dose of vaccine gives little protection against getting the dominant Delta variant.)

To talk about personal responsibility when answering a question about mask wearing is so utterly stupid, yet the government are persisting with it. It is stupid because the masks most people wear mainly protect others from themselves if they have COVID, and do very little to protect the wearer from others if these others are not wearing a mask. In other words most masks protect others from yourself, not yourself from others. So personal responsibility does not come into it.

Precisely because most masks do little to protect the wearer, it will be tempting for many to not wear a mask if they are not obliged to by law. That means that anywhere they go indoors will be dangerous to other people. It’s a classic reason why you need a cooperative solution enforced by the state. The law enforces a decision that most would like (a safe environment), but which wouldn’t happen through individual action.

An obvious analogy is drink driving. We don't leave how much people drink before driving as a matter of personal responsibility, allowing those without enough responsibility to crash into other drivers. Another is guns. In the UK we have laws that ban people from owning a gun. We do not say that there is no need to outlaw guns because whether you get shot is a matter of personal responsibility.

I make that last analogy because so much of what the government does nowadays comes from the worst of the US libertarian right, either directly or through newspapers. In the US compulsory mask wearing has been very controversial, with many saying it unnecessarily restricts personal freedom. But while anyone can buy most types of gun in the US, that is not the case in the UK. For similar reasons outside the right wing press and the ravings of an actor, mask wearing has not been controversial among most of the UK public. For example this poll suggests that most people think compulsory mask wearing protects them from COVID and that it should be made compulsory. Most people want compulsory mask-wearing to continue.

The government will argue that with much of the population vaccinated, allowing mask wearing to be voluntary we do little harm. We have to learn to live with COVID, they will say. But learning to live with something does not equate to ignoring it. With cases rising rapidly in yet another COVID wave, anything the government does to reduce restrictions will intensify that exponential trend. It still remains possible, if very unlucky, for those with two vaccine doses to die of COVID. It is more likely, and hardly pleasant, to be hospitalised.

However the real problems are those who have only had a single dose of vaccine (or those who have only just had two doses). They are much more vulnerable to ending up in hospital and even dying from the Delta variant. There will be millions in that position, probably over 30% of the adult population by 19th July. Why not wait until they have been vaccinated?

I have heard many people say that new admissions to hospital are low because of vaccination so there is no need to worry. But hospital admissions lag new cases by around 10 days. It is true that vaccination means the chances of going to hospital after catching Covid are now lower than they were in January, say. But if the current rate holds over the next few months then hospitalisations will no longer look so low in a month or so, at a time hospitals are trying to reduce the backlog of non-Covid cases.

  

Another reason to wait is mutation. The best way to get a variant of Delta that overcomes the defences of vaccines is to allow Delta to spread among those who have had one dose of vaccine.

Making mask-wearing voluntary will dent the UK economic recovery. A large number of people who don’t want to take the risk, albeit low, of catching the Delta variant will stay away from social environments where others are not wearing a mask. Environments like shops and public transport, for example. Prominent ministers in this government have never appeared to understand the point that if cases keep on increasing and no lockdown is imposed, many people will lock themselves down. The extent of this will be lower because of vaccinations, but it will not disappear.

Among those who will suffer most from making mask-wearing voluntary will be workers that have to come into contact with many people. Shop assistants, bus drivers, plumbers and the like. I can choose whether to go into a shop that has probably had many people without masks in there, but the shop worker cannot.

Why is the government doing something that is unpopular, and makes so little sense? The Prime Minister in his press briefing yesterday said if not now then when? He fears that when the summer holidays end and more people are indoors, it will be difficult to end restrictions. The obvious reply is why not end restrictions when everyone has been fully vaccinated. Everyone in this case could include school children. The truth, I suspect, is that the Prime Minister is caving into his own crude libertarian [1] instincts and pressure from his MPs and the press. He can do that because of complete self-confidence that whatever he does his media will spin it in a favourable light and the BBC will not ask any awkward questions. .

The so called libertarian right likes to talk about freedom, and in this case the freedom not to wear masks. In return for this freedom we will get less freedom for all those that want to avoid getting Covid and are forced to avoid the maskless, and those that have no choice but to do so. Those unable to get vaccinated for medical reasons, or are otherwise vulnerable. Those that get Covid (and particularly Long Covid) as a result of ending compulsory mask-wearing will obviously lose much more of their freedom. As is so often the case with this government, freedom for a few means a lot less freedom for the many.

[1] I say its crude because it sees no problem in curtailing the liberty of others, by preventing them demonstrate for example. 

The COVID wave the government doesn’t want to talk about

 

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Right now it looks like the government have thrown away the advantages of getting vaccinated early by letting the Delta COVID variant get a hold in the UK. There is little doubt this was because the Prime Minister wanted a trade deal with India, and so put off putting them on the red list. Here is a graph of COVID cases in various countries, and the increase in the UK is because of the Delta variant.

If we hadn’t vaccinated so early this Delta wave would have been far far worse, and we would have either already locked the country down or been talking about doing so. That we are doing neither is because vaccination - particularly two doses of vaccine - is very effective (but not 100%) at stopping people getting the Delta virus, or stopping them going to hospital.

A better description is that we have a race between vaccination and the Delta variant, and the government by delaying putting India on the red list gave Delta a big head start. This head start could be crucial, for a reason I will explain later.

Anyone who thinks from the chart above that other countries are going to escape a Delta wave will be disappointed. Here is a week-old chart from the FT of how the Delta variant is gradually becoming the dominant variant in other countries.

Because Delta is replacing other variants, aggregates will continue to fall until close to the point at which Delta becomes dominant. One by one, we will see those countries that are currently seeing falling cases experience rising cases again. The Delta variant will produce a new COVID wave in the West, just as the Alpha (UK) variant did before.

What makes this wave different is that the age ranges that are vulnerable to dying from COVID have largely been vaccinated, so deaths from the virus should be lower. But even if deaths are very low, there are a number of problems with running a high level of cases of COVID even if it isn’t associated with deaths. The most obvious is the impact on hospitals.

As Delta mainly affects younger people you might have thought that the number of hospitalisations would be low relative to cases. Initial data suggested among the unvaccinated there was about double the number of hospitalisations per case for Delta than for Alpha. However once we take vaccination into account, the ratio of hospitalisations to cases is about half what it is in January. If that pattern persists, and cases keep rising, we may see serious pressure put on hospitals that are already struggling to get back to normal.

A second concern is Long COVID. At least 10% of those infected with COVID still have serious symptoms 12 weeks later. We do not know, for obvious reasons, whether these numbers will also apply to the Delta variant, but the presumption must be that they will. Allowing another large wave of COVID cases is therefore likely to significantly increase the already large number of people suffering from long COVID.

A third, but time limited, concern is disruption in education. As the Delta variant is mainly being spread among school aged children, it will disrupt the education of many. It is a time limited concern because school holidays are weeks away.

A fourth, and potentially most serious, concern with another wave of cases is that this provides ideal conditions for a new variant to emerge that could seriously diminish the effectiveness of a double dose of vaccine. We just do not know how likely such a development is, but the fact that Delta compromises the effectiveness of one dose suggests complacency is not warranted.

Some have pointed to a falling off of cases in some initial hotspots to suggest that this Delta wave may be short lived. This could be due to a number of factors that have nothing to do with the virus itself, such as school closures and to a smaller extent greater self-isolation among the population in those areas. However even if this pattern is repeated, it will be a long time before we see it at a national level.

The key question is how large a wave we are likely to see in the UK, and whether this will be replicated elsewhere. The bad news is the likelihood that every other region will experience something similar to our current hotspots in time. The potential good news is the summer holidays. The school holidays could reduce the speed of transmission among children, which gives us more time to get everyone vaccinated with two doses.

Which is why the PM’s decision to delay putting India on the red list was so stupid. If other countries are lucky, the school holidays will arrive just in time to prevent what has happened in the UK being repeated all over the West. It will slow down Delta before it really gets going, allowing vaccinations to continue and give those countries a good chance of muting the Delta wave. That chance would have been even greater for the UK if only India had been put on the red list at the same time as Pakistan and Bangladesh.

We can be pretty sure that ‘freedom day’ in the UK will happen while cases are still increasing, hospitalisations are still rising, and deaths will be well into double figures each day. That conjunction says so much about our government: Orwellian to the last. Freedom day as the Delta wave gathers pace.

At the initial stages of a wave, where key data is being revised repeatedly, it is hard to predict the extent of this wave and when its peak will be with any certainty. (We may even see a double-peak wave caused by the summer holidays.) But we can say with near certainty that the implications for hospitals and Long COVID will be very serious indeed.

And the UK government will try and ignore it all. They have made it clear that after much of the population has been vaccinated, they are going to live with COVID. Unfortunately that seems to mean absolving the government in any interest in mitigating the virus. On 17th May face masks were no longer recommended by the government in secondary schools, and that advice has not been reversed despite Delta being mainly transmitted in Schools. (Israel, also highly vaccinated, has been more sensible.) Schemes to help schools improve ventilation have been none. Nothing has been done to improve the government’s lamentable Test and Trace operation, or to incentivise people to self-isolate. The catalogue of failure is endless.

Will the government succeed in pretending there is nothing to worry about during the Delta Wave? Not for long, I suspect. The problem is that there is a small chance that even those who have been vaccinated twice can still get the Delta variant, particularly as this variant is so infectious. With hospitals moving into crisis, I suspect that will make many cautious about a full return to a pre-COVID lifestyle. The UK recovery is likely to be delayed.

While the Delta variant will cause problems for those countries that are well on their way to being fully vaccinated, the real hit will be in those countries that are only starting vaccination. There is a debate about how to get vaccine production to cover all countries as quickly as possible, but it is clear not nearly enough is being done by the West. They must do much more quickly, if only because otherwise the example of the Delta variant could be repeated in an even more serious form, and past experience suggests Western countries will not be able to keep that variant out.

What attitudes to lockdowns tell us about the right wing media

When I talk about how important the media is in forming political opinions and attitudes, some people tell me the causation is all the other way around. Their argument is that the press in particular reflects the views of their readers and not vice versa. It is certainly true that good newspapers are aware of what their typical readers think, and that going radically against that could harm the newspaper. Imagine what would happen, for example, if a newspaper declared football to be the work of the devil.

But media influence rarely works like that. Instead it influences views about things that most readers have little idea about, or it amplifies some views at the expense of others. For example, most people have a natural fear of the other. So when certain newspapers started talking about hordes of immigrants flooding the country, that had an influence on readers who were not accustomed to following the actual data. These readers generally knew that immigrants were not yet flooding their own town or neighbourhood, but they also thought they knew it was happening elsewhere because of what they had read, and feared it might be just a matter of time before it happened on their patch. There are plenty of other examples on a similar theme. For example people often wildly overestimate the amount of benefit fraud because of stories in the papers.

But, like declaring football was the work of the devil, there are limits to what the media can do to influence their readers. An interesting case study is the merits or otherwise of lockdowns during the COVID pandemic. Few will have escaped the fact that the right wing press has been full of articles about why lockdowns are unnecessary and harmful. So did that just reflect the views of their readers, and if not was this anti-lockdown campaign able to substantially shift public opinion?

On both counts the answer appears no. Consider the period of September 2020. We had already had one lockdown, so the public knew the arguments for them, and the right wing press had had plenty of time to present their anti-lockdown message. Here is a poll focused on the very limited measures the government had taken so far. What those answering the poll would not have known is that the government had recently rejected advice from its scientists for a much stronger lockdown.

Half of those answering thought the government had not done enough, and of course they proved to be right. But only 13% of people were following the line pushed by many in the right wing press that nothing needed to be done. Furthermore that anti-lockdown view was stronger in younger people, while newspaper readership is concentrated among older people.

So right wing papers were not reflecting their readership, and their ability to persuade has had at best limited success. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. The case for lockdowns is fairly obvious, and most people (particularly of an age that reads newspapers) are pretty cautious about the prospect of catching a life-threatening virus. Trying to persuade people to carry on mixing socially during a pandemic which is highly infectious is in the ‘football is the work of satan’ category.

So why are newspapers pushing this line, if they normally have a good idea of the limits to their persuasive powers. One reason is fairly obvious: lockdowns are very bad financially for newspapers. Sales collapse when people stay at home.

However a more interesting answer is that newspapers were not so much trying to persuade their readers so much as trying to persuade those in power. I noted recently how journalists at Fox sometimes talked directly to Trump (who famously relied on information from Fox rather than his civil servants), and how if you believe Cummings Johnson too was and is influenced by what he reads in the press, and particularly his old newspaper. It is more reasonable to see right wing newspapers championing an anti-lockdown approach as an argument among the governing right wing elite.

So what can we conclude from all this. First, the right wing press do not always follow their readership. That is why politicians are so keen to meet the editors of these papers on a regular basis, and don’t just look at their polling and focus groups instead. Second, newspapers cannot tell their readers what to do when it goes against readers interest and understanding. Newspaper propaganda works best on issues where their readers are not well informed.

Whenever I talk about press propaganda recently, I get told that countering propaganda with better information will not work, because voters will believe what they want to believe. There is a lot of truth in that. When Fox News didn’t follow Trump in declaring he had really won in 2020, they lost many viewers. But there are two crucial caveats when we come to the UK. First, most Conservative voters are not nearly as radicalised as many Trump supporters, yet. Second, and just as crucial, elections work on the margins, and the margins here are voters that have not become radicalised.

Indeed, if selective or inaccurate information didn’t influence readers or viewers, we would have no reason to be concerned about media bias. In reality we now have considerable evidence that media bias does matter. For that reason we should be very concerned that a large section of the press now acts as the publicity arm of the Conservative party nearly all of the time. Having a free press is a great ideal, and we have departed from that in a big way. Press propaganda is an integral part of how a populist plutocracy can stay in power.

I am very pessimistic that this can change that in the short term. While new media like the byline group are great, the typical reader of the Mail, Sun, Telegraph or Express, who has little interest in politics, is not going to read media which is mainly about politics and contains no sport, celebrity gossip etc. In my view the only way to reduce the power of the right wing press is to bring it under the control of Ofcom, and for Ofcom to enforce balance. That can only be done when opposition politicians win power, and are prepared to look beyond negative headlines and act to change one of the main reasons why they find it so hard to win power.