Explaining macroeconomics to the Swabian housewife

Matthew Bishop has a nice simple post at SPERI suggesting how the ‘economy is like a household’ idea can be tackled. He is correct that this analogy has tremendous power, to the extent that I doubt we would have seen so much UK austerity without it. He uses an exchange between Yanis Varoufakis and a member of the Question Time audience to suggest that attempts to simply explain the economics are ineffective. He suggests that the “problem, as Jonathan Hopkin and Ben Rosamond have suggested (here and here), is that you cannot fight ‘political bullshit’ with facts”.

I want to make some observations, in ascending order of importance.

1. I think he is right that economists can usefully point out that households do not always balance their budgets. But all the examples he gives help explain why it may make sense for the government to borrow to invest. Indeed he could have added comparisons between governments and firms in this respect. That is why it is easy for economists to now argue that governments should be borrowing more to invest. I’m sure most economists would use exactly these analogies: after all most do try to teach this stuff.
   
   
2. However these analogies do little for the issue the audience member thought we were dealing with. He thought the analogy was exactly the case of spending too much on excessive drinking, and needing to sober up financially. While the examples Matthew quotes get you over the simplistic idea that governments should never borrow, they do not explain why (a) it is OK in principle to keep the ratio of government debt to GDP constant (governments live forever), and (b) why it makes sense for governments to borrow a lot more in a recession (the automatic stabilisers), or even (c) why the government should go out of its way to borrow even more in a recession when interest rates are at the Zero Lower Bound. We can try and get these ideas across as simply as we can, as I have tried many times (and suggestions on how to do it better are always welcome), but it is very difficult to do so in a minute or two on Question Time. It is sufficiently difficult that before the General Theory it was not understood by most economists.
   
   
3. I think the suggestion that economists are too busy trying to be correct and therefore too scornful of simple analogies is a little unfair. Only a little: in a live public appearance there is always the concern about what your colleagues in the department will say afterwards. Economists are also aware, as Chris Dillow points out, that partial analogies used in one context can easily backfire in others. However I doubt very much that most economists do the equivalent of mocking “every grammatical error made by friends practising their holiday Spanish”.
   
   
4. The big difference between economists and scientists at CERN is not that economists are less respectful of lay people’s mistakes. It is (a) they have politicians repeating false analogies about their subject as if they were facts, and (b) large sections of the print media doing the same, and (c) most of the rest of the media too clueless to challenge these falsehoods.
   
   
5. This is why, for an evidence based discipline like economics, the response ‘economists know that the economy is not like a household in important respects and here is why’ is not at the end of the day arrogant or dismissive. If Brian Cox was asked on Question Time ‘what is all this about the Earth moving: it is obvious that everything moves around the Earth’ we would not blink an eyelid if he replied ‘No, scientists know that is not true and it only seems that way to you because..’.
   
   
6. What austerity tells us, just as the climate change denial tells us, is that in today’s world respect for science is fragile. In the US public opinion about climate change is sharply divided along political lines, despite the near unanimity among scientists. It is this that should really worry us, and not how climate change scientists can better communicate with the public, desirable though that might be in itself. A world where the scientist has to compete on equal terms with the ignorant polemicist is not a healthy world.

In defence of George Osborne over Brexit

This by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator (HT Tim Harford) starts well: “Sometimes, George Osborne’s dishonesty is simply breathtaking.” Who could disagree with that? Except that the statement Nelson objects to is the following:

“Britain would be permanently poorer if we left the European Union, to the tune of £4,300 for every household in the county. That’s a fact everyone should think about as they consider how to vote.”

Nelson does not object to the economics behind the number, set out clearly in a Treasury study released yesterday. (For an excellent review of the study, which makes both of the points I make below, see Chris Giles here.) Instead he has two objections:

1. With economic growth we would not be poorer under Brexit, just less richer than we would have been if we had remained in the EU
   
   
2. The household figure is derived by dividing the GDP ‘loss’ by the number of households in the UK.
   
   

Nelson makes the point that household after tax income is only about two thirds of GDP/households. So implicitly he is saying is that we shouldn’t count lower taxes (and therefore government spending) and investment (future incomes) when assessing whether people would be poorer. But that seems silly. We all benefit from total government spending and investment, so we would feel less well off if we lost some of that. [1]

Indeed I have done exactly as the Chancellor has done when assessing the impact of 2010 austerity. I calculated, using OBR figures, that austerity cost each UK household at least £4000. The two figures appear comparable, but in fact they are not. My figure is a total one-off cost, on the (admitted very optimistic) assumption that the UK economy had completely recovered from 2010 austerity by 2013. The Brexit cost is a continuing loss each year.

Alas for Fraser Nelson dividing any GDP loss by the number of households is standard practice among economists (see John Van Reenen here for example), and we do it to make our analysis more relevant to those who do not commonly think in terms of GDP. It is also common practice to think about counterfactuals: if we did X (Leave) rather than Y (Remain) how much better/worse off would we be. It is just much clearer to do things that way. Who knows how much richer we will be by 2030: that would be a pretty unreliable forecast, because it depends on pretty well everything. In contrast we can be much surer (although still uncertain) about what the impact of just one change (leaving the EU) will have.

Now if you wanted to avoid any ambiguity, you could rewrite the first sentence of the Chancellor’s statement as follows:

““Britain would be worse off if we left the European Union compared to if we stayed in, to the tune of £4,300 for every household in the county by 2030, and for each and every year after that.”

If this is honest, does that make the original version dishonest. I do not think so.

If this report illustrates anything, it is that it would have been much more effective to have launched a 2003 joining the Euro type exercise immediately after the 2015 election victory, consulting widely among outside experts, and perhaps getting some of them to write key parts of the report. That would have produced a wider range of numbers for the cost, and the Chancellor could have then chosen the higher one, simply inserting ‘up to’ in front of it. But here I am, defending George Osborne and advising him on spin. I think I better go and lie down for a while.

[1] Slightly pedantic economic point: we should really use GNP rather than GDP, but it makes little difference here.