Brexiter nonsense and policy entrepreneurs

Brexiters typically sound convincing if you know little about what they are talking about. Ian Dunt takes a typical example from Rees-Mogg (still favourite to be next Conservative leader). Rees-Mogg asserts, with absolute certainty, that a House of Lords committee have missed a crucial aspect of trade law related to WTO rules. Trade experts spend some time scratching their heads wondering what on earth he is talking about. They finally work out where the idea comes from, and why it has next to zero applicability to Brexit. (See also Jim Cornelius here.)

As Dunt points out, nonsense of this kind is effective. Because broadcasters often fail to match Brexiters with trade experts, they get away with their nonsense. By the time the nonsense is revealed as such, and enough people know why it is nonsense. the discussion has moved on and new nonsense appears. The fantasy that is Brexit remains intact at the level of public discourse.

Politicians like Rees-Mogg are not able to generate this nonsense themselves. How could they when they seem to spend most of their lives going from one broadcast studio to the next. Because this nonsense normally has some tenuous connection to reality, it has to come from someone with some knowledge of international trade and trade agreements. Welcome to the policy entrepreneur.

The term policy entrepreneur comes I believe from Paul Krugman’s first book from 1995, Peddling Prosperity, which unfortunately remains as relevant as ever. The book begins with the Laffer curve and the economists - including Laffer - who promoted the idea that cutting taxes would raise revenue. It is a typical piece of nonsense. It takes the reality that if taxes were 100% lots of people would stop working, and mutates this into the idea that taxes are already so high that cutting them would encourage more growth such that tax revenue will rise. It is typical political bullshit: giving an imagined respectable gloss on something that too many Republicans just wish were true.

But in the latter part of Peddling Prosperity things got personal, as Krugman describes how different policy entrepreneurs took some of Krugman’s own research and used it in a way Krugman would not to lobby President Clinton for trade protection. Economic theory suggests that if a profitable opportunity arises and there are no barriers to entry people will exploit that opportunity. I think the policy entrepreneur is a good example of that happening. Some politicians want to pursue a policy but want some kind of rationalisation for it, and the policy entrepreneur steps up with some nonsense erroneously derived from economics or some other discipline to provide that veneer of respectability.

Policy entrepreneurs can be academics: in the UK the most obvious example many would point to is Patrick Minford. But they can just be good lobbyists, who put themselves in the right place at the right time. In the case of Brexit, the policy entrepreneurs from whom the Brexiters get most of their information are in the Legatum Institute. BuzzFeed has a very good profile of their until recently director of economic policy, Shanker Singham. It is worth quoting from it.

“BuzzFeed News spoke to multiple economists, policy wonks, Conservative advisers, politicians, and journalists who said they’re baffled that he’s become so prominent in the Brexit debate. They say his standing in the trade world has been overblown. They don’t dispute that he knows the subject, but most hadn’t heard of him before he emerged at Legatum. They find it exasperating that he’s been portrayed in the UK as a vastly experienced trade negotiator, as if he were one of the decision-makers in the room when the world’s biggest trade agreements were hammered out. He wasn’t that close to the action, they say.”

But of course someone with more experience or more knowledge could not take Singham’s place, because they would not be the true believer that Brexiters require. When you have faith as the Brexiters have, you do not seek real knowledge, but just enough facts to sound good and thereby promote the cause.

Policy entrepreneurs, whether they are seeing a profit opportunity or really are true believers, are a symptom that what I call the knowledge transmission mechanism has broken down. As Krugman’s book indicates, Brexit is not the first time that policy entrepreneurs have helped politicians enact destructive policies. Here I argue that that the knowledge transmission also broke down when it came to austerity. (Paper here.) It is possible for policymakers to use intermediaries like civil servants to find the best research and use it - it has happened in the past - but today it seems like the exception rather than the rule.

Protecting the public from policy entrepreneurs

One of Paul Krugman’s first books, Peddling Prosperity, made a distinction between academic economists and people he called "policy entrepreneurs". These are individuals who promote particular intellectual positions and ideological policy prescriptions which have little or no academic support, but which may appeal to certain politicians.

I remember it as a great book, and unfortunately one of the main subjects - the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves - is still current in the US. It remains the case that this idea has virtually zero academic support, but for whatever reason - the activities of policy entrepreneurs being one - it still has a tight hold on the Republican Party.

I also remember being dissatisfied with the concept of the policy entrepreneur. It seemed to me that the book failed to situate them in a more general framework of how different interests influenced policy. Why were policy entrepreneurs particularly prevalent in economics? Could academics also be policy entrepreneurs? But that was the social scientist in me speaking. It was clear that such people existed, and that their influence could be far from benign.

I was reminded of all this when someone referred me to Andrew Sentance’s latest piece where he advocates moving to a zero inflation target. Coupled with George Osborne and David Cameron proclaiming zero inflation as a great success, a horrible thought occurred. If these guys were re-elected, might they find the arguments of Andrew Sentance appealing, and actually go for zero inflation? (In the UK, the Chancellor sets the inflation target.) Getting rid of inflation completely - sounds like a vote winner!

Why is it a horrible thought? Because all the academic discussion has been going in the opposite direction, for a very good reason. The Great Recession has highlighted the problems caused by the lower bound for nominal interest rates. That problem will not go away if that lower bound turns out to be -1% rather than zero. The discussion of secular stagnation has highlighted how the ‘underlying’ level of real interest rates has steadily fallen over the last few decades. Put the two together, and you see that a 2% inflation target may mean that we hit the interest rate lower bound far too frequently for comfort. A higher inflation target is one way, although not the only way, of reducing this problem.

Given this, calling for a zero inflation target seems perverse. In response, Andrew Sentance says this: “And the fact that a target of zero inflation may not allow central banks to easily impose negative real interest rates may actually be a good thing – protecting savers, who have suffered heavily as a result of very low interest rates since the financial crisis.” This is just the kind of thing a policy entrepreneur would say: identify your target interest group, and appeal to their interests over the common good. A politician who wants to appeal to savers might think that sounds like a good idea, and before you know it the policy is in place.

I suspect things have moved on a little since Peddling Prosperity was published. The role of think tanks is probably greater. The good ones are a means of channelling academic research, as in this very recent discussion of how to enhance real wage growth from the Resolution Foundation (which I would call excellent if it didn’t have a contribution from me). But they are matched by others that are effectively the institutional equivalent of policy entrepreneurs.

One answer to this problem is delegation. If you delegate an issue to a non-political body, that institution is going to be less swayed by the policy entrepreneur, and more influenced by knowledge and evidence. The independent central bank is an obvious example. It is interesting that one of the contributions to the Resolution Foundation volume, from John Van Reenen, calls for a “permanent infrastructure strategy board”, to improve the level and quality of national infrastructure. Of course with delegation comes the danger of power without accountability, and one particular central bank is a good example of that.  

Is delegation the only way we have of protecting ourselves from the policy entrepreneur? I have one final thought. (The idea comes from Chris Dillow, but he said it on my blog first!). Policy entrepreneurs exist in part because of sectional interests. The problem arises if sectional interests drown out evidence based policy. Society as a whole clearly has an interest in evidence based policy, but one institution that is well placed to protect society’s interest here is academia. Although - in the UK at least - academia encourages the dissemination of research, most academics are always going to value their research above its dissemination, because that is how internal incentives work. So maybe the academic sector needs to create a few policy entrepreneurs of its own, whose mission is to disseminate not their own research, but research in a whole field. One of two examples already exist - maybe we should have more of them.