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Wednesday, November 26, 2014

'Understanding George Osborne' or 'Osborne's Idiotic Idea'

Simon Wren-Lewis:

Understanding George Osborne: Yesterday I spoke at the Resolution Foundation’s launch of their analysis of the UK political parties’ fiscal plans post 2015. I believe this analysis shows two things very clearly. First, there is potentially a large gap between the amount of austerity planned by the two major parties. Second, George Osborne’s plans are scarcely credible. They represent a shrinking of the UK state that is unprecedented and which in my view virtually no one wants.  
I would add one other charge - Osborne's plans are illiterate in macroeconomic terms. The UK economy desperately needs more growth. ...
In this situation a Chancellor should not plan to reduce growth further. I have yet to come across a single macroeconomist who argues that Osborne’s plans for renewed austerity will not in themselves reduce aggregate demand. So doing this when the recovery could go much further but is still fragile is just plain dumb. It is even dumber if you have done this once before, in a very similar situation, and the risks I outlined above have indeed materialised.
So why is the Chancellor proposing to make the same mistake twice? ...
I cannot think of any way to rationalise what the Chancellor is planning in macroeconomic terms. But perhaps I’m looking for something that does not exist. Perhaps he does not have a coherent economic framework. Instead he has a clear political framework, which has so far been remarkably successful. The goal is to reduce the size of the state, and because (with his encouragement) mediamacro believes reducing the deficit is the number one priority, he is using deficit reduction as a means to that end. However another priority is to get re-elected, so deficit reduction has to take place at the start of any parliament, so its impact on growth has disappeared by the time of the next election. But this explanation would imply we have a Chancellor that quite cynically puts the welfare of the majority of the UK’s citizens at major risk for ideological and political ends, and I do not think I have ever experienced a UK Chancellor (with possibly one exception) who has done that. But as Sherlock Holmes famously said ...

Chris Dillow:

Osborne's idiotic idea: The FT reports that George Osborne wants to make unicorn farming compulsory:

The new fiscal mandate is expected to enshrine in law one area of common ground between the Tories and Lib Dems: that the cyclically adjusted current deficit should be eliminated by 2017-18.

This is imbecilic. ...

Now, you might think that, in saying all this I'm merely being a Keynesian.

Wrong. In fact, I'm writing in a Hayekian spirit. Hayek famously and correctly argued that economic knowledge was inherently fragmentary and dispersed and so central agencies could not possibly know very much. I'm echoing him. I'm saying that the OBR cannot know enough about the productive potential of millions of firms to know what the output gap is. And it hasn't got enough knowledge of the future to predict recessions.

In presuming otherwise, Osborne is thus not only anti-Keynesian, but anti-Hayekian. I thus agree with Simon - that he is illiterate and plain dumb.

    Posted by on Wednesday, November 26, 2014 at 08:58 AM in Economics, Fiscal Policy, Politics | Permalink  Comments (13)


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