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Monday, August 03, 2015

'Is Deficit Fetishism Innate or Contextual?'

A quick one before hitting the road. Is deficit fetishism bullshit? This is from Simon Wren-Lewis:

Is deficit fetishism innate or contextual?: In a couple of interesting posts, Jonathan Hopkin and Ben Rosamond, political scientists from the LSE and Copenhagen respectively, talk about ‘political bullshit’. They use ‘bullshit’ as a technical term due to Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Unlike lying, bullshit tells false stories that pay no heed to the truth. Their appeal is more to common sense, or what Tyler Cowen calls common sense morality. At a primitive level it is the stuff of political sound bites, but at a slightly more detailed level it is the language of what Krugman ironically calls ‘Very Serious People’.
The implication which can then be drawn is that because bullshit does not reside in the “court of truth”, trying to combat it with facts, knowledge or expertise may have limited effectiveness. The conditions under which this might be true, and the extent to which information technology impacts on this, are fascinating issues...
In the case of fiscal policy, deficit fetishism as bullshit involves appeals to ‘common sense’ by invoking simple analogies with households, often coupled with an element of morality - it is responsible to pay down debts. The point in calling it bullshit (in this technical sense) is that attempts to counter it by appeals to facts or knowledge (e.g. the government is not like a household, as every economist knows) may have limited effectiveness. Instead it might be better to fight bullshit with bullshit...
I want to ask whether deficit fetishism will always be powerful bullshit, or whether its force is a symptom of a particular time, and what is more a time that may by now have passed. ...
At first sight deficit fetishism seems to be innate...

    Posted by on Monday, August 3, 2015 at 10:25 AM in Budget Deficit, Economics, Politics | Permalink  Comments (23)


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