Brown's appointment of Tim Besley to the Monetary Policy Committee looks like a nice vindication of Alan Blinder's saying - that economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and have the most influence on policy where they know the least.
Besley's done little work on macro and monetary policy; this isn't a criticism - just a sign that these fields don't attract many of the best minds these days. But he has written this (pdf):
In a representative democracy, the bundling of issues together with the fact that citizens have only one vote, means that policy outcomes on specific issues may diverge far from what the majority of citizens want. In such circumstances, allowing citizens to out legislation directly on the ballot permits the 'unbundling' of these issues, which forces a closer relationship between policy outcomes and popular preferences.
The chances of Brown heeding this are zero. He probably reckons it's better that Tim fiddles around with quarter-point moves on interest rates than actually comes up with ways of fixing our broken democratic institutions.
Not all of Tim's views are so dangerous for Brown, though. In this study of MPs expenses (pdf), he estimated that "each vote attended by a Conservative MP cost the taxpayer about £58 more than a vote attended by a Labour or Lib Dem MP."
I'm not sure that I've ever heard rational arguments against an experiment in plebiscitory democracy: don't people just raise their voices, wave their arms and allude to Hitler? A fair comment on vegetarianism, perhaps, but surely inadequate here.
Posted by: dearieme | July 13, 2006 at 06:01 PM