Stumbling and Mumbling

Criminally stupid

There is a point at which stupidity ceases to be a merely intellectual error and becomes a crime. If Nick Cohen is right, the government has crossed this point. He writes:

[David] Davis seems closer in spirit to a bubbly PR girl than a hard-headed statesman. He wants to hear only good news. He wants to see only smiling faces…On no account must businessmen and women say they are worried about Britain abandoning its membership of the single market, the civil servants warn. They needed to ‘go into the meeting saying that they were very excited by the possibilities of Brexit. Anyone who felt differently tended to be asked to leave in the first five minutes.

This echoes Ian Dunt:

We are living under rulers who do not believe, or at least refuse to trade in, objective fact. Reality is a barrier to the successful implementation of Brexit and must therefore be ignored.

Now, I have a dim view of this government but even I struggle to believe these accusations simply because they are so outrageous - though I fear that the "have cake and it it" memo corroborates them.

I say this because we know that top decision-makers can be prone to at least five cognitive errors*. These are: overconfidence; wishful thinking; the confirmation bias; the planning fallacy; and the tendency to become detached from the reality of what’s happened on the ground. Any good decision-maker should bend over backwards to avoid these obvious errors. If Nick and Ian are remotely correct, however, our government is doing the precise opposite; it is creating a climate in which these errors are actually encouraged.

In an uncertain world, it is impossible to take the best possible course of action. We should, however, be able to avoid the most egregious errors. The Tories seem however to be cultivating them.

This is unforgivable.  

For one thing, these errors have been well-known for years. Kenneth Boulding warned (pdf) back in 1965 of the danger of decision-makers “operating in purely imaginary worlds”. And the research on cognitive biases dates back at least as far as the 1970s and should by now be well-known to anyone who has even a passing interest in the social sciences.

But even if ministers are pig-ignorant of intellectual history – which itself is unacceptable - they should at least be aware of the Chilcot report. It showed that the decision to go to war in Iraq was based in part upon errors such as wishful thinking and the confirmation bias. And it warned that positive thinking “can prevent ground truth from reaching senior ears”.

Success – or even basic competence – requires that we learn from mistakes. This government, however, seems to be doing the opposite. Instead of learning Chilcot’s lessons, it seems desperate to repeat them.

All this poses two questions. One is: how can people who supported Brexit for years or even decades be so appalling prepared for the process of doing so?

But there’s a bigger question. The point of being a government minister is that you must take decisions. You should therefore at least know how to avoid the worst ones, and be acquainted with the basics of decision theory. But the government seems to fail even in this. Which poses the question: why the hell do they want power if they are unwilling to exercise it with even minimal competence?

* Of course, there are many more. I’m confining myself to those that seem most relevant for now.

Not understanding the right

We leftists should make more effort to understand the rise of the populist right, says Janice Tuner in the Times:

After defeat you must ask why. It is easy to blame Breitbart or the tabloids, to label every Trump voter a white supremacist, every Leaver a “Brextremist”. Easier than asking…what the hell you missed.

Here we must sharply distinguish two different meanings of “understand”: being aware of the cause of something versus being sympathetic to something. I can do the former without the latter.

For my purposes, perhaps the biggest cause of the rise of populism was pointed out back in 2006 by Ben Friedman. Stagnant incomes, he said, tend to increase support for intolerance. They lead to a rise in right-wing extremism. In the UK, this was exacerbated by the fact that constrained government spending allowed people to blame immigrants for poor public services. This created a demand for change - and people who feel they have lost out are often willing to gamble even on forlorn prospects.

Allied to this is the fact that people feel that they lack power – that it is others (“the elite”) that have control, not themselves. As Will says, Vote Leave’s slogan “take back control” was a stroke of genius. And Janice quotes approvingly Joan Williams claim that workers disliked Clinton because she reminded them of the professionals who have bossed them around all their lives.

Herein, though, lies a paradox. I have for years been opposing the austerity, managerialism and inequality that have created populism. And I’ve not had much support from those like Janice who now demand that I “understand” the right.

But let’s be clear here. Trump and Farage do not understand the working class. They come from immensely privileged backgrounds, have spent little time studying the real problems workers have, and make no effort to identify genuine circumstances where the people might be right and elites wrong. Instead, they are just narcissists who found a ready market for their bigotry thanks to helpful socioeconomic conditions, a complicit media and cognitive biases among voters.

There’s nothing much to understand here, because there is simply no credible evidence that their proposed policies will actually help workers (other than Trump’s fiscal expansion). It’s hard to engage with a vacuum.

This is especially true because, as Nick Cohen points out, there is in fact an intellectual crisis on the right.

In my lifetime, we Marxists have faced three different types of opponent on the right. First, there were those who were sceptical of grand theories such as Burke and Oakeshott; think of Popper’s critique of Marx in The Open Society and its Enemies. Then there was neoliberal Thatcherism. And now there’s populism.

But these different iterations are opposed to each other. Populists’ supposed concern that immigration is reducing the cohesion of traditional communities sits uneasily with the fact that Thatcher’s attack on miners destroyed such communities. And their assertion of the “will of the people” flatly contradicts Burke’s view that MPs should over-ride the poor judgement of voters.    

These iterations have very little in common, except perhaps a hatred of freedom and equality.

And you want me to understand this? To quote Thatcher: no, no no.

Forecasting GDP

The OBR’s downbeat forecasts for the economy have caused Brexiteers to question its competence. For example, Iain Duncan Smith says it has been “pretty much been wrong on everything.” Such attacks miss two important facts.

Fact one is that there is a crucial difference between unconditional and conditional forecasts. A conditional forecast is the sort that says: “if you put your hand in the fire you’ll get burnt.” An unconditional forecast says “you’ll get burnt”. These are obviously two different things.

Personally, I think unconditional forecasts - the sort that say “GDP will grow 1.4% next year” - are pretty much worthless and simply bring economics into disrepute.

But this isn’t the issue here. Instead, Brexiteers’ beef is with the OBR’s conditional forecast – with its claim that:

Over the time horizon of our forecast any likely Brexit outcome would lead to lower trade flows, lower investment and lower net inward migration than we would otherwise have seen, and hence lower potential output.

Is this claim wrong? Attacks upon the OBR’s record at unconditional forecasts are just childish ad hominem arguments that are irrelevant – not least because the OBR’s view is shared by so many others.

Better arguments would be that Brexit would permit freer trade (as Gerard Lyons still believes) and that this, plus sterling’s fall, would boost GDP growth.

Personally, I doubt this. But what’s the evidence?

You could argue that today’s figures showing a better than expected rise in business investment in Q3 is consistent with Brexiteers’ optimism; it might show that industry is indeed tooling up in anticipation of higher demand.

But here comes my second fact. It’s not just pointy-headed experts and elites that are gloomy about the economy. So too are the people.

The thinking here is simple. Households’ decisions on how much to spend should be forward-looking: if we anticipate good times, we’ll spend more than if we expect bad.

And this thinking is correct, to some extent. My chart shows that the ratio of consumer spending to house prices (a rough proxy for spending-wealth ratios) has predicted medium-term GDP growth in the past. Low spending in 1973, 1979, the late 80s and mid-00s all led to slower GDP growth, and high spending in the mid-90s led to decent growth. Since 1971 there’s been a correlation of 0.63 between the consumption-house price ratio and subsequent five-year growth in real GDP.

Which brings me to the punchline. This ratio is currently below its post-1971 average, which points to below-average GDP growth. Not catastrophic, note – merely below average. In fact, if post-1971 relationships hold, this ratio predicts GDP growth of 1.8% per year until 2021 – which, coincidentally, is exactly the same as the OBR forecasts.

Now, you can quibble with this, not least because there is of course a margin of error in this relationship. Brexiteers might argue, I suppose, that because consumer spending is partly shaped by habits it hasn’t yet fully responded to the good news of the Brexit vote. Such a hypothesis implies that spending should rise a lot in coming months. Let’s see.

For now, though, this leaves Brexiteers with a problem. It’s not just the experts they so despise that are downbeat about the economy. So too are those founts of all wisdom, the people.  

Populists as snake oil sellers

Simon wonders why disenchantment with globalization has caused people to turn to what he calls snake oil salesmen. That phrase is apt, because snake oil salesmen thrived for decades. And some of the reasons they did so might be relevant today.

My source here is a wonderful paper (pdf) by Werner Troesken which describes the massive growth in patent medicines in 19^th century America. This suggests to me four points of similarity between snake oil salesmen and populist politicians.

First, patent remedies weren’t entirely ineffective. They often contained alcohol or opium which gave people at least a short-term pep. As Ran Spielger shows (pdf), if people mistake this short-term boost for a genuine cure (which is especially likely if their ailment would have cleared up anyway) then demand for quacks will grow. In this tradition. Trump is mixing harmful anti-globalization policies with a helpful fiscal stimulus.

Secondly, the very fact that patent medicines failed to eradicate chronic ailments meant that the market for them grew over time as more people got ill. And ill people are desperate, and willing to take risks. Troesken quotes Albert Prescott, a chemistry professor writing in 1881:

Just as men driven to straights will put their last pittance into the lottery instead of the savings bank…so, with the better excuse of bodily prostration and nervous restlessness, against his own judgement, and suffering with a glimmering apprehension of the wholly unscrupulous character of the human harpies who practice on his credulity, the sick man tries one game of chance among the unknown remedies.

This, of course, expresses an element of prospect theory – that people facing losses take risks. And this same thing helps explain the rise of populism: people who feel they are losing out from the existing order gamble on change.

Thirdly, patent medicine sellers devoted huge efforts to marketing – an effort which consisted of gross over-hype, claiming their products to be “most efficacious in every way.” Troesken says:

Why promise to cure just one disease, and unnecessarily limit your market?  Promise to cure everything, and more people try the product—the more vile, painful, and incurable the disease, the better. Similarly, do not just claim to make the patient feel better, promise a full blown cure.

Genuine doctors were powerless against this sales drive, because ill-informed customers could not distinguish between quality and quackery. Troesken says:

The high-cost provider would have trouble signaling high quality through advertising because all providers, even the low-quality ones, are using their advertising to signal high quality.  Consumers would therefore discount the claims of the high-quality provider just as much as they discount the claims of the low-quality, dishonest provider….The…physician might have also told the patient: “don’t waste your money on patent medicines; they will not be able to cure you either.”  But absent some independent authority telling patients that the physician knew more than the advertiser of patent medicines, it is not clear why patients would have attached any more meaning to such a statement than they attached to advertisements

There’s a direct parallel between this the inadequacy of the media today. The BBC’s decision to become impartial between truth and lies means that the “independent authority” that might help people distinguish between quacks and experts is indeed absent.

Finally, quacks succeeded by denying that proper doctors had any genuine expertise – a denial aided by the fact that their expertise was indeed limited*. Troesken quotes Scribner’s Monthly from 1881, a magazine which advertised patent medicines, despite objections from physicians:

There is no such thing as medical authority…. The people are, and are obliged to be, the only judges of medicine and of physicians

When Jacob Rees-Mogg says that “experts, soothsayers, astrologers are all in the same category” he is simply echoing a 19^th century shyster – a fact which perhaps won’t surprise you.

My point here is simple. There’s nothing new under the sun. Simon is dead right to liken populists to snake oil salesmen because both use similar methods.

And the methods work. Liberals like to think that in the marketplace for ideas, good ideas will beat bad ones, just as in the marketplace for products good ones will displace bad ones. History, however, warns us that in both cases, it isn’t necessarily so. 

* You might see another parallel here with today’s debate between elites and populists.

Why not worker-directors?

I’m disappointed but not surprised that Theresa May has backtracked on the promise to put workers onto company boards. But let’s be clear why I’m disappointed.

A single worker-director would not greatly empower workers – although of course it might be a stepping stone towards a greater voice. Sam might be right to say that giving workers shares might be a better alternative.

Instead, I favour worker-directors not so much because I'm a socialist but because I'm a libertarian. I support them for the same reason that I support free markets (in some contexts) and free speech. It’s because I believe in cognitive diversity. Worker-directors would increase boardroom diversity – not least by bringing ground truth to the table – and thus improve decision-making. The more intelligent fund managers see this. This is what Aberdeen Asset Management told the BIS select committee:

There is a significant body of evidence showing that mixed teams make better decisions. The best boards feature a mix of gender, ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds.  Any board that believes it cannot be enhanced by the inclusion of views from significant parts of society is clearly suffering from closed minds in more ways than one.

This is especially the case because worker-directors have skin in the game. Workers are more exposed to the risk of the company doing badly than are outside shareholders, and so have a big incentive to ensure it is well-managed. As Tom says:

Employees have far more firm-specific risk than investors, and are acutely aware of the need to act in a way that does not damage their known "investment" in the business. In contrast, especially where the "shareholder" is an intermediary, investors have far less at stake in any given company, and can often act in a very short-term fashion to their own benefit.

I’ll concede that these arguments run into a problem. Evidence from Germany – where worker-directors are more common – suggests that their effect upon corporate performance is mixed: see, for example, this survey (pdf) by John Addison and Claus Schnabel.

This, though, might disguise the fact that there is a (large) subset of firms where worker-directors do make a positive contribution. These are in firms where workers are skilled and informed. Larry Fauver and Michael Fuerst say (pdf):

Labor representation increases firm value by acting as a conduit for the flow of information…On an operational level, it is arguable that labor has a unique perspective on the costs of production, especially those related to worker hours. A labor presence on the board consequently provides unique insight into project feasibility and therefore improves corporate decision-making.

They show that in higher-tech industries, worker directors do indeed increase shareholder value.

All this brings me to a paradox. Theresa May believes we should listen to the “will of the British people” even when this conflicts with expert opinion. And there are times when this is correct. Sometimes, the people do indeed know more than experts: this is the case if knowledge is dispersed and fragmentary or if the people know ground truth better than experts.

And as I’ve said, these conditions are more likely to be satisfied in workplaces than was the case in the Brexit vote. Which poses the question: how can Ms May favour giving people a voice in some circumstances but not in others, when that voice is likely to be an informed one?

The answer, I fear, is simple. Ms May wants to hear the people’s voice not out of a belief in the wisdom of crowds, but because she’s simply a populist. She want to hear the worst of people’s voices, not the best.  

On class politics

Trump’s election victory has led to calls to bring class back into leftist politics. “Class trumps gender, and it’s driving American politics” says Joan Williams. Sam Dale attacks the “toxic failure of identity politics” and says “Liberal elites have no clue about the lives of the working class. They should learn.” John Gapper writes that the resentment that led to Trump and Brexit “seems to me to originate on the factory floor.” And Mark Lilla writes:

The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.

Of course, I applaud this re-assertion of class – which, in generals if not specifics, applies equally to the UK. We must, however, distinguish between a good and bad way of bringing class back into politics.

The bad way is to regard the “white working class” as yet another “demographic” to be catered to by marketing politics, often by claiming to heed their “legitimate concerns” about immigration.

I fear this would fail in its own terms: workers don’t trust politicians who look like their bosses and who claim insincerely to care about their concerns.

But it fails in other ways. The very notion of a “white” working class plays the ruling class’s game of divide and rule. This isn’t just because it pits class politics against identity politics, but also because it imputes a racism to workers which is perhaps just as prevalent – and more damaging – among the boss class. It downgrades the many other genuine problems workers have, such as stagnant wages, insecurity and workplace tyranny. And it has the absurd implication that ethnic minorities aren’t part of the working class too.

There is, however, a more intelligent form of class politics. This starts from the fact that class isn’t a state of mind but an objective fact: if you’re in a position of subordination to an employer, you’re working class whatever you feel. This means that being working class unites otherwise disparate people. The immigrant chambermaid, the skilled coder whose boss is a twat, and the academic facing the neoliberalization of the university are all working class.

This means they have some common interests. All would benefit from increased control in the workplace and increased bargaining power.

In this sense, class politics should be a unifying force. And there needn’t be a conflict between class politics in this sense and identity politics, for at least three reasons:

 - The same fuller employment and anti-austerity policies that would benefit workers would also help reduce gender and ethnic inequalities. In a tight labour market, employers will have less power to indulge racist and sexist attitudes.

 - Faster growth in real wages would foster a climate of tolerance of diversity. This year’s events in the UK and US have vindicated Ben Friedman’s point that economic growth breeds liberalism and stagnation creates intolerance and racism.

 - The same high basic income that increases workers’ bargaining power is also (pdf) a feminist policy, both because it valorizes what has traditionally been “women’s work” outside the marketplace, and because it gives women the ability to flee abusive relationships.

Of course, all this is easier said than done. One challenge for the left – which is as great today as in Marx’s time – is to build class consciousness. Politics isn’t just a marketing exercise aimed at getting our person into office. It’s about building a constituency for intelligent class politics. This is a long game.

But let’s remember the underlying fact here. The interests of the working class are, to a fair extent, the interests of most people. In this sense, the working class is not a problem in politics. It’s the solution.

Ideology in economics

Much as I admire both protagaonists, the debate between Simon and Jo on the role of ideology in economics left me cold. I’m not interested in whether economics is mainstream or heterodox.

To see my point, let’s take an example from outside macro – the capital asset pricing model. This is an elegant, internally consistent and well micro-founded theory.

And it’s wrong. In particular, we’ve known since the first tests of it that low-risk stocks do better than they should. This is weird: theory tells us there should be a trade-off between risk and return, but the facts tell us otherwise.

Herein, for me, lies the essence of economics – the collision between theories and facts.

There’s a parallel here between the CAPM and (some?) RBC models. Both are theoretically elegant. And both fail to survive contact with the real world. Just as the great performance of defensives undermines the CAPM, so the existence of involuntary unemployment rejects RBC theories: the unemployed are significantly less happy than those in work – and in fact unhappier than the divorced or disabled.

But why is the CAPM wrong? There are some nice theories (pdf). But I want to draw your attention to a recent paper by Michael Ungehauer and Martin Weber at the University of Mannheim which I think is a model of good economics.

They show that a key assumption of the CAPM is wrong. The CAPM assumes that investors measure market risk by beta, the covariance of a stock with the market. But Ungehauer and Weber show that people don’t measure risk this way. Instead, they assess correlations by using a simple counting heuristic: how often does a stock co-move with the market? This leads to different measures of risk, because it underweights the importance of large price moves.

They established this first by experiments. Then they applied their theory to US data. And they found that if stocks’ riskiness is measured by the frequency of co-movement with the market, there is indeed a trade-off between risk and return. It’s just that, contrary to the CAPM, risk isn’t measured by beta.

In this sense, there’s another analogy between the CAPM and RBC theory. The CAPM says that agents’ view of risk is determined by beta; RBC theory says their view of the future is determined by rational expectations. For me, both claims must be tested against the facts.

I appreciate that I might just be expressing a personal taste here, but I don’t give a toss whether a theory is elegant or not, or mainstream or not. For me, what matters is: does it fit the facts? And: does it work? My response to elegant theories is often like that of Andrew Tyrie to Boris Johnson: “This is all very interesting, Boris. Except none of it is really true, is it?”

Now, you might find this surprising. We Marxists are supposed to be spittle-flecked ideologues, and yet here I am demanding facts and utility.

But of course, there’s no paradox at all. As a Marxist, I have no skin in the game of whether the CAPM or efficient theory is right or not: such matters are orthogonal to my concerns qua Marxist. And in fact even if Robert Lucas’s main points were right – that business cycles are an optimum response to technology shocks with little welfare cost – a lot of Marxism would survive. Such claims are consistent with the notion that capitalism is exploitative and alienating and leads to unacceptable inequalities of wealth and power.

It’s sometimes said that Marxism brings ideology into economics. For me, though, it takes it out.

On the doctrine of signatures

In pre-modern times, people believed in the doctrine of signatures. This was the idea that the cure for an ailment must resemble the ailment itself. So, for example, eyewort was used as a remedy for vision problems and toothwort for toothache because the flowers of those plants resembled eyes and teeth. As Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky write:

Historically, people have often assumed that the symptoms of a disease should resemble either its cause or its cure (or both). In ancient Chinese medicine, for example, people with vision problems were fed ground bat in the (typically) mistaken belief that bats have particularly keen vision and that some of this ability might be transferred to the recipient (p685 of this big pdf).

There was just one problem with this – it was wrong.

However, although modern medicine has corrected this error, we still see it in economic policy. What Gilovich calls the “like goes with like” dominates popular attitudes to economic policy. For example:

 - American voters who believe cheap imports have depressed domestic wages support the introduction of tariffs.

 - People who believe (mostly wrongly) that immigration has depressed wages favour immigration controls.

 - Leftists support higher minimum wages as a solution to low pay.

 - People blame the Bank of England for low interest rates rather than global secular stagnation or tight fiscal policy.

 In these cases we see a modern version of the doctrine of signatures – the belief that the cure must resemble the ailment. So higher import prices are the solution to cheap imports; higher minimum wages the solution to low pay; monetary rather than fiscal policy is to blame for low interest rates, and so on.

And just as the doctrine of signatures was wrong in medicine, so it is in economics. Even if tariffs or minimum wages would do some good, there are better alternatives. To the extent that immigration or cheap imports raise inequality, a better solution might be more redistributive tax and benefit policy. And it’s better to help the low paid by increasing demand for labour through expansionary macro policy and by increasing their bargaining power than by minimum wages or immigration controls.

So, why don’t people appreciate this sufficiently? It’s not just the lousy lying media that’s to blame. It’s because the same representativeness heuristic that underpinned belief in the doctrine of signatures is also at work here: people believe that effects must resemble causes. They are, David Leiser and Zeev Kril have shown, bad at connecting economic phenomena. Instead, says Leiser, public attitudes to the economy are shaped by a “good begets good” heuristic (pdf) – the idea that good things have good effects. That’s very similar to the “like goes with like” heuristic described by Gilovich and Savitsky.

I fear, however, that this is a case where diagnosis is easier than cure. It’s easy to see that popular attitudes to the economy are mistaken, but much less easy to see how they might be corrected, especially when so many people have an interest in not correcting them. It took the medical profession centuries to rid itself of the doctrine of signatures. It might take as long for public attitudes to economic policy to improve.

Tariffs vs exchange rates

The apparent popularity of Donald Trump’s demand for protectionism raises a question: why haven’t exchange rates done the job they were supposed to?

I ask because one justification of floating exchange rates back in the 1970s was that they would render protectionism redundant. If a country ran a trade deficit, the thinking went, its exchange rate would fall, thus improving its competitiveness and pricing its workers back into jobs. As one of my old textbooks put it:

If the exchange rate is free continually to equilibriate the balance of payments, a country’s policy-makers should not have recourse to protectionist devices for balance of payments reasons: the freeing of exchange rates should usher in a period of more liberal trade (Ronald MacDonald, Floating Exchange Rates, p4)

For a long time, this looked valid: trade barriers have indeed fallen since the 70s. So, why is there now a call for tariffs rather than for exchange rate adjustment?

You might think the answer is simple: China has fixed its exchange rate to keep it artificially low and therefore its exports cheap.

But this isn’t entirely true. China has fixed its nominal exchange rate. But because it has had higher inflation than elsewhere, its real exchange rate has risen a lot – by over 40% in the last ten years according to BIS estimates.

You might think that even this appreciation hasn’t been sufficient: perhaps the US’s status as a reserve currency under the “Bretton Woods II” system has sustained demand for dollars and so prevented the US dollar falling as much as it should.

Maybe – although this overlooks the fact that the US’s lack of competitiveness because of high wages is greatly offset by the advantage it enjoys of cheaper energy.  

But perhaps there’s another reason. Maybe exchange rates don’t equilibriate the balance of payments after all. Let’s suppose China were to greatly revalue its currency? Would more expensive Chinese exports thereby improve the lot of US workers? Yale’s Ray Fair has used his econometric model to answer this. His finding is that:

The net effect of the yuan appreciation on U.S. output and employment is close to zero—in fact slightly negative. (p194 of this pdf)

There are two reasons for this. One is that a rise in the yuan would cut China’s output generally, and this would reduce US exports. The other is that dearer Chinese imports would raise the prices faced by US consumers, thus reducing their real incomes. These factors offset the tendency for a dearer yuan to make US goods more competitive.

This suggests that there might be a grain of truth in the call for tariffs, insofar as exchange rate adjustments don’t work.

But of course, only a grain. There are many better ways of helping unskilled workers: looser macro policy, welfare reform, a jobs guarantee and so on. Such policies have the added virtue of protecting such workers from the myriad (and I think greater) other threats to their livelihoods.

Rather than say this to endorse Trump, I do so to attack the mainstream. The presumption that free markets and floating exchange rates would protect workers from cheap imports might well have been wrong, and it distracted attention from the need for policy interventions to help the (minority of) workers hurt by them. In this sense, Trump’s victory represents a failure of centrist policy-making.

Ed Balls & modern "politics"

Ed Balls’ performances on Strictly Come Dancing shed more light upon politics than is generally appreciated.

What I mean is that Balls the politician was presented as an unsympathetic figure. “Bruiser” and “bully” were common descriptions, and his coining the phrase “post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory” gave the impression of being a pointy-headed technocrat. He embodied the Oxbridge elite that is supposedly out of touch with the common man.

And yet on Strictly his performances have been “a rare delight to brighten our weeks”. He’s charming, popular and funny: we’ve been laughing with him, not just at him.

Which poses the question: how can there be such a massive difference between Balls the politician and Balls the dancer?

It’s tempting to blame the media. After all, the same journalists who painted so unsympathetic portrait of Balls also made a public schoolboy who doesn’t listen to music or watch TV into a man of the people, and a serial liar and friend of a criminal into a loveable buffoon. The BBC, of course, has been complicit in this misrepresentation, and remains so: just listen to how John Humphrys usually aggressive interview technique deserted him this morning (2’09” in) when faced with a Trump crony.

But perhaps there’s something else. Balls the politician made a terrible mistake. It’s the same error Ed Miliband is making when he calls upon the left to “rebuild with deep thinking”. This mistake is to take politics seriously.

Doing so has two costs. One is that being serious commits you to some principles and a vague commitment to the truth as you perceive it. This puts you out of touch with ordinary voters with your truth conflicts with theirs, and makes you inflexible. By contrast, the Tories lack of interest in ideas allowed them to shift from being a party of the metropolitan elite to appearing as a sort of Ukip-lite. And it enabled Trump to tell his voters what they wanted to hear, regardless of whether he can or will enact his promises.

The other cost is that it means you come across badly on TV. If you prepare well for interviews and try to make serious points, you’ll look humourless and out of touch. The Johnson cheeky chappie approach works better.

Political success is achieved today by treating public life as a game, as a jolly jape. Taking it seriously destines you to failure.

Again, the BBC is complicit in this. It invited Marine Le Pen onto the Marr show not out of a deep interest in French politics but because it knows that fascism sells. It booked Le Pen rather than Alain Juppe (the favourite to be next president) because it thought it would be “good TV”. And it rewards politicians like Johnson who play along with this aim.

The idea that the BBC’s politics output is high-minded is nonsense. It is part of the entertainment business just like Strictly is. The difference is that Strictly is good entertainment.