A wise person has said that our brains love to make either-or choices. Which is why it’s wise not to waste much energy on the concocted furore over Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ 6000-word essay musing on future economic policy.
The world is a complicated place, and so are the choices we make about what we need to do get an economy that improves the lives of the humans who constitute it, including those at the bottom, not just the top.
But our brains look for ways to simplify the many choices we face. The simplest choice is binary: between A and B, black or white, good or bad. This fits with our tribal instincts. My tribe versus the rest, us and them, the good guys versus the bad guys.
Our two-party political system has been built to keep things simple. And thus, to minimise the need for hard thinking. Many people don’t have time to decide what they think about this policy or that, so they pick a political party and outsource their thinking to it.
“Am I for it or against it? Tell me what my party’s saying, and I’ll know what I think.” There’s plenty of survey evidence that people who voted for the government – any government – are more inclined to think the economy’s going well, whereas those who voted for the other side think it’s going badly.
Too much of the outrage over Chalmers and his essay has come from media outlets whose business plan is to pander to the prejudices of a particular “market segment”.
Economists like to think of themselves as rational and objective, but economics and economy policy are highly susceptible to binary choices, and fads and fashions.
All I’ve seen over the years has made me a believer in the pendulum theory of history: we tend to swing from one extreme to the other. After World War II, people – particularly in Britain and Europe - were very aware of the failings of the private sector, so they decided to nationalise many industries.
By the time Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan arrived, people had become very aware of the failings of government-owned businesses. So they decided to privatise many industries.
The big binary issue in economic policy is broader than privatisation, it’s government intervention in markets. Should governments intervene as little as possible, or as much as is necessary? To put it in the comic book terms beloved by Chalmers’ partisan critics: we face a choice between the free market or socialism.
Except that we don’t. My point is that the truth – and the ideal place to be – is unlikely to be found at one extreme or the other. It’s much more likely be somewhere in the middle.
To me, this is what economics teaches. It’s why economists say we should make decisions “at the margin” and are obsessed by finding the best “trade-off” between our conflicting objectives.
We want to be free to do as we choose, but we also want to be protected from instability (high inflation and high unemployment) and unfair treatment in its many forms.
The period of deregulation and privatisation instigated by the Hawke-Keating government in the mid-1980s, known locally as “micro-economic reform” motivated by “economic rationalism”, eventually degenerated into a belief in public bad/private good under subsequent governments, and was dubbed “neoliberalism” by leftie academics.
While the inclination to favour business and sell off government businesses remained under the former Coalition federal government, it had no commitment to minimising government intervention. Its willingness to impose its wishes on electricity and gas producers, for instance, was often on display.
And while the big reforms undertaken in the name of economic rationalism – floating the dollar, deregulating the banks, ending import protection, and introducing national competition policy – have served us well, many of the privatisations and efforts to outsource provision of government services have not.
In 2023, we’re left somewhere between the two extremes, with an economy that’s not working nearly as well as we need it to. Chalmers and Labor’s other ministers will have to intervene – but do so in ways they’re reasonably sure will make matters better rather than worse.
That’s the hard part, and their econocrat advisers aren’t nearly as well-equipped as they should be to tell them “what works and what doesn’t”.
Why not? Because we’ve done far too little hard thinking about the problems, preferring to take refuge in the happy delusion that the answer lies at one extreme or the other.