A shocking headline

After my rapturous comments on the Barcelona team win the other day, I must pin my colours to the mast. I'm a Roger Federer fan and have never in my life anguished or triumphed with any other sportsman/woman in quite the same way.

So you can imagine my horror to see the recent newspaper headline: Is the Mighty Fed in Decline? I quickly scanned the article, and was relieved to find that it had nothing to do with the Supreme Sportsman. It was about the slipping of power away from the US Federal Reserve Bank, obliged for the first time in this difficult world to explain its actions to the American public.

CJM

No Other Gods Before Me

‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ (Exodus 20) Such was the admonition of the God of the Old Testament, a god who, Nietzsche confidently told us, is now dead. But as we know, natura abhorrat vacuum, and there is strong evidence throughout human history that worship is wired into our genes. What then, has come to replace God as the object of our veneration and sacrifice? Why, ‘It’s the Economy, stupid!’ as Bill Clinton was reputed to have pinned up on the wall of the Oval Office.

Once you look closely, the similarities between religious belief and economic belief are frighteningly similar – in the same way that some ingenious commentator found striking parallels between George W. Bush and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

To begin with, the actual practice of economics relies on unquestioned dogma which is founded on the pattern: A (advisor to the present government) learnt it from B who is now safely in a zimmer frame, who learnt it from C, who has long been dead.

This sequence of transmission, ensuring that current economic policy will always be out of date and ineffective, was pointed out to me when I was a young journalist covering summits in Paris. It was satisfying later to find the same theory applied to scientific revolutions in general by Thomas Kuhn. The crux of his thinking was that a couple of generations of academics had to die off before there could be any significant change in the current ‘paradigms’ (for which read ‘dogmas’). In the case of religious institutions (of whatever stripe), we are talking of rather more generations, of course.

A further similarity with religion exists in that fundamental economic concepts (while purporting to be scientific) have no basis in reason. Take, for instance, a key tenet of economic policy: ‘sustainable growth’. Already back in the late 1970’s Albert A. Bartlett, professor at Boulder, Colorado, argued cogently that those who believed in indefinite growth were the modern-day equivalent of Flat-Earthers. Even earlier, Kenneth Boulding, JFK’s environmental adviser is quoted (New Statesman) as saying: ‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad – or an economist.’ And has anything changed since then?

What we see around us, as practised by our leaders internationally, is a version of the Emperor’s New Clothes so far removed from sanity that it makes one roll one’s eyes. The barometers of GNP, the measure of the output we generate as a nation, and thus supposedly of our wellbeing, have in practice no bearing on the quality of our lives. As has often been pointed out, the commercial activity stimulated by a major disaster shows up as a positive in economic statistics. The levelling of the Amazonian rainforest for the production and export of soya adds a huge plus to Brazil’s balance of payments. Short-term exploitation and consumption rule because these are what, on the current model, the Economy demands so as to 'thrive'.

So this is the new religion. Our god Economy will be lord over all. He/she must never be upset and to this end must be kept 'stable' and 'sound'.  A depressed Economy will be unhappy, and so every effort must be made to stimulate him/her if this is the case. But beware, equally, of overheating, this makes the god very uncomfortable and even menacing. If this arises, all of us have to tighten our belts in an act of propitiation. Sacrifices must then be made.

But at what human cost? Here our leaders seem to take Inca kings as their role models, in terms of the human victims needed for the appeasement of the god Economy. We have it straight from the lips of the great Labour reformer, Anthony Giddens, who was adviser to Tony Blair at that crucial moment when we still believed in a Third Way and may even have voted for a theoretical kind of socialism with a human face. Years later, Giddens, writing in The Independent in 2007, expressed the article of faith beyond doubt: ‘Ensure the economy is strong. Securing greater social justice depends upon a robust economy, not the other way around.’

Ah, so bring on the Five Year Plan, move the peasants into the factories, house the ignorant b--s in thirty-storey tower blocks. Social justice will follow, inevitably.

No, there was no Third Way; there never was. Even Giddens admits he had stopped using the phrase because it was 'so widely misconstrued'. Ironically, the financial institutions were already on the road to their almighty crash (and our ruin) even as Giddens wrote that piece in praise of chancellor Brown and his 'sound' economic management. We were lured into the temple of progress, only to find ourselves worshipping and grovelling to the same old god, Economy. The priesthood, which is to say, the bankers, continue to stand in their pious protected circle, and intone the same old anthems.

CJM