Professor Ben Rosamond Inaugural Lecture

JOHN: Good evening everyone. Thank you all for taking the time to come along this evening for the inaugural lecture by Professor Ben Rosamond. These are always very special occasions because there's an opportunity for either a newly promoted or a newly arrived professor to come along and talk about their work, to really introduce themselves to the academic community within the institution. But also to say something which maybe gets us all talking over a glass of red wine or white wine later on this evening. As you will all know, Ben joined us in the summer of 2022 when he arrived in Edinburgh, from having spent, I think it was 11 years in Copenhagen, and before that, 15 years at Warwick. So many of you probably have known Ben for some time even before he arrived here, but what you'll also know, even if you didn't know him beforehand, was just how an open, collegial and friendly individual that he is. I've had the great pleasure of working with Ben in his role as Head of Subject, in my role as Head of School over the past year and a half. And while there's been a few bumps in the road in higher education during that period of time, it's always been great to have the opportunity to work with Ben. He holds a first degree, a BA in Government from the University of Manchester, where he also completed an MA in European Politics. Before going to Sheffield to complete his PhD, which was titled 'Beyond Nation State Socialism, British Trade Unionism and European Integration in the Thatcher years 1979 to 1990'. And as you can see from the title of tonight's lecture, there's a continuation probably in some of the themes from then. When Ben was appointed, the vacancy was listed as either Professor of Politics OR International Relations. And that was actually Ben's official title for the first period of time that he was here. Almost one of those things that is taking a gamble: Which are the two groupings within PIR looked as though they were the most fun to hang out with?  But in reality, Ben did what Ben often does and his official title is Professor of Politics AND International Relations. So he's keeping a foot firmly in both camps there. Ben's held various visiting positions at institutions internationally. And he's also a colleague who's been very active, not just within the universities that he's been in, but also the wider discipline. It's very apparent from looking through his impressive CV that one of the things he talks about is being most pleased to have been involved in is that he was the founding co-editor  of the journal Comparative European Politics since 2003. And I think you're still involved up until this moment in time?  In terms of other interests. It's good to read this bit on what people sort of actually say about themselves. Ben enjoys exploring Edinburgh with the family as well as enjoying photography and music. And as a matter of fact, if he had his time all over again, he probably would have preferred to be a music journalist. So it's continuing a theme for anybody who was at Nick Pryor's inaugural about six months ago. Very much the theme of that was also sort of popular music. We're absolutely delighted that Ben's joined this evening by Annika, his partner, and also Oscar and Alice, his children. And so, we're delighted that you've both been able to make the time to come along this evening. Ben's going to speak for about 45 to 50 minutes. We've decided, Ben's decided not to have questions and answers because he doesn't want to keep you here any longer than it's absolutely necessary. But what we hope is that there'll be plenty of opportunity over a glass of wine or something softer to have a chat later on. Because that's equally an important part of this evening, Ben. I say we're absolutely delighted that you're here working with us at the University and we're all looking forward to hearing your inaugural lecture this evening. BEN: Thank you very much, John. Thank you for those very kind words. And just to throw it back at you, it's been an absolute pleasure to work with you as Head of School. That's made my transition into being Head of Subject a heck of a lot easier than it might have been. And it's always wonderful to work with you. And I look forward to working with you for the next 603 days, 5 hours, 37 minutes. Not I'm counting or anything like that, but thank you also to Helene, who has helped with the organisation of this, particularly the tricky issue of the use of profanity in University communications and whether certain words are allowed or not. So I thank you for your guidance for that. It's a pleasure to be here in PIR and the School of Social and Political Science. It's just a place full of tremendous colleagues and tremendous energy. Living in Scandinavia, we sometimes thought about, would we ever move? I think when we talked about moving we thought, well the fantasy move would be to come to Edinburgh and it actually came off which is rather wonderful. It actually genuinely feels like we've come home, and I think that says something about the welcome we've had here as well. So we appreciate  that, very much. Influencing the world since 1583. That's not me by the way. That's the University of Edinburgh. I guess my academic journey, as John said, began really 39 years ago, when I walked into the University of Manchester to do my undergraduate degree. My good friend, Dan Wincott, did precisely the same thing 39 years ago. Lovely to see you, Dan. Thank you for coming. Since then, I guess I've had a journey of twists and turns and a fair helping of luck. And I think we underestimate the role of luck in academic life, quite frankly.  This is the second time I've done an inaugural. I don't know if that's a cheat or not, but it's the third professorship I've held. But Warwick, with its kind of unremitting, sort of modernity and its kind of disdain of all things medieval just didn't do inaugural lectures, so I had to move to a very kind of Hogwartsy institution in order to be able to do an inaugural lecture. Hence, the University of Copenhagen, where I did my first inaugural 11 years ago. The University of Copenhagen dates from 1479, so by the standards of Copenhagen, the University of Edinburgh is a kind of vulgar upstart impostor. During my first inaugural about this point, Oscar, who's sitting here in the front row, got a bit grizzly. And just as I was about to say nice things about my family, my entire family left. Shall we try it again? First thing: Annika, my permanent in-house interlocutor, and my terrifyingly productive source of inspiration. Barely a week goes by without some new publication emerging from somewhere or other. My best friend, my rock, and my colleague, which is fantastic. So we were able to do that. Sitting right next to her is Oscar, who is currently doing some of his wonderful art. As many of you know from his posts on social media, what a wonderfully intuitive, brilliant artist whose creations exude warmth and wit. And that's pretty much him, actually, all over. Alice, you weren't able to make my inaugural 11 years ago, and you really didn't make this one because of the trains doing their level best to stop you from coming yesterday. So, you had the interesting odyssey via Belfast from Liverpool this morning. So, I'm really glad you could make it. I did mention 11 years ago, you just actually, at the age of 14, if you remember, passed a GCSE exam in statistics and I got me thinking, I thought, well, if I can just like, you know, syphon off some of this for research assistant purposes, then surely routine publication in the American Political Science Review will just be a kind of matter of routine. But as it turns out, Alice headed in a slightly different direction. And now she's on the kind of the early stages of her own journey through academia. And all I would say is that she writes as beautifully as Oscar draws. She's a passionate, critical citizen. My mum didn't quite make it long enough to hear the news that I got this job. But I think she would have loved it to know that I had. She'd also have loved this occasion a lot. She wouldn't have been able to be here, but she would have lived through it vicariously. There's no question about that. My dad will watch this once the recording becomes available, on his trusty iPad, and he will, no doubt, as Alice and Annika  will know, ensure that his trusty and wonderful carers do exactly the same. I do feel a bit sorry for them because they are tortured on a daily basis with an of a large picture of me in my full PhD regalia from 1993 on my dad's living room wall. When I turn up and I meet them, they look at me and they look at the picture and then they think, my God, you've let yourself go. In any case, just on my parents, I absolutely could not have become this person standing here without them. I think what really strikes me always is just how keen they were for me to take a pathway through education. A pathway which for them, born into the circumstances they were born in, was just not possible for them. And also, I must acknowledge my Swedish family as well: Björn, Ulla, Lasse especially; they would be here if they could be. They will also get the URL for the recording as well eventually. Now to the lecture itself. Actually, some of you may have seen on Facebook, I thought this morning because I couldn't really do much this morning, I was a bit nervous about this, so I instructed Chat-GPT to write, write me a lecture.  Two things: One is, it's a lot shorter, we get to the wine a lot quicker. The only snag is it's terrible. It's also incredibly pompous. I did ask you to write an inaugural lecture on conservative economic policy discourse since the global financial crisis, in the style of Ben Rosamond. It came out using all sorts of intricate phrases which makes me sound like Jacob Rees-Mogg.  So we won't bother with that. I promise I'll get onto this in a minute, but my previous inaugural, it might be worth saying, was about the possibilities and paradoxes and challenges of free movement. I used my own positionality, I suppose, as the basis for that, a Brit living in Sweden, working in Denmark, and some of the puzzles and paradoxes and trying to think some of those things through. I'd been appointed to a Chair in EU Politics. That was what I felt would be an interesting thing to do, of course, how things have changed. For one thing, I'm now also a Swedish, as well as a British, citizen. But of course, the free movement dream came to a crashing halt with the advent of Brexit. In a sense, I suppose I typically describe myself as having this position at the interface of EU studies broadly defined and international political economy broadly defined. I try to work in the zone where those two things connect. But I guess over the past decade or so, I've been bothered by two things, overwhelmingly, those two things there. One is, from the political economy side of my brain, the puzzle about austerity policies as they were implemented in the UK, but also across parts of the Eurozone in ways that seem to be happening completely independently of the expert consensus on the utility efficacy of austerity policies - if you like, the growing expert consensus that they didn't work. And then what we might kindly call the economic irrationalism of Brexit. Why was something that was obviously harmful to the UK economy being undertaken without recourse to what you might understand as being expert understandings? And what I just displayed here is maybe a group of four papers in which some of these themes have been thought about, and upon which I will draw today. But I'm very much trying to talk forward from these things. In that respect, I need to acknowledge some co-authors who've helped me along the way: Ben Clift; my brilliant former PhD student, Rune Stahl; and Jonathan Hopkin.  But I've also found when I was thinking about this that I've also thought about a lot of these things through teaching as well. And so I've included the front pages, a bit old school I know, front pages of syllabuses of elective courses that I taught at the University of Copenhagen - The Politics of Crisis and Austerity and Brexit in Perspective. The latter was very much a kind of personal therapy session with student helpers. But in a way, these are kind of mechanisms through which I've tried to think through some of these puzzles and problems. And actually, the more and more I think about it, the more and more I simply cannot see the distinction that maybe some people make between scholarship and teaching. I see them as entirely intertwined and completely mutually constitutive. And I think that's why I've got those things there. So in terms of the broad themes, the recurring interests, if you like, that I've worked on in recent times and see myself (once I've lifted my head above my spreadsheets and People and Money) working on in the future are the use of ideas about the economy in political contestation and policymaking; the uses, misuses and indeed non-uses of economic knowledge in politics; the economy and economic policy as sites of politicization and de-politicization; the role of bad ideas in politics - I'll think about what they mean in a minute; and finally, the discursive politics of the economy and Brexit. If I was going to, if you point a gun to my head and said, what are the five things that you do? Those are the five things that interest me. What do I mean by these things? First of all, the economy. Now, the economy isn't just a thing that we react to and seek to govern. It's a construct, I've said here it's a social, discursive and a statistical construction. So it's socially constructive insofar as economies emerge through the interaction of human agents, collective and individuals, there is a sociological way in which economies come into being. But they're also imaginatively narrated, they're brought into being through discursive activity. Some of my earlier work on the genealogy of the idea of the European Economy, sort of really resonates here, because in a way I think that's probably true of any economy. What's interesting is the way in which actors seeking to govern legitimately a territorial space invoke the idea of the adjective economy in order so to do, thinking for example the Scottish economy, which is a discursive construct, but it's also a statistical construct as well. We can't govern something unless we know it. We know it through numbers. And so one of the interesting things that has always struck me as being important is the combination of that sociological, discursive and statistical effort.  At the same time, if we think about political exchange and democracy - contestation - the economy is often central.  Economic knowledge, well, typically of course, we have a domain of knowledge production called economics, which professes to provide authorised formal analysis of the economy. That's its job. I guess there's an interesting debate about the extent to which cutting-edge economics actually does that. Does it actually tell us stories about the real economy? Or does it deal with a fictionalised construct that's produced in economic modelling? But the other thing I think it's also true to say is that the economy is something that's both abstractly discussed in the equations of high level economics journals, but it's also something that's experienced on a day to day basis by individuals. One of the things that sort of emerge from these discussions I've been having with myself over the past decade is the kind of ways in which those things work together and work against each other. Of course, we can think about the economy or debates about the economy as reflecting different ideological takes broadly reflecting left and right views, I suppose, but different ideological takes on questions of appropriate distribution or the extent to which the state should or should not be involved in the steering of an economy. But one of the tendencies that scholars have identified, in particular over the past 20 to 30 years, has been the tendency to depoliticise the economy, to take the economy and economic policy out of democratic contestation, reflecting a much older idea. Montagu Norman, who was the Governor of the Bank of England for an extraordinary amount of time, from the 1920s to the 1940s. He spoke about the need to "knave-proof" the economy and that reflects a tradition in economic thought and an economic policy practice which actually distrusts democracy and government as ways to arbitrate and manage an economy. Bad ideas - I'm defining them quite tightly here as normative beliefs or causal claims that remain influential or normalised in political discourse and policymaking despite "scientific reputation or deep contestation". I was on a panel at a conference a few years ago where the panel had bad ideas and the title... our discussant was Sheri Berman and Sheri Berman started her remarks by saying, well, look, I study the 1930s and you think these ideas are bad, you should see some of the things that I had to study. And obviously there's a terminological issue there. But I mean, I quite like the idea that ideas that have this kind of naturalised quality despite being highly contestable or indeed potentially refuted in authorised sources of knowledge. And finally, just defining what I mean by discursive politics, the role of advocacy claim and counterclaim in policy oriented deliberation. Right, so just broadly speaking, in terms of how I've thought through these puzzles, one is to think about austerity and the expert consensus or dissensus around austerity, around the question of the management of public finances, and then the Brexit question is obviously to do with the UK's external economic alignment. In terms of how we think about these things today, I just want to talk a little bit about conservative economic policy discourse. In part, because the Conservatives in coalition, or individually, have been in government since the end of the global financial crisis, or since the onset of the global financial crisis, or the ramifications of the global financial crisis became apparent from about 2010 or thereabouts. And broadly speaking, it just hooks up to a kind of broader understanding of how we might think about the relationship between the domestic and the external in UK political economy. So if I'm going to just vomit out my argument quickly, it'll be something like this. The first thing I don't think is a new thing to say at all, this is, I think, well established, indeed, Joseph Stiglitz used the phrase "deficit fetishism" as far back as 2010 to describe the tendency of the question of how you manage the public finances in advanced democracies in terms of the dominance of what we might call austerity mindset. But that's in many ways my starting point. What I would then want to argue is that that mindset relied upon a particular set of epistemic claims, particularly claims that emerge not exclusively, but largely, from the field of Economics, which over time became increasingly less and less easy to justify intellectually. But at the same time which seemed, and this is the point about everyday experience of the economy meeting abstract theories of the economy, it seems to reflect what we might call a dominant folk wisdom about the economy. I'll say what that is in a minute. Which had the consequence effectively of rhetorically entrapping a range of political actors from across the political spectrum. What I want to try, and I'll talk through that case in most detail in a few minutes. But what I'm going to call that is as a case of successful bullshit, as depoliticization. Now I've just sworn, so that's not so good maybe, but it is a technical term. It comes from a philosopher. So it's not only a technical term, it comes from philosophy. Harry Frankfurt wrote a book called On Bullshit in 2005. To bullshit is to engage in a speech act that proceeds without concern for the veracity of the claim that's being made right. Lying and bullshit are different things. Lying is actually when you lie, you know what the truth is. When you bullshit, you might know what the truth is, but actually you don't care, right? So that's the distinction that I'm working with here. As I say, it's a technical term, I'll try not to say it too much. Looking at the case of Brexit, what's interesting here is that there were, on the one hand, I guess on the kind of orthodox Remain side of the argument, appeals to the epistemic authority of credentialed economic expertise, right? So the argument that a lot of people on the Remain side thought was going to win the Brexit referendum was we bring the big tanks out which show that ultimately, Brexit will be an economic disaster and we'll win the referendum.  On the other side, the Leave campaign in its various guises did two things. The first thing it did was to effectively say, look, we don't care about experts - remember Michael Gove's famous intervention, if you can remember back that far. But at the same time, interestingly, something that I've written about is the way in which it sought to develop a cohort, a cadre of quasi- experts of its own. And in so doing, produced a bullshit in the technical sense. I'm going to call this a case of successful BS - let's be a bit more modest now - under conditions of acute politicization. So there's a interesting relationship between politicization, depoliticization, and the use of particular types of rhetorical utterance. And finally, the weird and wonderful case of Trussonomics, which I'm still thinking through, which I'm going to say is a case of failed BS, but with an interesting twist which we'll get to. I'm not going to quite do them in that order, but I'm going to do the public finance one first, then we'll do Trussonomics, then we'll do Brexit, and then we can drink some wine. So let me start with just to try and assemble the building blocks of how I understand the deficit fetishism bullshit of the austerity era. In that sense, what I want to try and do is maybe think about three different things. The type of economic knowledge that's being invoked, the type of folk wisdom which is being appealed, and the narrative arc that's being used in Conservative economic discourse. In terms of economic knowledge, we're looking at a case for something called 'expansionary fiscal contraction', which I'll talk through in a minute. In folk wisdom, the very powerful analogy that economies are exactly like households - the household finances, and the finances of the economy, the public finances, are identical in terms of the way in which they work, which is (spoiler alert) rubbish. And then a narrative arc which was used extremely successfully, but that actually in the UK case, at least, austerity was the necessary solution to "Labour's recession". OK, I'm going to talk about each of those in turn. So in terms of economic knowledge, one of the really central things is the significance of budget deficits and accumulated public debt. These things really, really matter in this discourse, right? So the budget deficit is the difference, the annual difference, between what a government brings in in terms of revenue and what it spends. A deficit is where you spend more than accruing revenue. And the accumulated public debt is the year on year accumulation of debt over surplus. Now, what's interesting here is the threshold claim that's made in some very, very influential economics literature from around about the period in which the austerity mindset takes hold in Western democracies. And there's a particular paper called Growth in the Time of Debt, published in the American Economic Review by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in which they show, so they say, that if a government accrues a debt to GDP ratio of 90% or greater, then that will have dramatically bad effects upon economic growth going forward. Now it's an academic paper. It's a very visible, highly regarded at the time, paper. But interestingly, it was one that was picked up by politicians and was often cited by politicians. George Osborne who became Chancellor of the Exchequer under the coalition government in this country in 2010 here clearly citing Reinhart and Rogoff in a speech given shortly before he was, that coalition government was elected.  Beyond the, the threshold number, there's a bigger question here about the idea that budgets ultimately should be balanced. That actually government should operate according to very strict fiscal rules. Actually, there are advocates and there are practices whereby the idea that you write these fiscal rules into constitutions, you create constitutional amendments, which effectively say a government should not spend more than it accumulates in taxation revenues. That, of course, means that certain kinds of economic policy are more or less automatically ruled out. A Keynesian style stimulus, for example, where you would use government borrowing to generate kind of multiplier effects that create consumption and generate economic growth, that's actually something that's more or less constitutionalized out of politics if you follow that line. The reference is to a paper by Augustine Menendez in Comparative European Politics from last year, which is a brilliant genealogy of fiscal rules in the European context. An absolutely superb paper. This is Osborne in 2015 after the 2015 general election victory at his Mansion House Speech, basically suggesting that this idea of sound public finances as reflected in balanced budgets, underwritten by strict fiscal rules, is something that is accepted across the political spectrum. And indeed, there was very little debate in the 2015 general election about this. Evidence from the Labour Party Manifesto of the same year: The next Labour Government will balance the books. You'll see why that's necessarily a slightly strange thing in a moment. So the first thing was the significance of budget deficits and accumulated public debt. The second is a set of claims which emerge from advocates of expansionary fiscal contraction about how you steer an economy out of a recession. This idea of expansionary fiscal contraction becomes very, very popular as a kind of counterpoint to the classic Keynesian stimulus way of thinking about, about recessionary economic management. Well, theoretically, there are a couple of points that underwrite this. The first - I mentioned this paper by Alberto Alesina and Guido Tabellini from 1990 because it's actually a very good example of the theorization of this issue.  Effectively what Alesina and Tabellini argue in this paper is that democracies have an inbuilt bias towards deficits, right? The reason they do that is because democratic governments and office- seeking parties over-promise to their electorates. Number one, in effect, they bake in spending commitments which they are then obligated to deliver upon, but also tactically what governments who expect to lose an election do is to make it difficult for successor governments to manage public finances by building up higher deficits. Which means that incoming governments have to break down, draw down the deficit so they have a hard time economically. That actually reflects a tendency in a lot of economic theory, which suggests that actually, if you want economic optimality, democracy is not necessarily the best way to do that. Democracies are flawed because democracies tend to oversize the state and oversize the levels of public expenditure. The other reason I mentioned this paper in particular is because it's published way back in 1990. I did a quick back of an envelope calculation the other day - 71% of its citations, it served like 2,300 citations since it was published, which is quite a lot - 71% of those were since 2008. It's a paper that's become remarkably influential just as the global financial crisis was breaking and after, which just seems to me to be an interesting little factoid. The second thing is a thing called Ricardian equivalence, which is an old idea. It's an intuition that David Ricardo had in the 1820s. But it's basically the idea that actually Keynesian style stimulus doesn't work because actually consumers are clever people. They understand that actually, if you're going to, if you're going to open the floodgates and let me kind of enjoy the fruits of your stimulus, I'm going to have to pay for that ultimately with tax rises. So they don't, they save rather than spend. So I think it's Rudolf Bahro who kind of formalises that in economics. But it's an idea which you can see running like a red thread through quite a lot of economic theory going throughout the 20th century. But also empirically, advocates of expansionary fiscal contraction saw cases where it appeared to work. Denmark in the early '80s, Ireland in the mid '80s being examples. And broadly speaking, what the empirical argument seems to be was that you can reduce debt to GDP ratios with a large deflationary adjustment without causing a recession. You can do that in ways that are more effective than if you do the other thing which you could do to balance the books, which is to increase taxes. And the third argument, which of course becomes very attractive to politicians, is that it seems that governments who follow that line, who do that short, sharp shock, deflationary treatment to their economy, they don't actually suffer systematic electoral setbacks. Then you've also got a lot of intellectual and normal entrepreneurship going on by some of the economists who are responsible for creating these ideas. Alesina famously prepared this paper for the European Council of Finance Ministers Meeting in Madrid, on 15 April 2010 - 'Fiscal Adjustments: Lessons  from Recent History'. A good example I think of an economist moving from what an economist called Craufurd Goodwin calls philosopher mode into priest mode. Moving away from the kind of ivory tower economics into the bit where you go out and preach like a missionary. And quite a lot of people have traced and thought about the influence of the expansionary fiscal contraction school and their influence upon, particularly upon European economic governance over the past 20 years. Our incoming colleague,  Oddný Helgadóttir, has done that. Mark Blyth as well. Various others. OK.  So what's then interesting is the - collapse might be too dramatic a word but I quite like it - the crumbling of the intellectual case for expansionary fiscal contraction. I think three things happen. Act One is the discovery of the spreadsheet error in Reinhart and Rogoff's basic data. This could be made into a Hollywood movie. If somebody did the script for this, you could make this into a Good Will Hunting style movie. Thomas Herndon was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He had an assignment from his Econ professor which was see if you can replicate the findings of a famous economics paper. He chose growth in the time of debt, and he got the raw spreadsheet data from Reinhart and Rogoff. He actually then looks at it and thought - some coding errors in here, five cases aren't accounted for. There's some unconventional wasting of summary statistics in here. Hey presto, Herndon and a couple of his professors wrote a paper which was published in the Cambridge Review of Economics in 2014, but trailed as a working paper from April 2013, basically discrediting really crucially, the thesis that the debt to GDP ratio of 90% wasn't quite the threshold boundary that people thought it was. In fact, there seemed to be very, very little evidence that 90% debt to GDP was actually the problem that Reinhart and Rogoff and their disciples thought it was. There's also other work which actually asked questions about the direction of causation. The assumption was that high debt is the source of low growth, but actually it could be the other way round. It could be that low growth is the source of high debt. That inverts the way you think about this in terms of policy for sure. What was also interesting was that when the credit rating agency Fitch downgraded the UK's credit rating, coincidentally in April 2013, just as Herndon et al's paper was first circulated, they cited the UK's consistent failure to bring the debt to GDP ratio below 90%, something which the government had made a great thing of, citing Reinhart and Rogoff as their magical source. Also, it was one of the arguments used in Indy ref against Scottish independence, the idea that your credit rating is going to be awful, right? So there are some interesting political ripple effects of this. And as my wonderful PhD student at the time, Thomas Skov Lauridsen, said, Mr Osborne meet Mr Petard, you know, hoisted by your own petard. Anyway, Act Two is the fact that actually there's increasing research being done in the early 2010s which begins to cast doubt upon the idea that the empirical case for expansionary fiscal contraction was robust. And it's not just heterodoxic economists who are doing this. It's the IMF Research department that's driving this set of findings which suggest that well maybe the empirical case for expansionary physical contraction isn't quite what we thought it was.  The Third Act is I think the one that really, really interests me, is the fact that as you go into the early 2010s, there's a lot of the critiques of austerity that begin to emerge from other fields other than Economics that become quite loud and quite salient. In particular, the thing that really strikes me is that in order to find out about the austerity debate from about 2011/2012 to 2015 you don't just read political economy journals, you read public health journals. You read The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, epidemiology journals. That's where a lot of the work is being done. What they are doing is saying, look two things. One is we need to measure the effects of austerity in ways other than the standard economic metrics. We need to use other data, and secondly, we need to use other methods. It's feminist work and it's public health work that's beginning to open up debate - it's not just whether the multipliers that are unleashed by  austerity policies are positive or negative in terms of GDP growth. It's about the health and gender equality effects that really matter. Of course, the dice are loaded because the best statistics or the most robust and most consistent sets of statistics tend to be those that national governments put together to measure the economy. So Martin McKee and his colleagues make this point. There's a marked contrast between the energy that national governments put into collecting economic statistics and what they put into gathering and analysing health data. (Alice is a public health researcher so she's nodding along vigorously.) So what does that leave you with? It leaves you with the kind of normative case that governments are bad for the economy and democracy is bad for the economy. And as Simon Wren-Lewis put it, if that kind of intellectual case, both theoretically and empirically, is in trouble, then effectively you've got the kind of normative claim that the best kind of state is a small state. Now I think the debate is a bit more complicated and I'll just stylized it there, but I mean, that seems to me to be the broad contours.  So in terms of folk wisdom, well, the folk wisdom thing is summed up, I think by, this was David Cameron writing in the News of The World - remember that - in 2008, "This government has maxed out our nation's credit card" - this is talking about the Labour government, of course - "and wants to keep on spending by getting another.  We believe to get a grip, to be responsible and help families now in a way that doesn't cost us our future." That is a refrain that is repeated again and again and again, and it makes quite a lot of sense. Actually, Jeremy Hunt just the other day used the credit card, the national credit card analogy, to caution against excessive spending. As we'll see, it was an interesting argument that was used against Trussonomics, advocates from their own side, quite recently.  Of course, this is rubbish, but it's an incredibly powerful metaphor. Because it brings to the idea that just like a family, a country has to live within its means and effectively what that means is that we need to balance our budgets as countries, not just as families, but as countries. It underwrites the case for fiscal rules. So if this folk wisdom has this intuitive sense, then obviously you don't need the technical arguments so much. If it makes sense to people that governments can't live beyond their means, then so be it. There's quite a lot of research which suggests that lay understandings of the economy actually operate, do operate in that kind of way. Liam Stanley's work I particularly like, he did a lot of focus group work at the height of the austerity conversation. Basically showing that the way in which people understood the economy directly connected to how they understood their insertion into the economy as economic subjects basically as people who spent and saved and accumulated debt. Another way of thinking about this might be Jacqueline Best's idea of practical ignorance and that there is something politically useful about mobilising into politics the fact that lay people don't understand the economy in that sophisticated way. That one's something I've not thought through fully yet, so any comments on that, I'd be pleased to get. But of course, the idea that an economy, particularly for a monetary sovereign like the UK, is like a household, it's just nonsense. It's a fallacy of composition. Yes, the economy consists of millions of households, but actually that is not how an economy works. Countries, monetary sovereigns, do not have credit cards and they don't have credit limits. And unlike you or I, they have central banks at their disposal. And central banks are great because they can set your interest rate and they can print money. Now you know, that would transform your kind of personal life as an economic subject if you had something like that. But you don't. So if you think about it, right, so if a household cuts 10% of its budget and its income stays constant, then actually it's likely to be able to reduce its debt that way.  If a government cuts 10% of its budget, what happens? Wages and employment in the public sector go down. That has knock on effects, into the private sector, that then leads ultimately to falls in government income. The same strategy by a government behaving as if it were a household is going to have precisely the opposite effect. Finally, just on the narrative arc, austerity as a necessary solution to Labour's recession. Just look at the discourse over the past 13, 14, 15 years or so about what happened during the global financial crisis. There's one minor exception, very, very recently, following the death of Alistair Darling, who of course was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, Conservatives including Jeremy Hunt. were saying, well, actually he did the right thing. That's not what they've been saying for 13 years. And of course you could argue that anyway... there's an argument about the culpability and responsibility of Labour. But a very powerful script was: austerity is the solution to this problem that Labour caused. Of course, if you look at the actual recovery from the start of recessions beginning in, you know, this is from the 1920s onwards and different recessions. The one with the kind of lowest recovery arc is the 2008/2009 recession. Of course, this is quarters since the start of recession, so what's, it seven years before growth gets back to the kind of levels of 2008? And that, of course, is a period of Conservative government. That's a period where austerity is being practised the most. It's a historically poor recovery from a recession which and also taking this to pieces and thinking about it into kind of regional terms, its also a recession with recovery with significant regional asymmetries. And I think one of the arguments as to why Brexit happened was, is bound up with some of the dynamics in that diagram. And you can see from that very clearly that London, the Southeast, actually managed to recover by 2015 to levels above where they were in 2007. But other parts of the United Kingdom absolutely did not and some parts did very, very badly indeed. Yeah, that's something about the first case. I'll be much briefer on the other two.  Trussonomics. You know what? I can't decide whether this was just a mad fever dream or whether it actually happened. So if you remember last year, the mini budget, which was 23 September 2022, basically, as announced by Kwasi Kwarteng who was at the time the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a whole series of tax cuts which were basically unfunded. They hadn't consulted various forecasting agencies, they even sacked one of their senior economists. They particularly were looking to stimulate economic activity by corporations and the wealthy.  There was, to say the least, a negative market reaction to that budget. Kwarteng was sacked on 14 October. Truss resigned as Prime Minister on 25 October after 49 days in office. We've talked about bullshit a little bit. This episode actually brought in a new technical term that Jonathan Hopkin and I are trying to wrestle with at the moment. And this was Gillian Tett, chair of the FT's editorial board on Channel 4 News. and this created quite a debate on Channel 4 News, it has to be said - so is there any conceptual distinction between bullshit and bollocks?  It's an interesting question that you might want to think about. Let me try and summarise what I think might have happened here and we'll talk about Brexit in a minute, but there is a kind of Brexiteer strategy here of doubling down on technocratic authorities. So first of all, they sidelined the UK's official Fiscal Council set up by the Conservatives in 2010, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which normally kind of models economic budget statements and predicts what will happen in terms of growth and other effects. They basically set the OBR's forecast to one side. They sacked Tom Scholar - friends in the Treasury were distraught when Tom Scholar, the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, was sacked. In terms of economic knowledge, the Trussonomics isn't coming from the economic mainstream, it's coming from the kind of world of dark money think tanks in Tufton Street. It's the Institute of Economic Affairs, it's the Brexiteer economists like Patrick Minford. It's people like that. This is not the economic mainstream. So in a sense, it's anchoring in authorised economic knowledges is arguably very, very thin.  In terms of the folk myth, so the folk myth of austerity is the idea of the economy as household. It's trickle down, right? It's an old idea, come back. Trickle down economics is basically this, right? If you see a homeless person on the street, what you should do is go to a cash point, take out £20 and post the £20 note through the letter box to a millionaire. Because the activity that you will stimulate from the millionaire will ultimately have aggregate effects in the long run, which will benefit the homeless person. That's basically the essence of trickle down economics. As the wonderful Onion headline, never surpassed, from 2007 said, "Reaganomics finally Trickles Down to Area Man" - just magnificent. And there's no authoritative metric really to anchor, to anchor Trussonomics. In fact, the debt to GDP issue actually comes up as one of the reasons why it was such a bad idea. Its loss, it's  two of the things which austerity policy had, Trussonomics didn't. Where's the narrative arc? Where's the Labour's recession equivalent argument? Basically, the argument for Trussonomics, is we've got a problem of low growth. The way we solve that problem is through a really aggressive run of tax cuts. But of course, that doesn't blame shift to somebody else as the austerity argument did, Labour's recession. It basically points the gun at themselves. It points the gun at the Conservatives It undermines Conservative credibility. One of the really interesting things, reading the debate on 23 September 2022 around the mini budget, was just how much deficit fetishism came in as a way of framing what Kwarteng and Truss were trying to do. So these are just a few quotes that come out of the debate. The ones that are shifting to the right are the critiques and the others to the left are more of the defences.  So as  Meg Hillier, the Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, says, 'The Chancellor has ripped up fiscal responsibility, mortgaged the future of our children and our country.' In other words, you're basically bringing in the kind of folk wisdom of economy as a household. Chris Bryant: 'It must surely be the definition of chutzpah to come to the House of Commons and say he believes in sound money when he's just put £72.4 billion on the never-never credit card for the country.' So again, that metaphor. And equally the other, the defences, are kind of saying, well actually if we think about, they think this through, the debt to GDP ratio will improve so that they're trapped by that metric. They can't escape the rhetorical attractment of that powerful metric. That deficit fetishism is still there. So in a way I think one of the things that does for Trussonomics is the fact that it doesn't have a convincing narrative arc of its own. It doesn't have a convincing folk myth, it doesn't have authorised economic knowledge at its disposal, but it encounters the problem of the survival of that idea of deficit fetishism. And then I'm just thinking beyond Trussonomics. I put this in my title, I thought my title back in September when the Conservatives were saying some really mad things about the economy. I wonder whether there was a new subcategory beyond bullshit of deep fake economics, which is effectively where you create and manipulate truths. I guess my prime example of that was Rishi Sunak's idea that the Conservatives would, would cancel the meat tax or they would, there's no meat tax, nobody's ever proposed a meat tax, the idea of seven bins. These kinds of ideas, the obsessive focus on 15 minute cities, these kinds of things. As Chris Stark, the Chief Executive of the UK Climate Change Committee, said on the Today programme earlier this year, 'Sunak seems to be cancelling a set of policies that the Government hasn't announced', which is I suppose, a political technique. I wonder whether there's something there. So that's where my deep fake idea comes from. Again, it's just a germ of an idea and it may come to nothing. But if you have any thoughts and do, let me know. Right, finally on Brexit. So how bullshit trumped, and that's a deliberate use of the word , trumped economic technocratic reason. So what interests me here is the way in which from the kind of official Remain side of the campaign, which of course was led by people like George Osborne, there was a determined attempt to effectively use the muscle of authorised economic knowledge to make the case to show that Brexit would be an economic disaster, right? So you get graphics like this. This is actually from a meta analysis done by the Institute for Government, but what it's basically showing is a selection of forecasting entities, be they private banks or be they public entities, or be they interest groups of one kind or another, including the Treasury, the fourth from the left, of what the economic effects of Brexit, specifically the GDP effects of Brexit would be, in terms of particular scenarios of Brexit ranging from being part of the EEA, the European Economic Area, through to unilateral free trade, which would basically mean leaving the EU, leaving the WTO, and unilaterally suspending all tariffs on imported goods. Of course, there's a range of forecasts because different methods are used, different models are used. Although there is a modelling orthodoxy which is used pretty much by all but the final two, Open Europe find a slight effect of the unlimited hard Brexit; whereas Economists for Free Trade, which is a group set up in the context of the Leave campaign, led by Patrick Minford of Cardiff University, basically making it up. All right, and what seems to me is that, you know, the Osbornite strategy, the Remain strategy, was to basically use this to say, OK, we will win the political argument by not having to talk about politics. We'll simply use the forecast to show the Treasury report came out in May of 2016, right in the final weeks of the referendum campaign. It was meant to kind of win the argument - it didn't, and that interests me.  Now, the economic case for Brexit. Now, if you read Dominic Cummings, which I regret I had to, Dominic Cummings wrote an enormous, must be like 50,000 word blog post, about how he won the referendum, which I read. It's fascinating. It's nuts, But it's fascinating. One of the things he says is that well actually, it wasn't about the economy. We've made it not about the economy, which is true, but at the same time, the Leave campaign also created a rival group of economists, led as I say by Patrick Minford and others. Actually, my favourite research finding of the past decade is that Patrick Minford has fewer citations than I do. Remember, Patrick Minford  was one of Margaret Thatcher's inspirations. The Liverpool model was used by the Thatcherites to pursue a lot of their policies in the 1980s. But I have more citations than he does. I don't know what that tells us. I think what it does tell us is that Minford is not taken seriously in orthodox economic circles. His citations are coming from people like me who kind of read this stuff. It's not coming from the economics mainstream. So I suppose an idea of heterodoxy, and he self-presents as a heterodox economist. I mean, when he rolls his sleeves up and moves away from the modelling, he starts talking about his ragged band of Brexiteer economists as being the heirs to Cobden and Bright in the 1830s, to people who were arguing for the repeal of the Corn Laws and opening Britain up. And they basically created a modelling methodology that's just... heterodox is a polite way of putting it. So they discount the kind of standard understanding that geographical proximity matters to trade. So gravity assumptions go. The idea that common regulatory standards will have a positive effect upon trade outcomes is discounted. They assume that countries, all else being equal, purchase from the lowest cost supplier which is just not consistent with standard economic modelling assumptions at all. Actually, people who ran Minford's numbers through orthodox assumptions ended up reversing the effects of Brexit from a 4% improvement to 2.5% deterioration of GDP. Basically, the economists for Brexit, Economists of Free Trade, EFT, is Economists of Free Trade, they renamed themselves after the referendum - they basically admit that the UK would have to leave the EU, it would have to leave the WTO, it would have to abolish all tariffs on imports. That would effectively kill any manufacturing capacity in the UK and would create a significant spike in wage inequality. They're open about that. I think the point here is not that this was a serious contender although there are some interesting things of course, to say about the kind of how much we value economic models and whether we fetishise them or not. And I think there's a risk that we say, well, just because we like Remain, we think, you know, the ones over to the left are better because they're giving us the results we want. Of course, as I said before, in the austerity debate, the really interesting kind of debate got opened up by people who weren't economists who found other ways to measure the effects of austerity. But I think what economists, Brexit Economists for Free Trade as they became, were doing, they weren't interested in winning the debate. They were just interested in creating the impression that there was a debate amongst economists. There was no debate amongst economists, but for a variety of reasons and I guess media balancing norms had something to do with it they created the impression that there was a debate amongst economists about Brexit. I think what they did was to draw upon nomenclature of economists whilst also simultaneously devaluing it, something I've written about a little bit. I think what they did, this is something that Ben Clift and I have written about in a paper that's just about, it's been accepted, but you know, sometime next year it will be published by New Political Economy, is that the fundamental unknowability of what the post Brexit economy would be like, that there were no priors to model against. And I think that's something which forecasters like the Office for Budget Responsibility found extremely, were extremely prudent and cautious about. We're not going to make bold claims because ultimately we cannot know, there is a knowledge gap here. Whereas the Brexiteer economists, Economists for Free Trade/ Economists for Brexit, they basically embraced the unknowability and said, well, it's going to be like this because we can say that. So I think the Brexit case is kind of interesting, which leads me into the domain of my conclusions. They're are really more questions and conjectures, and things that we might go ahead and think about. The idea that Jonathan Hopkin and I have is that we might actually write a book which is about bullshit and economic discourse and uses the UK since 2010 as our case. And basically what you've just heard are the outlines of three of the, what will be the four, empirical chapters. The fourth will obviously be about Covid. I wonder whether there are two distinct modes of bullshit, excuse the swearing again. On the one hand, it seems to be a rhetorical strategy that's used to depoliticize, to take the economy out of the dangerous embrace of politics. And maybe to take it outside of the realm of democratic contestation. I think that's a standard way of thinking about how the economy has been governed over the past 30 years in advanced democracies. The Brexit case, actually the Trussonomics case as well, brings us to the idea that bullshit might also be a rhetorical strategy to do precisely the opposite, to politicize the economy by discrediting established economic expertise, that perhaps bullshit can work two ways. The footnote to the third thing is does bullshit require an intuitive anchor in lay understandings and lived experience of the economy? The idea of the economy as a household,  Is that the thing that made the austerity bullshit work? It seems to me that it probably did, but we need to think about that a bit more. Lastly, and apologies for the diagram, if we think about these two modes of bullshit, is actually bullshit in both directions? The depoliticizing version and the politicizing version.  Is it for governments or political actors of one kind to escape the constraints, the checks, the balances of representative democratic politics as represented by what I'd call the normal mode where you have technocratic input, but also public deliberation in politics. The balancing between expert knowledge and public sentiment - that's ideal typical of course. But maybe what we saw in the 1990s and before leading into the austerity debate was the reliance upon a technocratic mode of politics, at least in terms of economic governance which effectively delegated authoritative knowledge about the economy to economic experts, at the expense of socially sourced understandings of how the economy should be. Maybe the Brexit view is a move into this much more plebiscitary mode where knowledge is sourced, I've said here, from public sentiment, but in a very visceral way, expert knowledge has no way in. Those are just some thoughts maybe to toy with and think about. But that's me done. Thank you so much for your attention. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Ben. Thank you for taking us through what was a really fascinating talk. It's been thought provoking in terms of the way that you've been intertwining politics and economics and playing both off against each other. And as some of you know, sort of, a lot of my work focuses on the issue of trauma. And I did sort of listen to your lecture, thinking about being re- traumatised of the past 13 years of Conservative government in the UK and all that we've lived through. And just when you thought it was going to get bad, then we had more unremitting horror ahead of us all. But it did sort of make me think that, yeah, what we've seen over the past 13 years is an undermining of politics by a misrepresentation of economics. And I think sort of what you've very helpfully done is tried to sort of pull apart what has been a deliberate strategy that's been employed in order to try and advance particular issues and causes and agenda. So thank you very much for all that. Not necessarily for the re-traumatization, but for the way you've very skillfully helped us to sort of explore what's been going on and what we've been living through. We have a new colleague, Chris Wretman, who's at the back of the room, who's only arrived from the States in the past few days. Chris, it is this bad. OK, so just when you thought you've escaped from the States, you've now come to the UK. But hopefully you'll find that it's a different type of madness here. Thank you very much Ben. It's been lovely to sort of hear you talk about your work, the journey that you've been on, the people that you've been indebted to, both in terms of family and colleagues, to have brought you to this point in your career. And you're much younger than me, so you've got many more years ahead of you to hopefully talk about the upturn that there will be in both politics and economics. So, can we please show our appreciation again?