gordonfreude
It’s been a year since Gordon Brown arrived in Number 10 Downing Street, uncontested.
I don’t normally look to record anniversaries (apart from this and this, and maybe this), nor comment directly on politics. I wish politics were better, of course, and I think the political media must take a lot of responsibility for not being sufficiently critical.
A far more technical examination by the political press of politicians’ achievements is long overdue. This takes greater journalistic resources than tend to be applied. But I am sure that, if it were done better, there would be more popular engagement. Too much reporting is done either on a whim, or cascades too readily from the previous coverage on a subject. Political coverage has dumbed down to the point that what matters is opinion polls, and relative positions, prospects of early elections, rather than the serious matters affecting society. The level of debate about the economy, education, nutrition and environment is disastrous.
As the capitalist system grows ever more technologically and financially complex, the blunt instrument of politics and political reporting needs to be refashioned so that it operates much more in line with what is driving modern society.
Gordon Brown’s tenure, firstly as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Prime Minister, is a singular example of an overly simple and overly confident attitude toward our modern political and economic ecology. Although I can’t find it now, somewhere in my old blog I got so fed up with his pride in hitting his economic forecasts that I described him as a “lucky fool”, à la Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. He continually took credit for a period of economic growth that was largely sustained by… er… credit.
So, “Gordonfreude” is the word I’d like to coin to represent the guilty pleasure that one might feel every time more bad news besets Gordon’s government. Year after year, the man told us that he had delivered an end to boom and bust, and protested his prudence, and advertised that he had achieved economic stability. No-one in his party was prepared to stand for election against him. You just knew it would end in tears.
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Tim – worth noting a couple of stories in the ever-so-slightly Gordonsceptic business pages of the Telegraph today. As a percentage of GDP British consumer debt is now the highest ever measured in any G7 country, and GB’s housing adviser (and former MPC ‘wise man’) Stphen Nickell is predicting a slump in house prices so severe that they won’t recover for seven years or more.
The more data points that emerge, the more our economy seems to resemble 1990 Japan – massive debt, overinflated property and asset prices, embedded inflation and a system that uses taxpayers’ money to prop up ‘zombie banks’ like Northern Rock in the interests of political expedience. If we are heading for a recession (and no disinterested party seems to be arguing that we are not) I believe that we will be lucky to end up like the 1980s – most likely we will end up with the 1970s and in the worst case we enter a period of deflation not unlike the 1930s. Whatever happens, asset prices will collapse and sweep away what’s left of GB’s rather tattered reputation for economic competence – not long now before his boast of ‘an end to boom and bust’ will be thrown back at him at PMQ’s.
Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?
Dave,
At a purely psychological level, based on my own direct experience, when hubris experiences reversal the disorientation that follows disables the faculties required to solve the ensuing problems.
Recessions are painful, but some say that they are merely the process of society switching production from things that people no longer need in such abundance to things they do. For me the granite worktop symbolises that.
Tim
Granite worktops are great if you have neither stainless steel pans that chip them nor glass bowls that themselves chip or shatter. The state of the economic kitchen will find an equilibrium but the Labour Government pushing voters toward home ownership was a symbolic change that Brown – though having better credentials than Blair – did nothing to resist.
By analogy with schadenfreude, Gordonfreude would be a secret enjoyment of his situation. In the circumstances outright scorn may be the more appropriate reaction. This is the man that said “prudent” and “over the cycle” but made little preparation for the inevitable. Re Tim’s comment, the main hubris was believing hype that propensity to Inflation in wages was dead, this was a temporary effect of Far East competition and outsourcing. In terms of domestic incentives and risk control I ask: why is every minicab driver building a string of rental properties financed by mortgages, whose fault is that really – theirs?
James, I wonder too what distorting effect the massive and unexpected wave of immigration had on the usual economic signals. For instance, but for that influx would we not have seen a more significant economic softening earlier? Housing was supported, especially the rental sector, and retail sales too. And if reports are to be believed, EasyJet and sterling weakness can turn the influx into just as sudden an exodus, which would add to the inflationary wages argument.
Tim