Professor Hayek to the white telephone please, Hayek to the white telephone

Steering the UK economy out of the inflationary storm would always require unusual finesse, but the task would be easier if the Bank of England governor had an unemployment number he could trust.

The problem, highlighted by Andrew Bailey in a recent hearing, stems from deeply flawed labour market data from the Office for National Statistics, led by national statistician Sir Ian Diamond.

It’s possible to work merely with management consultancy platitudes - you can only manage what you can measure for example. Which is, in fact, the complaint being made here. The desire is to manage inflation, for that it’s necessary to have the employment numbers and therefore we desire to have those so that we can manage.

We can and should go back a step into theory. Which is that economies are big and complex and therefore we’re simply never going to have those numbers to the level of detail required for that pinpoint management. This is the rock upon which all clever macroeconomic schemes founder. Not only don’t we know, we can’t know.

For example, we really don’t know how many people there are in the country. Observations of, say, sewage volumes (with, admittedly, some heroic assumptions about diet and so on) are rather at odds with any counts of National Insurance numbers or Census counts. Certainly, anyone who tries to insist we know to within better than 5% either way is on very dodgy ground indeed. OK, maybe 3%.

It’s not just this number either. It’s all the numbers we collect have those error bars. Which means that attempting to fine tweak to within those error bars is going to be a nonsense.

Yes, obviously, a 10% fall - or a 5% increase - in recorded GDP is something to take note of, even panic about. Inflation of such sizes and so on. But in that pointillist detail required by the more ambitious macroeconomic management schemes we’re really just out of luck on that information front.

Sad, but there it is. Which does mean that economic management needs to rely upon the things that can be done. Set up the basic systems properly and leave be. Make sure that incentives are good, the rule of law is tolerably enforced, we’ve not a bureaucracy descending upon economic activity like piranhas upon a corpse, taxes are easy and so on. The outcome becomes something not managed, for that’s impossible, but emergent from the correct set up of the system in the first place.