Economic Nonsense: 36. It is important to ensure that the finest minds are directing the economy

This commits the Platonist fallacy of supposing that the problem is to find the wisest, noblest rulers.  The assumption behind it is that we will come out best if only the right people end up in charge.  In "The Open Society and its Enemies," Karl Popper exposes the fallacy.  The problem is that that whatever method we choose to select our rulers, those rulers can easily be corrupted in office.  The temptations of power are all too obvious.

If we did manage to have the finest minds in charge of the economy, the odds are high that they would direct it to serve ends they approved of, rather than the ends that ordinary people would freely choose if they had the opportunity.  

But there is a deeper fallacy.  It is that any minds, no matter how fine, can have sufficient information and act quickly enough to direct the economy.  The economy is changing from micro-second to micro-second as choices are made, decisions reached and actions taken.  These all input into the flow of information conveyed by prices and deals.  The economy is not like a vehicle that can be controlled by accelerators, brakes and steering wheel.  It is more like a living organism in its complexity and its ability to adapt to changing circumstances.  The odds are that if the finest minds were to direct the economy, they would direct it badly. 

Popper's answer was not to ask, "How can we choose or train the best rulers," but to ask instead, "How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?”  His answer was that you need a means of rejecting the bad, rather than selecting the good.  In the economic sphere this happens without the direction of the finest minds.  Products that do not cut it with consumers are counted out, along with the firms that market them.  Capital is redeployed to the newer, smarter people who can satisfy customers.  It is a continuous process by which the less competent is weeded out in favour of the more competent.

If we did have the finest minds trying to direct the economy, the chances are that they would contrive to stop this happening, or at the very least, interfere with it in ways that made it less effective.

Two cheers for technocracy

Who needs experts? The minimum wage was once an example of the triumph of technocracy, where decisions are delegated to experts to depoliticise them. The Low Pay Commission was set up to balance competing priorities – increasing wages without creating too much unemployment. If you were a moderate who thought the minimum wage was a good way of boosting low wages, but recognised that it might also create unemployment, the LPC gave you a middle ground position. (For what it’s worth, I’m an extremist.)

That technocratic settlement also allowed politicians to, basically, safeguard against an ignorant public. By delegating decisions like this to experts, bad but politically popular policies could be avoided. Relatively well-informed politicians could avoid having to propose bad policies by depoliticising them.

Other examples of this include NICE’s responsibility for deciding which drugs the NHS should and shouldn’t provide, and the Browne Review that recommended student fees, which had cross-bench support. The old idea that “you can’t talk about immigration” comes from an informal version of this – everyone in power knew that people’s fears about the economics of immigration were bogus, so they were basically ignored.

But that technocratic settlement now looks dead. Labour has now made a specified increase to the minimum wage part of its electoral platform, following George Osborne’s lead earlier this year. That means that voters will have to choose not just between two rival theories about the minimum wage, but two competing sets of evidence about whether £7/hour or £8/hour is better, given a wage/unemployment trade-off.

Whether voters are self-interested or altruistic doesn’t really matter. A self-interested low wage worker would still need to know if a minimum wage increase would threaten her job; an altruistic voter would similarly need to know a lot about the economics of the minimum wage and the UK’s labour market to make a judgement about what level it should be.

And of course the minimum wage is just one of dozens, if not hundreds, of questions that political parties offer different answers to that voters have to make a judgement about.

In practice this does not happen. Voters are very uninformed about basic facts of politics, and are almost entirely ignorant about economics, which almost everyone would agree would be necessary to make the correct judgement about something like what the minimum wage level should be (even if they didn’t agree on which theories and evidence was relevant). Even the use of rules-of-thumb such as listening to a particular newspaper or think tank (ha) will suffer from the same problems.

Voters, then, face a nearly impossible task. Assuming they are bright, well-intentioned, and believed that it was important for them to cast their vote for the party that would have the best policies, they would have to amass an enormous amount of information to make the right decision on all the questions they, in voting, have to answer.

So voters are trapped. They cannot know what minimum wage rate is best any more than they can know what drugs the NHS should pay for. They are, empirically, very unaware of basic facts, but they would find it hard to overcome that even if they wanted to.

Does democracy make us free? Maybe, but it’s the freedom of a deaf-blind man – we can choose whatever policy we want, without any idea about what those policies will actually do. So, if the alternative is more direct democracy like this, maybe technocracy isn’t so bad.