Feeble-minded: Martin Wolf
The economics journalist Martin Wolf: pompous, pretentious, portentous, imprudent, shallow and idiotic
Dalrymple observes that there are now so many economists or economics commentators that
some of their predictions must sometimes come true. If economists make enough predictions, some of them will be right.
But he notes that certain economics journalists are
especially gifted, in that, despite many prognostications, they get everything wrong.
Dalrymple asks how such fools become panjandrums.
Is there a special school for them? If there is, I suppose they teach there such subjects as gravitas and pomposity, pretentiousness and portentousness. No doubt students are selected by natural ability in these subjects.
One such panjandrum is Martin Wolf, described officially as chief economics commentator of the London Financial Times newspaper and unofficially as the most conceited journalist in England. Dalrymple writes:
It is not my intention to pour scorn on anyone, but still one must sometimes take individual examples to illustrate a general point, in this case the foolishness of economic panjandrums.
He cites three typical sentences in a Wolf column for the newspaper:
Borrowing by the government for any programme or project with a zero or better real return must be profitable. Such a programme might be to sustain aggregate demand, in order to minimise long-term scarring caused by the pandemic. It might be investment in physical or human capital. Either should be economically beneficial, now that debt is so cheap.
Dalrymple looks at the
combination of imprudence, sheer idiocy, and shallowness
of the passage, asking,
What of the possibility that the government, by its expenditures, will create future liabilities rather than productive assets, and indeed, by a variety of methods, for example by the granting of rights and privileges to certain persons or classes of person, has often done so? What of the possibility that rolling over debt will become ever more expensive? (In 2018, even with low interest rates, Britain spent more on servicing its debt than on its defense.) For the month of December 2021, British debt repayment was 300% what it had been for December 2020. And interest rates had barely risen.
Dalrymple recounts the experience of an acquaintance of his who has a small business. He
received a $40,000 grant from the government, not repayable (at least not by him), though he did not need it and never ceased to make a profit, albeit a smaller one than the year before.
The government was
unable or unwilling to distinguish between those who needed propping up and those who did not.
And this is the organisation that the fool Wolf would entrust with making investments! Dalrymple asks:
Would he take the government as his personal financial adviser?
As to increasing human capital, so-called,
in the hands of government it is likely to result in an overgrowth of qualifications irrelevant to, and even obstructive of, any productive activity whatsoever, to what one might call, if it were a disease, fulminating diplomatosis.
Dalrymple says:
It is true that there are several possible ways to solve the problem of excessive borrowing. There is real economic growth, but it is at least very likely that growth in debt repayment will outpace real economic growth. Taxation might fill the gap but beyond a certain level has an inhibiting effect on growth. There is repudiation of the debt by default, which is a form of theft, and there is debauching the currency, another form of theft, and much favoured by Lenin as the midwife of the glorious future.
