As vaccination is rolled out across advanced economies, the main danger has become mutations of the virus, or variants. We all know about the B.1.1.7 variant that emerged in the UK in September and helped generate the rapid rise in cases in December. We also know about the ‘South African’ variant (B.1.351), which appears to reducethe effectiveness of all vaccines to some degree. But these are just two of the better known variants, which seem to be emergingall the time (see also here). COVID variants are the reason that so many countries have now severely restricted travel (‘almost closed borders’) into their countries in recent weeks. One of these variants could severely reduce the effectiveness of a country’s vaccination programme. It is likely that scientists would… [Read More...]
COVID-19, experts and the media
On February 4th, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) publishedan editorial which suggested that the actions of most government’s in mishandling the COVD-19 pandemic could be described as ‘social murder’. They write: “The “social murder” of populations is more than a relic of a bygone age. It is very real today, exposed and magnified by covid-19. It cannot be ignored or spun away. Politicians must be held to account by legal and electoral means, indeed by any national and international constitutional means necessary. State failures that led us to two million deaths are “actions” and “inactions” that should shame us all.” The biggest state failure of them all is the UK Chancellor persuading the UK Prime Minister to ignore his expert scientific advisers last autumn. This damning… [Read More...]
Media radicalisation in the US and UK
Perhaps many people outside the United States do not realise how dangerous the attack on the United States Capitol was. The views from outside the Capitol, which is all the media could immediately show, seemed harmless enough. The reality was very different. Five people died, including one policeman. As one Republican described, seeing the faces of those trying to force their way through a police barricade to get into the House Chamber “I saw this crowd of people banging on that glass screaming. Looking at their faces, it occurred to me, these aren’t protesters. These are people who want to do harm. What I saw in front of me was basically home-grown fascism, out of control.” We now know that this was a well organised… [Read More...]
Why vaccines alone are not enough, how the UK government could mess things up again and which European country will eliminate COVID first?
Why has the UK government decided to apply serious travel restrictions to incomers because of COVID now, almost a year after the pandemic began? What took them so long, and what has changed? The obvious answer to the second question is vaccination and mutation. We don’t know how much the vaccines so far approved will stop people passing on the infection to others, but what evidence we have suggests there will be at least some dampening effect. Israel is likely to provide the first firm evidence on this. That will reduce R, the number of people one infected person passes the illness on to. What vaccines will certainly do is substantially reduce the chance of people getting ill from COVID. The danger is that, as vaccines are… [Read More...]
The two sides of austerity.
I thought I’d use the FT’s mea culpa on austerity to make a point which is easily missed in public debate. Sustained austerity of the kind inflicted on the UK from 2010 until quite recently was terrible for two types of reason. The first, that most people focus on, are the cuts to government spending (shrinking the state) that went well beyond trimming any fat and caused real hardship. The second is macroeconomic. Cutting government spending in a recession is never a good idea, and when interest rates were stuck at zero it was a disaster. To highlight that distinction, I’m going to claim (with a few provisos) that the current Chancellor in this recession has so far not made the second, macroeconomic mistake. In that sense we… [Read More...]
Who caused our current COVID crisis: an example of public deception by the media and government
Let me start with what the public thinks: It is a straightforward question and the majority of the public give a clear answer. Unfortunately that majority are wrong. There is no doubt that the rise in COVID cases over the last month is a result of government failure. Let me set out what the government’s mistakes were. Having ended a lockdown that still left the level of cases pretty high, the government reverted to their Tier system. Much the same tier system that had led to the November lockdown in the first place. London was put in Tier 2. The warning signs were immediate. Cases started rising rapidly from the beginning of December. We now know why, but you didn’t need to know why (or be any kind… [Read More...]
Trump tries to incite a putsch, and his UK cheerleaders reveal their own contempt for democracy
It appears as if the Facebook ban on referencing this blog has been lifted. Many thanks to all those who complained to Facebook. I doubt I will ever know who persuaded them to ban it. Would be democratic dictators, elected heads of state who want to ensure they can never lose an election, should know the first rule to staying in power. It is to control a sufficient amount of the media. Convincing your faithful that the mainstream media is fake news is not enough. What that sufficient amount is will depend on many factors, including the voting system for President. It may be, for example, that given the advantagesa united right wing socially conservative party has in the UK, control of a majority of newspapers and … [Read More...]
Why the UK’s COVID crisis should be personal for so many Tory voters
There are around16 million over 60s living in the UK, nearly a quarter of the UK population. They are the most at risk from COVID: catching the virus could be a matter of life or death. To them the government’s handling, or rather mishandling, of the pandemic should be a matter of acute personal concern. It certainly is for me. Around60% of over 60s voted Conservative in the last election. The NHS is currently at breaking point. Tired and demoralised after almost a year of COVID, doctors and nurses find their hospitals are full and we haven’t yet seen the impact of Christmas and New Year. Whereas Johnson acted in March to save the NHS, this winter he decided to save Christmas instead, until he was… [Read More...]
It is inevitable that Labour in opposition will not be a champion of social liberalism
Trump has been defeated, but only just. Trump, that most ludicrous and destructive of US presidents, still won 46.8% of the vote. More importantly, the number of votes between Biden and Trump in the Electoral College was very small. Voters still turned out for a Repubican party that backed Trump all the way. Perhaps worst of all, the aftermath of the election showed that the Republican party backed Trump’s attempts to overturn democracy. What Republicans do on a smaller scale with gerrymandering they are happy to do at a national level. The future of the US is still very uncertain when one of the two main parties does not respect democracy. The Conservative party in the UK is only beginning down that particular route, with its plansfor… [Read More...]
The political economy and psychology of COVID rebounds
You can call it a second wave, or a resurgence of the first wave. But whatever you call it we are seeing in some European countries a steady (and occasionally rapid) increase in new cases after a longer period when new case numbers have been coming down or been stable. A good reason to not call this a second wave is that the first wave never went away. Changing social behaviour, aided by government support and a lockdown, reduced new case numbers rapidly. However governments relaxed the lockdown before new cases fell to almost zero, and so domestic transmission continued at a low level. But why have the number of new cases started increasing in the last few weeks in many countries, after a period of apparent … [Read More...]
Brexit may be pointless, but it will be with us for some time
You have probably read a lot of stuff asking what, precisely, are the benefits of Brexit. I’m going to make some points that try and look at this from the point of view of those who supported Brexit, whether we get a trade deal or not. For those who voted for Brexit the main concrete preoccupation was immigration. Here is the latest version of a chart I have shown before (source): Those voting for Brexit because they wanted low migration will have been disappointed (although I’m not sure how many realise this), because the fall in EU immigration has been matched by an increase in non-EU immigration. Net immigration is slightly higher than it was when the referendum took place. Seems to confirm that immigration really… [Read More...]
If the UK government fails to do a deal over unfair competition it is not because of UK sovereignty. It’s because of crazy stupidity.
Why do people keep saying the impasse over a trade deal with the EU has to do with UK sovereignty? I know the government says this, but the government says a lot of things that are just untrue. They are standard lines the go down well in focus groups. For those who are not paid to follow the government line, to repeat the government’s line seems odd. The current impasse seems to me to be about EU sovereignty, not UK sovereignty. As present (see date of post) the main stumbling block in agreeing a deal is the EU’s insistence that it should be able to increase tariffs if it feels that UK goods have a competitive advantage because of future UK government subsidies or rule divergence. Avoiding… [Read More...]
Fiscal policy during and after the coronavirus pandemic
This post was partly inspired by this recent seminar, but also by thisexcellent paper from The Resolution Foundation. Apologies for the length, but there is a lot to cover. This post is in five parts. The first looks at how our understanding of fiscal policy has evolved over the last decade or so. It is an essential background to how fiscal policy should be employed during the pandemic. The second looks at fiscal policy support during the pandemic. The third looks at what could be quite a short period between when the pandemic is effectively over as a result of mass vaccination, and when the economy has fully recovered. The fourth asks whether, once the economic recovery is complete, we should attempt to gradually reduce the debt… [Read More...]
Politicians and experts: austerity, Brexit and the pandemic
I’ll be talking about fiscal policy during and after the pandemic at a Resolution Foundation/MMF event in a week’s time: https://www.mmf.ac.uk/resolution-foundation/ I have written quite a few posts on the relationship between policy and expertise, and between expertise and the media. The better ones are in my book, but they were all written before the COVID pandemic. How does the relationship between experts on the one hand and politicians and the media on the other that we saw with economists over austerity and Brexit play out with medics and the pandemic? All three cases are different from each other. Although the evidence set out in my book suggests that the majority of academic economists opposed austerity (a majority that got… [Read More...]
How the electoral system in the US, and to a lesser extent the UK, is biased towards social conservatism.
The UK is often torn between following the US or following Europe. We share a language with the US, and a lot of popular culture. But we also share a voting system that ensures the political right has a heavy built in advantage. The United States may be too far down that road to change, but in the UK there is still hope if only the current opposition leadership see sense. Once we get over the relief that Donald Trump is no longer President, comes the realisation of just how bad the US election results really were for Democrats. Trump was a Republican, and the Republican party backed him almost without exception. Even in the current ludicrous situation where Trump is refusing to concede, many senior Republican… [Read More...]
COVID, the US election and media balance
I want to start with my last post. It contrasted a minority of countries that were good, were not too bad and the majority that were terrible at handling the pandemic. What surprised me was how willing people were to believe that each of the good countries had some special attribute that explained their superior performance, rather than accept the more obvious explanation that they had more practice at handling pandemics, or just had better governance. These countries that have handled the pandemic well knew that you needed a good TTI operation, you needed to keep case numbers low, you needed strong border control and in most cases that if you lose control of case numbers you lock down quickly and hard. The UK has failed on… [Read More...]
How governments in the West failed to learn
You would think, after so many countries were taken by surprise by a pandemic caused by a new virus in the Spring of this year, these countries would resolve to never let it happen again. They would be mad, knowing what they now know, to let cases explode in a similar manner to they did earlier this year. In what we call the West we like to think we have reasonably rational governments that listen to expert advice on matters of life and death. Well at least some of us thought that. I am prepared to make an exception of the UK and US. The UK is run by fantasists who thought we would hold all the cards in any negotiations with the EU and there would… [Read More...]
Starve a kid to save a quid [1]
One of the myths perpetuated by mediamacro is that management of the public finances is all about controlling our debt by keeping deficits down. As with so much of mediamacro, this is something no academic macroeconomist would say. Econ 101 (first year undergraduate economics) tells you that the deficit should rise and fall with the economic cycle. In particular in major recessions deficits rise rather a lot, and that is exactly what they should do. Econ101 also tells you that in a recession caused by collapsing demand, it makes sense to increase the size of an already large deficit through fiscal stimulus. It becomes absolutely necessary to do so when interest rates can no longer stimulate the economy because they are stuck at their lower bound. Fiscal stimulus… [Read More...]
Why do some find the economics/health trade-off so hard to get? Because it’s like the Phillips curve.
The distinction between the short run and long run traditional Phillips curve (not the New Keynesian variety) is so ingrained in economists that it seems obvious to us. We sometimes forget that it took many years for policymakers to understand it. I think something similar is happening with the economics/health trade-off in this pandemic. There is undoubtedly a short term trade-off between imposing greater restrictions (in extremis, lockdowns) to improve health outcomes (a good) and the negative effect that has on the economy (a bad). In much the same way as there is generally a short term trade off between expanding the economy to reduce unemployment (a good) and getting higher inflation (a bad). But in both cases that is not the end of … [Read More...]
The anti-lockdown crusade gains oxygen from this government’s ineptitude
If anyone still doubts that Brexit was our Trump moment, look at some of the same characters (Tory MPs, newspapers, even voters) who supported Brexit getting behind what has become an anti-lockdown crusade. I use the word crusade deliberately. Rather than religion it is ideology that drives most anti-lockdown proponents. That ideology is libertarian, although to borrow a phrase from Chris Dillowon mask phobia, this libertarianism is just solipsistic narcissism. What the crusade isn’t, for most of the anti-lockdown brigade, is evidence led. That is not to say that some scientists may genuinely believe that lockdowns are never worthwhile. Science shouldn’t be closed to heretical ideas, and there will always be scientists who put forward such ideas. Occasionally the heretical turns out to be… [Read More...]
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