In the early years of this century, I spent a lot of Tuesday afternoons with Vince Cable. Then occupying some sort of role on the Liberal Democrat front bench, and representing Twickenham in parliament, Dr Cable MP would invite political correspondents to a room on the Committee Corridor of the House of Commons. There he would deliver what could only be described as lectures on contemporary economic issues. I remember a very good one on oil prices. It was often impressive and generally interesting, and almost entirely pointless.
The problem was that Cable, who later became an interesting Cabinet minister then a poor Lib Dem leader, struggled to connect his economic insights to practical politics. The ever-smaller band of hacks attending used to leave that room each week wondering what his seminars had to do with the Blair government, the Lib Dems’ prospects, or anything else that was then on the agenda at Westminster.
Those Commons sessions — erudite, informative, almost devoid of politics — came to mind while I read Cable’s latest book. Money and Power is good and interesting, but fails utterly to deliver on one of its key promises. The book is 16 portraits of world leaders who made a real economic impact, and if you’re looking for a brisk, slightly old-fashioned “great man” primer on modern economic history, pre-order it today. But if you’re taken by the publisher’s promise of a book “examining the fascinating interplay of economics and politics”, prepare for disappointment.
Because this is economics largely estranged from — and sometimes wholly divorced from — politics. Time and again, the matter of whether and why economic policies and their authors are approved or rejected by their populations is an afterthought, treated like a weather event: something that just happens. And in his intelligent but bloodless way, Cable unwittingly says quite a lot about what can go wrong with economic policymaking. By omission, he points towards some things that the next generation of economically-interested politicians should be thinking hard about now.
Maybe the first and biggest question is: how important should economic policy be to politicians? Cable quite rightly notes that for most of the post-war period, countries around the world have given national priority to rising living standards and economic wellbeing. He goes on to describe how a variety of leaders have sought to do that, with varying degrees of success. Cable’s measure of success for the politicians he profiles is largely based on economic outcomes: did they deliver more wealth and wellbeing for their populations?
The importance of that barely needs to be explained: sustained economic growth in recent decades has transformed human experience in ways that were barely conceivable even a generation ago. Infant mortality has plummeted, lifespans are soaring, and the years of life we have are happier and healthier than ever before.
But is that enough? And is the pursuit of growth above all always the right thing for politics to do? Cable’s economic policymakers often come across almost as Platonic guardians, distant and superior beings making decisions about the best interests of the masses who will eventually benefit, whether they know it or not and whether they welcome it or not. One of Cable’s most revealing observations is about Margaret Thatcher: “One of her traits — and an admirable one — was to introduce and persist with measures that she knew to be unpopular but judged to be necessary.”
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