The Tragic Triumph of the Econocracy

'The Bank', with a capital letter, means the Central Bank in any country or community: in our case, the Bank of England; and 'the banks', as a collective, means all the other firms and partnerships that the Bank recognises as legitimate banks and thus it is authorised to give them instructions and to trade with them. Specifically, it will sell them bonds and other debt certificates [from a list of approved categories] and lend them money at a publicly announced rate of interest called 'base rate'. A large proportion of the Econocracy [the prevailing rat-pack of professors of Economics] argue that if the management of the banks by the Bank is perfectly calibrated the economy can operate perfectly. If the money-managing institutions work perfectly, the whole economy can achieve 'equilibrium': a state where all the resources available to the human race are allocated to their optimum uses.

This is a model of perfection. The realities of human existence make it a total nonsense: but the Econocracy currently has control of the channels of advice to governments, and most of the economic commentators in the media, in banks and investing institutions are required to parrot the prevailing orthodoxy: though there have always been some brave spirits who have the wit and the integrity to deny the validity of the whole structure.

So-called Monetarism, a package of ideas formulated by Econocrats in terms that could be explained to politicians and to students, was introduced in the USA in the later nineteen sixties, when the flaws in the attempt at practical neo-Keynesianism had generated a disastrous wage-price spiral as trade unions demanded pay increases to match price increases [as reported on official indexes of 'inflation']. In the early nineteen seventies the major oil-exporting countries tripled the royalties that they charged for access to their oil and natural gas; and this sent up the prices of all goods and services because of the universal impact of the costs of fuel for vehicles to deliver goods and people to where they were wanted, and the price of fuel for the provision of energy to heat homes and schools and to power factories. Additionally, petroleum was a vital ingredient in many plastics and polymers. So all prices were rising, hence wage demands took on a new stridency: and governments tried to stop the 'spiral' going out of control.

The Monetarists argued that if real control was given to the Bank and the government backed up the Bank in issuing stringent instructions to banks as to when and on when terms they could lend money to whom, that would strangle the spiral of rising wages and prices. Employers would not be able to borrow from their banks on affordable terms: so instead of borrowing to pay workers inflated wages, they would have to tell them "take what is on offer, or we'll have to close down and sack you all". Similarly, consumers would be told that they could only stay in the homes on which they were servicing mortgages provided they paid penal interest rates which went as high as 15%: which left them with little to spend on other things. So if they kept the house and the car, paying high mortgage interest and high interest on their car loans and the loans against which they had bought their fridges and TV sets, they had to reduce consumption of everything else.

The Thatcher government adopted their own version of this policy straight after their election in 1979, and by 1992 they were well on the way to implementing it. Economic growth slowed dramatically; and wage growth slowed even more. Then the government itself stopped creating money with which to maintain activity in the coal mines and the shipyards. They compensated for the loss of income that they suffered as the real economy declined from the tax revenue that they received on North Sea oil and by the sale of the privatised industries. They cut back heavily on government spending on defence and in support of industries that had previously been considered essential for national survival: steel, shipbuilding, aerospace and coal. The economy was dramatically changed, as the 'real' material productive sectors were decimated and the financial services - notably 'investment banking' - began to predominate: and that sector of the economy was supposedly susceptible to refined control by the Bank.

Thus, by 2005 the 'real' - the material - economy on which human animals depend for their continued existence and comfort was utterly denigrated and largely despoiled; and the finance sector was put in a position to undermine the entire economy through its greedy overindulgence in speculative deals that the Bank did not even understand. This is the achievement of the Econocracy. The real incomes [money wages adjusted so that their current purchasing-power can be computed] of the mass of the British population have been static for a decade. Over those years, 2007-2017, plenty of jobs have been created; almost all of them in activities that do not result in any substantive increment to the real economy. There has been a spectacular degree of material stagnation which, set alongside the government's obsession with 'austerity' [in which they have been mentored by the same Econocrats] leaves almost everyone with an awareness that the economy is not "working for me". That is because the economy is being driven in obedience to an abstract model. The fundamental reality, that the economy should be the mechanism that serves material, living, aspirational individuals, has no place in contemporary Economics. That is why Economics must be brought down from its high place in academic temples, and opened up for radical restructuring.