I am writing this on a late train home from Kings Cross. I came to Kings Cross from the Green Room at BBC Newsnight, where I was having an interesting discussion with Jonathan Powell. Then I learned I was cancelled for the programme. Jonathan was not.
I'll be honest. I always expect to be cancelled by Newsnight. Fifty per cent of all my planned appearances have been cancelled, usually with less than an hour to go. Tonight follows a pattern. But it's worth noting what happened.
I was called by Newsnight just before six this evening. I happened to be on a train into London. I spoke at the book launch for David Boyle and Andrew Simm's new book ‘Economics - a crash course'. Newsnight wanted me to come on to discuss Boris Johnson's ‘Boosterism' economics with Arthur Laffer, the creator of Reagonomics'. I ran through what I thought of Boosterism, and Laffer come to that. I debated with Laffer in Paris last year at the OECD, winning resoundingly in an audience vote after the debate. I knew what I was taking on.
A bit after 9.30, as I headed up Regent Street to the BBC I thought it may be safe to tweet that I was going on air. The BBC had booked me a hotel for the night by then, as I could not get home after the programme. It seemed it was going ahead.
And then they said Laffer had pulled out. No reason had been given. I could suggest one. He'd learned who his opponent was.
And after another 20 minutes they admitted they could find no one else to debate with me. So although Steve Bannon could go on the BBC today without an opponent apparently I can't. Which I think worth noting.
So, I'm heading home.
But what would I have said? The Guardian discussed Boosterism very soon after Johnson said he would use the word. And I think we can safely align it with Laffer, Reagonomics, and the failed Kansas experiment from 2012 to 2017 which so convincingly proved that such ideas have not a shred of substance to them.
But these issues would have required interpretation. And what I would have made clear is that there is no harm in talking up the economy, But there is a very big ‘but' to attach to that comment. And that is that the talking up has to make sense to those who hear the message or its just Hucksterism.
So, the hearers have to believe that the economy might reasonably be talked up. And I know no reasonably aware economist, accountant or business person who thinks that is possible of the UK economy right now. It is glaringly obvious that we are heading for the most massive economic shock and no amount of huckster hype changes that.
Then the hearer has to think that what is being promised can be delivered. Johnson is promising schools, hospitals, ships, rail lines and a great deal more right now but at the same time he and his colleagues say we are at full employment and that they do not want immigration. The promises do, then, appear undeliverable. Or something already being said is not true.
Now I happened to think that we are far from near full employment because many so-called self employments hardly exist, and under-employment and low pay is rampant, as low productivity data shows. But Johnson would have to admit that to make his promises possible to deliver, and he hasn't, so again his promises ring hollow.
And then there is a third issue, and that is that the spend has to be controlled within a recognisable economic framework or there isn't a person on earth who thinks that boom and bust will not result. But Johnson is not doing this. There is no hint of modern monetary theory and its conceptual framework for deficit spending mixed with job creation on offer fro0m him, which is the only way what he is doing could be justified. Nor is there a hint of the fiscal framework that MMT relies on to make the programme deliverable without inflation, boom or bust resulting. Instead there's just hype.
And we've had enough of crashes. The dot.com crash was built on Boosterism. So too was the 2008 coach. Both overhyped an activity without relating it in anyway to underlying economic reality. And that's just what Johnson is doing now. He's hyping an offering he cannot deliver because it is wholly unrelated to real economic activity. It is bound to fail.
And that's before I'd have slipped in anything on the fact that Laffer's economics have never worked. Tax cuts always deliver reduced revenues, not increased ones.
And tax cuts for the rich never trickle down. They just increase inequality.
Whilst Kansas, when using his policies, which were heavily ‘Boosted', grew less than average in the USA and had one of the lowest rates of job increase in the whole USA. Plus a record deficit. What was delivered was the exact opposite of the Booster promise.
As it will be by Johnson, who will simply deliver tax cuts for the well off, not a new job and no delivery of any promised programme.
And maybe that's why I did not make it to air. Who knows? But the BBC have just offered me a £75 cancellation fee.
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The BBC is a government agency which was captured long ago by the sort of people who uncritically broadcast whatever their political masters tell them to. I lost trust in the organisation after the first Scottish Independence Referendum.
Will anything good ever be achieved by engaging with them? I think not.
At least you get to spend the night at home 🙂
Pretty shit of the BBC to cancel – they should have empty chaired Laffer, Also it’s a shit cancellation fee but while establishment shills like Humphries get £800K/year, ordinary contributors are being paid less and less and often asked to work for nothing.
Point of information. John Humphreys earns just under £300,000 a year. Too much, I know, but it’s important to get one’s facts right.
Worse. He’s an established establishment shill! Gratified, all the same, to have my personal assessment of Humphries so trenchantly put. Cheers!
I’m very disappointed to learn that you were cancelled but thanks for putting this out for everyone to see. Very clear and concise, it has a ring of experience and expert analysis. No wonder they didn’t want you on!
Excellent bed time read thank you for explaining ‘Boosterism’ Prof.
I don’t watch TV at home having eschewed the regressive licence. I used to be an addict of Newsnight.
I think we got a lot more from your paltrily paid train ride home than you would have been able to get across by whotever the current narrative controller they have.
And you’d have been schooled into calling Powell, Pole (if you didn’t already know that).
Firstly, I am going to complain to the BBC – as a license payer. You bet!
Secondly I applaud you telling us about this at so late an hour and a lot of inconvenience.
I have written elsewhere on your blog about what I think Johnson is up to and his ‘fake’ MMT bribe to the electorate.
I wonder what the media will make of all this expenditure given that they have fallen for the gross lie that New Labour left Government saddled with debt in 2010?
I wonder how the MSM will respond – and the IFS – that much vaunted protector of the public interest!!
Cynical – me? Never?!
I admit I woke up late this morning…..
A £75 cancellation fee? Maybe don’t spend that all in the one shop now….
Is there anyone left who wonders why Scotland wants out of the grip of this nonsenseconomics? Would an Independent Scotland be a “ walk in the park” no there will be issues and problems to analysis and solve. The difference is a Government in control of everything a modern economy has to manage is accountable to the people who elect it. Scotland hasn’t voted for any of this and simply is not buying this building the lesser British Empire rubbish. One thing is certain if we carry on this path it won’t be a trickle down disaster for the most vulnerable, it will be a flood.
In the autumn of 2016 I became curious about MSM ownership. What’s in it for them was my question? I discovered that all were billionaires. Relate that to the EU tax haven incentive and there was the reason. Moving on I’ve always been very anti low tax regimes. I never believed Thatcher’s trickle down theory, again enter tax free havens into the equation. The Scandinavian example qualifies the value of higher taxes. Moving on we have austerity. Got to balance the books. Again this can be done by low taxes. Hmm why then are bankruptcies, IVAs, CVAs and Nat. Debt at a record high? Moving on Johnson is offering ‘Boosterism’. So eloquently explained by you. It fits with my assessment of Johnson, hot air posturing. No substance. In the meantime the country is now floundering on the rocks.
A little further enlightened again, thanks Richard for exposing falsehoods and dangers of this government and articulating arguments so well.
Very disappointing you were barred and appalling Bannon got on. Weird that BBC itself sucked into populism, but I suppose it’s because simplistic and made-up economics much easier than real life and real solutions…
AC Grayling this week said this gangster government deliberately creating noise and obscurantism.
How sinister and worrying to realise such provocative broadcasts are part of a wider plan and manipulative strategy… it’s so hard to counter corruption in politics .
You’re quite rightly cheesed off.
But the BBC are quite discredited by now as you know, and reaching audiences doesn’t have to be through them any longer, fortunately.
You’re doing that in your blog, on Twitter, perhaps on FB (I wouldn’t know as I’m not on it), and your readers share with others who share with others….
The message is getting through, but not to those who don’t want to hear…it probably wouldn’t anyway, Newsnight or not.
Thanks
I am technically employed, self employed. I’m registered on one of the online tutorial sites offering science and biology tutoring. I have not thus far earned a single bean from it. Nobody has been tutored by me through it.
Yet I dutifully registered as self employed with HMRC so I will appear as a data point on the employment figures. Lots of people are looking around trying to find any way they can to earn a little bit, or a little bit more.
I briefly had a job taking small groups of the long term unemployed and tutoring them on modern employment skills (it’s all online) and giving them wellbeing tips, the mindfulness went down a treat. But I told them honestly that if you had wanted to design a system to give people incentives to earn money under the table in the black, cash in hand economy then Universal Credit is pretty much it.
The claw back when you earn something when first proposed would have kicked that, but the Treasury vetoed it and you lose 60p in the pound of earnings. An incredible effective tax rate for the lowest paid in society and a disincentive to earn anything other than a full time wage or salary.
So when you are thinking what a mean clusterfuck UC is, don’t forget to aim a dart at the Treasury for their niggardly kiboshing of it. Or maybe the Treasury likes the idea of the cash in hand economy, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Thanks
Peter, Unrelenting Cruelty is even worse than you describe. Huge numbers of claimants who may have had tax credits any time in the past *twenty* years are being slammed with clawbacks for ‘overpayments’ for which no explanation is provided, leaving them with pennies or nothing to live on.
See fb group “FUCA”, Fighting Universal Credit Atrocities for some of those stories.
I welcome this direct criticism of the pseudo economics we are being fed through the public media.
Any independent assessment of the tone and content of newspapers and some media controlled by a billionaire clique illustrates how the flow of mis-information targets and manipulates two key emotions – hate and fear. The opposing promises of this Govt; lower taxes and increased spending, will only mean one thing – a collapse of essential services. Think of the effects of even greater “austerity”?
What are the obvious outcomes?
The rich will pay less tax, but will not increase personal expenditure or investment. Most people will become poorer.
Public services will be severely reduced or collapse. The most vulnerable will suffer most, and there will be no support.
The rising string of expensive promises can’t be delivered. There will be no funds for them, nor economic capacity.
More of us will head for the exit. Australia beckons….
I could go on….Depressing.
But – one thing is being completely ignored. The Tories might have a brief resurgence; but will probably be obliterated come the next General Election. If they want to walk into their own self-immolation; don’t let them drag the rest us into the flames with them.
[…] have already noted that I did not appear on Newsnight last night, despite getting as far as the Green Room. And I have […]
[…] have already noted that I did not appear on Newsnight last night, despite getting as far as the Green Room. And I have […]
I guess the real question is why aren’t journalists asking Johnson and his cohorts the right questions, how is spending spree costed and where”s the money from? I can’t remember how many times Corbyn was asked these questions while campaigning in the last GE.
“why aren’t journalists asking Johnson and his cohorts the right questions, how is spending spree costed and where”s the money from? I can’t remember how many times Corbyn was asked these questions while campaigning in the last GE”
The Wykehamist fallacy.
Blogger Chris Dillow outlines it wonderfully – https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/11/the-wykehamist-fallacy.html – and Richard Murphy’s experiences with Newsnight reveals its intent and its purpose.
A sound summary – thanks, the Kansas experiment was worth reading. Like many of your readers I stopped viewing Newsnight, it just made me too irate.
“He’s hyping an offering he cannot deliver because it is wholly unrelated to real economic activity. It is bound to fail.” – this is the way a Huckster works to a tee and the UK media will lap it up.
I suspect Johnson will argue – the Paradoxical Perils of the Precautionary Principle.
We are sinking into a very British type of authoritarianism. The BBC and its wyhamist instincts ( https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/11/the-wykehamist-fallacy.html ) leads the way.
Thank you for pointing out that these jolly good chaps are wrong, possibly charlatans, possibly worse.
The BBC might often revoke your involvement in their flagship news programme, but your voice is actually stronger and clearer as a result. Thank you.
Thanks Mr. Murphy for these points.
You confirm what I have read elsewhere.
Johnson, his wide-girls and -boys are there to distract the common people from what is really happening behind the scenes and, come October, a great pile of whatsit will be the future for the people of these islands; whilst the top 1% go cavorting to wherever their ‘offshore’ (including these islands) are kept to have a jolly good time and amuse themselves at the chaos caused to the lives of the little people (us).
The government would like to end taxation altogether and have all services provided by private business.
Further austerity is certain.
Reducing government takes time, finding a way to shift people from universal credit to private insurance is the difficulty.
Privatizing the NHS and other services not so difficult it’s already happening .
Yes, Richard, cancellation because the establishment will not like what you have to say sounds like the BBC these days. And a £75 cancellation fee is a very familiar story – where freelance punditry is concerned, the BBC is the stingiest organisation I know. I think the rot really set in as long ago as the Iraq war – when one of its correspondents said somethng which offended te Blair government, and the BBC at once fired both its DG and its chair in the face of threats from No 10. Journalistic independence couldn’t survive that, and it’s never resurfaced.
Maybe at the age of 79, and being an established academic with credentials, Laffer just couldn’t be arsed dealing with your superiority complex…
You don’t know Arthur, do you?
It happens, I do
Laffer bothers me Jamie in that he is still peddling an idea that is not as secure as he makes out.
But when that idea is your meal ticket and it also gives creedence to other bad ideas (the Neo-lib hold on the economics profession in universities and supports (say) the top 10% or so of society who will of course support Laffer’s idea in return) – you’re hardly going to give ground are you?
[…] last two points are very important. When I wrote about the cancellation on Wednesday evening I […]
So far, it really feels like BoJo expects that Brexit won’t happen the way we’re led to belive he wants it to; this Boosterism nonsense is just words in preparation for a general election. They’ll say, see? we gave the public sector a pay raise, cut yourtaxes and we’re ploughing money into the economy. We’d have Brexit now as well if Corbyn had voted with the Government. Typical, Tory word salad.
Hopefully the BBC will get you on Newsnight soon – sorry it was canceled, it would have been interesting.
Thank you for this. The BBC often show their bias, such as the attitude revealed by overpaid interviewers to public sector pensions and union representatives.
To know about the ‘Hunger Games’ future anticipated by the rich you only have to read William Rees-Mogg’s frightening book ‘Sovereign Individual’ which looks to the end of democracy, the end of any kind of welfare state and a future of mass poverty and exploitation for the ‘non-rich’ rest of us, although we will get our ‘soma’ if we behave ourselves.
Big Brother meets Brave New World achieved via lies, fantasy economics and a blatant appeal to the basest of prejudices, as we have seen with the whole Brexit project.
I’m not sure what your complaint is? Here you are on social media with an unopposed platform and an audience, potentially, greater then any Newsnight has ever seen!! And you got paid for it and a free night in a hotel!! Win win.