I've been accused of repeating myself on this YouTube channel. And that's true. I have. But it's only by honing our stories about what a decent, sustainable world looks like that we can persuade people that it's possible to have one.
The audio version is here:
This is the transcript:
Why do I repeat myself on this channel? It's a good question. I've been asked it, and I want to answer it.
The answer is, in fact, very simple. I repeat myself because right-wing economists have taught me to do so. I haven't learned much from right-wing economists, but this much I have. They tell simple stories, all of which are false, by the way, but they tell them time and time and time again so that people might believe them.
On the left of politics, if we believe that there are better narratives that explain the way that we should be living to achieve better outcomes for people in the world, then we have to tell our stories time after time after time again so that people hear them, understand them, can repeat them, and then absorb them as if they are the truth, which is what they are in this particular case.
So, for example, why do I keep telling the story that governments spend and then tax? For the glaringly obvious reason that it's true and because people don't know it.
The more often I tell that story, the more people will hear it, the more people will understand it, the more people will, therefore, absorb it, and the more often they will repeat it to others. That is why I tell the story time and time again. And I know that it works.
In 1947, two people, Hayek and Friedman - Hayek, the economist, and Milton Friedman, that was - met together with about 20 other people and formed something called the Mont Pelerin Society. Mont Pelerin is in Switzerland. They were invited to join together as a group to oppose the work of Keynes - Lord Keynes, who had recently died - but whose work was very clearly going to lay the foundation for the post-war consensus that swept the whole of Europe, the UK and the USA, oh and Australia and New Zealand and even Japan in the end, and which said that large government should play a role in our societies to guarantee full employment and deliver prosperity.
These right-wing politicians were terrified of that story. They believed in free markets, which, of course, aren't free at all - they're only free in the sense that they deliver wealth to a few and not to the many. But they believed in this and small government. Small government because, again, they wanted to deliver freedom to the wealthy to oppress everybody else.
But in the Mont Pelerin society they began the promotion of the narrative that the market is pre-eminent, that choice is what everything is all about, even though their outcomes deny it to almost everyone, and they promoted the idea that only through private sector activity could growth be delivered.
All of these things are false, but they repeated them time and time again.
Not only did they repeat them time and time again, they set up organisation after organisation after organisation to repeat the story. So in the UK, we do have, for example, what are called the Tufton Street Think Tanks. For those who are not familiar with it, Tufton Street is very close to the Houses of Parliament. In that street, and in particular, at one address in that street, number 55, there are a series of think tanks, all putting out the same story with slightly different variations, all repeating these same narratives about right-wing choices that will always deliver growth without ever asking the question who for, and why, and what the cost to society might be.
Repetition, repetition, repetition is their theme.
And if I repeat myself, it's because I know from them that this has worked. We have been cursed with neoliberalism because for more than 40 years the same old story has been repeated by them time and time again. It has cost us dearly. But at present, there are very few narratives that challenge what they say.
Because so pervasive has been their work, and so successful has been their promulgation - through these myriad of think tanks - of these ideas that have undermined the very credibility of the society that we live in, that we now have to rebuild.
We have to understand that we need a society to tackle climate change.
We have to understand that we need a society to deliver freedom.
We have to understand that we need strong government to deliver the services that we so obviously require and are not getting.
We have to understand that law and order is dependent upon investment in that process.
We have to understand that education and the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next is not just about childcare; it's also about liberating the minds of the young to think in ways that have never been done before.
All of that is the job of government and society working together. But these think tanks would have us think otherwise. I quite literally hate what those think tanks say. I believe that they are the antithesis of what is good in the world in which I want to live.
Therefore, I will repeat myself.
I want you to understand - you and anybody else who watches this video - to understand that government can be a force for good.
That the economy can deliver well-being.
That we can manage inflation without imposing penal interest rates on the country, which don't work.
That we can use the tax system to cancel the money that the government spends into the economy.
That we can use the tax system to redistribute income and wealth or to reprice those things that are harmful to us, including excessive carbon and ultra-processed foods and everything else like that.
I want you to believe that the government can support the survival of democracy when I think it's under threat.
So, I will repeat stories around that because storytelling is how we understand the world around us. If that's a bit repetitive on occasion, I'm sorry.
If you see a video that you think is going to repeat, you can skip it. But the truth is that this channel is growing by 20% a month at present. And if that's the case, there are lots of people coming here who haven't heard this story before, who do need to hear it, and who do need to repeat it as you do too if you think that this is a story which is worth telling, because the more often we tell these stories, the stronger they become, and the more likely it is we can be the change that we want to create in our society.
And for that reason, it's worth your while repeating these stories, too, so that you can perfect them and you can tell them.
Repetition is literally the way we change the world.
Please repeat yourself as often as you like because the world needs to hear what you say about these things.
Thanks for reading this post.
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The book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman agrees with you. Repetition works, that’s why bad actors use it as well.
Interesting thoughts. It’s obviously obvious that’s your way of putting things. There is another view if we’re looking at the last 40 years as you suggest, that current interest rates are historically normal, taxation is higher, and government despite being bigger has not gotten better.
There is nothing normal about the last 45years.
These have been the Thatcher years which has burdened the country with high interest rates, deindustrialised the country, reduced investment , sold off assets , reduced competitiveness and tied our future to the rentier economy .
Richard, you are correct to continue repeating what you have said. Each time, it may be that you explain in a slightly different way, or use a different example. I find that as I read your posts, often I may skim across bits that I understand, and then you provide a new example that reinforces the point, and gives me confidence that I have understood.
Cheers
Thanks
Bravo!
Blindingly obvious but all the more necessary to keep repeating the message that cod neoliberalism, taught l as “commonsense”, and saturating the mediasphere has brought the UK to its present state.
BTW: we need a shortened form for neoliberalism that is instantly comprehensible and at the same time undermines it.
KBO.
I can’t post links here so forgive the cut and paste. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has produced a report on economic growth and poverty and the conclusion is here and quite damning in my opinion about the Labour party without mentioning them (note the dates):
‘4. Conclusion
Without a deliberate shift in redistributive policy across housing, wider costs and incomes, business-as-usual economic growth in the UK is likely to benefit higher-income households more than lower-income ones, and the gap between the middle and the bottom – relative poverty – is likely to remain broadly unchanged. This means that while a growing economy will see average incomes and living standards rise, the level of material and social exclusion for those on low incomes compared to everyone else is unlikely to change. Even when accompanied by very high employment, which does benefit lower-income households more, poverty and deep poverty remains broadly flat between October 2024 and October 2028. This analysis therefore shows the need for a specific policy focus on the living standards and economic security of lower-income households if poverty is to be reduced.’
This is one of the reasons why repeating one’s self is so important.
Thanks
Yes you do need to repeat it but the media is still dominated by the current approach – we don’t have any money, must cut services and benefits. The BBC is particularly prone to this.
I find that when I engage with people on X (formerly known as twitter), about housing which I blog about, the Tufton street gang and their supporters start going on about how the free market will provide more housing. They are quite happy that we build dwellings to use as second homes, holiday lets and investment properties when they do not actually house people. They also are wedded to supply and demand fixing house prices when the evidence suggests that most increases in house prices are due to lower interest rates pushing up asset values and the impact of QE.
The free market is only free to those with wealth
And free in the sense that it offers them money for free, in effect: rentier economics rules, ok?
The free market only exists in an economics textbook!
“Play it again, Sam”, and keep playing it. No apology necessary. We omnibus passengers need to hear it several times anyway before we “get it”.
One humbly offered suggestion from the Omnibus passenger perspective, based on my omnibus passenger conversations – keep the messages
/explanations about “taxes don’t finance spending – gov’t’s create money – they can’t run out of money, only run out of resources to spend it on” SEPARATE from messages about QE & QT and how bonds (don’t) work. Omnibus passengers can’t take both those messages in at once. I’m STILL trying to get my head around bonds (hoping the Kelton video will help, with its encouraging clip of Bernstein not understanding bonds either).
The danger of a message/video with BOTH parts in, is that when you do the bit about bonds, Omnibus passengers reject the whole message because our heads start hurting. BOTH messages are important, but those of us with absolutely no b/ground in finance, take longer to get our heads round it. The Reeves/Thatcher “household budget-public purse” analogy is so simple, and familiar. Of course its wrong too, but simplicity often beats truth. Keep up the good work. The omnibus is on the move – this stuff IS cutting through (and I will get my head around bonds eventually, then I have to start on foreign exchange and trade balances and “China” – AAARGH! – Pass the paracetamol!).
All noted
And understood
Repetition works, but is just a technique. The Mont Pelerin Society had more; a long term plan, and the resources (from beneficiaries of the plan) to execute it. They targeted first the Ivy League Law Schools, because that was the clever way to induce the generational intellectual change they sought, in an area where it would matter – the law; and because the US was the key place to start an intellectual revolution of this kind. Win over the lawyers in a (fragile, ropy) subject the lawyers didn’t study, and didn’t understand; and over time would absorb a predilection for ‘market’ friendly interpretation of the law.
True….
“…so that you can perfect them and you can tell them.”
Absolutely agree. As we tell them, better expressions or metaphors occur to us and get honed further in the telling and we learn from how our audience responds: what works and what confuses.
Also many of us need to see/ hear things repeated, in different ways, in order to really grasp them. My own experience of learning about #MMT is a case in point. I started by hearing it as a kind of Keynesianism (my prior knowledge) but as I read and heard more and tried to explain what I was learning to others, the many pennies dropped. I think my understanding now is good -certainly by comparison with 5 years ago, for example, (albeit I’m still working out about international exchange and trade).
Thanks
Learning first goes into short-term memory, and is often forgotten if it is not re-used. Repeating learning transfers short-term memory into long-term memory. As a teacher, we will often start a lesson by recalling what we did in the previous lesson, in order to repeat it, and begin the process of memorising something.
Short-term memory lets us recall around 7 facts. That’s it. Repeating a subject lets us learn more facts. That’s why a top-down approach is good: learn an overview first, then move on to some detail.
It is also worth saying something about paradigms, which is the framework by which our understanding is based. Facts that fall outside of a paradigm tend to be ignored. Everyone “knows” that taxes pay for government spending, and this is reinforced every time we read or hear it. To unlearn this fact takes much more effort as we need to understand why.
The result, as Mark Twain said: “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Sources
“Understanding memory, and making it work for your students”
https://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/education/blog/understandingmemoryandmakingitworkforyourstudents
“How liars create the ‘illusion of truth’”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161026-how-liars-create-the-illusion-of-truth
“Illusory Truth, Lies, and Political Propaganda”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202001/illusory-truth-lies-and-political-propaganda
I completely agree
That is always my teaching approach
This teacher concurs. With a slight addition: with regard to the teenage brain in particular, repetition or creating interest helps transfer information from the short-term to the long-term memory!
That’s what the Dutch teacher-training degree taught me at least!
As Ian says, repetition is fundamental to teaching and learning and is what I was taught when doing a degree in education back in the early 70’s. In school in the sixties the maths teacher did a couple of examples on the board of some new process, then it was onto the text book and “now do the next 30 examples from p.45”.
As someone who is still trying to get his head round all this I’m grateful for the repetition. Each time you do, something new sticks. Keep it coming.
Thanks
I find these comments – and those YouTube, where they are very positive – very useful
May I intrude an off-thread passing comment on the Post Office Horizon Inquiry? Nick Read, the CEO is giving his evidence today; I will pass over his morning evidence, little of it is frankly illuminating; fore mere illustration, he describes specific, major, dysfunctional failures of executive management as “spats”, without defining what he actually means by his use of the term, even after Counsel prompting, beyond carrying off the same vague, dogged observation with urbane aplomb. I am reminded of some of the characteristics of detachment in Robert Musil’s major work, for some obscure reason.
Far more important, from what I managed to glean from a very incomplete viewing of the morning session; my first, but strong impression is that we can now see the real culprit here: Government and Parliament, specifically for allowing the Post Office to carry out investigation and remediation of Postmaster claims, when it is an interested party in the outcome. We discover in the testimony today that the Post Office (too late in the day) was obliged to investigate its own people in the context of a Past roles/Present roles review (i.e., where no wrongdoing was involved), but where potential conflicts between past and present roles of managers could arise (as I understand it); here, 35 people with Past roles had been flagged RED (roles in the past that could potentially conflict with current roles that may be related to the Horizon Inquiry, or remediation, for example). This discussion appears to be around January, 2024. I believe all the people flagged RED should never have been placed in what seems to me a difficult and invidious position.
It seems to me extraordinary that this should have been allowed to go on so long given such an obvious issue of potential conflicts; that the government should ever have decided to allow the Post Office to be left in such an invidious position, to have to deal with such conflicts. The Post Office should have been removed from this role entirely, from the beginning. The only reason I can think of, that the government would be irresponsible or cynical enough to allow this to happen, is because the government and indeed Parliament did not wish the public to realise that the principle culprit in the debacle was Government itself; and did not have the slightest idea how to cope with it. So it just left the mess largely in the hands of the Post Office. It seems completely unbelievable; totally irresponsible and grossly negligent.
Thanks John
I have not had time to follow this
The afternoon is something of a jaw dropping, beautifully timed coup de grâce by Inquiry Counsel (but you have to have seen earlier intervention by the Chair to appreciate the smooth, unexpected decisiveness of the execution). I do not have the time to explain; hopefully it will be picked up by the media.
But it was important in what it revealed.
My wife is following it – I suspect she will give me the details later
Putting it all in crudely marketing concepts, repetition of the same message over and over again builds brand awareness. Lies work the same way ( ref trump).
Thatcherite neoliberalism repeated at nauseum is the first thing most brits think is good sound economics, when in fact it’s the recipe for economic slavery for ordinary folk. It was her brand awareness until the ides of march got her.
You and others like you repeating your message over and over again will eventually counter the neoliberal poison to bring about constructive change. Keep repeating the message in as many creative and inventive ways you can. It does work.
Anyone objecting, well that’s their problem, not yours or anyone like you.
Thanks
I always asked my first-year economics students to write a small analysis on where in the world a free market exists or has existed since the post WW1 period.
They always struggled.
But having read yet another witless, feckless and downright incorrect piece about Reeves on the front page of the Guardian this morning, nothing surprises me anymore.
Nor me…
The Guardian is really in a very strange and over-the-top place right now
New Economy Brief has just produced a paper (in response to the Reeves hare set running on debt and fiscal rules); titled, “Defining public debt”. I will not go into all the details, but it is a typically pick-and-mix economists’ selective dip into shuffling transactions with casual indifference into a ratio denominator. It is all lazy and silly.
I am becoming tired of all this smart-alec nonsense. Just produce a balance sheet. Finis.
Quite so
This needs a video
And I read that briefing – typical vaguely lefty NGO nonsense is my summary
I gave up engaging with them a while ago
“All of these things are false, but they repeated them time and time again.”
The well known technique of proof by repeated assertion, still finding a lot of use today.
With reference to “examples” – I’ve just been listening to an earlier Stephanie Kelton video (not her latest) of a presentation given to a British Libray event,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IBEoWSiTHc
involving Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, a UK thinktank, “Rethinking Public Value and Public purpose in 21st Century Capitalism” – the video is entitled “The Public Purse” – where she used the game of Monopoly as an example of where money comes from. She asked the audience what was the FIRST thing they had to do before the game could get under way.
Answer: Appoint a “banker” whose first act was to distribute to each person, an agreed amount of the official Monopoly currency.
The players then roll the dice, and use the money to buy and sell, pay taxes and fines, and once per circuit, were given some more currency when they passed Go.
If this step was missed out, the game couldn’t proceed in any meaningful way, as the first time the player landed on a penalty square they would be facing a penalty without the resources to pay it.
A good example
Maybe great minds do think alike? -Forgive the self aggrandising but common phrase. When I was younger I prevailed on my siblings to play ‘adapted’ Monopoly -along the lines mentioned above. Later it occured to me that it could be a good educational tool. I wrote it up here:
https://nouslife.blogspot.com/2021/12/how-will-we-pay-for-it.html
As many of the comments so far tell you, we can stand, and benefit from the repetition for as long as you can stand repeating the stories.
Besides which, as you say, the readership is enlarging and new people are hearing this for the first time.
There is another thing which is kind of relevant. Some wise person said ” you never look at the same bookcase twice”. Well you do, but your eye will catch different titles because you are not quite the same person who looked last time.
And you aren’t simply republishing the same script. You rewrite it every time in a slightly different way.
Thanks