I think that journalists are all asking politicians the wrong question. They should be asking every politician: “What are your priors?”

Instead, they ask “How are you going to pay for it?”

That's the wrong question because a person's priors are the assumptions they bring to every debate before they even look at the evidence. Those assumptions shape what they believe government can do, what they think markets can achieve, and which policies they consider realistic or impossible.

If we knew a politician's priors, we would know why they think something can or cannot be paid for, so that has to be the question that comes first.

Too often, however, these assumptions remain hidden. Politicians present opinions as facts without explaining the political philosophy that underpins them. As a result, important ideas such as neoliberalism are treated as common sense rather than as viewpoints that deserve to be challenged.

Political economy reminds us that economics is never value-free. Every economic argument reflects assumptions about power, society and who should benefit. If journalists exposed those assumptions, political interviews would become far more revealing and far more honest.

Instead of accepting claims that “there is no alternative”, we could begin debating the alternatives that genuinely exist. Then we might break the political logjam we are in now.

This is the audio version:

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This is the transcript:

We're used to hearing any journalist ask any politician about any idea that the politician talks about: “How are you going to pay for it?” That question now dominates almost every political interview, but I think there is a far better question that is rarely asked. That question is: “What are your priors”? It's an American question, but it's a good one. Political debate would change if only journalists here in the UK asked it.

What are your priors? Priors are the assumptions you bring before looking at evidence. They are your foundational assumptions that underpin your worldview. They shape how you interpret every economic and political question. They determine which policies you think seem possible, or even impossible. They often matter more than the facts themselves, and that is because they are the hidden assumptions that dominate political debate.

Many politicians never explain their underlying beliefs. They present opinions as if they were objective facts, and they make economic arguments into assertions instead of analysis. The real debate that is required is therefore never revealed in many of the interviews that we see on television and which we read about in our newspapers and other media because people's prior assumptions are not revealed.

And in all of this, neoliberalism has become the unspoken default. Markets are assumed by almost every politician to solve most problems, and government is assumed to be inefficient or unaffordable, and public investment is treated with automatic suspicion.

These assumptions are so rarely stated that they're very rarely, if ever, challenged directly. But asking about priors would expose the weak political thinking that underpins these assumptions. It seems to me that many politicians now have no coherent political philosophy at all. They have eaten hook, line and sinker the neoliberal cause and made it their own and have adopted its assumptions, but they have no thinking of their own.

As a result, many of them have never even questioned this framework. They treat it as a given, and it isn't. And all of that will become obvious if their priors were examined. That's why I think this question matters.

And this is important in political economy. Political economy asks who benefits from these prior assumptions. That's because every economic argument reflects values as well as evidence. Neutral economics is a total illusion. There is no such thing. Different assumptions produce different policy choices, and that is why a person's priors matter so much.

In that case, journalists should be asking: “What are your priors?” They should be asking all those they interview why their assumptions are justified, and they should ask them to explain what those assumptions are. And then they should ask whether alternative assumptions exist. That would expose the interviewee and their ideology instead of simply accepting their neoliberalism as a fact, which most interviews do now.

This would produce far more honest political debate. We could talk about what people believe, and that's fundamental. After all; why else is a person a politician if they do not have a set of political beliefs? But if they're never challenged, we don't know that, and we don't know whether those assumptions are right or wrong.

Those beliefs should be on the table. The fact is that if those beliefs were on the table and open for discussion, we could work out whether the assumptions were true, and whether the claims made were justified.

And the claim that there is no alternative would be exposed for being false. The fact is that this is what politicians say, and have done, since Margaret Thatcher coined the line “TINA' - There Is No Alternative” about neoliberalism. But she was wrong, and so are all those who rely upon this assumption now.

There is an alternative to neoliberalism. We talk about it on this channel. So do lots of other people. The assumptions that underpin the idea that government is bad and markets are good are just false, and we need to be discussing that.

But if we did, what we would find is that in fact all our mainstream political parties believe that claim, and that would become clear. And that would then give us the opportunity to explore the choice of other narratives that they could adopt. They would be forced to change. That would be good. We would have to consider the alternatives.

So, the question “What are your priors?” is key at this point in time. It exposes the hidden ideology behind economic claims. And it reveals the absence of coherent political philosophy in so many cases in politics because that is, I think, one of the challenges that we are facing.

It would expose the dominance of neoliberal thinking, and it would ask the question in a way that would require real political change by putting on the table the alternatives that really exist, and that I think is what we now need.

But that's my opinion. What's yours? There's a poll down below. Let us have your comments. Please do share and like this video. Please do subscribe to our channel and hit that bell so you get notified when we make new videos. Please do make us a donation if that's what you like. Tom and I need to be kept in coffee, and there's a link for that right down below.

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