Newspaper Reader follows the convoluted politics of a Financial Times Mandarin!

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Dec 22, 2024

Opinion: Populism

Headline: Economics can’t explain all the anger of voters

Sub-headline: If it did, the US should have much healthier politics than Europe

Janan Ganesh

Editor: Mr. Ganesh specialises in ‘Pop History’ that acts the part of the actual thing itself , without its reilization. Its fluidity of application to various iterations is the key to the ‘Ganesh Methodology’. Reader I’ll begin here:

Except for the most tiresome pedants, who celebrated the millennium on January 1 2001 rather than 2000, we are nearing the quarter-point of our century. What are the surprises so far? What would people have found hard to believe 25 years ago?

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Here’s another. The US would outclass Europe in economic growth, and be no happier for it. If people ultimately vote on their material experience — a common sense thing to suppose —

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How odd. Perhaps what voters do is compare their economic experience with that of their own forebears, not with that of contemporaries in other countries. The data that matters is longitudinal, then, not latitudinal.

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In the 1980s, Sinn Féin won 1 or 2 per cent of the vote in Irish general elections. In the noughties, this went up to around 6. Though it didn’t break through, the party scored 19 per cent in last month’s election.

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It has to reckon with the fact that Ireland, despite a savage crash in 2008, is richer than it was a couple of generations ago, and to little obvious glory for the established political order that oversaw most of that success.

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Greece, which had a scarring economic experience in the last decade, and an excuse to turn to the fringes, has a prime minister who is the toast of international moderates. Italy, which underwent less structural reform, has a populist. Not only is there no faithful correlation between economic circumstances and political choices, there isn’t even a useful line of best fit.

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If not just economics, then, what is bugging voters? Immigration, in large part. But even this isn’t a clincher.

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Another explanation for what is going on is “hedonic adjustment”. As incomes rise, so do expectations. Voters become quicker to revolt. In other words, economics is decisive, but not how you’d imagine.

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This was Joe Biden-ism. In fact, it is much of western liberalism. There is impeccable common sense to it, but also an intellectual ponderousness. Conservatives have been quicker to intuit that stranger forces than material interest are at work in the world, and to master them.

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Just to stipulate, then, I’m a growth zealot. I want 20mn Londoners, not 10mn. But the case for growth must be that it is good in and of itself, that more stuff for more people is intrinsically worthwhile, that romanticising the pre-industrial world is imbecilic tweeness.

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Editor: Ganesh flirts with the evocative fragment as I present it, as an itegral part of my self-seving critique! Yet his final paragraph ends in another collection of more of the same: I’ll repeat: ‘Mr. Ganesh specialises in ‘Pop History’ that acts the part of the actual thing itself , without its actual reilization. Its fluidity of application to various iterations, is the key to the ‘Ganesh Methodology’. In the end it resembles a riff on kitsch !

In fact, the causal link between economic performance and political outcomes has broken down in both directions. Not only can a nation have a thriving economy to no obvious benefit to its politics, it can sustain awful politics without incurring economic damage. At this time of year, we are asked to reflect on all the things in life that money can’t buy. To “love” and “class”, add civic sanity.

Newspaper Reader