This won't be a particularly coherent entry, because I am going to write about economics, about which I know very little. (A mediocre pass in Economics 101 thirty years ago is my lot. It will show, believe me.)
I have just had an indirect contact with an economist. I asked my wife (who - surprise, surprise - is an economist) what his particular "angle", attitude or shtick was. She didn't know, but it occurred to me that these public economists are a bit like rival witch doctors, competing for an audience.
By "public economists" I mean that small group (thank God, I hear you cry) of people who appear on television or are heard on radio from time to time peddling a particular vision of the world which is, they're telling you, the only sensible view on offer anywhere.
On the world stage there are giants like Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith, who take (as I understand it) virtually opposite views on everything but who are also great mates - or were, since JKG is no longer with us, having joined the Choir Celestial.
Here in New Zealand there are a dozen or so of these strange people - all men - some of whom seem to do very well out of punditry, while others make a tenuous living on the fringe of society, and others ... well, better not ask.
A man named Brian Philpott used to be one of these. As another eminent New Zealand economist, Sir Frank Holmes, put it, Philpott ...
the most prolific New Zealand economist of the post-war era in his output of books and monographs, journal articles and research papers ... remained an advocate for indicative and consultative planning, well after the time it became unfashionable.
In my mind at least, Philpott's mantle has passed to Brian Easton, whose avuncular style never manages to disguise the fact that there is a raging statist within. All will be well in the best of all possible worlds, one feels, provided government is big, left-wing, and responsive to the advice of Brian Easton.
Gareth Morgan's shtick is something about markets, which sounds very conventional (no bad thing) and is elegantly expressed (an even better thing). What he makes of the Labour Goverment goodness only knows, and he's smart enough not to tell us.
Another public economist is Professor Tim Hazeldine of Auckland University, who seems to me to be as complete a looney as one could hope to find anywhere on any campus in New Zealand (where, believe me, he has a lot of competition). He has spent much of his career attempting to prove that the theory of comparative advantage is incorrect, or hopelessly flawed, or tastes wrong on Tuesdays - I've never been able to work out which.
And so it goes. Two thoughts occur to me about this.
* First, these people seem to be very much like witch doctors, competing for the attention of very ignorant and superstitious tribes-people. (That's you and me, folks.) All they have to do to get into the game is claim - loudly, and insistently - that they have the answer to the ultimate question (which may or may not be 42, irrespective of what the question happens to be).
Secondly, and this is the really funny thing: they don't have to be right - any of the time, let alone all of it. All they have to do is persuade some of us to listen, some of the time, and they can make a living.
Economists are juju men. Who says we have advanced beyond the culture of the caves?
An early economist:
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