A series of simple economic blunders

Jon Moynihan has a useful Critic piece on the problem of economic growth in the UK.


A real plan for growth

A series of simple economic blunders has led to self-defeating policies that strangle any chance of prosperity for all

Growth, growth, growth. Everyone’s talking about growth. All the Conservative party leadership candidates have said we must achieve it. All the major parties in the last election said it was their number one objective. Our new prime minister has stated that he will focus “laser-like” on growth. And not one of them seemed until recently to have a clue what they meant by the word; prescriptions as to how to achieve it there were none.

Well, okay: I think we all understood that what they were talking about was economic growth. But how to define that metric? The politicians, media and commentators use the simple measure of Gross Domestic Product. That leads them into grievous error, coming from their not really understanding what the simple purpose of achieving economic growth is: to make the lives of our citizens better.

Which means that GDP is the wrong measure: we should be targeting growth in GDP per capita; that latter metric is what makes it possible for each citizen — each capita — to pay for their needs, to take care of their families, to achieve their dreams and ambitions of a better life.


The whole piece is well worth reading because growth in GDP per capita isn't what we are likely to see under this Labour government. A decline in GDP per capita seems more likely at the moment. 

Moynihan gives a number of familiar reasons for the problem, one being mass immigration as a politically favoured way to raise GDP as opposed to GDP per capita. Another is the vast size and increasingly intractable nature of government itself. 

Why is it that it should be seen as so difficult for our country, our economy, to revert just to a size of government, a size of taxes, and indeed a level of regulation, that existed just a couple of decades ago? Why is it, for example, that the number of civil servants has shot up by 100,000 since 2019 and by over 4 per cent in the last year alone, and that’s impossible to reverse?

Is it just that the civil servants now run things, and the politicians have no ability to rein them in? Is it that Professor Adolf Wagner, who in 1865 enunciated Wagner’s law, roughly saying “in any democracy, the size of government inexorably expands and expands”, has been proved correct? Is Britain still equal to the task of electing politicians, if they can be found, who will take us to a more sensibly structured, growth-promoting economy?