Hypnodosh

Kristian Niemietz has a useful Critic piece on Zack Polanski and his plans to dazzle low carbon voters with yet more incoherence. This time it's economics. 


Zackonomics is incoherent and outdated

Zack Polanski is a great political entrepreneur but he is terrible at economics

So this is it. Zackonomics.

Today, Green Party leader Zack Polanski outlined his economic philosophy at an event organised by the New Economics Foundation (NEF). I will not pretend that I was listening with a completely open mind: I mostly made up my mind about Zackonomics on the day when Polanski said that his three favourite economists were Gary Stevenson, Richard Murphy and Grace Blakeley.

My issue with that is not that all three of those are completely wrong about economics (although they are). It’s that they are all wrong in very different, and mutually incompatible ways. You can be a fan of each of them in isolation (although you really shouldn’t), but you cannot, in a meaningful way, be a fan of all three of them at the same time.

The whole piece is worth reading as a reminder that numbers sometimes matter a great deal. The number of useful idiots who vote for example.  

I could go on, but I realise that I am missing the point by judging Zackonomics by the standards of a conventional economic policy programme. Zack Polanski may be terrible at economics, but he is a great entrepreneur — a political entrepreneur, that is. The lesson from Corbynmania, the Greta Thunberg movement, BLM, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, the gender movement and the Palestine movement is that there is a lot of vaguely youthful, vaguely left-wing, vaguely anti-capitalist political energy around. That energy was looking for a political outlet, a gap in the market which Polanski spotted and filled. I wish he had used his talents to become an actual entrepreneur in the private sector instead, creating wealth rather than promoting ideas that destroy it.