A Capitalist Carol, Stave 3







“I am the Ghost of Freedom Past”


“Your past. Your ideology’s past.”










We can show that conscription is economically inefficient





Democratic discrimination: Minors’ voting rights, poorer households and inequality







A Capitalist Carol, Stave 2

…It was the living face of Adam Smith. He knew it from that irritating Institute that bore the name. It seemed to emerge, ethereally, from his wallet, and hover before him, a ghostly wig upon its ghostly forehead. But then, as Splurge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a banknote again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible self-doubt to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. And though he never took out his own wallet much, it seemed perfectly restored to normality. So he said “Bah! Humbug!” and closed the door with a bang that echoed through the whole lavish apartment.

Lounge, billiards room, private cinema, ensuite bedroom and dressing room. All as they should be. Nobody under the Chippendale sofa or behind the Picassos. An indulgent blaze in the grate. Yet the image of Adam Smith preyed on his mind.

“Humbug!” said Splurge, mentally attributing the apparition to the surfeit of over-ripe Stilton and over-rich port that he had enjoyed at lunch in Claridges. His colour changed, though, when without a pause, the apparition came through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes.

Its body was transparent; so that Splurge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.

Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold economic logic; he was still incredulous. “What do you want from me?”

“Less,” said the spectre. “Much less. Less spending and less bureaucracy. For I created the wealth that you are now squandering.” It raised a cry and rattled the heavy chain that it was carrying.

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.

“I don’t,” said Splurge. “Your stony old economics was completely dispelled by the Keynesian revolution.”

“You must,” replied the spirit. “These heavy chains are not mine, but yours. Every politician is doomed to limp through history, loaded down by the weight of the national debt and the burden of regulation that he forged in life. And your chains will be heavier than anyone’s.” It shook the chains and wrung its shadowy hands.

Splurge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face. “Adam,” said Splurge imploringly. “Speak comfort to me.”

“You will be haunted,” resumed the ghost, “by three spirits.” Expect the first tonight, as the bell tolls One.”

The spirit beckoned Splurge to the window. The air was filled with phantoms – many of them, he could see, former ministers from his own party – wailing under the weight of their own spending promises.

But being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the high-spending fatigues of the day, in much need of repose, he fell asleep upon the instant.

Mariana Mazzucato, is there no beginning to her knowledge of economics?

It is, of course, becoming increasingly irritating to see Mariana Mazzucato being lauded for her stunning finding that the only reason we have nice things is because of government. Especially when one considers that this finding came from a research program funded by government. Biting the hand that feeds is really very terrible economics after all.

The latest irritant is this, in her acceptance speech for an award:

The point is not to belittle the work of Jobs and his team, which was both essential and transformational. But we must be more balanced in the historiography of Apple and its founders, where not a word is mentioned of the collective effort behind Silicon Valley. The question is this: who benefits from such a narrow description of the wealth-creation process in the hi-tech sector today?

If policymakers want to get serious about tackling inequality, they need to rethink not only areas such as the wealth tax that Thomas Piketty is calling for but the received wisdom on how to generate value and wealth creation in the first place. When we have a narrow theory of who creates value and wealth, we allow a greater share of that value to be captured by a small group of actors who call themselves wealth creators. This is our current predicament and the reason why progressive parties on both sides of the Atlantic are struggling to provide a clear story of what has gone wrong in recent decades and what to do about it.


She seems entirely unaware of the basic paper on this subject. Those “wealth creators”, those “entrepreneurs”, how much do they get from their innovations?


The answer is a little under 3% of the total value created by the innovations. Almost all of the rest ends up as consumer surplus being enjoyed by the great unwashed citizenry out there. Which is great, as it should be perhaps, the aim and point of this whole having an economy game is to make the average Smith and Jones as rich as they can possibly be without bursting with the pleasure of it all.

The complaint is that Professor Mazzucato seems to be entirely ignorant of all of this. Sure, Steve Jobs ended up with a pile of money that Scrooge McDuck would blush to surf down. But we don’t actually care because Jobs ended up with a trivial amount of the value created. It is quite seriously being said that another 10% of the people in a developing country with a smartphone adds 0.5% to GDP growth (and no, not 0.5% of extant growth, an entire 0.5% of GDP more) in said developing economy. Whether Jobs ended up with $5 or $50 billion for sparking that amount of value creation is an entire irrelevance compared to that value creation.

And no, we don’t insist that Jobs “earned it”, nor “deserved it”. It’s a purely utilitarian calculation. If someone who innovates (for Mazzucato would insist Apple and Jobs did not “invent”) something that adds entire percentage points of growth to the developing economies of the world then gets to have hot and cold running private jets for the rest of his life, well, that’s just fine. Because we think that would be a pretty good incentive for the next person who is going to make the poor of the world richer to buckle down and get on with it.

The first point of economics is that incentives matter. So it would appear that there is no beginning to Professor Mazzucato’s understanding of the subject.