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ABSTRACT
Debates about economic policy in Britain have been dominated by claims that sovereign debt problems are due to loose fiscal policy and excessive spending rather than volatile capital flows and flawed monetary policy. There are strong grounds for believing that these stories are largely nonsense, yet they inform policy and are widely believed among mass publics, and have proved almost impossible to refute in everyday political discourse. The answer to this puzzle, we suggest, is that such claims are better thought of as bullshit (as conceptualised by Harry Frankfurt 2005) rather than outright falsehoods: in other words, as speech acts that are indifferent to the truth and proceed without effective concern for the veracity of the claim in question. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of political bullshit applied to economic policy debates since the financial crisis, and seek to explain its hold on the popular imagination. We assess what makes some particular brands of bullshit more successful than others, and argue that in a world of competing realities as well as competing theories, the power of rhetoric is more likely to settle an argument than evidence and logic.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Jonathan Hopkin is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Party Formation and Democratic Transition in Spain (1999, Macmillan) and co-editor of Coalition Britain (2012, Manchester University Press). He has published widely on the party politics and political economy of Europe and is currently completing a book for Oxford University Press on The Return of Politics: Anti-System Parties and the Crisis of Market Liberalism.
Ben Rosamond is Professor of Political Science and Deputy Director of the Centre for European Politics at the University of Copenhagen. Working at the interface of international political economy and EU studies, his most recent research has focused on the political economy and discursive construction of Brexit and the interplay between scholarly and policy knowledge of European integration. His next book will be a co-edited volume on the politics of Brexit.
Notes
1 See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/11578326/Ed-Miliband-loses-credibility-by-refusing-to-admit-that-the-last-Labour-government-overspent.html [accessed 18 May 2017] and http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/04/milibands-refusal-to-admit-that-labour-overspent-could-cost-him-dear/ [accessed 18 May 2017].
2 A significant improvement in the Tories’ rating for economic competence appeared to coincide with the retreat from strict austerity budgeting in 2013. See http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/aug/12/guardian-icm-poll-tories-economic-confidence [accessed 18 May 2017].
3 Tony Blair had said much the same six months earlier: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2891948/Miliband-Left-wing-win-election-says-Blair.html [accessed 18 May 2017].
4 The manifesto also promised a rise in the marginal rate of personal taxation for the highest earners (a return to the 50p rate) and a generalised crackdown on tax avoidance.
5 http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/article1577182.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2015_07_05 [accessed 18 May 2917].
6 On Sweden and the Social Democrat-led government’s wish to relax the budget surplus target: http://www.wsj.com/articles/sweden-seeks-to-drop-budget-surplus-target-1425379037 (Wall Street Journal, 3 March 2015) [accessed 18 May 2017].
7 http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/12/osborne-plan-has-no-basis-in-economics [accessed 18 May 2017].
8 Aggressive deficit reduction targets were also outlined in the UKIP Manifesto (UKIP Citation2015: 8–9). The Liberal Democrat manifesto (Liberal Democrats Citation2015) spoke in rather less precise terms about reducing the deficit ‘fairly’. But there was no question that annual deficits should be eliminated and debt to GDP ratios should be reduced significantly.
9 Wren-Lewis suggests further that media macro tends to be the work of political journalists rather than trained economics correspondents.
10 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4557053.ece [accessed 18 May 2017].
11 We are grateful to one of the anonymous referees for this suggestion.