Whatever else they are, they are not economists. Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, and the other 350 signatories of an anti-poverty manifesto have given up on any claim to that name.
An economist is someone who studies the production and distribution of goods and services, someone who analyzes the voluntary transactions we make in pursuit of happiness. These campaigners are not interested in “growth” (which they made a point of putting in scare-quotes in their launch article last week. They want to halt it, to cap incomes, to grind down living standards in the name of eco-tyranny. They assert that “our economies must be redesigned around the fulfillment of rights and collective wellbeing within planetary boundaries, rather than maximizing output at any cost.”
They still call themselves economists, but that title hangs loose about them like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief. Nor, in any meaningful sense, are they eco-activists, or even anti-poverty campaigners. No, they are more similar to religious ascetics thundering against excess. That description would doubtless horrify them, good humanists as they are, yet the anti-materialist spirit is present in every religion. Lamas, yogis, sufis, monks — all transcend the desire for betterment that motivates their fellows.
Christianity acknowledges both the appeal of degrowth and its impracticability. When a young man who has kept the commandments all his life asks Jesus what else he needs to do, he is told, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor.” Which, of course, the unfortunate fellow can’t do, any more than most of the rest of us can.
It is hard not to respect those who have renounced worldly goods in pursuit of spiritual purity. These faux-economists, by contrast, deserve no such respect. They are preaching their miserable agenda in pursuit of what they claim would be a better life now, and, in doing so, they beclown themselves.
“Poverty is manufactured,” they declare, which is the exact opposite of the truth. Poverty was mankind’s primordial condition, and remained the lot of our species for a million years. It was wealth that was manufactured, and, in the last two centuries, brought within the reach of more than 9 in 10 people. The gloomsters pounce on this statistic, moaning that “in a world richer than ever before, roughly one-10th of the world’s population still lives in extreme destitution.” In fact, thanks to capitalism, the number of people living in what the United Nations defines as extreme poverty has fallen from 38% in 1990 to 8% today.
The most striking thing about the Savonarolas of every era is their presumption. They aver that, while material progress was fine and dandy in the past, theirs happens to be the generation that has reached the saturation point, the generation that gets to call a halt. The Pikettys of the late 19th century made exactly the same argument at a time when almost no one had indoor plumbing or electricity. The truth is that today’s luxuries become tomorrow’s necessities.
Do Piketty and his friends mean what they say? Are they personally volunteering to do their laundry by hand and ration themselves to a couple of hours of electricity a day? I wonder. When the global financial crisis hit, I was a Member of the European Parliament. I remember being in the chamber in 2010 and listening as a Swedish Green, fulminating against what he called the failure of the capitalist system, a failure now inflicting poverty and misery on the world.
As we strolled out together, I told him that I thought he would have been happy. After all, he was always telling us that we were consuming too much, flying too much, fretting too much about gross domestic product. Surely he was now getting precisely what he wanted?
He was genuinely nonplussed for a few moments, trying to reconcile his rage at the bank failures with his hostility to growth. Eventually, he recovered himself and said, “But the wrong people are suffering!”
THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE WAS WON BY BRITS
Who gets to decide who the right people are? How, indeed, could anyone enforce the kind of agenda that these former economists want? What kind of coercive power is needed to prevent people from fulfilling their most basic instinct: to get a better life for themselves and their children?
We know the answer. We have seen it in every regime that seeks to impose equality by preventing enrichment, from China to Czechoslovakia, from Cuba to Cambodia. The only way to enforce equality is through labor camps, torture chambers, and firing squads. A straight line runs from teenage musings about excessive materialism to the gulag. Refusing to see this doesn’t just disqualify you as a serious economist; it disqualifies you as a responsible adult.