Jacob Rees-Mogg just shared some catastrophically innumerate Brexit propaganda from The S*n

The Tory Brextremist-in-chief Jacob Rees-Mogg has taken to Twitter to demonstrate what a gullible and innumerate fool he is.

He made this demonstration by Tweeting a clipping of some absolute idiot-fodder from The S*n.

Rupert Murdoch's hacks at the S*n helped to bring about the Brexit farce with a relentless barrage of misleading pro-Brexit propaganda, but they're so invested in it that they're refusing to admit what a shambles it's turning out to be, and continuing with yet more pro-Brexit distortions.

It hardly takes a genius to spot some of the many things that are wrong with the S*n clipping that Rees-Mogg liked so much he tweeted it to his followers.

One of the most obvious problems is that a significant number of the items mentioned are produced within the EU.

Why would you worry about paying a tariff of fake mozzarella-style cheese when membership of the European Single Market means that we can buy genuine mozzarella from Italy with no tariff at all, and be sure that you're buying the genuine thing because of protected designation of origin labelling rules?

Then there's the supposed saving on beef. Why on earth wouldn't you just eat British or Irish beef that come with 0% tariffs, rather than crying that you have to pay a tariff on imported hormone-riddled beef from the United States?

Aside from beef and mozzarella, there are numerous other products that could easily be purchased tariff free because they are mass produced in the EU, like cherry tomatoes, butter, and dog food.

Then there's the "no deal" Brexit scenario to consider. A decision to quit the EU with no trade deal in place would mean a reversion to WTO rules, and WTO tariffs. This would mean that tariffs would have to be paid on products imported from the EU, and that the EU would impose tariffs on products of British origin.

Brextremists like Rees-Mogg and the secretive "party within a party" ERG Brextremism group he leads are actually pushing for a "no deal" Brexit flounce that would dramatically increase the tariffs on regular supermarket items, but they're deliberately reversing reality and pretending that they're opposed to tariffs.

Then there's the LG flatscreen TV. It's hardly a secret that the EU has a bilateral Free Trade Agreement with South Korea, meaning that tariffs of South Korean flat screen TVs have already been eliminated.

A chaotic "no deal" flounce out of the EU would actually mean the re-imposition of tariffs on South Korean electronics. So that's yet another piece of Orwellian reality reversing nonsense from the Brexiteers at the S*n.

The S*n clipping is truly Orwellian in the way it invents fake tariffs on products to make Brextremism look like a great option, when everyone knows that the kind of hard Brexit favoured by Rees-Mogg and his ilk would result in new tariffs being applied on products from within the EU, and on products from within the dozens of other economies the EU has bilateral trade agreements with (like South Korea). 

Then there's the supposed tariff on the Viking bicycle. Whoever compiled this deliberate misinformation forgot to mention that Viking is actually a British company, and that British consumers wouldn't have to pay import tariffs on their bikes under any circumstances.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of all is the disgraceful mathematical illiteracy of the whole thing. Take the butter as an example. If the butter costs £1 originally but has a 50% tariff applied on it, then the price rises to £1.50, not to £2.

If the price is £2 after the imposition of a 50% tariff, then the original price was £1.33, not £1.

The same goes for all of the other calculations too. Every single one of them have been made by someone so innumerate they'd fail Year 6 maths.

If the Brexiteers are so innumerate that they can't even cope with simple mathematical operations that my 9 year old son can understand, then who on earth would trust their judgement on an issue as complex as Brexit?

When it comes to Rees-Mogg actually sharing this nonsense, once again we're drawn back into the age old debate of whether the Tories have resorted to this lamentable propaganda because they're thick enough to believe it themselves, or because despite knowing that it's absolute reality-reversing and innumerate trash, they're such arrogant elitists they see the general public as such a bunch of gullible halfwits that we'll simply believe it without conducting any critical analysis whatever.

There is a case to be made that because Ress-Mogg is this type of arrogant elitist because he once described people who attended state schools as "potted plants".

If he's arrogant enough to dismiss 93% of the UK population as "potted plants" he's easily arrogant enough to deliberately spread such brazen misinformation. But in this case I think it's sheer stupidity. The man has seen something that triggers his confirmation bias, and instead of subjecting it to even the most rudimentary of critical analysis, he's just tweeted it out to his followers.

The way Rees-Mogg actually thanked the S*n for making these misleading and innumerate calculations indicates that he couldn't be bothered to check that they were accurate before sharing them, which is decidedly odd behaviour given that he considers himself a member of the vastly superior intellectual elite, yet it was state educated "potted plants" like me who actually bothered to conduct some rudimentary critical analysis on what he shared.

Idiot or elitist, either way, Rees-Mogg's dissemination of such abject and innumerate misinformation is absolutely unforgivable. But the Tory party is such a mess these days that there's not the flicker of a chance that he'll ever be made to apologise for spreading such easily disprovable lies.

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OR

A letter to ostentatious unfollowers

Dear ostentatious unfollower,

I know from my Facebook statistics that on average several dozen people unfollow my Facebook page per day. With almost 300,000 followers this kind of churn is to be expected. 

The vast majority of people who unfollow my page do so without making a big song and dance about it, but then every so often there's one like you who feels the need to ostentatiously announce that you're unfollowing my page with a temper tantrum and a hail of insults.

I know what motivates you to flounce off like this, but I haven't got a clue what you think this kind of "I'm flouncing off now" announcement is actually going to achieve.

Your motivation for stropping off however is beyond obvious. You're the kind of person who is so insecure that you can't tolerate things that challenge your pre-existing biases.

Presumably you began following my page because you mistakenly believed it was the kind of page that would massage your ego by confirming your pre-existing opinions, but now I've posted something that you don't agree with. Rather than just think something like "I didn't agree with that one, I hope he returns to writing content I agree with soon" you feel the need to not only remove my page from your social media feed, but also publicly announce that you're running away too.

The problem is that you want your social media feed to be a pure echo chamber that never challenges your opinions. You want to like in a closed ideological bubble because you hate the feeling of cognitive dissonance, and rather than deal with it like an adult (by thinking about the seemingly contradictory ideas to either disprove one of them, or to find a way of reconciling them) you're running away like a coward.

The thing that baffles me about people like you is not that you're running away. I don't expect anyone to agree with everything I write and nobody is obligated to follow my page. The thing I can't figure out is what you think you are achieving by having such a tantrum about it instead of just quietly leaving like the vast majority of unfollowers do.

What's the actual purpose?

If you think that flouncing off in a tide of insults is going to make me change my opinions and offer content that is more suited to your worldview, you couldn't be more wrong. I have the editorial freedom to write what I want, when I want. I don't tailor my content to suck up to any particular group of people, and especially not people who have just flounced off from my page and slung a load of insults at me in the process.

If you think anyone else cares that you're announcing your intention to create yourself a pure social media echo chamber where you never see anything that challenges your worldview, you're also wrong. You're just making a fool of yourself in public by having a public tantrum about an action (unfollowing a social media page) that almost everyone else is capable of doing on a regular basis without feeling the need to make such a pathetic spectacle of themselves in the process.

My best guess is that you think that flouncing off in a hail of insults and abuse is an inspirational thing to do. You're imagining yourself as some kind of glorious revolutionary hero who is taking a brave stand against the tyranny of facts, information and analysis that you don't like aren't you?

You're imagining that by publicly announcing that you're unfollowing my page, you're going to inspire hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of others to follow your lead.

You're imagining that by publicly announcing that you're stropping off you're somehow punishing me for daring to present facts or analyses that you don't like by inspiring loads of other people to follow your inspirational lead by quitting my page too.

The problem for you is that you're doing nothing of the sort. For every one person who does a public flounce like you, hundreds of others begin following my page.

You're not hurting me, and even if you do inspire a few others to flounce off too, you're actually doing me a favour. My page doesn't exist just to massage people's egos by confirming their pre-existing opinions. If people are such fragile little buttercups that they can't tolerate opinions that don't match their own, they're no use to me (or to themselves for that matter). They're bound to eventually run away from something I say, so by inspiring them to leave early you're doing me a favour.

In conclusion I'm glad you've gone. I don't actually want to be part of your social media echo chamber. I don't exist just to confirm your pre-existing biases. In fact it makes me feel a bit sick that I ever was part of your pathetic little ideological bubble in the first place.

There never really was any point in you following my page at all if you're not open to new facts and ideas, if you're incapable of critical thinking, and if you're afraid of considering opinions that don't match your own. 

You were never going to learn anything new from it anyway, so there never really was no point in you following it.

So good luck purifying your social media echo chamber. I hope you one day achieve your ambition of never being confronted by facts and opinions that don't match your own so that you can live in a gloriously pure ideological bubble.

Goodbye (and please stick to your word and actually leave instead of coming back again and again to try to have the last word like so many of your flouncy predecessors have)

Tom (Another Angry Voice)

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Don't read this article

I'm not sure why you're reading an article entitled "don't read this article". Maybe you're childishly susceptible to reverse psychology? Maybe you're so belligerent that you simply won't be told what not to do? Or maybe you're just curious as to why anyone would write an article called "don't read this article"?

Not reading articles

The reason I've written this is that I'm absolutely sick of people wading into the comments threads underneath the links I've put up on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page and making it absolutely and totally clear that they didn't even bother to click the link and read what the article said before they started spouting off about how shit and wrong it is.

What makes this behaviour so annoying is that I know that some 90% of people never (or very rarely) leave comments, even when they have read the article. This means that that those who leave comments without having read the article are part of a vocal minority. There's nothing wrong with being part of the vocal minority (in fact I'm delighted that so many people read my articles and then leave insightful comments), but there is something terribly wrong with people who are so opinionated that they yell their opinions without having even made a rudimentary effort to establish the facts about what it is that they're shouting about.

This habit of barging in with their opinions about the article they didn't even read is most commonly observed amongst UKIP supporters. Over the years I've found that you can't even convince them to read the article even when you use a link description goading them about the Ukipper habit of not reading the article.

Even if you say something along the lines of "If you leave a comment on this article about UKIP that shows that you haven't read it, you're only demonstrating to the rest of us what a confirmation bias riddled and belligerent bunch Ukippers are" - you'll still get a load of Ukippers showing up to write criticisms that demonstrate beyond doubt that they haven't bothered to read the article!

This trait of not reading the article before spouting off is most common amongst UKIP supporters, but it is not confined to them. In February 2015 I shared an article by Professor David Nutt about the way the UN is planning to impose a world-wide ban on the medical use of ketamine, even though it has proven and unique medical properties (it's the only anesthetic that does not cause respiratory depression).

The idea that just because some people use a substance to get high, means that doctors all over the world should be banned from using it for medical purposes is precisely the kind of ideologically driven nonsense that proves the irrationality of the "war on drugs". However many of the people who saw the link decided to wade in with their opinions on the recreational use of ketamine, and even to chastise me for "promoting drugs".  Had these people actually read the article, or even the article description where I explained that it was about the medicinal use of ketamine, there's no way that they could have construed my posting of the article as an endorsement of the recreational use of ketamine.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

This tendency for people to express opinions on articles they've not even read is an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the proven theory that the less of an expert a person is on a subject, the more they tend to underestimate their lack of knowledge. Thus a guy who reads nothing but simplistic pro-austerity narratives in the S*n or Daily Mail (written in the vocabulary of a 10 year old) might think himself an expert on economic issues, whilst an economics expert who understands how ludicrously complex the global derivatives market is, will know that it's now so complicated that it's far beyond the ability of even a visionary genius to understand the entire financial system.

Essentially what people are doing when they express an opinion on something they've not even bothered to read is taking the incredibly pompous stance that they're such an expert, and their perspective is so inherently perfect that they don't even need to examine the evidence before they share their sage and ever-so-important opinion.

Long before the Dunning-Kruger effect was formalised, the philosopher Bertrand Russell said "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

Intellectual laziness

There is nothing wrong with forming an opinion just by looking at the title of an article and the associated image, in fact that's the way that most of us determine which links we're actually going to click and read, and which we're going to ignore.

The problem I have with intellectually lazy people is that they make the perfectly natural decision not to read an article, but then decide to share their blatantly unfounded opinion that the article they refuse to read is "absolute crap"!

The thought process they undergo is something like this:

1. I'm not going to read that because I don't like what I imagine that it says.
2. Nobody else should read articles that say things that I don't like.
3. I'm going to leave a comment saying how crap the article is in order to dissuade other people from reading it.

This kind of behaviour is about as clear a demonstration of intellectual laziness as is possible.

I find people who are ill-informed slightly annoying, but it's understandable that the person who hardly reads anything other than flicking through the copy of the Daily Mail/S*n in the workplace canteen has got some pretty weird misconceptions (like immigrants being to blame for everything or George Osborne being a genius). Okay, these people should still probably understand that the newspapers are propaganda devices, and that they shouldn't allow themselves to be so easily programmed with right-wing propaganda narratives, but they can't really be blamed for their lack of critical thinking skills (that's a result of the top-down authoritarian education system we suffer in this country) nor for failing to come across independent information sources (even a reasonably successful blog like mine is a minuscule drop in the ocean compared to the daily circulation of the S*n or the Daily Mail).

There is a huge difference between being misinformed, and the sheer intellectual laziness of choosing to completely ignore the information you've been presented with, yet trying to form a counter-argument anyway. 

  
Hopeless counter-arguments
 How is it even remotely possible for anyone to believe that they've presented a coherent counter-argument, when they've refused to even read what the argument is?

The only way that it seems possible is if they are so fundamentally lacking in debating skills that they think that ad hominem (against the person) attacks, foul mouthed abuse, blatant straw man misinterpretations of what has actually been said, or a whole host of other common logical fallacies constitute debate winning tactics.

It is stunningly obvious that it's impossible to construct a rational counter-argument if you're unwilling to even consider what has actually been said. Yet some people are so afraid of reading things that might challenge their worldview that they will not only refuse to read it, but they'll construct ludicrous fallacious arguments against it in pitiful efforts to deter others from reading it too.

A simple rule

If you see an article that you think you're not going to like and choose not to read it, that's fine. It's just a manifestation of confirmation bias. I'm not judgmental about that in the slightest because I do it every single day when I decide not to read clickbait articles, celebrity culture drivel, above-the-line trolling or articles written by journalists with writing styles I find annoying, or opinions that I find offensive.

What I have a problem with is people who decide not to read an article, but then decide to express their opinion on it anyway. There's a simple rule that I try to follow, and it's this: If you can't be arsed to read the article, don't bother to offer your (worthless) opinion about what it says.

Conclusion

The problem I have in explaining my objection to the people who are this intellectually lazy, is that I can't explain why they should read things before they comment on them in the form of an article, because they clearly wouldn't bother to read it would they?

I was hoping that by giving it a "don't push this button" kind of title I might at least trick a few of them into reading it.

If you're the kind of person who doesn't angrily criticise articles that you've blatantly refused to read, and you feel like I've tricked you into reading this, then I hope you at least understand my reason for me doing this, and accept that the blame is entirely yours anyway, because I clearly told you not to read it in the first place!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
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Why 73% of UKIP supporters should actually vote Green
                          
Why you should question everything, even me!
                
Why do so many people trust Osborne with the UK economy?

If the Green Party have the best policies, how come hardly anyone votes for them?

                                
The rise of the non-traditional parties in UK politics
  

Economically illiterate "Osbornomic" propaganda and the Guardian newspaper

A few months ago I lambasted George Osborne for repeating his economically illiterate fallacy about the all time record low cost of government borrowing representing "market confidence" in his fiscal austerity experiment. The full article about George Osborne's "market confidence fallacy" is here: The gist of it is that Osborne's "market confidence" claims rely upon a brazen conflation of fiscal policies with monetary outcomes. In essence, what George Osborne is asking us to believe is that the recent record low interest rates being paid on UK government bonds have absolutely nothing to do with the monetary policy at the Bank of England, the sustained strategies of holding the base interest rate at an all time historic low (0.5%) since 2009 and "magicking up" £375 billion (via Quantitative Easing) in order to manipulate the UK bond market.

Osborne's fantasy is that "market confidence" in a Chancellor's fiscal policies is best measured through UK bond prices, that these record low prices have nothing to do with sustained record low interest rates or quantitative easing and instead represent "market confidence" that he is doing pretty much the best job any Chancellor of the Exchequer has ever done in the history of the UK economy.


Anyone with the slightest understanding of how quantitative easing and the zero lower bound actually effect government bond yields must be able to see that these all time record low bond yields are occurring because of QE and the sustained all time low BoE interest rate (just as they are in other QE economies such as the US, Japan and Switzerland) and that this low cost of borrowing comes in spite of, not because of Osborne's ideological austerity experiment.

It must surely be agonising to anyone with a smattering of economic literacy, to hear Osborne endlessly repeating this naive and economically illiterate propaganda about how low borrowing costs demonstrate that "the markets" have vastly more confidence in his fiscal austerity agenda than "the markets" ever had in, lets say, the economic policies put in place by  Tory Chancellor Harold Macmillan between 1955 and 1957, before he became Prime Minister and famously informed the British people that they'd "never had it so good" six months later. How real economists teeth must grind when they hear Osborne insinuating that his fiscal policies are more "confidence inspiring" than any fiscal policies in the entire history of the United Kingdom. According to Osborne's absurdly narcissistic justification narrative, the all time historic low cost of government borrowing demonstrates that no Chancellor, not even when Britain was leading the industrial revolution and the British empire was at the peak of global domination, has ever inspired greater "market confidence" with their fiscal policies than himself.

If it really were the case that "the markets" had unprecedented confidence in Osborne's fiscal policies, do you really think that the IMF would be repeatedly pleading with Osborne to slow down his fiscal austerity experiment? That the Chairman of of Goldman Sachs Asset management would be worrying that "Osbornomic" austerity is likely to cost the UK a "lost decade"? Or that the Credit Rating Agencies would be threatening to revoke the UK's cherished AAA credit ratings?

Osborne strikes me as exactly the kind of weak minded and self-important individual that would blindly overlook a mountain of evidence that his policies are failing in order to cherry-pick any sliver of positive economic date (no matter how tenuous) to weave it into a web of solipsistic confirmation bias, constructed in order to congratulate himself on what a wonderful job he is doing.

It doesn't matter a jot to Osborne that this absurd fiscal policy/monetary outcomes narrative he has created, exposes him as the n -1th grade economic thinker that he clearly is. He doesn't even seem to have the economic nous to understand how idiotic these delusional comments about "market confidence" make him look. Osborne is a man that publicly demonstrates his inability to differentiate between (or a man that chooses to willfully misrepresent) the distinct consequences of monetary and fiscal policies. Someone openly flaunting this level of fundamental level of economic illiteracy shouldn't even be near an undergraduate course in economics at an under-performing economics department in some backwater, chronically under-funded university campus, let alone be serving as the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the World's 6th largest economy.

What is infinitely worse than this pompous self-entitled fool repeatedly making these economically illiterate pronouncements, is not that his political party and the ever loyal right-wing press see fit to disseminate similar pseudo-economic justification narratives to defend Osborne's ideological austerity experiment; it is that so-called left wing press choose to  repeat these facile and misleading assertions uncritically. The specific instance I'm invoking is the Guardian article on the 24th of January entitled "Britain's national debt tops £1 trillion".

The uncritical repetition of Osborne's brazenly pseudo-economic "market confidence fallacy" occurs in the fifth paragraph of the article, where someone called Daniel Solomon of the Centre for Economics and Business Research (we'll come back to them) was quoted as saying:

"at least the government's focus on fiscal prudence had resulted in low interest rates on its debt."

I would like to know how the Guardian found themselves printing this disturbingly illiterate Tory justification narrative without anything approaching critical appraisal, and as if it represented some kind of unbiased economic viewpoint from a legitimate sounding economic organisation. Given that this is actually the view of a very recent economics graduate (BA completed 2009, Dphil completed 2011) who has demonstrable links to several hard-right Conservative affiliated economic Think Tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs, I find the whole thing as distasteful as I find it concerning.

The exact same Tory propaganda narrative is uncritically quoted again in another Guardian article, this time without even the facility for below-the-line commentators to point out what abject nonsense it is. In this one Solomon is actually referred to as an "expert". From a newspaper that provides column space to genuine economics experts with real credentials like Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini and Ha-Joon Chang, describing a barely out of university right-wing wonk like Solomon as an expert is frankly atrocious.

What makes the Guardian's uncritical repetition of Solomon's propaganda narrative so worrying is that it demonstrates the abject level of economic illiteracy across the whole political spectrum. If transparent conflations and misinterpretations like Osborne's "market confidence fallacy", spoken by free-market fundamentalist wonks that are barely out of university are presented as an unquestioned economic viewpoint from a reliable source even in the so-called left-wing press, it shows that economic illiteracy is desperately ingrained across the entire political spectrum. That such abjectly nonsensical Tory propaganda goes unquestioned even it the publications that should be using such transparent economic gibberish to expose the fundamental illiteracy of "Osbornomics" is a very sad indictment of economic discourse in the UK media.

The fact that the Guardian have now taken to churning out misleading "Osbornomic" propaganda from recently graduated free-market wonks like Daniel Solomon, as if it were actually unbiased commentary from an economic "expert" leaves us with a few questions:

Firstly: Who, other than me, is lambasting Osborne for repeatedly asserting this lazy and economically illiterate "market confidence fallacy"?

Secondly: Why does the Guardian not disclose that their source, Daniel Solomon, is actually a very recent economics graduate with a short employment history littered with hard-right Tory party affiliated Think Tanks, or that the employers that provide him a veneer of legitimacy, the CEBR, are actually a Think Tank with close links to the right-wing business lobby group the CBI?

Thirdly: Why was the obvious and economically illiterate conflation that underlies this "Market confidence fallacy" not picked up upon by a single person working on the Guardian economics desk before the article went out for publication?

Fourthly: What does an oversight that allows such brazen and illiterate Tory propaganda, from such an inexperienced and clearly biased source, to go to press totally unchallenged tell us about the current level of economic analysis at this once proud left-wing newspaper?

See also

The fallacy of market confidence in austerity
  
An entirely avoidable "Osbornomic" recession

What is... A Justification Narrative? 
 
   What is... Confirmation Bias?

 

Tory policy: All narrative, no substance

Tory economic illiteracy exposed

Damian Green: An egregious public liar  
 

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The Office for Budget Recklesness?

The creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was formally announced by the Tory chancellor George Osborne in May 2010, days after the Tory / Lib-Dem coalition had come to power, however it had actually come into existence in shadow form in December 2009. George Osborne used his first ever official speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer to criticise the economic and fiscal forecasts of the previous Labour government, and announce that in future the OBR would be responsible for publishing these forecasts "independently of government".

A short track record of failure 

From the very start, the OBR got their economic forecasting badly wrong. A pretty spectacular failing for an organisation established with the primary purpose of improving on the poor economic forecasting of the previous Labour administration.

The OBR were forced to begin downgrading their economic forecasts within months of being formally established by the 2011 Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act. After four downgrades in 2011, even the right-wing press began complaining about the inaccuracy of the economic forecasts emanating from George Osborne's pet project. The Daily Telegraph even reported the view that Osborne may have to disband the OBR in 2012 if their economic forecasting was as disastrously inaccurate as it had been in 2011. In fact their forecasting for 2012 has been even more wildly inaccurate and subject to even larger downgrades, but the Telegraph seem to have gone quiet about it.

Each time the OBR has been forced to further downgrade their economic forecasts, or explain the large disparities between their predictions and the quarterly economic results, they have come out with a list of absurd excuses (the cold winter, the Japanese Tsunami, the wet spring, the royal wedding, the Jubilee, the Eurozone crisis...). In fact, several of the events the OBR has cited as excuses for poorer than forecasted economic performance, were actually talked up as being economic stimulants before the fact, especially the two large royal events in 2012. One is left expecting their excuse for poorer than expected third quarter results to be based upon the staging of the £multi-billion Olympic and Paralympic games in London.

Whatever excuses the OBR posited for their inaccurate predictions, those of cynical disposition have been left with the distinct impression that the litany of feeble excuses are little more than transparent justification narratives cobbled together to cover up the failure of George Osborne's ideologically driven austerity experiment. To put this into perspective; in the improbable (or impossible) circumstance that "Osbornomics" had produced better returns than the OBR's forecasts, does anyone believe that they would have pre-packaged the positive economic results within a justification cloud of reasons for the over-performance of the economy? Of course they wouldn't have. They would have said little more than "it is better to be slightly conservative than to be recklessly over-optimistic" and offered a slight upwards revision of subsequent figures.

The litany of post-hoc justification narratives from the OBR has left many people with the notion that they were defending George Osborne's austerity agenda as an act of loyalty to the man that created their jobs. Another plausible explanation for their excuse-mongering is that the people picked to work at the OBR, were chosen specifically because of their neoliberal economic backgrounds. The majority of the board and expert advisory panel have broadly similar backgrounds. The majority are macro-economists that have studied at Oxford, Cambridge or both; many have experience in working for independent central banks (the Bank of England, the ECB); several have been economic advisers to Tory governments; two of the three members of the Budget Responsibility Committee have experience at the IMF (Robert Chote and Graham Parker); and many more have experience working in the financial services industry that was responsible for triggering the global economic crisis, most notably John Llewellyn (who was the chief economist at the collapsed Lehman Brothers bank) and Ben Broadbent (who was Goldman Sachs Senior European Economist when they were helping the Greek state to hide their debts in order to cheat their way into the Eurozone and when they later started betting on the collapse of the Greek economy, that they themselves had helped to engineer). If the composition of senior OBR staff is predominantly sympathetic to neoliberal economic theories and major financial institutions, they would be sure to approve of Osborne's agenda of repackaging neoliberal economic reforms as unavoidable austerity and hoofing financial sector regulatory reform into the long grass.

Of course, another potential motivation for the litany of lame excuses is pure self-interest (the motivation at the heart of neoliberal economics). The OBR have found themselves in the situation time and again where they have had to come up with something, anything, to obscure the fact that they have consistently got their economic forecasts so spectacularly wrong. 

In 2012 the UK economy slumped back into "official recession" (two or more consecutive quarters of economic contraction) but the post-hoc excuses from the OBR continued as reliably as the downgrades in their economic forecasts. To put the inaccuracy of their economic forecasts into perspective; in March 2011 they predicted that the GDP growth rate for 2012 would be a healthy 2.5%, however given the dismal first two quarters, it would take an 4th quarter miracle for the UK economy to recover to even a 0% growth rate for the entire year.

The OBR, the IMF and Fiscal Multipliers

In October 2012 the IMF announced a massive revision to their fiscal multiplication estimates (the returns on government spending). For years they had maintained that the fiscal multiplier was around 0.5 (a return of 50p for every £1 of investment), but the newly announced figures ranged between 0.9 and 1.7 (a 90p - £1.70 return). This revision shows a vast 80% - 320% margin of error on the original estimates. Here's what they said:

"IMF staff reports, suggest that fiscal multipliers used in the forecasting process are about 0.5. Our results indicate that multipliers have actually been in the 0.9 to 1.7 range since the Great Recession. This finding is consistent with research suggesting that in today’s environment of substantial economic slack, monetary policy constrained by the zero lower bound, and synchronized fiscal adjustment across numerous economies, multipliers may be well above 1." (IMF Global prospects and policies report, page 43)

This announcement was extremely bad news for the OBR, since rather than conducting their own fiscal analysis to calculate the lost economic returns on the government spending that Osborne had been slashing, they had simply been using the IMF's guesstimated fiscal multipliers of around 0.5 to make the calculations. In other words, they had been working under the assumption that government spending is essentially 50% "waste", when according to the revised IMF figures government spending ranges between 10% "waste" and a 70% increase in economic productivity. It is clear that slashing government spending is much more harmful to the economy if it ranges  between -10% to +70% economic stimulus, rather than matching the grossly underestimated -50% figure the OBR had been working with.

Later in October 2012 the OBR vaguely admitted the possibility that their fiscal multiplier assumptions were responsible for the inaccuracy of their forecasts in the executive summary of their 2012 Forecast Evaluation Report. Here's what they said:

The multipliers would have needed to be more than twice as large to explain the growth shortfall we have seen. Estimates of multipliers vary widely, so it is clearly possible that the fiscal consolidation exerted more of a drag on growth than we assumed. (page 10)

Given that the IMF announced an 80% - 320% revision of the fiscal multiplier, the get out clause of multipliers needing to be  "more than twice as large to explain the growth shortfall" doesn't look particularly unrealistic. Later in the document the OBR calculated that:

"The average multiplier over the two years would have needed to be 1.3 – more than double our estimate – to fully explain the weak level of GDP in 2011-12" (page 53)

By coincidence or not, this figure of 1.3 lies slap bang in the middle of the IMF's revised range of 0.9 - 1.7! 

The TUC carried out some analysis on the effects of the Osborne's austerity measures using the middle of the range figure of 1.3 and estimated £76 billion in economic damage, however if the higher estimate of 1.7 is used the scale of unforeseen economic damage from Osborne's austerity agenda could be as high as £114 billion. Whatever the case; if the IMF's figures are to be believed, the OBR helped Osborne to obscure between £38 billion and £114 billion in economic damage he was inflicting through his ideological austerity agenda by lazily bunging IMF statistics into their calculations rather than attempting to determine the fiscal multiplication values of the diverse range of axed government services for themselves.

Anyone familiar with science or maths knows that your entire equation is invalidated when you begin simply throwing in numbers based upon arbitrary assumptions. What makes the lazy reliance upon IMF figures even worse, is the IMF's appalling track record of failure. One country after another (Argentina being the most famous example) has suffered severe and catastrophic economic meltdowns after adhering too closely to the IMF neoliberalisation plan. An organisation that has shown a ruthless decades long determination to push the policies of privatisation, small-government, reduced welfare spending, and deregulation has an obvious vested interest in maintaining the fiction that government spending is essentially "waste". Given this track record of failure and the clear vested interest in downplaying the benefit of state spending, it seems incredibly unwise to take the IMF's fiscal multiplication statistics at face value and simply transpose them into your own national growth forecasts.

If millions of ordinary people are aware of the IMF's appalling track record of failure, it is fair to expect that  trained economists should be aware of it too. However, the problem is, that the people at the OBR have emerged from the same orthodox neoliberal macro-economist mould as the policy wonks at the IMF. In fact Robert Chote, the head of the OBR is a former IMF employee. When the IMF released absurd post-hoc justification narratives to explain away the catastrophic Argentine economic collapse, despite the fact that Argentina had been lauded as the IMF poster child for the pace and extent of their IMF backed neoliberalisation reforms throughout the preceding decade, people like Oxbridge trained macro-economists lapped it up. It is obviously easier for them to give in to confirmation bias and accept the IMF's absurd post-hoc rationalisations at face value, than it is to admit that a hell of a lot of the neoliberal dogma they've based their careers upon is fundamentally flawed, that many of the macroeconomic models they've learned are defunct and that the entire global economic system need to be dramatically reformed.

Simply transposing IMF fiscal multiplier figures into their calculations, rather than conducting their own analysis on returns on government investment is an act of budgetary negligence. The OBR are guilty of telling Osborne exactly what he wanted to hear, in order to justify his ideological austerity experiment. They fudged the figures in order to plaster his ideologically driven agenda with a veneer of economic credibility.

Even now, the fiscal multiplication statistics provided by the IMF must surely be treated with extreme caution. If they are prepared to make vast (80% - 320%) adjustments, who would bet on the latest figures being entirely accurate? If the OBR are going to continue to use fiscal multipliers in their economic forecasts, they must surely undertake rigorous returns on investment analysis across the whole range of UK government spending. If they don't adopt this evidence based approach, it would perhaps be better for everyone if they gave up the pretense of conducting rigorous economic analysis and admitted that, like Osborne, their agenda is an ideological one.

Responsibility

That the Conservative party established the OBR many months before the election leaves the distinct impression that it is, and always has been a partisan organisation. Their willingness to fudge the figures in order to tell George Osborne exactly what he wanted to hear (that "austerity would, or even could ever, work) suggests that if not demonstrably sympathetic to the Tory party, they must at least be considered sympathetic to the Tory indiscriminate austerity agenda, of further IMF style neoliberalisation dressed up as the cure to the economic crisis.

That the OBR have made catastrophic forecasting errors is beyond doubt, and no amount of excuses or absurd boasts about the health of the UK bond market are going to cover up the fact that fiscal consolidation is failing and that the OBR gave Osborne the green light to plough ahead with austerity policies that were widely predicted to fail (even by the odious Ed Balls).

Who should be held accountable for this disaster? Well on  page 92 of the OBR's 2011 Economic and Fiscal Outlook we find this statement:

"All judgements and assumptions in the forecasts are made by the OBR’s Budget Responsibility Committee (BRC), and the BRC takes full responsibility for the final forecast."

If this doesn't count as an overt admission of responsibility, then I'm not sure what would. Despite this admission of responsibility, I believe that the blame must go further that the three man BRC team (Chote, Nickell and Parker). George Osborne must be held accountable for not bothering to ensure that the OBR were fit for purpose before handing them responsibility for economic forecasting for the whole nation, and he should also be held responsible for the catastrophic failure of his austerity experiment.

What next for the OBR?

The claim of OBR "independence" must come under enormous scrutiny now, since their excuses have always been aimed at defending Osborne's austerity policies and because their fiscal multiplication errors allowed Osborne to plaster his ideologically driven agenda with a veneer of economic credibility. However, now that they are aware of their errors, the OBR have been presented with a golden opportunity to (at least partially) redeem themselves. 

Firstly: They can do what George Osborne would never do, and admit that they made a catastrophic £multi-billion mistake. They need to admit that their massive underestimates of the value of government spending led them to produce wildly inaccurate economic forecasts. They must also admit that these underestimates allowed George Osborne to inflict a massive amount of damage on a fragile but recovering economy, driving it back into recession.

Secondly: They can recalculate the costs of Osborne's ideological austerity experiment in light of the new fiscal multiplier figures, or even, God forbid, actually attempt to do their own research into the fiscal multiplication values of specific areas of government spending. Using these evidence based figures, they could present a plan of action (based on immediate increases in funding for strong fiscal multipliers and proposed funding cuts or systemic reforms in areas of particularly weak fiscal multiplication). With these new forecasts and proposals they could present an undeniable case that austerity hasn't been working, and will continue to not work. This would leave Osborne with the choice of abandoning his mindless austerity experiment or adding the body of experts he actually created to the ever growing list of people and organisations that he ignores in pursuit of his ideological dream. The futile dream of disproving the vast wealth of evidence that government stimulus and regulatory reform are the cures for economies reeling from the consequences of catastrophic free-market deregulations and unrestrained financial sector greed.

If the OBR take these steps, then perhaps there is a case to be made that they have a useful economic function and a potential future. However if they ignore the IMF's revision of fiscal multiplication values, continue to produce wildly inaccurate economic forecasts and deliberately obscure the destructive effects of austerity by churning out feeble excuses, I'm fairly sure they will be so utterly discredited that they will have to be immediately disbanded as soon as Osborne is removed from power.
 

See also

What is... Fiscal multiplication? 
  
The Golden Hammer of Neoliberalism
 

Austerity and the double-dip
 
  The inefficient state fallacy
 
The catastrophic failure of "Osbornomics"
  

Osborne's indiscriminate "austerity"