During the EU referendum debate almost the whole global economic and financial establishment lined up to warn of the consequences of Brexit, and yet 52% of the country ignored them.
For many Remain voters it is a clear sign of the shift into an era of post-truth politics. While economists developed rigorous, evidence-based arguments, Leave campaigners slandered experts and appeared to pluck numbers out of the air. Yet they won.
Post-truth politics is indeed a scary prospect but to avoid such a future we cannot simply blame “populist politicians” or “ill-informed voters”. We must understand the referendum in its wider context; economists must realise that they are both part of the problem and a necessary part of the solution.
We are living in an econocracy. Such a society seems like a democracy, with political parties and elections, but political goals are expressed in terms of their effect on “the economy”, and economic policymaking is viewed as a technical, not a political, activity. Areas of political life are increasingly delegated to experts, whether at the Bank of England, the government’s behavioural insights team, the Competition Commission or the Treasury.
As members of Rethinking Economics, an international student movement seeking to reform the discipline of economics, we are campaigning for a more pluralist, critical and participatory approach. We conduct workshops in schools, run evening crash courses for adults, and this year launched Economy, a website providing accessible economic analysis of current affairs and a platform for lively public debate. We want economists and citizens to join us in our mission to democratise economics.
That’s because the language of economics has become the language of government, and as the experts on “the economy”, economists have secured a position of prestige and authority. Their rise has gone hand in hand with the increasing importance over the 20th century and beyond of the idea of the economy in political and social life. This idea in its modern use took hold only in the 1950s but today GDP growth is one of the central indicators of success for governments, and it is unheard of for a political party to win a general election without being viewed as competent on the economy.
We have also seen the economisation of daily life, so that parts of society as diverse as the arts and healthcare now justify their value in terms of their contribution to the economy. But in this process economists have largely ignored citizens and failed to consider their right to participate in discussion and decision-making.
In the wake of the referendum, Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Britain’s most authoritative economic thinktank, lamented that economists had “failed to communicate basic economic concepts to politicians, journalists and businesspeople, never mind the public”. Johnson’s soul-searching highlights a broader feeling within the economics profession that it has been ignored and diminished by the result of the EU referendum.
The Leave campaign explicitly attempted to devalue economic expertise, including Michael Gove’s now infamous claim that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. This is an effective strategy in an econocracy because it exploits the fact that people feel cut off from, and unrepresented by, economics.
Our view is that experts are essential in the modern world but that, in the case of economics, they have in many ways overreached themselves, undermining democracy and fuelling popular discontent in the process. In polling we did with YouGov, just under half of respondents reported talking about economics only once a month or less. Only 12% felt that politicians and the media talked about economics in an accessible way.
This isn’t to say that economic issues weren’t an important part of the debate. After all, social class and location were key determinants in the outcome of the vote, with Leave voters much more likely to have a lower income and be from poorer areas.
What is striking is how unlikely most of those people are to use the language of economics to describe their views. Instead nationalism and immigration have filled the vacuum left by the absence of a public language and spaces in which people could air their economic grievances. Nationalist and anti-immigration arguments had more resonance with many people’s lived experience of the economy than those provided by economics.
The referendum illustrates clearly a nation divided between a minority who feel they own the language of economics and those who don’t. Unless economists find a way to give people a voice to engage in debate, economics risks becoming completely disregarded as irrelevant or propaganda.
Economists’ tools and theories fail to describe the lives of many people in the UK. It is only through sustained and two-way public engagement that economists can regain the trust of the public and prevent the scary drift towards a world of post-truth politics.
To those who are saying that the vote for Brexit showed we shouldn’t let people make these decisions, we say that we need more democracy, not less. At Rethinking Economics we are trying to be the change we want to see, and we call on economists and citizens to join us in our mission to democratise economics.
This article draws on the authors’ forthcoming book The Econocracy: The Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts, to be published by Manchester University Press in November