Edward Hadas

Many people think politics is really a branch of economics. When the United States invaded Iraq in 1991, the common cry was that it was all about oil. On the same thinking, rich countries were indifferent to the brutal civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – which has cost 5.4 million lives, according to the International Rescue Committee – because the economic stakes were too low to matter. This economic reductionism goes on in developed countries too. Pundits and pollsters argue that elections are won and lost above all else on the economy.

Such ideas can be traced back to the philosopher Karl Marx. He believed that material considerations motivated everything people do, including how they are governed. In modern surveys, people routinely say that the desire for better jobs or higher incomes is not what drives their voting behaviour. On Marx’s view, these respondents are either lying, or in denial. They may not realise that economic discontents and aspirations drive their action – and all of history.

Followers of this dialectic should be disconcerted by current events. Only a die-hard Trotskyite could see economic issues behind the conflicts in Ukraine and Iraq.

Economic explanations are inapplicable to the strategy of Vladimir Putin, even if the president of Russia is trying to reconstruct the glory of the supposedly Marxist Soviet Union. Putin treats narrow economic motivations with disdain. His creeping invasions are not cheap, the occupied areas are mostly in dire economic straits, and retaliatory sanctions will create economic hardship for all of Russia.

For Putin, power is clearly more important than prosperity. His propaganda machine is trying to persuade the Russian people to think the same way. That creates a good test for the neo-Marxist reading of history. Russia is sufficiently rich and large to tough out widespread foreign hostility, especially with some help from China and other sympathetic governments. However, tight sanctions will make the Russian people poorer. Will they put up with the required economic sacrifices, or will they eventually prefer greater prosperity to national pride?

Economic systems that work well do not have many heroes. The elevated status of the world’s central bankers – seen in the close attention paid to their annual get-together last weekend in Jackson Hole, Wyoming – is a sign that the financial system works badly.

Most of the modern economy flourishes without much help from professional economists. That would have pleased John Maynard Keynes. The British economist thought his peers should be like dentists – “humble, competent people” who could deal effectively with specialised problems. Such technicians do in fact take care of the production and distribution of goods and services, the allocation of incomes, the protection of the environment and even the development of new products.

These practical, almost anonymous experts have been a huge success. The prosperity of developed economies is fantastic by any historic standard, and many goods and services are available to rich and poor alike. The system deals fairly easily with innovations, changes in taste, natural disasters, military action and pretty much every sort of disruption – except severe financial problems.

Edward Hadas

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Give Janet Yellen credit. The chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve is keen to use monetary policy to help get more people into good jobs. Her priority – work is more important than finance – is reflected in the subject of this week’s get-together for the world’s central bankers: “Re-Evaluating Labor Market Dynamics.” One item should be on the agenda of the distinguished guests at Jackson Hole, Wyoming: how to replace the concept of unemployment.

The suggestion may sound frivolous, but the idea of a simple measure of unemployment is tied to a wrong view of how modern economies work. The unemployment rate made sense in developed economies a century ago, when workers were men who wanted full-time jobs as soon as they finished school, and to continue until they died or retired. In that world, unemployment was easy to define – working-age men without a job.

By Edward Hadas

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Are authoritarian governments bad for the economy? Turkish voters do not seem to think so. On August 10, Tayyip Erdogan won an absolute majority in the country’s presidential election. Observers say that the country’s increasing prosperity is a big part of his AK Party’s appeal. Erdogan is not the only popular authoritarian around. Viktor Orban, who reportedly endorsed “illiberal” government, wins similar majorities in Hungary. If Russia had an election today, President Vladimir Putin would win big. And Xi Jinping, who seems to be making one-party rule in China more authoritarian, would undoubtedly triumph if the government bothered with elections.

The success of such leaders irritates many Americans and Western Europeans, who believe that genuine multi-party democracy is the natural political arrangement in the modern world. Clearly, though, most voters in some countries want authoritarian leaders who tolerate no effective opposition and who impose their vision on the nation.

By Edward Hadas

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The International Monetary Fund recently engaged in what has become an annual ritual. For the fourth year in a row, it reduced its forecast for world GDP growth. The 0.7 percentage point average decline from the earlier estimate to the new 3.4 percent growth projection is not huge, but the persistent disappointments make many economists uneasy.

Larry Summers has an explanation for the problem in rich countries, which he calls secular stagnation. The former U.S. treasury secretary’s argument has several strands, but his main thesis is that investment has been too low for almost two decades because prevailing interest rates have been too high and because politicians have not permitted sufficiently large government deficits. Controversially, he suggests that growth has been painfully slow whenever financial bubbles are lacking, as in the years since the 2008 crisis.

By Edward Hadas

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Competition is fierce for the Bankers’ Bad Behaviour Award. Rate-rigging, client-fleecing, dishonest documentation, reckless trading and exorbitant pay were all widespread before the 2008 financial crisis, and faulty practices have proven remarkably persistent. It sounds like there is something wrong with all banks. The ethical problem, though, is not universal.

Many of today’s lenders do have deep and disconcerting similarities. Their culture has been shaped by a faulty ideology, the cult of the market. They believe that society gains from fierce competition among firms which aim only at maximising returns for shareholders. Leaders of such enterprises only pretend to care about the future for marketing purposes and think they have no ethical responsibilities beyond obeying the letter of the law.

Perky, productive robots, or nothing more than a few new smartphone apps? Cascading innovation, or just a few tweaks? Economists and technologists are debating what the future holds.

Pessimists like Robert Gordon of Northwestern University see decades of slow growth ahead, with little scope for big leaps forward. The optimists, among them Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expect new technological glories. Both sides are more wrong than right.

Everyone is wrong when the wrangling is numerical. Arguments based on GDP and productivity growth are too circular to resolve anything. A main cause of any slowdown in reported productivity numbers is a judgment that innovations are becoming less valuable. So a reported slowdown cannot logically be used to support the argument that technology is advancing more sluggishly.

The public has a right to know. Individuals have a right to privacy. The common good is served by both these contradictory statements, so someone has to decide how to balance them when they come into conflict. When it comes to internet search, the European Union’s Court of Justice has given the job to search engine providers such as Google. In a way, that’s a good call.

The court decided in May that some internet links deserve to be “forgotten” because certain data can over time become “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”. The search operators were held responsible, in the first instance, for judging whether to grant requests to remove links.

The court’s decision creates a mess, because it provides no practical guidance. Still, it made a clear step forward in the endless debate between “the legitimate interest of internet users” and “the right to protection of personal data” by recognising that search engines have changed the meaning of privacy.

By Edward Hadas

The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

The fast increase in loans to pay for higher education is a trend that is moving in the wrong direction. The idea that borrowing should play an important role in financing higher education, now standard thinking in the United States and the United Kingdom, is financially dangerous and economically wrongheaded.

Overall, American households are deleveraging. Most notably, U.S. mortgage debt outstanding has fallen to 51 percent from 71 percent of GDP since the end of 2008, according to survey data from the New York Federal Reserve. However, over the same period the ratio of student loans to GDP increased to 5.7 percent from 4.3 percent. The $1 trillion now outstanding is economically significant. In England, the ratio of student loans to GDP is only about half as high as in the United States, but the 80 percent increase over the last five years has been even faster.

What will happen next in the housing market? The question comes up all the time in many countries, for an obvious reason: house prices jump around too fast for the good of the economy.

The price hyperactivity does not follow a uniform pattern around the world. Look at the indices of average prices for dwellings by nation, adjusted for inflation, compiled by the Bank for International Settlements. Since 2000, the real average price is up by 63 percent in the UK, by 49 percent in Switzerland and by 12 percent in the United States. The average Dutch price declined by 7 percent. In Germany, though, there has been so little house price action that BIS could only find data back to 2003. Since then, the average German price is down by a tiny 1 percent in real terms.

Basic economic indicators – GDP growth, employment levels and general price levels – can explain almost none of this variation. The patterns in the American and European economies over the last 13 years have been far more similar than the house price trends.