Second Guess?

If anybody needed proof that astrology only exists to give a veneer of credibility to economic forecasting, the last few weeks have provided it in abundance. No two economists (although ‘economist’ is as ill-definable as is ‘libertarian’) appear to agree, in the same way that no two humans ever seem to witness any event in the exact, same way. The truth, as is so often the case and in so many walks of life, is that nobody knows.

Sure, in retrospect we can analyse what went wrong, or right, and draw conclusions, but those conclusions are just as much coloured by what we wanted to see as what we actually saw. And those conclusions inevitably lack the unfortunate dearth of information confronting the person in the here and now, deciding what would be best for the hereafter. 

We all harbour longings to return to past events with the knowledge of hindsight, believing we would make better choices… but I bet we wouldn’t. For a start, if we could go back and re-run elections, personal choices, fashion faux-pas and the like, so too, could others. And given that we each have a slightly different agenda, the outcomes would likely be no more predictable than they are now.

Which is why elections are so fraught with uncertainty. For sure, a Conservative government going into a general election right now would likely be annihilated. People are pissed off enough to vote for the charisma-void of Starmer’s Labour, but would it really be ‘better’? I think we could probably come to a reasonable consensus on what better means: happier, more stable, debt-free, anxiety-free. That stuff is easy, but how to get there is not.

Free markets rely on the agglomeration of many independent choices, so if enough people opt for one particular course of action – buying decisions, for instance – the overall outcome will look like the ‘invisible hand’ has been hard at work. But the devil makes work for idle invisible hands to do, so without regulation free markets become enslavers of the many to the whim of the few. But who regulates the regulators? In theory we, the electorate do. But, in practice?

In the aftermath of the last week's political car crash everybody seems to want to proffer an opinion as to what went wrong. From lofty positions of superior education and supposed insider knowledge right down to the bile-spitting, snarling Tory haters, driven by nothing but their revulsion for something they know nothing about, nevertheless they all feel the need to be heard.

Literally nobody knows whether the defenestration of Truss would instantly buoy-up the markets, or whether it would take a full-scale Tory Apocalypse to achieve that. There is too much going on, too much turmoil, too much distrust, and too little in the way of hard facts. The future will only be known once it is in the past, and the most honest seers should admit to luck playing a large part should their prognosis come about.

But every now and then, all those different observers, from their partisan viewpoints do happen to see at least something on which they can all agree. Whether the eventual outcome is equally transparent is another matter entirely, but I’m pretty sure we can all get behind the notion that Truss’s time in power is done.