Copyright Bloomberg
Every now and then, people get particularly fed up with economic orthodoxy. And who can blame them? It must be annoying to cheer on something kind-hearted, popular or politically audacious, only to be told that the same old pesky unintended consequences will come crashing in and ruin the fun. The extent to which this is the case ebbs and flows with the political cycle. For about a decade now, voters in much of the West have been disinterested in the warnings of dismal science. Former Conservative minister Michael Gove marked a change of tone in 2016 when he said Brits had “had enough of experts”, shortly before the UK voted to leave the EU; in the following months, Donald Trump was elected to the White House and Jeremy Corbyn attracted hundreds of thousands of new members to the Labour Party, both railing against the assumptions of mainstream economic thought.
