This book is based on interviews with 85 elected politicians from across the political spectrum, with some under-representation on the part of some far-right parties, who resisted being interviewed. The politicians either have economic front-bench responsibilities, whether in government or opposition, or economic committee membership, so are predisposed to be interested in economic issues. In addition, I interviewed 14 partisan economic advisers or economists attached to committees. I chose to interview some advisers to triangulate what politicians said, but my main aim was to ascertain the politician perspective. As the interviews are confidential, throughout the book I give brief details of who is being quoted, such as “German CDU/ CSU1 politician”, or “former British Conservative minister”.

At the research design and interviewing stage I kept an open mind about how far politicians might share attitudes to economists and voters and how far they might diverge, and, if so, whether in national or ideological directions. By the end of the study I was struck by how much elected politicians had in common, more than might have been expected. Therefore, Part I of the book starts with what most of the politicians seemed to share.

In Chapter 1 I set out why it is important to research politicians’ perspectives on economic policy-making given that many commentators, increasingly including progressive ones, do not believe that politicians can solve the complex economic problems we face and call for a “new technocracy”. In Chapter 2 my focus is on what politicians share in their attitudes to economists. In Chapter 3 I turn to the second area where politicians share a common approach: their attitudes to voters and the economy.

Economist Kate Raworth (2017) says that “you can't walk away from economics because it frames the world we inhabit”, but decided we need to “flip it on its head”: “What if we started economics with humanity's goals for the 21st century, and then asked what economic mindset would give us even half a chance of achieving them?” She develops the doughnut concept of boundaries, in which the hole in the middle is where people's needs are not met and the boundary beyond the edge of the doughnut is where we risk putting too much pressure on the world's resources. Drawing on numerous strands of economics, such as “complexity, ecological, feminist, behavioural and institutional eco-nomics”, her aim is to find how to meet humanity's needs. But she says it will require a fundamental transformation of the “mainstream economic mindset”, from universities to parliaments.

So far, this book has related how politicians describe their current economic mindsets. Most recount a chronological path, starting in their late teens or early twenties, of becoming interested in politics, becoming aware of their own values and predispositions and how this process affected their thinking about the economy.

In this chapter French politicians describe a cultural and institutional landscape that sets France apart from the coordinated and liberal market economy models of the other four countries in this study. Although I have discussed some aspects of French left ideas in Chapter 4, I bring other aspects of what French leftist politicians say in here so as to help us understand the perspectives of centrist and right-wing politicians and overall trends in the French approach. How do French politicians from the full range of parties interpret what “responsible” economic policies are and what the balance should be between being responsible and being responsive to voters? How do they see the role of economic experts? In line with politicians from the other four countries, I show that, despite being aware of great economic challenges, French politicians do not think it is necessary or desirable to cede more control to independent economic experts.

There is a huge body of scholarship on France's historic and distinctive pro-state-planning or “dirigiste” approach to economic policy-making. Many have debated how far France went in a more “neoliberal” direction in the early 1980s and how its neoliberal turn might have been different from that in the UK and United States. Ben Clift (2016) shows how in the “thirty glorious years” after the war there was a common education for top civil servants and politicians, to some degree separate from academic economics, sharing an underpinning belief in the value of dirigisme. In those years France's dirigisme seemed successful, and was even copied by other countries.

My overall aim was to research politicians’ economic ideas inductively, in order to describe them accurately, being relatively open about the main themes that would emerge, following an interpretivist epistemological approach (Bevir & Rhodes 2003; Cramer 2016). This book is based on the dominant themes that emerged from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 85 elected politicians and 14 political advisers from the UK, France, Germany, Denmark and the United States. The interviews were conducted primarily by video conference, between February 2020 and December 2022.

I was responsible for the “politician strand” of a broader project exploring economic thinking. It was based in the Politics Department at University College London. I have used the first-person singular, “I”, throughout the book to reflect my responsibility for much of the research design, and for the data collection and analysis. However, as I acknowledge in the preface, the wider research team had already made some decisions, helped me make others and contributed to some of the interviewing. Therefore, in this appendix I use a mix of “I” and “we” as appropriate. I set out details about our case selection, choice of interview as method, interview design, analysis, recruitment strategy and characteristics of those interviewed.

Case selection

The research team chose Germany, France, Denmark, the UK and United States to research for two reasons. First, they are long-established democracies with varying institutional traditions in degrees of federalism, separation of powers and voting systems. Second, they have relatively well-functioning economies and some autonomy over their economic policies. They correspond both to “varieties of capitalism” (Hall & Soskice 2001), ranging across coordinated to liberal and Scandinavian categories, and to growth models (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016), ranging across consumption and export-led categories. However, as I stress in Chapter 1, the primary aim is not to focus on how different economies and political traditions may affect politicians’ economic thinking, but to describe their attitudes to economists and voters.

Why interview politicians?

The research team has heeded the call for descriptive studies of ideas to “primarily rely on direct evidence of policy actors’ ideas and belief” (Daigneault 2014: 463). Politicians’ economic ideas at the general level have been neglected.

The genesis of this book lies in a comparative research project to understand how politicians approach the making of economic policy. Although there is already a substantial body of evidence on the voter side, the economic thinking of politicians is curiously under-researched. So, we asked 99 politicians and advisers from five established democracies – France, Germany, Denmark, the UK and the United States – to talk to us. What are their economic goals, and how do they think they can achieve them? How far do they draw on economic expertise? The book is about the intense and challenging balancing act they describe having to perform, between trying to achieve their economic goals and trying to please voters. It is about how this struggle may be particularly hard when it comes to economic policy, compared with other policy areas such as social or foreign. It is about how it may be becoming even harder as we navigate the post-crash and pandemic economy combined with deepening economic pressures from climate change. However, it is also optimistic, attesting to the determination and potential of politicians to find a way through.

By way of introduction, particularly for readers who are not economists, in this Preface I introduce three core themes of the book – economists, the populist threat and expertise – by setting out how three of the politicians I interviewed talk about them. The three politicians, a German Christian Democrat, a French Socialist and a US Democrat, help define how the terms are used in the rest of the book.

The first interviewee, a German politician who lost his seat when his Christian Democratic party fell out of favour, is talking about his economic ideas. He is passionate about them and keen to get re-elected so that he can pursue pro-market economic goals, deregulating and cutting taxes. His economic ideas came from what he saw as he grew up: the struggles to reintegrate the East German economy and to modernize and decarbonize. But he also mentions many economists he has read along the way, from Adam Smith to a cluster of German ordoliberal thinkers. And, even though he never formally studied economics, he has the greatest respect for it. He gives the most comprehensive history of mainstream economic ideas and economists of all the politicians I interview in this book.

Technocrats argue that politicians ought to listen more to experts, because, in today's complex world, experts are necessary to help them deliver economic policies that can be defined as “responsible”; in the long-term interests of all. But how likely is it that politicians will agree to listen more to economic experts? A crucial consideration is how far they respect the authority of economists. I start by showing how politicians think about the starting point for their economic policies, their economic goals. At this goal level, economists do not seem to have influenced them very much. But politicians may feel the need for expert advice when they come to think about how to fulfil those goals. Here we need to explore whether they see economists as experts. I take the criteria for judging expertise: of technical knowledge, objectivity and independence. First, how far do politicians agree that economists are objective and independent? Second, I take the other criterion of expertise: technical knowledge. Do politicians find economists’ technical knowledge useful? This helps to build a picture both of how far politicians respect the authority of economists (Hirschman & Berman 2014) and of how far they have seen economists as driving economic policy up until now.

The “morality” of politicians’ economic goals

Most supporters of technocracy accept that politicians should continue to set economic goals, competing with other politicians with different goals. The politicians agree; at no point in any of the interviews do they propose that it might be legitimate for experts to set goals.

I have combined the left from all five countries because of how much they share. Their right-wing counterparts tend to follow more nationally rooted paths, which I cover in the next chapters. This chapter illustrates three themes. The first theme is the divergence in economic ideas, driven by the left. Much of the existing research into politicians’ economic goals and policy-making was conducted at the height of the neoliberal era, when many argue that centre-left goals were becoming more similar to those on the right, converging on a pro-market stance (Berman 2006; Mudge 2011, 2018). But many of these interviewees argue that, since the 2008 financial crisis, they have moved to the left (see also Manwaring & Holloway 2022). There is an increasing confidence that leftist economic ideas are gaining a wider audience, although, perhaps not unsurprisingly, left-wing politicians in Europe show greater confidence than progressive Democrats in the United States.

The second theme is how politicians on the left respect economists, but only if they belong to a particular strand of thinking. There are crucial differences between the attitudes of centre-and far-left interviewees towards economists. The centre left often follows “Keynesian” approaches, while the far left follows a mix of economists but only if they are in the heterodox category, outside the mainstream. The far-left politicians are, arguably, paying closer attention to economists than their centre-left counterparts. The differ-ences in which economists are respected reinforces the point that politicians would find it difficult to follow a technocratic path involving ceding control to economic experts in general.

Finally, many commentators have seen the left as generally more opposed to ceding control over economic policy to experts than the right. I find that the left still seems to believe that, in the current time, economic policy should continue to be contested in the political domain.

At first glance, the national and ideological chapters in Part II have shown stark differences. We go from the deep and taken-for-granted respect of politicians for economists as “scientists” among the centrists of Denmark and the right of Germany to the greater dismissiveness on the part of the Anglosphere right.

There is also an ideological divide, perhaps strongest in the four European countries. The far-left politicians across these countries are experimental, radical and heterodox. They respect some economists, but this is certainly not respect for the authority of economists as a whole, and not in the way that technocrats would see as facilitating any kind of consensus on a settled view. The far left is still wedded to contestation, as one might expect. Far-left politicians also have the greatest challenges when it comes to voters. They are proposing ideas that seem new and require a lot of dedication in time and effort to grasp. They are particularly conscious of how hard it is for them to persuade low-income voters of their environmentalist policies, which, even if they make them as progressive as possible, may nevertheless still provoke fears of potential privations on the part of those who feel let down by past economic policies. On the centre left, respect for economists is partial, since it is almost exclusively applied to Keynesianism. I posed the possibility that the French might be distinctive in their attitude to economists, respecting their plurality, a trend that might spread to other countries, but that would necessitate a wholesale reformulation of the place of economics within the context of expertise. If pluralism proceeds, economics loses its status as a science. This could lead to all sorts of benefits, but it makes it hard to argue for economic technocracy.

With the possible exception of Danish centrists, these chapters in Part II have been united, for different reasons, in pointing out how unviable economic technocracy is. They also include undercurrents that show how undesirable economic technocracy would be. The populist threat has varied in its visibility across the five countries, more noticeable in France and the United States. But in this final chapter I argue that relationships with voters more generally are a common problem for the five. The commonality of the problem relates to the morality of politicians’ economic visions and their role as elected representatives, and points to a common solution.

In this chapter I consider the attitudes of Danish and German politicians towards economists. I consider them together, because they are often categorized as “coordinated” economies, both with consensual political systems. In the case of Denmark, I focus on the politicians from all parties to show how there is a consensus on economic ideas. There is also a commonality in how Danish politicians see economists that spans across the political spectrum. However, in the case of German interviewees, I have already considered left and far-left German interviewees in Chapter 4. The attitude of the German right to economists is distinct from that of the German left; therefore, in this chapter, the focus is on the German right alone.

One feature that ties the interviewees together in this chapter is a relatively high degree of respect for economists, but of the home-grown variety only. Denmark and Germany each have councils of economic advisers that are independent of government and check on the soundness of their economic policies. The Danish councils are chaired by four university economics professors, who are often referred to as the “wise men”; one interviewee even described them as “wizards”, somewhat ironically. In Germany, two of the current members of the Council of Economic Experts are women, and they tend to be referred to as “the sages”. I found similarities in the relatively high degree of respect Danish centrist and the German right interviewees showed for these home-grown economists’ professional authority, whether “sage” or “wise”. Technocrats might argue that this Danish and German respect for experts means that they do not need to cede power to them as, by definition, they must already be delivering “responsible” economic policies. However, in the German case in particular, economic policy is becoming more contested, and there has been some shaking of faith in economic expertise.

The first question I have asked about economic technocracy is whether it is workable, whether politicians are likely to cede more control to economic experts. Crucial here is their respect for economic expertise. In this chapter, following the national and ideological variations, I return briefly to the subject of the low level of that respect overall.

There is more to say here about the second question, of whether economic technocracy would be desirable. I look again, following the national and ideological variations, at the vexed question of whether economic technocracy undermines democracy. I show that politicians seem uneasy about the damaging effects on democracy of past attempts they made to take economic policy out of the political domain and cede control to experts. Their unease supports the argument that any further embracing of technocracy could fuel populism and, by doing so, destabilize democracy. However, we need to ask why politicians were so accepting of the past attempts to take economics out of the political domain. I return to the long-standing tension, which may pre-date populism, at the heart of politicians’ relationships with voters: the mismatch between politicians’ moral economic visions and voters’ self-interest. Politicians have attempted to fudge that mismatch, not only in the past ceding control to experts but also, more broadly, in the downplaying of explanation and education in their communication with voters on economic issues. But the increased complexity of the economic issues, alongside the arrival of populism, makes it more important than ever before that politicians are more open with voters about their economic visions and make fuller efforts to explain them, reaching the Mansbridge standard of “educative” communication. In the final part of the chapter, I draw on the interviewees who believe they are already educating voters about economics in order to offer their advice as a blueprint for others as to how to educate.

Even after two world wars, crumbled city landscapes still largely spoke of a nineteenth-century provenance. Rows of back-to-back terraces built by industry sat next to tenements built for the poor. A window into the appalling nature of living conditions is given by Ron Charnick, a former health inspector in London’s Southwark: “Littered with bomb sites, overcrowded, badly damaged, poorly repaired and much unfit housing … Overrun with rats both within and outside public sewers, needing 12 rodent operatives to control. No DDT so infestations of bed bugs, fleas, lice and cockroaches prevalent … Air pollution heavy” (Historia Sanitaria 1954).

Tenants of slum landlords could count on very little regulation or assistance. On those occasions when health inspectors such as Charnick turned up and followed through with enforcements, many landlords abandoned their property, placing the responsibility for the home or its demolition onto the local authority.

In Chapter 2 we noted that Charles Booth’s nineteenthcentury street survey of London effectively conjoined each class to the space that it occupied such that squalid areas inferred squalid peoples. In Chapter 4 we noted how postwar Commonwealth migration was parsed through the same calculus such that areas populated by Black and Asian peoples were considered squalid due to the racialized demographic. In what now follows we show how a new topography of squalor became integral to the postcolonial political imagination.

In this chapter we examine the politics and strategies of slum clearance in the postwar era, a process that ran parallel to the suburban and New Town building initiatives discussed in the last chapter. We have already noted that slum clearance was always accompanied by a segregation of the working class into “God’s” and the “devil’s” poor, or, those considered hygienic or dysgenic to the imperial and national project of capital accumulation. However, with New Commonwealth immigration, these segregating logics took on renewed and sharpened racial lines.

Thus far we have argued that social and economic development never followed slum dwellers displaced from their habitats, and so squalor merely reproduced itself down the road. But in this chapter, we turn towards a novel vertical answer to the horizontal reproduction of slums – the high-rise tower block.

So far, I’ve been talking about the type and level of financial support that's on offer in our social security system. But when you talk to people living in poverty, it's clear that it is equally important to consider non-financial support and how people are treated when they access both financial and non-financial services. An abstract view of poverty tends to focus purely on amounts of money and modelling behavioural responses to taxes, benefits, the labour market and so on. But the experience of poverty is as much about feeling powerless, dismissed and despised as it is about material hardship.

Public services – social security, employment support and health, social and local authority services – can build people up or knock them down. They can be a forum within which people are treated with dignity, listened to and respected, and where they are empowered to change their circumstances and realize their ambitions. Or they can be a place where people are made to feel they are problems to be fixed and are further disempowered and infantilized.

Before Beveridge and the reforms of the 1940s onwards, our public services were made up of a patchwork of voluntary and mutual organizations, Church provision and some limited local government funding and services. The Elizabethan Poor Law, introduced at the end of the sixteenth century, provided a legal underpinning and baked in the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. It ensured that the evolving system included detailed assessments and harsh conditions to prevent those classified as undeserving from receiving help that might encourage idleness and immorality. There were basically three roles available within this system: wise benefactor, passive supplicant and roguish malefactor. There were some positives to this system, particularly its localized nature and close involvement of what we would now call grassroots voluntary and community sector organizations. However, it failed to protect many people from hardship or provide the help that would enable them to build a better life for themselves. It was also wholly unsuited to the new industrial age.

The development of the industrial economy transformed all parts of society. Workers were collected in large numbers in cities, working in factories and on production lines and living in close proximity to the elites and middle classes. The growth of city slums gave rise to fears of disease spreading not only through the new working classes but also to the middle classes.

So, what would my four-year-old self think about the state of ignorance in education in 2021, almost 80 years after the Beveridge Report and Rab Butler's Education Act? What would be my future if I was four years old now? For starters, I would no longer be an “infant”. I would be a pre-schooler in an early years foundation stage, with teachers who know all about cognitive development and social learning skills, as well as crayoning and singing songs. They would be following government guidance on whether I had achieved my early learning goals. Ofsted would soon be checking up on whether my reception class was good or outstanding, especially in preparing us for the literacy and maths skills we would need in Year 1 and the first Key Stage tests. But my present and future achievements and levels of ignorance would still depend heavily on my social class and ethnicity, my family or care background, whether I had been told I had SEND and especially the schools I would attend. Would they be expensive or cheaper private, part private academies, local authority maintained, selective grammar or comprehensive, faith-oriented or agnostic, urban or rural, well-resourced or starved of funds and much else? I would also have started my schooling not with actual wartime bombs falling, but with the bombs of a pandemic still falling all around and a government that had not responded well to the Covid-19 pandemic and its mutations. I would not have had a full year's schooling in 2020 and 2021 as the pandemic took hold, and 2022 and beyond was looking shaky. Although early ignorance of the implications of a pandemic were understandable, the public has been subjected to much deceit, evasion, fabrication and lies affecting all public institutions and the well-being of the whole population. A YouGov poll in December 2021 “revealed huge public cynicism” over trust in politicians to act in the national interest (Helm & Savage 2021), but the view presented by Nish Kumar in his Daily Mash programme was that “the British public are now so used to lies and stupidity that the entire country has become immune” (Kumar 2021).

Beveridge was clear that maintaining full employment was necessary to his plan. It was a good in itself but was also vital to make the welfare state affordable and ensure workers would only need their unemployment payments for short periods. All that is still true, but the problems we now face in our labour market have changed.

Mass unemployment, although not necessarily gone for ever, has ceased to be the big challenge facing us. After the Great Recession and before Covid-19, the employment rate recovered amazingly strongly, but more and more workers were still pulled into poverty. The big issues now are low pay, lack of progression, insecurity and underemployment. Our central concern should be the quality of work that those at the lower end of the labour market are able to get, not just how many people have a job. So how do we prevent workers getting stuck in low-quality jobs?

One answer is to improve their skills and qualifications so that individuals can compete more effectively for better work and move employer to increase their pay, security and treatment. That is certainly necessary. The majority of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds reach the age of 16 without the baseline of five good GCSEs or their equivalent. The gap in attainment between children from richer and poorer families has remained stubbornly large and the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out a decade's worth of (very modest) progress in narrowing it (Education Endowment Foundation 2021). Five million adults lack basic reading, writing and numeracy skills. Accessing the next stages of education and getting a decent start in your working life is incredibly difficult without these basics.

Once adults are in the labour market, those with low levels of qualifications are far less likely to then get further training from employers than those who already have higher qualifications. The payback for doing training as an adult, in terms of getting better work or higher pay, is uncertain and very variable depending on the qualification, sector and where in the country you are. The barriers to low-paid workers getting more qualifications without the support of their employers are high; many people experience difficulties with finding the time to study when also working and caring, avoiding falling foul of benefit conditions or facing unacceptable hardship or debt if they try to reduce current work to allow training.

Previous chapters empirically established the fact that Korea’s development state had been notoriously hostile to labour unions while disciplining chaebols, by suppressing labour movements forcibly and punishing chaebol families who failed to comply to the state’s preferences. This chapter revisits that important topic in more depth, by focusing on the violent suppression of the labour movement from the 1970s to 2018. Some of the years covered in the chapter overlap with the initial phase of democratization and the legal recognition of labour unions. The chapter explains why such state violence was needed for economic growth, while we also analyze why it is related to economic inequality and wage structures in Korea in the 2000s. Furthermore, as we will explain, during both the democratization and post-democratization periods, state-sourced violence and repression of the labour movement and other niche markets shifted towards privately supplied violence specialists, which acted, and continue to act, implicitly, and at times explicitly as proxies for state power.

THE LABOUR FORCE IN THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE

The issue of labour has long attracted the attention of social scientists from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines and approaches. The case of labour issues in Korea is no exception and especially so regarding scholarship focused on explaining Korea’s rapid economic miracle. When Park Chung Hee assumed power following the 1961 coup d’état, as already explained throughout the preceding chapters, he did so under the pledge to instil economic growth and order. Moving away from the import-substitution approach that had been adopted, much to the detriment of the economy by the Rhee Syngman regime, Park first focused on the development and promotion of labour-intensive EOI, mostly from 1961–72 (Haggard & Moon 1993: 54). This move towards EOI was rewarded with remarkable growth until the end of the decade when the GDP began to decline, coupled with rising inflation and wages among other worrisome economic conditions. In conjunction with an economy in decline, and thus with Park’s reduced legitimacy, politically the regime was increasingly being challenged by opposition seeking to capitalize on the weak economic performance.