The Art of the Impossible

In last week’s ‘Observer’  appeared the following quote from Lord Skidelsky, the economic historian and biographer of Keynes;

“"It may be that there is no perfect [economic] model and that the quest for one is an error. Maybe we need different models, different theories, for different situations, and that's the best we can do".

Abso..bloomin..lutely!

There is a long-standing debate about whether economics is a science or a humanity, and an interesting academic debate it is too… (yawn).

But when it comes to dealing with practical problems, surely we have to see economics as a craft, which comes with a box of tools that politicians and officials need to learn how to use skillfully, selecting the right ones for the right job.

We hamper ourselves by throwing away half of the toolbox simply because it doesn’t fit with current ideology, and this is particularly dangerous now at a time when we find ourselves facing unprecedented economic hazards.

It’s as if we hired plumbers on the basis of whether or not they believe in spanners.

Politics used to be the art of the possible, so why do politicians so often seem to go out of their way to make it into the art of the impossible?