(This should really come before Part 1 - but I forgot to write it first
time around!)
Introduction - What do I know?
In my career as a general practitioner, I believe I had a certain skill
in diagnosis. In medicine this is not often the ability to put a name to
some clear-cut pattern of symptoms and physical signs, look up the book
and prescribe the right drug. It is the ability to extract plausible
patterns from a confusing array of variations from what someone
perceives as ‘normal’ for them, and then decide on a priority for
testing the likelihood of these patterns to provide a guide to
therapeutic action. How to go about this depends less on theoretical
models of illness, but on a sensible assessment of the reality of the
threat to wellbeing and on the efficacy, risks and costs of particular
tests.
Often the difficulty of testing and of preferring one pattern to another
renders this process impractical. In this case no action at all may be
warranted. (Most human illnesses resolve themselves in time, after all.)
If this is unacceptable, because the distress is too great or is
worsening, then a ‘therapeutic trial’ may be justified. Given all the
possibilities and uncertainties, the potential benefits of improvement
appear to outweigh the risks and costs of inappropriate treatment.
The nature of economics, with its global compass and dependence on the
actions and interactions of billions of individuals, changes in climate
and so on, ensures that virtually all economic ‘diagnoses’ are
provisional (and explains why so many plausible ones can exist at the
same time.) As a result all economic policies are of the same nature as
therapeutic trials.
In medicine, if the patient is not improving despite unpleasant
side-effects or is getting worse, then the trial treatment is stopped.
It may then be appropriate to consider another pattern which conforms to
the facts, and try another treatment. There seems little doubt that the
global economic patient is currently at risk of a severe relapse,
despite the seriously unpleasant side-effects that the poor and
powerless of the world have had to put up with.
In this analysis of the global and UK economies, from which I suggest my
own ‘therapeutic trial’, much of the evidence which I have used to form
what I believe to be a plausible pattern has arisen from the results of
previous ‘trials’, such as laissez faire, Keynesian demand management
and monetarism. The pattern chosen has to make sense of what has really
happened, but must treat areas of uncertainty as neutral. The pattern
should not lose its validity with any possible future outcome from these
areas. It must not therefore rely on any particular macroeconomic theory
which attempts to explain areas of uncertainty in a particular way,
because in the dynamic system of the global economy these theories can
never be adequately tested.
Diarmid Weir
djgw@febl.abel.co.uk
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