Tim Harford’s guide to fixing the economy is elegant, simple – and suggests Liz Truss was right
Tim Harford can fix the economy. You may be thinking: who is Tim Harford? Well, he presents More or Less on Radio 4, a programme in which he examines the statistics behind matters of political debate. He wrote a book called The Undercover Economist, which is also the name of his column in the Financial Times. And now he has produced a Channel 4 documentary, Skint: The Truth About Britain’s Broken Economy, in which he tells politicians where they’ve been going wrong.
On the one hand, explains Harford, we have a highly developed economy and we excel in financial services, biomedical science and advanced manufacturing. We are a nation of entrepreneurs and thinkers. On the other hand, rates of child poverty and rough sleeping are rising; there is a huge backlog in the courts and on NHS waiting lists. Harford explained this with the help of graphs projected onto the screen – think Jeremy Vine in his CGI studio on election night, but with a much smaller budget.
One of the most striking statistics concerned GDP. If growth had continued at its 1970s rate of more than two per cent per year, incomes would be doubling every 33 years. Each generation would be twice as rich as their parents. But now it’s growing at less than half a per cent, which means at this rate it will take more than 180 years for incomes to double.
Successive governments have failed to fix the economy. Harford thinks Liz Truss had the right idea but went about it in the wrong way. His own idea seems elegantly simple: we need to grow the economy by increasing productivity in cities outside London, and build more homes for the workers. The last of these would require overcoming “our near-religious defence of the green belt”, and Harford held up Cambridge as an example of a city of innovative start-ups that is unable to realise its potential because a lack of housing is holding it back. Unlocking growth would create more money to pay for public services, without hiking taxes.
You might think it takes some chutzpah to present yourself as the man with all the answers, but Harford has a low-key presenting style. This extends from the way he calmly explains the issues to the way he dresses. No shirt for Tim, just a snug grey T-shirt in the style of a centrist dad who lives in Oxford and is very much in favour of more cycle lanes. He strolled around various topics, chatting to like-minded people about green energy and unscrupulous private landlords. Nobody countered his ideas, so what we got was simply one man’s theory of how to dig us out of this economic hole.
