Mazzonomics and mackerel
The essential premise of the economic proposals of Professor Mariana Mazzucato is that if we get all those really clever people in government to really think hard and do stuff to us then we’ll be better off. This is, of course, incredibly popular among all those really clever people in government who would like to be able to do stuff to us, good and hard.
As with all scientific ideas it is necessary, just occasionally, to look up from the theory and bench test it against the real world:
Mackerel stocks are nearing a “breaking point”, experts have said as the fish is downgraded as a sustainable option.
People should be eating herring instead, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) said, because mackerel continues to be overfished by countries including Norway and the UK.
Every year the MCS releases the Good Fish Guide, which ranks choices based on how overfished they are. Northeast Atlantic mackerel, for example, once plentiful and viewed as a more sustainable fish choice, has, over the last four years, been overfished by an average of 23%.
Fish stocks have been intensively managed by all those clever people in government for many decades now. In fact, we had that long period when it was all managed by an even higher than national level of government, the EU, and of course only the super-clever climb to those higher levels of governance.
The essential premise of Mazzonomics is that given that fish stocks have been subject, for all that time, to cross-cutting strategic plans with firm goal-orientation we should all be swimming in fish. We seem not to be.
Here in the UK we’ve had the nationalised planning of land use since 1947 and no bugger can get ahold of any land to build anything at all upon. We’ve had national divination of what truly equal, equitable and fair wage rates are for a decade and more and as a result the bankrupt Birmingham City Council has to pay dinner ladies more in order to solve a binmen strike. If we devolve down a level again, the Scottish government bankrupted its own shipbuilding yard by awarding it a contract to build ships for its own ferry line.
Oh well, many a beautiful theory has been destroyed by an inconvenient fact. But theories that are disproved are indeed disproved - that’s what makes a science.
Mazzonomics works wonderfully as a political theory among the political classes. As an actual design for the real world not so much.
Tim Worstall