Anatole Kaletsky

Absurd wishful thinking. This is how most finance ministers describe criticism of their tough budget policies designed to control government debt and reduce borrowing. Britain, even more than Germany, has been in the vanguard of this austerity movement, as Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne demonstrated again in this week’s budget statement:

“Confronted with tough economic conditions, some say we should abandon our deficit plans, and try to borrow more – they think that by borrowing more, they can borrow less.”

For Osborne , this reductio ad absurdum seemed so conclusive that there was no need to justify his controversial economic beliefs.

To claim that a government should borrow more when its debts are already too high is ridiculous ‑ as ridiculous as suggesting in the 16th century that the earth moves around the sun or that humans evolved from monkeys.

While economics does not deserve to be called a science on par with physics or biology, it is supposed to be a systematic and objective analysis of empirical evidence about the way the world works. The goal of such rigorous analysis is to find insights that are not obvious, and may sometimes even seem ridiculous to casual observers.

When Mark Carney, the respected head of Canada’s central bank, was appointed on Monday to the even more august position of governor of the Bank of England, Britain’s reaction was a characteristic blend of self-deprecation and smugness.

The self-deprecation was publicly expressed by an Opposition MP, Barry Sheerman: “Isn’t it a little surprising that the leading banking nation on earth could not find a British candidate for the job?” This feeling of mild embarrassment seemed to be quietly shared by many Britons in addition to the distinguished domestic candidates who were passed over.

The smugness has been much more in evidence. There has been a veritable orgy of self-congratulation among British politicians, media commentators and financiers at having nabbed “the outstanding central banker of his generation,” as George Osborne, the British chancellor, described his new hire. Embarrassment and praise are both justified, but for other reasons.

Four years after the start of the Great Recession, the global economy has not recovered, voters are losing patience and governments around the world are falling like ninepins. This is a situation conducive to revolutionary thinking, if not yet in politics, then maybe in economics.

In the past few months the International Monetary Fund, previously a bastion of austerity, has swung in favor of expansionary fiscal policies. The U.S. Federal Reserve has committed itself to printing money without limit until it restores full employment. And the European Central Bank has announced unlimited bond purchases with printed money, a policy denounced, quite literally, as the work of the devil by the president of the German Bundesbank.

This week an even more radical debate burst  into the open in Britain. Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, found himself fighting a rearguard action against a groundswell of support for “dropping money from helicopters” – something proposed by Milton Friedman in 1969 as the ultimate cure for intractable economic depressions and recently described in this column as “Quantitative Easing for the People.”