Edward Hadas

For once, investors have got it right. In 2008, their panic turned a financial crisis into a long multinational recession, but they have mostly yawned right through the drama in Nicosia. They hardly twitched at a stream of warnings from investment banks and pundits: bank deposits are no longer sacrosanct; the European Union has been exposed as despotic and incompetent; the Russians are coming; the Russians are going; capital controls will destroy everything; “bail in” (taking losses on loans that cannot be repaid) is the end of the world as we once knew it.

Such talk was out of proportion. Cyprus is a small country – its GDP would put it at 116 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest quoted U.S. companies – with a financial sector that had expanded excessively for two decades, almost entirely by attracting flight capital from Russia. A national financial collapse was both insignificant and merited. Besides, the EU and the International Monetary Fund had a plan to deal with the collapse: a combination of financial help from other countries and managed pain for depositors in Cypriot banks.

Alarmists could not deny all this, but they invoked the great demons of financial crises: precedent and contagion. That was silly. Cyprus was obviously a special case, and the European Central Bank was clearly determined, and able, to keep its problems from spreading. Even if Cyprus had left the euro zone, there would have been no dangerous precedents or grim effects, just a demonstration of a bizarre desire for economic self-harm. For everyone else, Cyprus would still be like a flea-bite – scratch for a minute and forget about it.

Why then have so many distinguished economists made so many dire predictions? I believe the answer is that they overestimate the current power of finance.

Recent history is on their side. For more than three decades, financiers almost always prevailed over political authorities. In the 1980s, they bamboozled politicians with spurious arguments for financial deregulation. In the 1990s, banks trampled over their regulators. In the early 2000s, central bankers became votaries at the altar of finance. They treated rising asset prices as signs of divine favour.

Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Wise parents tell small children that, and wary lovers use that command as a taunt. But in the world of finance, unrealistic promises are the norm, and they are too often broken. Depositors in the banks of Cyprus may be learning that lesson.

True, the government of the Mediterranean island may retreat from its first plan, and in any case the accounts are to be taxed, not written down, so the terms of the deposit insurance will be technically kept. And strictly speaking, deposit guarantees are not being breached in the United States and other countries with an inflation rate higher than the interest rate paid on savings accounts, even though that inflation-tax steadily erodes the accounts’ real value. But in fact, governments – both small and suspect like Cyprus, and large and respectable like the United States – have failed the lovers’ test. They have made promises to savers which they either cannot or will not keep.

These trust-breaking governments can resort to the errant lover’s usual excuse: we could not have known what the future would bring. Just as bitter experience somehow invalidates a promise of undying love, an impossible-to-predict avalanche of bad loans might erase the obligations of Cypriot banks and the equally unpredictable financial crisis could exculpate monetary authorities in the United States and elsewhere. Such events, they can say, are like the acts of God which invalidate insurance policies.

The tax system could well be the most idiotic, hypocritical and unnecessarily complicated part of modern industrial economies. The system needs to be rebuilt.

In developed economies, as governments have expanded, taxes have increasingly been used as a tool of economic and social policy. The rich are taxed more than the poor for the sake of a vision of social justice: from each according his ability. Depending on the jurisdiction, some good cause or another is favoured: house ownership, marriage, children, charitable contributions, savings. For companies, an almost endless series of exemptions, deductions and definitions are supposed to encourage investment, employment or some other desirable end.

Each tax wrinkle produces its own complex set of rules. Taxpayers’ continuous efforts to minimise payments lead to yet more rules. Each tax jurisdiction has its own system, a diversity which both increases the intricacies of international business and creates opportunities for individuals and companies to place income where it is less highly taxed.

What is the right size for pensions? That question can be approached in two ways: “then” and “now”. Pensions, and other economic arrangements to support elderly people, may be considered repayments for what they did back then, when they were young. Alternatively, these payments may be considered as a share of output right now. In rich countries, the two approaches are in conflict. The “then” logic, which is based on promises made long ago, supports higher pension payments than the “now” logic, which is mindful of rapidly ageing populations. Politicians struggle to find acceptable compromises between the two approaches.

Until 60 or 70 years ago, politicians did not have to worry much because governments played a minimal role in supporting the few people who lived long enough to be unable to earn their keep. The elderly mostly relied on their own families for support. Moralists provided a “then” justification for this obligation: children had a duty to the parents who gave life, the young owed the old more than could ever be repaid for the provision of nurture and wisdom.

Philosophers and religious teachers often claimed that the duty of children to parents was as natural as that of parents to their children. However, many people must have remained unpersuaded. Otherwise, the injunction would not have been repeated so often in such solemn tones.

Barack Obama did not win the election because more Americans thought he would be a better president than Mitt Romney. More Americans voted for the incumbent than for the challenger, but it is Obama’s superior campaign organisation, and not his personal appeal, that deserves most of the credit. In particular, his product managers were better than Romney’s at using the technique of “data mining”.

The technique, pioneered by supermarkets, is conceptually simple: measure everything and tweak as necessary. In practice, it is a delicate affair. Suppose a popular soft drink has 4 percent higher sales when it is stocked next to a salty snack than when healthier raisins are its shelf-neighbour. Should shelf locations be swapped? There are many variables: the effect on sales of salty snacks and raisins, the profit margins of the different products, and customers’ sensitivity to any price changes. Most of the effects are tiny, but the study of millions of data, including a large number of computer simulations, can increase a retailer’s revenue and profit by a few percent.

In elections, data mining can bring votes to candidates and can increase the supply of contributions which pay for vote-gaining advertising. The work is detailed. Time magazine reports that the Obama campaign carefully tested how much more likely undecided voters in each close state were to yield to the blandishments of local rather than to out-of-state volunteers. The superiority in detailed computer work – “We ran the election 66,000 times every night”, as one expert explained to Time – probably gave Obama a few more percentage points of votes than Romney. It was the margin of victory.

The winner of the presidential election should do something about U.S. unemployment. The current rate of 8 percent is high by America’s historical standards, and that measure does not capture the gravity of the problem – too many people have spent too long out of work or have decided to leave the workforce because jobs are too hard to find. European leaders face an even greater challenge. The EU unemployment rate is 10.4 percent, and during the last decade it has been below 7 percent for only half a year.

What is to be done? Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama has a clear plan. The Federal Reserve has an idea, but it is hard to see how $40 billion a month of newly printed money will actually help create jobs. I have an alternative approach: EAST. It is both an analysis of the problem and a solution.

E is for Efficiency. The industrial economy continually makes more stuff out of less labour. More efficient workers, machines and systems constantly add to consumption, and constantly subtract jobs. The lost labour has mostly been dangerous or tedious, so there is little to regret.

For more than three centuries, defenders of people’s freedom and dignity against the oppression of governments have frequently focused on economic depredations. In the 17th century, John Locke decried unjust limits on private property. In the 20th century, Friedrich Hayek attacked the state’s control of the means of production. The Austrian philosopher, who is a kind of patron saint for today’s crusaders against big government, was certain that men could not be free without free markets. He saw socialist economics behind all big governments, which he believed to be universally oppressive.

It is not only the enemies of powerful governments who have considered economic matters to be pre-eminent. The followers of Karl Marx disagreed totally with Hayek about government and freedom. They thought free markets led only to the oppression of the poor by the rich and that large states were needed to defend true freedom. However, like Hayek, they put the economy at the centre of the debate about the proper role of government. They merely reversed his primary prescription, with pure Marxists calling for total government control of the economy and revisionists calling for a strong state and a carefully limited private sector.

The revisionist Marxists are now known in Europe as Social Democrats and in the United States as Democrats (although few would admit this intellectual ancestry). They have had their way with the economy throughout the developed world – and the economies have basically flourished. Extensive, active and basically honest governments are good economic stewards. Big governments support and supervise the massive investment projects, complex technological standards and the astounding diversity of tasks required for industrial economies to thrive. Thorough tax systems restrain the rich while welfare benefits protect the poor.