I find I have very little to say about her. What matters about Thatcher, or at any rate about Thatcherism, is that there really was a significant change among elites about the power and efficacy of markets. My general sense -- and to be sure, this is an impression, nothing hard and rigidly empirical about it -- is that in the 1960s and through the mid-1970s, there really was a sense among many that markets were old-fashioned hokum, and that bureaucracies and other centralized planners could do many things far more efficiently. Oh, not Soviet-style central planners; by 1970, certainly, no one looked to the USSR (or China) as an economic model.
I'd put it this way: I suspect (and again, I have no solid study that I know of to cite here, but I think it's correct) that if you looked around in 1965 the only people who would be referencing Adam Smith, at least in the US, would be a very small group of committed Goldwater conservatives. If you looked around in 1995, Adam Smith gets used by everyone across the ideological spectrum -- and perhaps more by liberals than by conservatives, who seem more interested in Ayn Rand once liberals dip into Smith and discover that they like him.
Of course, what liberals learned from Smith isn't to have "faith" in markets; it's to respect and use the power of markets.
Now, how much of that is Thatcher, how much is Reagan, how much is generational, how much is a consequence of the economics of the time...I have no idea. For that matter, I don't even know that the change happened at all; maybe it was just that people did a good job of selling that change. I don't think so, though; policies such as the ACA and cap-and-trade really do reflect something different. Whatever it is, Thatcher was certainly the face of it, and I'd say deservedly so.
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Thatcherism was and is a disgrace that inflicted massive amounts of suffering wherever it was enacted to benefit the upper class. Burn in hell.
ReplyDeleteI recall many times when conservative dissent was given warning on this blog because it was deemed potentially inflammatory. But this stands.
DeleteThis is the culture you've cultivated in these comments. It's not very good.
@Anon 9:12. That is not the usually level of commentary here, which you'd know if you were a regular. It gets better below. Your criticism was both wrong and premature.
DeleteI didn't say it was usual, and my criticism was not that the blog commenting here is hateful. My criticism is that there's a general double standard based on political persuasion and that this, in turn, has led to an overwhelmingly liberal group of commenters.
DeleteI disagree about a double standard. I call strikes rarely, but I can only remember doing it once with a conservative commenter. Maybe I've forgotten others, but I've certainly called strikes on liberals, multiple times.
DeleteI'm unlikely to call a strike on insults at specific politicians. Generally, what I want to eliminate are flames directed at other commenters. That will include impolite derogatory comments about members of political parties or ideologies, because general comments would imply something about each member, but not so much if it's about politicians.
In the context above, I interpreted "Thatcherism" as an insult to Thatcher, not to all Tories or all conservatives or whatever. It's not language I would have used, especially in yesterday's context, but I didn't think it rises to the level of needing a warning.
Thatcher and Reagan through their income tax cuts and their verbal admiration of private enterprise and successful businessmen roused the animal spirits of businessmen in the anglosphere and encouraged talented American and British students to major in business. I taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1982 to 1987, before my own animal spirits had been raised enough to head for Wall Street in 1987, and in each of my five years there, during the height of Thatcher and Reagan popularity, Wharton applications soared while Arts & Sciences applications were stagnant. When I arrived in 1982, average SATs were about the same for Wharton and Arts & Sciences undergrads, but by the time I left in 1987 Wharton undergrads had SAT's about 50 points higher, as the brightest students applied in increasing numbers to business schools. The attitude of Thatcher and Reagan that unleashing private enterprise leads to prosperity for all raised the morale of businessmen in both countries, and was a significant factor in the "seven fat years" of 1983-89, in which GDP growth soared in both countries.
ReplyDeleteSo more business graduates, stagnating science graduates. If it's true that progress is stagnating, we may have found the cause.
DeleteI really have to push back on the idea that Thatcher's (or Reagan's) oratory about the glories of the free market caused things like the 80's stock market booms (although it certainly didn't hurt). The reality is that Thatcher drastically altered the way fiance worked in Britain. Since time immemorial Britain had very strict capital controls about money going in and out of the country, Thatcher did away with all that and then completely deregulated the City of London in such a radical way that the reforms were referred to simply as "The Big Bang." Adam Curtis has a good montage capturing the mood of the time: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00pgcpz
DeleteIt also hints at some of the losers of the time, something that most people ignore these days.
One thing that is often neglected is that Thatcher could nver have been elected if Britain had proportional representation. Even in her 1983 "landslide", parties to the Left of the Tories got about 56 percent of the vote.
ReplyDeleteThis does not take away from her achievements, of course. But I find that every now and then, people say "If she was so unpopular how did she win three elections?" And the answer is very simple: divided opposition, and first-past-the-post.
Blair's landslide saw around 57% of the vote fo to parties to the right of Labour. The Liberal Democrats are not a left party, they're a centrist party with a tilt to the left. Given the state of Labour in 1983, many of those who voted for the SDP-Liberal Alliance would have supported the Tories otherwise.
Delete"The Liberal Democrats are not a left party, they're a centrist party with a tilt to the left."
DeleteBy 1997 Labour had moved so far to the Right--that after all is why they called it *New* Labour--that in some areas (civil liberties) th Lib-Dems were actually to New Labour's left. (Gordon Brown was a bit more "Old Labour" than Blair, though of course the moderate wing of Old Labour.) Had there been PR in 1997, a Labour/Lib-Dem coalition would have been the most likely result.
I agree that if there had been no Alliance in 1983, many of the Alliance voters would have preferred Thatcher to Foot. (Though this would not make them "Thatcherites," just people who saw Thatcher as the lesser evil.) But the fact remains that if there were PR, the Alliance would be the decisive force in Parliament--they would get to decide whether they would support Labour or the Conservatives, and would force either party to modify its policies.
This does not mean there was anything illegitimate about Thatcher's victories. Britain in fact did not and does not have PR, first-past-the-post were the rules of the game, and she won fair and square under them. I'm only saying that the electoral system was largely responsible for Thatcher's electoral success, and that the evidence is dubious that the majority of the British people embraced "Thatcherism."
What holds with Reagan works doubly with Thatcher - we can't allow ourselves to forget the starting points. I've read lately taxes before Thatcher were 87% in the top bracket for earned income, 98% on unearned income. Maybe this is Ronnie and Maggie's influence, but even liberal as I am, I think that's nutty-high. Meanwhile, there actually was massive direct government control over and ownership of industry in pre-Thatcher England (unlike what some people think is going on in the America of Obama).
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if that's so much an assessment of Thatcher, as it is something to keep in mind moving forward.
Severely overrated even by American liberals. Meanwhile Blair is severely underrated even by the British left (I'm talking economics here, not Iraq). Just look at the unemployment rate since 1979. The best years were clearly under Labour, not the Tories (and Cameron is not going to improve their record much in the forseeable future). I've noticed some Democrats are somewhat more sympathetic to her than to Reagan, but Reagan's record is marginally better on this front.
ReplyDelete