If Shakespeare were writing today, ROBERT MACKLIN thinks he’d change his famous quote from Dick the Butcher in “Henry VI, Part 2”. You know the one, “The first thing we do, Let’s kill all the lawyers”. Not that Macklin has much time for lawyers… 

RECENTLY, I needed to sort out a concern over one of my biographies with a relative of the subject. We were quite good friends and we pretty much sorted it out face to face and on the phone. 

But then she said she’d ask her lawyer to confirm it in writing. And wouldn’t you know – when the lawyer’s letter arrived it expanded the little problem into a big issue and I had to get my lawyer to respond. Suddenly, the relative and I were adversaries; the dispute was finally resolved but a friendship that I valued was gone forever. That’s lawyers for you.

However, these days they are much less pestilential – at least on the macro scale – than that other mob of pretentious “experts” we call economists. 

They pretend they know stuff in the same way that theologians assert their absolute certainty about the number of angels who could dance on the end of a pin. And by their jabbering of forecasts – they affect our day-to-day lives in the most extraordinary manner.

How many times have you heard some television newsreader intone the message that: “Most economists believe the number of jobless/hours worked/inflation figures/trade balance/widgets exported would have been much higher/lower/smaller/bigger than today’s result”. 

And in consequence the government is embarrassed or triumphant and either changes course or doubles down on whatever the result portends. Either way, it turns out a mistake.

Truth is, the economists don’t know, any more than the theologians know the precise number of their angelic terpsichoreans. It’s all a giant con. Yet we’re so scared of the unknown that we elevate them to the status of guru and every night on the ABC we get a segment from the chummy Alan Kohler with pretty graphs and chatty reportage about the minuscule movements – for no apparent reason – of various stocks, bonds and commodities. At least he does it with the smile of someone who is in on the joke. 

Unlike, say, the Nobel Prize committee who have given the Economics Prize to three characters who, they assured us, had thrown a piercing light on the causes of the Great Depression of the ’30s. Golly, I’d been on tenterhooks waiting for that one.

However, I confess that until recently I’d actually made a point of reading Paul Krugman in the “New York Times”, who also won a Nobel for some breathtaking economic insight. I thought it gave me a social cache at parties to casually drop his name into the conversation. But then I read this – his latest. It was my road-to-Damascus moment:

“I agree with the conventional wisdom on this, and I’m agnostic about the issue of whether slack is best measured by the unemployment rate, the ratio of vacancies to unemployment or something else. I’m also reasonably sure that the economy is indeed running too hot, so the Fed was right to raise rates – although I’m much less clear about whether the Fed needs to keep raising rates, given that much of the effect of past rate hikes has yet to be felt. As I said, there’s still a lot of downdraft in the pipeline.”

See what I mean: “The first thing we do…”

robert@robertmacklin.com