risky balls

The IMF has applauded the government's deficit-reduction plan and is predicting that Britain's growth rate will increase next year.

Now, the IMF may be wrong, of course. But this news highlights the risk the Labour Party is taking by constantly predicting a double-dip recession. This is the central thrust of their attack on the Coalition's economic strategy. But it can't be wise to base your economic message on something that can be empirically disproven. In the short term, they risk looking like whining Cassandras, almost begging for bad news, and in the long term, if there's no double-dip, they're going to look like idiots. If they're right, of course, they'll appear prescient and wise. But the question is, is this a sensible risk?

The risk pertains with particular force to the most vocal articulator of this critique, Ed Balls. The press seem to have bought into his view of himself as an economic savant. But serious economists don't make predictions with the kind of certainty he has been making this one - they know that all macro-economic predictions are inherently fallible.

Ed Miliband would be smart to take this risk into account when he's picking his shadow cabinet. Does he really want a shadow chancellor whom George Osborne might be able to taunt every week with year-old predictions that turned out to be utterly wrong?

Comments

[Scott]

Ian

It was interesting to read Ed B's piece in the Guardian yesterday because he unwittingly confirmed a core insight of your anaylsis below of the problems facing Ed M: Balls starting out by saying that, yes, the Labour Party needs to articulate a universal message for the general public, and then - in the SAME PARAGRAPH - got bogged down in those muddying details beloved of the Brownites.

I bring it up here because, well, that's a very nice pic of Balls. And it's never nice to see comments (0) is it?

[Ian Leslie]

You're right Scott, but sadly an all too familiar sight; my readers are a backward-in-coming-forward bunch, or maybe they just agree with everything I say.