I'll say "with love" that being a FBoEE puts you in a place where a lot more people are going to listen to you about economics and information than (eg) me (former engineer then anthropologist who studied economists and decided they had developed a weird set of tribal beliefs about information). Not sure what this says about Reeves, probably that if she actually wants to make the interesting and modern centre-left ideas she has happen, touting the FBoEE probably will make it easier for her to do it than it would be for (eg) John McDonnell. But the hanging question (as the spectres of Hancock and Haldane loom like Banquo's ghost) is does she actually want to push the good ideas, or whatever contrarian ones are buzzing in the back of her brain?
It definitely does, and that's why I used to trade off it so much. With respect to the question about her ideas, I will confess that I had absolutely written her off before the Mais Lecture, but it's actually really quite interesting.
"Bank of England people have exactly the same cultural cringe with respect to the private sector as any other public servants of the last five decades"
This is a really big deal. I wrote something similar about Australia and Covid. Key quote asterisked
I'll quote at length since you've already given the tl;dr version
Suppose that a Commonwealth government such as the one we had 50 years ago was in place when the pandemic began. It’s highly unlikely that the crisis management would have been left to the states. In the 1970s, the Commonwealth still operated quarantine facilities and had its own department of works, capable of building new facilities or expanding old ones. In the previous decades it had managed both the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of troops from World War Two and the provision of housing to support an immigration program on an unparalleled scale.
The farcical situation today where Australians stranded abroad have to pay horrendous amounts for a handful of available seats on commercial flights would scarcely have occurred if, as in the 1970s, the Commonwealth owned its own airline (and, for that matter, rail and shipping businesses).
On the medical front, the Commonwealth ran its own network of repatriation hospitals and owned Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, now privatised as CSL. The question of vaccine passports would certainly not have been controversial, since the government required a range of vaccinations for travellers (indeed, the scar from smallpox inoculation, required before overseas travel, served as a kind of permanent passport).
*Above all, the Commonwealth government had confidence in its own capacity, employing the best and brightest graduates of the universities that had expanded massively thanks to Commonwealth funding beginning in the 1960s. The Commonwealth government saw itself as both more competent and less subject to interest group pressure than the states. Under both conservative and Labor governments, the Commonwealth had steadily expanded the scope and scale of its operations, reducing the roles of both state governments and the business sector.*
The Commonwealth government of those times would have been far better equipped to deal with a pandemic, and would have seen itself as having the obvious responsibility to do so. We might therefore have expected a national response, including requirements for Qantas to repatriate Australians from overseas, a rapid expansion of dedicated quarantine facilities, and a consistent national policy on lockdowns and movement restrictions.
Of course, we have seen nothing like this. At almost every stage in the process, the Commonwealth has sought to avoid responsibility, and transfer it either to the states or to private parties ranging from management consultants to hotel operators.
I still often think every couple of months that when I was 11, the BBC wanted to produce a television series about microcomputers, and consequently commissioned the development and production of "the BBC Micro", on the basis that this would be what the British middle class would buy as they would not trust mere private enterprise to produce something as important and complicated as a computer. (the company they commissioned it from later became ARM)
I think as well as the points you made the BoE also just has a very strong working culture (certainly compared to other places I've worked). Whenever my wife spends any time with my ex-BoE friends she inevitably asks me afterwards why we all talk the same..
For me the big cultural change that happened at the BoE with the financial crisis was that we all had to think bigger (without giving up on the nitpicking at all!)
when a friend was going to work there and asked what it was like I said "well, it's pretty incestuous". He asked what I meant by that, and I had to reply "they have sex with each other, a lot".
alternatively, someone I shared an office with while I was at the Bank was invited to a meeting organised by HR for "second jobbers". He actually did email them back to say that it was quite odd that there was a) a special name and b) a need to facilitate networking for the category of "people who had worked anywhere else"
actually I should probably have mentioned that as a potentially material point of difference between me and Rachel Reeves - I worked there on the regulatory side, before the establishment of the FSA while she would have been after the split and left before the PRA, at a purely monetary institution.
Former Fed non-economist here. The excessive respect for markets is a characteristic of the US federal government as a whole. Governments are going to make decisions, and some of them are going to be bad ones. It's much better for your career and agency if you fail in a pro-market direction than an anti-market direction. (For those of you who are not bureaucrats, "market" is the polite way to refer to the interests of business.)
I'll say "with love" that being a FBoEE puts you in a place where a lot more people are going to listen to you about economics and information than (eg) me (former engineer then anthropologist who studied economists and decided they had developed a weird set of tribal beliefs about information). Not sure what this says about Reeves, probably that if she actually wants to make the interesting and modern centre-left ideas she has happen, touting the FBoEE probably will make it easier for her to do it than it would be for (eg) John McDonnell. But the hanging question (as the spectres of Hancock and Haldane loom like Banquo's ghost) is does she actually want to push the good ideas, or whatever contrarian ones are buzzing in the back of her brain?
It definitely does, and that's why I used to trade off it so much. With respect to the question about her ideas, I will confess that I had absolutely written her off before the Mais Lecture, but it's actually really quite interesting.
There's an old Chinese saying that uses the word "interesting".
"Bank of England people have exactly the same cultural cringe with respect to the private sector as any other public servants of the last five decades"
This is a really big deal. I wrote something similar about Australia and Covid. Key quote asterisked
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2021/september/1630418400/john-quiggin/dismembering-government#mtr
I'll quote at length since you've already given the tl;dr version
Suppose that a Commonwealth government such as the one we had 50 years ago was in place when the pandemic began. It’s highly unlikely that the crisis management would have been left to the states. In the 1970s, the Commonwealth still operated quarantine facilities and had its own department of works, capable of building new facilities or expanding old ones. In the previous decades it had managed both the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of troops from World War Two and the provision of housing to support an immigration program on an unparalleled scale.
The farcical situation today where Australians stranded abroad have to pay horrendous amounts for a handful of available seats on commercial flights would scarcely have occurred if, as in the 1970s, the Commonwealth owned its own airline (and, for that matter, rail and shipping businesses).
On the medical front, the Commonwealth ran its own network of repatriation hospitals and owned Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, now privatised as CSL. The question of vaccine passports would certainly not have been controversial, since the government required a range of vaccinations for travellers (indeed, the scar from smallpox inoculation, required before overseas travel, served as a kind of permanent passport).
*Above all, the Commonwealth government had confidence in its own capacity, employing the best and brightest graduates of the universities that had expanded massively thanks to Commonwealth funding beginning in the 1960s. The Commonwealth government saw itself as both more competent and less subject to interest group pressure than the states. Under both conservative and Labor governments, the Commonwealth had steadily expanded the scope and scale of its operations, reducing the roles of both state governments and the business sector.*
The Commonwealth government of those times would have been far better equipped to deal with a pandemic, and would have seen itself as having the obvious responsibility to do so. We might therefore have expected a national response, including requirements for Qantas to repatriate Australians from overseas, a rapid expansion of dedicated quarantine facilities, and a consistent national policy on lockdowns and movement restrictions.
Of course, we have seen nothing like this. At almost every stage in the process, the Commonwealth has sought to avoid responsibility, and transfer it either to the states or to private parties ranging from management consultants to hotel operators.
I still often think every couple of months that when I was 11, the BBC wanted to produce a television series about microcomputers, and consequently commissioned the development and production of "the BBC Micro", on the basis that this would be what the British middle class would buy as they would not trust mere private enterprise to produce something as important and complicated as a computer. (the company they commissioned it from later became ARM)
I think as well as the points you made the BoE also just has a very strong working culture (certainly compared to other places I've worked). Whenever my wife spends any time with my ex-BoE friends she inevitably asks me afterwards why we all talk the same..
For me the big cultural change that happened at the BoE with the financial crisis was that we all had to think bigger (without giving up on the nitpicking at all!)
when a friend was going to work there and asked what it was like I said "well, it's pretty incestuous". He asked what I meant by that, and I had to reply "they have sex with each other, a lot".
alternatively, someone I shared an office with while I was at the Bank was invited to a meeting organised by HR for "second jobbers". He actually did email them back to say that it was quite odd that there was a) a special name and b) a need to facilitate networking for the category of "people who had worked anywhere else"
I think the PRA merger (and the terrible pay at HMT) means there are more experienced hires these days.
actually I should probably have mentioned that as a potentially material point of difference between me and Rachel Reeves - I worked there on the regulatory side, before the establishment of the FSA while she would have been after the split and left before the PRA, at a purely monetary institution.
Former Fed non-economist here. The excessive respect for markets is a characteristic of the US federal government as a whole. Governments are going to make decisions, and some of them are going to be bad ones. It's much better for your career and agency if you fail in a pro-market direction than an anti-market direction. (For those of you who are not bureaucrats, "market" is the polite way to refer to the interests of business.)