Modern democracy uses short electoral cycles, 3-5 years mostly. You can’t do much that’s lasting for a…

Modern democracy uses short electoral cycles, 3-5 years mostly. You can’t do much that’s lasting for a society in 3-5 years. So politicians take actual problems (when they can’t ignore them entirely), and create manipulable proxies for them. Short 🧵/1 https://t.co/MRjwoW3ghF

The pandemic is a perfect example. Right now, after two hard years, politicians want to wash their hands of pandemic responsibility, because they have elections coming, and because their capacity to extract political mileage from it has been exhausted. /2

They were happy to play pretend-to-be-in-charge when it played well with people, but as the effort required extended into years, it was time to cut it loose. Clean out the in-tray. And so they chose a couple of manipulable metrics - hospitalisations and ICU - and made those…/3

…the ‘end of the pandemic’. The global, hugely complex multi-dimensional monster that a pandemic is, was suddenly reduced to a couple of hospital metrics. Metrics also open to manipulation (a politician’s favourite). We’ve seen this in NSW, how who goes to hospital…/4

…and into ICU can be massaged by use of other care modalities, and sometimes substituting palliative care for ICU etc. So now it looks like the politicians are not only in control, but are ending the pandemic. But they’ve been doing this for years, and on a much bigger scale. /5

Without question the greatest sleight of hand in modern political strategy was to replace society itself, all of it, with the ‘Economy’. The Economy is a concept used by all sides of politics now, as if it’s as real as trees and rocks. I’ve Tweeted a lot about this lie. /6

Either everything that goes on in society is just the Economy, or the Economy is what ‘funds’ everything else. Conservatives invented this idea quite deliberately, to replace centuries of traditional political categories with this mono-dimensional fiction. Journalists and…/7

…other political commentators, as well as the general public, swallowed it wholesale, the Economy is now spoken of unproblematically, as if it’s an actual thing. It isn’t. It’s a set of statistical indicators of social activity. That is literally all it is. /8

You can hear how it’s used politically every day of the week. Calls for government investment in some neglected area will be met with instant counter-calls of ‘how will we pay for it?’. As if government needs to ration out its money, as we do with our bank accounts. /9

Not getting into MMT debates here, but sovereign governments print the bloody money, it can never run out. A society can lack the expertise and resources to do something, but it can never lack the money. A keystroke at the Central Bank can create more whenever needed. /10

Look again at the pandemic, how ‘economies’ prospered as tightwad economic governments handed out money. And how turning off that tap, again deliberately, was used in 2021 to force a shift to a ‘live with the virus’ strategy. The Economy is a political weapon. That’s…/11

…its original and still dominant rationale for even existing. So that conservative politicians could stop talking about social problems, and just harp on repeatedly about growth and unemployment rates, and interest rates etc. All metrics that (not accidentally) also create…/12

…wealth for those with existing wealth in our societies, when they’re trending upwards. Not hard to favour your constituency of the well-off, if you redefine all of society in a handful of statistical measures that facilitate their existing wealth. /end