Bank of England’s Haldane is an inspired choice for the RSA

George Monbiot was his usual provocative self earlier this week when he bemoaned that while the UK has a “thriving intellectual culture,” this culture is scarcely represented in the media.

The Guardian journalist and environmentalist went on to say that as a result, “public intellectuals” are an endangered species and derided as a “pointy-headed elite’” whereas in Europe, they are cherished.

In many ways Monbiot is right: far too much of the media – particularly the TV broadcasters – avoid properly debating the big issues of the day like the plague. Many have been reluctant to tackle our very own plague in depth, too often preferring Gotcha journalism at the No 10 press briefings and shouty Newsnight sessions to full-on debates bringing together our many dissenting voices at such a critical moment.

He’s also spot on that the UK does have a thriving culture of academics and experts but, for the most part, they are hiding in plain sight. The interesting question to ask is, why is this so? Is it because the media – and the broadcasters – don’t believe the public are interested in such sophisticated grown-up, hour-long navel-gazing (as the French do so well)? Or do they assume the public would prefer the more vapid five second bites we get from Question Time?

Yet many of us would like to listen to such philosophising: can you imagine having Professor “Lockdown” Ferguson discuss his views with protagonists such as Professor Sunetra Gupta or the US epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya?

Or watch Jonathan Sumption, the former judge and historian, arguing with fellow academics about the dangerous nibbling away at our freedoms? If you want to see how this is being done well, take a look at the sessions that Governor Ron de Santis has been hosting in front of the cameras in Florida on the rights or wrong of lockdown, on how best to measure public health and freedom.

Monbiot may have spoken too soon about the “public” intellectual being endangered though. This week it was announced that Andy Haldane has been lured away from his post as chief economist at the Bank of England to head up the Royal Society of the Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, the nearest creature the UK has to a public debating forum or ideas salon.

Haldane is not a household name. He is perhaps better known in the arcane world of international central banking than in the UK. In 2014, Time magazine voted him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Over the last ten years or so Haldane has gained something of a reputation for being an imaginative thinker, challenging the orthodoxy of our times and prepared to go out on a limb to express his often unorthodox views. He first came to global attention in 2012 with his now infamous speech, The Dog and the Frisbee, at the central bankers’ annual conference at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which argued that despite the layers upon layers of new regulations, central bankers were still not able to spot a crash coming. He concluded that simple regulations were the best.

He also kept a close eye on what was happening on the ground here in the UK. As the Bank’s chief economist, he travelled around the UK holding town hall meetings to understand how those outside of the metropolitan elite were living. He would ask locals pretty basic stuff, down to the price of milk.  

Mountain climbers, artists and poets were invited by him to come and talk to staff but also City audiences to exchange ideas and trigger creativity.  A decade ago he caused a ripple or two writing a report on the The Future of Finance which took a critical look at what the extraordinary growth of the financial industry had achieved – or not achieved – over the previous few decades.

He had time for the Occupy movement, which gathered around St Paul’s Cathedral after the financial crash, claiming that the protestors were right in many of their criticisms of the collapse. 

Always puzzled by Britain’s low productivity levels, he ran the Industrial Strategy Council, since closed down, and set up Pro Bono Economics, an independent charity chaired by the former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell, to look at how economics can be best harnessed to help people’s well-being. 

When we first met a decade ago, his parting words as we stood at the door of his grand bank parlour office, were: “You know, we economists should be studying evolutionary biology rather than economics to help us understand better how the world of finance works.”

Haldane went on to write a paper for Nature magazine with Lord May, the Oxford University ecologist and former government scientist, on financial ecology, looking at the lessons that financial regulators can learn from biology and  natural ecosystems – and the spread of diseases – to avoid another crisis. 

Haldane argued – and still argues – that policy makers need to promote diversity across the financial system, that the big international monopolistic banks need breaking up and new entrants encouraged. As he put it, “Homogeneity bred fragility.”

It’s why he was one of the earliest supporters of alternative finance, the advent of peer-to-peer lending, crowdfunding and other financial innovations to break the monopoly of the big banks.

On the impact of the pandemic, he has been thoughtful, musing to me in interviews that working from home will become the new normal, and that there will be radical thinking in how we reward and treat those who have worked so hard during the pandemic in nursing and social care.

But Haldane –  a pessimist by nature – will be best remembered for being the most optimistic of optimists about the UK’s recovery post-pandemic. For him that bounce back is going to be a whopping big V shape, and the UK is “a coiled spring” ready to rebound fast. Which is why he also warns we need to watch out for rising inflation and higher interest rates.

He’s an inspired choice to head up the RSA. But why would Haldane leave the grandeur of the Old Lady – and his international platform – for the RSA? Many have been surprised by his decision, suggesting it’s a rather bizarre and sideways shuffle.

Knowing Haldane a little, it’s not surprising at all. He clearly didn’t want to hang around for another shot at being Governor. And why should he. Although he was young at the time, he was an outside contender to take over from Lord King, the Governor who stepped down in 2013.

Haldane was overlooked – wrongly in my view – by George Osborne. Maybe the Chancellor found Haldane too outspoken. Instead Osborne hired Mark Carney, who was followed more recently by Andrew Bailey.

Rather than wait around, Haldane appears to have taken the view that running the 280-year-old RSA is far more enterprising, giving him a leap into a world where he can stimulate ideas about economics, business and the arts and marry them in a livelier, more public debate. And therefore influence policy more directly?

He’s in good company: the organisation was founded in 1754 by William Shipley, a painter and social entrepreneur, with an ambition to “embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufacturers and extend our commerce”. Former fellows include US founding father Benjamin Franklin while Charles Dickens was a vice-president. 

And he is not the only economist to come on board: Karl Marx and Adam Smith were members.

When Haldane takes over in September, look out for a lot of high-spirited thinking and debate coming out of John Adam Street.