\u201cI think you need to take part in the debate that other people are having,\u201d says Bowman, above the ASI\u2019s office in Westminster.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about trying to say look: there is a version of free market liberalism that\u2019s quite flexible, that\u2019s self-aware, and that\u2019s focused on the actual pressing policy issues of the day \u2013 rather than worrying about how you privatise the courts and the police. As interesting as those things are, they\u2019re not where the debate is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bowman\u2019s decision to reclassify the ASI as a neoliberal, rather than libertarian think tank, was met with some criticism but has paid dividends, Bowman insists. Much of the move, he says, was about mischief, winding up those who use the term pejoratively \u2013 as a lazy slur \u2013 to evade understanding free markets.<\/p>\n
And while the move also served the purpose of disassociating the ASI from the \u201cnativist, quasi-racist, alt-right\u201d that has hijacked the libertarian cause, Bowman had, and still has, a vision of waking up swathes of society to the neoliberal movement he advocates.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me, it was this big group of younger people who consider themselves to be classical liberals, or free market liberals, but don\u2019t see any vehicle for that \u2013 don\u2019t see any movement for that,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd the neoliberal thing is saying: \u2018this is us, we are flexible, pragmatic, non-fanatical, free market liberals\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Broken supply chain<\/strong><\/p>\n Creating a movement is one thing, but influencing policy decisions, says Bowman, is harder under Theresa May<\/a> than previous governments, and one of many reasons for her dismal electoral performance.<\/p>\n He refers to the supply chain of politics being broken.<\/p>\n \u201cYou need to have a process where there\u2019s a public discussion about policy before the politicians embrace it themselves. That was just completely abandoned, weirdly. Nick Timothy [May\u2019s former chief of staff] worked for the New Schools Network, so clearly had been part of the supply chain at some stage. But they abandoned that, and all these untried policies, which had absolutely no testing in the real political arena, were included in the manifesto. It was backwards.\u201d<\/p>\n While policies presented by the ASI were adopted by Blair, one might assume its natural home to be within the Conservative party. But Bowman says many Tories espouse free market credentials out of blind obligation, like the Catechism of the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a bunch of arguments that you learn off to remind you about why all the apparent inconsistencies don\u2019t actually matter. And free market dogma seems like that for some people within the Conservative party. They\u2019ve learned by rote: \u2018free markets are good, of course I\u2019m a free marketeer,\u2019. But everything they do on the campaign trail speaks otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n The independence from party allegiance works in the ASI\u2019s favour though, he says. \u201cIt might be one reason that we\u2019ve managed to slightly punch above our weight. We have fewer people to let down.\u201d<\/p>\n Productivity wonk<\/strong><\/p>\n In Bowman\u2019s time at the ASI, a position he says he fell into accidentally, he has lived and breathed free market policy. He\u2019s championed causes from immigration to tax reform, planning reform to defending high executive pay. On the latter his ideas matter particularly, he says.<\/p>\n \u201cIt matters because if executives are being systematically overpaid then that implies much bigger things about markets in general, and how good we think markets are at pricing things. So even though it seems like a trivial or obscure debate to a lot of people, it\u2019s important. Because if we\u2019re wrong on this \u2013 and I don\u2019t think we are \u2013 then we\u2019re quite possibly wrong on much bigger and more important issues. So I think it\u2019s important to be right about it.\u201d<\/p>\n The matter that keeps Bowman \u201cup at night\u201d though, is planning. He argues that the figures often touted as evidence of housebuilding are massively overstated, due to relying on national, rather than regional figures. The job market for most people in the City, and for most people in London, is not transferable to other parts of the country \u2013 the high value jobs they do, can only be done in the capital.<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter to you or me that you can rent a house in the Lincolnshire countryside for an eighth of the price that you can rent an equivalent place in central london for. It\u2019s irrelevant. Really, what we care about is building in the places where people want to live for economic reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n Bowman\u2019s preoccupation isn\u2019t just housing affordability though, it\u2019s a question of productivity. If people<\/p>\n can\u2019t move to fast growing, high productivity cities because the rents are so high, then they\u2019re unable to get the sort of jobs that will increase their productivity.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that people who are productive coming into a city make the other people productive through basic Smithian mechanisms such as the division of labour,\u201d he says. \u201cIt allows us to specialise more, and that is the number one thing we can do to boost productivity.\u201d<\/p>\n Continuing on the theme of productivity, as one gets the impression Bowman does regularly, he switches to immigration. Unlike many on the economic right, he is expressly pro-immigration, and pins the future success of the UK on not kowtowing to the more extreme voices proposing migrant caps and the like.<\/p>\n \u201cVirtually every economist alive,\u201d he says, \u201caccepts that highly-skilled immigration is good for the migrants and good for us \u2013 not just because it makes us more productive in the short run, but because immigrants can be very innovative. To me the immigration question is the lowest hanging fruit in terms of making global poverty much less awful than it is.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s interesting, I suggest, that given the negative associations of the neoliberal tag \u2013 that of greed, corruption, and laissez faire free marketeering, that he aligns the movement he envisions with issues of social mobility, immigration, and alleviating poverty. He replies that it\u2019s partly resultant of the disassociation from the more swivel-eyed libertarians of old.<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing I\u2019m most proud of is the emergence of quite a big movement of flexible, self knowing, self aware, pragmatic and evidence based neoliberals in the UK. People who I believed had always been out there, and I believe more and more of them are beginning to think of themselves in that way.<\/p>\n \u201cThey may not use the word neoliberal, but more and more people are beginning to see that this is a legitimate way. This was what Friedman was like. He called himself a libertarian because there wasn\u2019t a better word at the time.<\/p>\n I\u2019m very happy about getting away from the really ugly, and the really fanatical parts of the libertarian world.<\/p>\n The ugly parts of the gut. And making them feel like we are on our own \u2013 a force for good\u201d. Bowman is likely to remain a force of his own for some time.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/strong> <\/a><\/p>\n Original Article<\/a><\/p>\n [contf] [contfnewc] The post Adam Smith's ambassador: Meet Sam Bowman, the free-market evangelist<\/a> appeared first on News Wire Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rising to prominence as one of the key intellectual driving ..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40481,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n[contfnew]
\n ![](\"http:\/\/www.bnreport.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/latestcb20150503233945-109.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nCityAM<\/a><\/h5>\n
\n[contfnewc]<\/p>\n