Time sure flies when you’re having fun, as Americans say. Seems like it was only yesterday when the actor was sacked as presenter of the satirical show Have I Got News for You.
In fact that unfortunate event happened in 2002 – 13 years ago! The sacking was precipitated by a scurrilous tabloid claiming that Mr Deayton had done cocaine (and who in his profession hasn’t?) and cavorted with ladies of easy virtue (ditto).
That was enough for the BBC, known for its unimpeachable moral probity, not to mention political sagacity, to sack the hugely successful presenter – this though 75 per cent of the public begged the Beeb to let him stay.
I must admit to my shame that, not being a regular watcher of TV programmes, I’ve lost track of Mr Deayton’s career since then. But I’m glad to see that apparently he landed on his feet.
Rather than moaning about his shocking dismissal, Mr Deayton buckled down and changed careers altogether by retraining and taking up the study of economics.
He made such giant inroads on his new field that he has just been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize. Mr Deayton ought to be praised for taking just 13 years to travel from the novice position at the bottom of his new profession to its very summit.
I can’t say I’m unduly surprised. Economics, after all, is a dubious science. Unlike, say, physics or chemistry that require, in addition to intellect and talent, a command of a staggering corpus of knowledge, economics is a bit of a non-science.
This Enlightenment construct essentially describes ways in which people make a living, an endeavour in which they had been succeeding famously throughout history, and long before the first economist was a twinkle in his father’s eye.
Since then practitioners of this non-science have alternated between uttering either truisms or falsehoods.
The self-evident truisms (sorry about using this tautology) essentially revolve around the observation that people will make a better living if the government doesn’t put obstacles in their way.
The utterers of counterintuitive falsehoods, on the other hand, maintain that the more money the government takes away from the people, supposedly to spend it on their behalf, the better off the people will be.
This is more or less it. The rest is waffle, typically reinforced with computer models and other such arcana. Economists use those as rods with which they fish in the troubled waters of human behaviour, in this instance its economic aspect.
They also use recondite vocabulary to talk about some mysterious ‘paradigms’ that explain why people make a better living when left alone, or conversely when interfered with by the government.
I suggest that, if we listen to these chaps, or especially organise our affairs on the basis of their prescriptions and predictions, we’ll soon all be marching to Depression-style soup kitchens, singing ‘Brother, can you paradigm?’ (I’m plagiarising myself here: this silly pun first appeared in my 2011 book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis. Sorry about that.)
All in all, I’m not surprised that a sacked comic actor with the gift of the gab took just a few years as a newly hatched economist to collect the Nobel…
Oops, hold on for a moment… My wife has just looked over my shoulder and said that the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for economics isn’t the actor Angus Deayton but his near-namesake Angus Deaton, who actually is and always has been an economist.
Well, disagreements over a single letter have been known to start religious wars with thousands of casualties, so I’m not surprised that my wife is upset about my negligence.
Actually, as it turns out, Prof. Deaton (sic!) has received his accolade for the earth-shattering discovery that people still buy things even if they’re unsure they’ll continue to have much money to buy things with for any foreseeable future.
Come to think of it, I’d rather give the Prize to Mr Deayton (sic!). He probably didn’t make a similar discovery only because his mind was set on other things – which, one has to admit, are as much use but much more fun.