Ever wonder what’s wrong with the economy?

This uncannily accurate cartoon doesn’t paint the whole picture. But it’s an important fragment.

For Messrs Smith, Ricardo, von Mises and Hayek failed to mention one immutable law of economics: If the state sector dominates or even edges towards domination, even the private sector will be tropistically attracted to it.

As the state controlled by bureaucrats grows more corporatist, so do actual corporations controlled by shareholders. At both manufacturing and service companies, those who actually make the products or provide the services are increasingly marginalised by bureaucrats.

Our state-owned NHS provides a ubiquitous blueprint, what with the frontline medical staffs routinely outnumbered by administrative parasites holding positions similar to those lampooned in the cartoon above.

They spend their time issuing counterproductive regulations, writing reams of unnecessary memos and forcing overworked doctors to sweat over endless reports and superfluous administrative tasks. As a result, many excellent doctors, unable to fight permanent nausea, take early retirement, opening doors for immigrants whose medical credentials may not be up to our standards.

That blueprint is dutifully followed in the so-called private sector. The centre of corporate gravity there also shifts towards self-perpetuating managers in sinecure posts who as often as not hamper the actual work. The situation was first diagnosed, with foresight of genius, by James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution.

Burnham spotted the first signs with the eyesight of a sleuth and predicted the future with the accuracy of a prophet. Written four generations ago, his work still reads as up-to-date reportage.

An attempt to analyse this situation brings together three different disciplines, each posing its own questions. The sociologist asks ‘what?’, the political economist asks ‘how?’, and the philosopher asks ‘why?’

The first question is the easiest, and the cartoon above comes close to answering it adequately. The next question is slightly thornier because it’s closely related to another inquiry: “Can today’s bosses be really so stupid as not to see that a profusion of useless sinecures reduces productivity and profitability, in more ways than one?”

The answer is, no, they can’t be, not as a rule. However, a car whose brakes fail acquires a mind of its own, making questions about its driver’s skill irrelevant. Why our socioeconomic machine seems to have reduced its drivers to impotence is a question neither a sociologist nor an economist can answer.

A philosopher may try, but even he will soon realise that no satisfactory answer lies anywhere close to the surface. Nor is there just one answer but many, and it’s hard, although not impossible, to trace them back to their common origin.

Having taken that task on in several books, I realise that a short article isn’t a fitting medium for it. So let’s just tug on one string in the hope that it will turn into Ariadne’s thread.

Every year, about 800,000 youngsters graduate from British universities. Now, at the time of John Henry Newman a university was an institution accommodating young people with an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

They sought to make our world intelligible, a task, they knew, that involved concerted inquiry into the inner depths of many disciplines, such as theology, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, music, astronomy, law, mathematics. Then as now, the number of such savants in the making was low. For example, all British universities combined awarded only 800 degrees in 1850.

At that time Britain’s population was about one third of what it is now. Hence, if the same proportion pertained today, we’d be producing 2,400 graduates a year. Since the actual number is gravitating towards a million, one has to reach some awkward conclusions.

Clearly, admission standards at our universities are no longer designed to filter in only youngsters seeking pure knowledge above all. Equally clear is that an overwhelming majority of aspiring students wish to go to university for some other reasons, typically the hope of a more lucrative career.

In the past, we had technical colleges serving such people, but they have almost all been converted into universities. However, considering the expectations of their students, these schools in fact remain technical colleges, jumped up to university status.

Moreover, since they largely or wholly depend on the students’ fees for their funding, they have to treat students not as charges to be raised to some higher understanding, but as customers to be served.

Since most students crave not knowledge but simply a degree, it’s natural that universities have to make it easier for them to get one – just like supermarkets try to make it easier for customers to part with their hard-earned.

Hence the profusion of non-academic degrees reflecting their holders’ social conscience and TV viewing habits, rather than their learning. Women’s studies, black studies, gender studies, ‘Philosophy and Star Trek’, ‘How to train in the Jedi way’, ‘Harry Potter studies’ and so on figure in most curricula these days.

Now proud possessors of BA degrees, such graduates soon find out that even their original limited purpose for seeking higher education remains unfulfilled. Their degrees are as useless for all practical purposes as they are for all intellectual ones.

So why do they still want to go to university if they have no high intellectual aspirations, nor any realistic hope of converting their degrees into cash (“What do you say to a philosophy graduate?” “I’ll have fries with that.”)? Because the whole ethos of modern society has indoctrinated them to believe they are all equal – no hierarchy of intellect, taste or learning exists, or should be allowed to.

If that’s the case, then a lad who can’t read without moving his lips feels he is fully equal to another youngster who has already perused, if not always understood, The Critique of Pure Reason. And equal not just before God (none of that obsolete rubbish) but in every respect.

Specifically in relation to higher education, they have been encouraged to think that way by intellectual and moral pygmies like John Major and especially Tony Blair, both of whom vowed to make sure half of all Britons have university degrees.

This is one of the few areas in which politicians actually do what they promise. However, this raises the inevitable question: If some eight million graduates, most with useless degrees, are disgorged on the economy every 10 years, what are they going to do? They can’t all wait at tables or deliver pizzas – we have immigrants for that.

The modern ethos lends a helping hand, the same ethos that has brainwashed youngsters who could otherwise become good plumbers or electricians that they are equal to that four-eyed egghead they bullied at school.

That same ethos applies the principle of supply-side economics to a festering social and cultural sore: supply generates demand. But the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who first formulated that law, never suspected it might find such a multifarious future.

Fine, people holding advanced degrees in Harry Potter can’t design bridges or treat patients. But they can drive engineers and doctors potty by lecturing them on diversity, gender equality or faddish appetites disguised as human rights.

That’s the supply, and the ethos kindly provides the demand by indoctrinating prospective bosses in the vital need for such services. And if they are slow to learn, the state steps in with threats of fines and legal prosecution.

That closes the circle, and it’s bound to be vicious. Or else funny, as in that cartoon.