Live from Kilkenomics: anger and economics

Katie Martin (0:11)

Hello, and welcome to the Unhedged podcast.

If you're listening at home, you'll be able to tell that I'm not in the dreary FT audio studio. I am live in Kilkenny in Ireland at the Kilkenny Comics Festival. And I'm Katie Martin from the FT. I didn't mention that. But we are around the back of a pub in Kilkenny at the Kilkenny Comics Festival. And we've got a live studio audience, which is great. So one cliche that we have as journalists, whether we're writing stuff or we're doing podcasts, is imagine you are doing this for your mum so that even your mum can understand it. Now, I don't have to imagine because my mum is there.

Leah Downey (0:52)

Yeah.

Katie Martin (0:57)

So when I said to her that we were going to be recording my podcast today, she said two things. She said, first of all, you didn't say you had a podcast.

I did. And secondly, she said, what's a podcast? So it's been a great start. And it brings me on to my topic for the next discussion, which is anger. So I've got two furious people with me today, furious people who are going to talk about anger and economics and where they kind of meet in the middle. I've got Eric Lonergan, who literally wrote the book on this. He wrote Angrynomics even. He's an economist. He's a hedge farm manager. And we have Leah Downey, who is a fellow at Cambridge University focusing on, get this, the democratic politics of monetary policy.

Leah Downey (1:44)

Makes me feel angry, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_3 (1:47)

It makes you sound so clever.

Katie Martin (1:50)

You are so clever. So anger, I mean, let's start off with, how about those Americans? Hey, I mean, Leah, you're American. Please answer for their actions. How much has economic anger fed into politics?

Leah Downey (2:07)

I think it is hugely about anger. I don't know if it's all economic anger. I think there's almost nothing more dangerous than anger, especially the anger of a majority of a very large country that has no outlet. And I think that there are a lot of people in America who are really angry and have been for a long time about how their lives are going. And they don't feel that they have an outlet to change that. And I think democratic politics has failed them. And that's partly because of how we've constructed the state and the policy making apparatus over the last 30 years in that citizens and their elected officials don't have as much power and therefore as much responsibility for actual policy. And as a result, people are pissed off. And if they don't feel that there's an outlet for them to actually initiate change through the system, what's the point of maintaining it? And so I think a lot of this is a sort of screw this, smash the system.

Katie Martin (3:05)

Yeah, there's a kind of burn it all down kind of feeling, right? I mean, Eric, this is something that keeps popping up at this festival this year, which is around inflation and how much voters hate inflation. How significant do you think that is?

Eric Lonergan (3:20)

Significant, but I think probably the migration dimension may be more significant in terms of generalizing about the role of anger in politics. So when Mark Blythe and I wrote a book on angrenomics in 2020, one of the things we looked at is there's a big difference first of all, between private anger or anger in the private sphere, which usually if people are angry in their private lives, there's something going, it's stress or something. Something's going wrong in your life, typically if you're being very angry. But if you look at it in the public sphere, it's very interesting. We did a big search of news stories, and the two most frequent forms of public anger are, funny enough, sports fans, which is a very interesting question. Why do, typically, men go to watch sports to get really angry? But that is literally like if you do screen stories, it's angry sports fans. And then the other one is actually ethical, it's moral. It's moral outrage of different sorts. And the moral outrage is not about taking sides here on who's right or who's wrong, but not being listened to is a form of ethical, you know. If we're in a democratic process, I want my politicians to represent me, nobody's listening to me or worse than that, they say they're going to do something for me, and then they don't do it. And actually, I think migration, if you look at it, is both the tribal dimension, which I think is undeniable.