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Comment by throwaway48540 | Hacker News Reader

What is shady about them? Are they criminals?

Their agenda is to frame the self-serving interests of a very narrow group as the economic interests of everyone. That's shady.

Depending on the specifics, that sounds congruent with some of Adam Smith's economic theories so it's not surprising to see such arguments used, especially if some of the authors are from the Adam Smith Institute.

His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.

It's more likely a sincerely held belief than an attempt at misdirection.

Adam Smith is probably spinning in his grave.

> His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.

That theory is predicated on the market being composed of buyers and sellers of broadly similar financial power. This is no longer the case in most markets, certainly not in the UK as far as ordinary people or most small companies are concerned.

Yes. Markets pursue the interest of wealth-weighted humans, not evenly-weighted humans. Disguising "wealth weighted value" under the concept of "value" (which, colloquially, has a more even weight) is the propaganda coup of the century.

I doubt Adam Smith would agree with anything the Adam Smith Institute says.

As rjsw says, they refuse to disclose who funds them. See https://www.monbiot.com/2022/10/07/thinktanking-the-country/ for some background.

If you consider tanking the UK economy to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions of pounds, then yes, absolutely.

How could they possibly do that?

They are referring to the liz truss budget.

What happened wasn't primarily due to her budget. It was due to a meltdown in the pension sector triggered by over-leverage, arguably caused by the BoE not doing its regulatory duties correctly.

Don't get me wrong, a budget that cuts taxes without cutting spending is no good. But the idea that what happened was a direct consequence of that doesn't make much sense as it had been telegraphed a long way in advance, giving the markets plenty of time to adjust. The central bank changed monetary policy a day before the mini-budget, and changes in that are kept secret until the moment of announcement. Additionally, UK spending has since blown through what the mini-budget would have created without any sudden market turmoil.

https://www.ft.com/content/4701b6ac-851e-43fd-a2b2-b38dd07c7...

Regulators failed to anticipate the dangers that borrowing by pension schemes posed to the stability of the UK’s financial system, according to a parliamentary report into the turmoil that hit the gilt markets following Liz Truss’s disastrous “mini” Budget in September last year.

Pension schemes suffered multibillion-pound losses after they were forced to sell assets to ensure that complex derivative-linked strategies — known as liability driven investments (LDI) — did not implode when gilt yields jumped as investors rejected the then prime minister’s economic strategy.

Also, Truss is basically correct that the UK needs more growth. Disagreeing on her tactics is reasonable, disagreeing on her goals isn't. She was unfortunately attempting to create growth from a position of weakness: in a party that didn't want to do anything hard like cutting spending, and with a fragile/over-leveraged financial sector.

Pull the other one. Only some of the tax cuts had been telegraphed in advance. Abolishing the top rate of income tax and cutting the basic rate early hadn’t been. They ignored all the warnings they were given and sidelined the OBR. The Truss/Kwarteng budget directly crashed the economy and trying to pretend otherwise is some serious revisionism.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/63229204

You're arguing with the conclusions of the official investigation, not me.

The committee report only looked at the regulator. To be sure, the regulator and the pensions industry should have done more. But the idea that Truss and Kwarteng are blameless innocents in the whole fiasco is ridiculous.

So it is the elected representatives who are responsible for choosing them and implementing whatever they suggested?

Being elected doesn't remove your obligations to follow sane, moral policies.

That's my point. Crazy economists are not responsible for the damage, it's the elected people who listened to them and followed through. To create an intentionally extreme parallel, imagine they have chosen a group of idk, satanists. Would you blame the group of satanists for being satanists, or the people in charge of a country who contacted a group of satanists for advice?

Surely you blame both? Being consistently evil and living up (or down?) to ones reputation for evil doesn't make one less evil.

They refuse to say who funds them.

Led By Donkeys' exposure of the Truss mini-budget and the Adam Smith Institute involvement is enlightening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRDLIOME47c

Hats. The fedoras they wear shades their faces from view, m’lady

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