There is a familiar storyline in classic European novels, in which a young man from a wealthy family wastes his inheritance through foolish behaviour. In Russian examples this generally involves running up massive losses at gambling tables, whereas in the most famous German example – Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks – it occurs when the northern virtues of diligent labour and prudent trading are abandoned in favour of the southern vices of impulse and the cultivation of an artistic temperament. The reckless squandering of great wealth that had been carefully accumulated by one’s ancestors is presented to the reader as an evident sign of personal irresponsibility and, more widely, social decline. It is far less common to read of older people of modest means, whose ethical failing consists in indebting their great grandchildren. I find this surprising, since duties, presumably, should run in both directions, up and down the family tree.
One of the many achievements of the welfare state, which became the dominant socio-economic model in the Western world in the second half of the twentieth century, was that it replaced the lottery of family inheritance with a safety net that guarantees a minimum of goods and services to all citizens, regardless of what might be passed down by their families. Irrespective of what kin supplied, kith ensured a decent standard of living for all. That was the basic idea. Lately, as the cost of goods and services continues to rise – due in part to a steady expansion of expectation as to what might be included in the baseline package – and widespread resistance to higher taxation grows, Western societies have all – to a greater or lesser extent – decided that their welfare state should be partly funded by future citizens.
Public debt is deferred taxation; spend now, pay later. There are all sorts of reasons for thinking that this a sensible way of managing the mismatch between the appetite for services and the willingness to pay for them through the tax system. Spreading costs over time has long been understood as a good strategy for individuals – using mortgage payments to buy a house, or insurance premiums to cover the risk of having to replace a major item that might be lost – and using borrowing to fund investments that will improve future profitability is well understood as a rationale for corporate leverage – the increased productivity achieved by upgrading machinery or premises, or the improving sales that follow from a large marketing campaign – so it should come as no surprise that a similar approach has been adopted by governments. The national debt exists, so it is said, not to burden future generations but to increase their inheritance: it should not be thought of as a liability that we pass on, but as a mechanism for increasing the size of the legacy we leave behind. Well, maybe.
While almost all economists recognise the value of debt as a tool for managing the imbalances between revenues and spending over time, there are significant differences of view as to what a prudent level of debt might be, for individuals, for companies, and for nations. If we focus on public debt, at one extreme – paradoxically a position occupied both by Ronald Regan and Paul Krugman – is the view that almost no amount of borrowing is “too much” so long as the proceeds are used wisely, which might mean tax cuts and defence spending (RR) or investment in research and infrastructure (PK). At the other extreme are those – John Maynard Keynes and his followers – who think that governments should ‘lean against the wind’, meaning that when private sector demand is weak the state should borrow to spend thereby reducing the risk of recession, but when the private sector growth is strong, the state should raise taxes to slow the economy thereby reducing the risk of overheating. Cyclical demand management (JMK) should lead to a stable public debt position over time. In this post, I am less interested in the question as to which of these two views is correct, and more interested in the question as to what happens if we get the answer wrong.
Consider the public debt contract. This is a legal contract whereby the government agrees to borrow money for current expenditure (whether public consumption, investment, or tax cuts) while at the same time committing its future citizens to repay or refinance the debt. Legal contracts might be amended or broken (a point I will come back to) but at the outset the normal assumption of both parties – borrowers and lenders – is that the terms of the contract will be honoured. The lenders – for public debt these are normally institutions, such as sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and insurance companies, but they mostly manage funds on behalf of groups of individuals – are normally able to sell their loans prior to maturity, since most public debt is widely traded on regulated markets, which means that the ultimate owners of the debt, at the time when repayment is due, might not be the initial purchasers. The legal obligations of the borrower, namely that its future citizens will make full and timely repayment, are transferred to the new owners whomsoever they might be.
From a philosophical point of view, public debt contracts have some features that are essential and some that are accidental. Essential features of an object are features that it must possess to be the thing it is: more formally, an object x has essential property E, if and only if necessarily whatever is x has property E. By contrast an accidental property, A, is non-essential, meaning that object x might or might not have A, but it does not cease to be x if it does not have A. To give a simple example, the property of having three sides is essential to a triangle, so too is the property that the sum of its three angles equals 180 degrees; however, having a right-angle is an accidental property of a triangle.
The frequency and amount of interest payable, and the repayment of the full amount of the debt at the stipulated maturity of the contract are both essential to the concept of public debt. The use that the public authorities make of the money they borrow when they issue the debt is, however, an accidental feature. This matters for the following reason. Borrowing money for thirty years and using it to reduce the current rate of taxation might stimulate an acceleration in economic growth that might over the thirty-year period increase the absolute amount of taxable income even at the lower rate. Borrowing money for thirty years and using it to invest in cutting-edge technological research might stimulate an acceleration in economic growth that might over the thirty-year period increase the absolute amount of taxable income by more than the cost of the initial investment. However, irrespective of whether and how the borrowed money is used and what it achieves, it will certainly need to be repaid. The benefits are contingent, but the costs are certain.
To illustrate this point, consider Jean Baptiste Colbert, Finance Minister to Louis XIV of France. Colbert was concerned by the rising military power of the Dutch and English based on the size and speed of their navies. In 1669, he drafted an Ordinance issued by the King, On the Waters and the Forests, which set out a plan to restore and protect France’s woodlands. In particular, he ordered the re-planting of oak forests across France, to supply wood for building bigger, stronger ships. His aim was to ensure that in two hundred years, when the Dutch and English were running out of marine timber, France would have an unrivalled supply. While it is tempting to admire this example of long-termism in government investment, the reality is that in the 1870s, just when the oaks were mature and ready for use, the first steel ships were built by the French and British navies, which meant that possessing the best timber in Europe was no longer a competitive military advantage. Colbert’s farsightedness proved misguided. (It is only fair to note that France’s oak forests function today as major tourist attractions; and aficionados of fine wine and whisky will know that the best barrels for maturing alcohol are made from French oak.)
Now, imagine future citizens of a democracy, who inherited massive public debts that must be repaid, but the expected benefits of the borrowing did not for some reason materialise. Perhaps the tax cuts did not generate an acceleration in economic growth, perhaps the research investment turned out to be misjudged, perhaps growth was slowed by some exogenous factors that overwhelmed the positive impacts of the economic stimulus achieved by the borrowed money. Perhaps the government did not cut taxes and did not invest in research, but simply used the money to subsidise current consumption – by capping the cost of energy bills, or index-linking pension payments, or abolishing tuition fees for higher education, or some other measure that was very popular with current voters, but of less appeal to future voters – and economic growth continued on the same trajectory that it was already on. It is quite possible that there will be no future benefits, whereas it is not possible that the debt will not fall due.
At some point in the next fifty years, I predict that at least one main-party candidate running for US President, and at least one mainstream party competing for election in Japan, France, and the UK, will advocate the cancellation of some or all of their national debt. Leaders of both centre-left and centre-right will find some ‘patriotic’ reasons for advocating this policy and most voters will not be sufficiently well-informed about the history of sovereign defaults to know the longer-term detrimental consequences, particularly the chronic impact of higher borrowing costs. So, I accept that one realistic option for future citizens will be to default on the promises made by previous generations. However, to be clear, this option is just another form of cost that will have been bequeathed to these future citizens by their predecessors.
To understand the strengths and weaknesses of democratic government, it helps to draw on the experience of Athens, the first city-state to test this model of governance to destruction. One of the founding heroes of Athens was Solon, the lawgiver and poet, who reformed the economic and political system of the city in around 600 BCE. Athens was facing economic crisis and political upheaval, due to the domination of a small number of very rich families, who controlled the political system and used predatory lending to extract wealth from the large number of poorer residents. Solon introduced a series of reforms, including a one-off forgiveness of debts and the abolition of debt-bondage, a process by which poor borrowers, without any other form of collateral, would pledge their own labour, and the labour of their children, as security for loans which they would use to buy seed. In addition, they would also pay one-sixth of their harvest to the lender as a form of interest payment. (Seventeen percent does not sound high compared to modern tax rates, but it is worth remembering that this interest payment was in effect a tax on labour, for which the borrowers received no ancillary benefits). There were many cases of labourers and/or their children being sold into slavery because they had failed to honour their debt payments. At the time, Solon’s laws proved too radical to please the rich and insufficiently radical to please the poor, but later historians recognised that they established the political and economic stability that allowed Athens to achieve pre-eminence in the ancient Greek world.
I mention Solon because the issue of debt bondage is highly pertinent to the question of public debt. If future citizens do not want to default on debt contracts, then they will need to refinance or repay them. Refinancing might be possible, but the cost is currently unknown. It is easy to say, as Paul Krugman has done repeatedly, that when interest rates are very low and governments could borrow for thirty years with almost no interest to pay, that it made sense to take as much ‘free money’ as possible and invest for the future. Except that, today we have no idea of the circumstances in which these debt contracts will mature and therefore what the costs of refinancing might be: market forecasts of interest rates thirty years hence are pure guesswork. Whatever these costs are, future generations will need to pay back the loan, or borrow new money to refinance it, and in either case they will do so through the tax system. Taxes are levied primarily on income and consumption – other taxes are mostly levied on asset transfers which can be thought of as deferred forms consumption – which means simply that future generations will have to work more and consume less than they otherwise would have done, if they choose to repay the debts they have inherited.
I suspect that most current citizens do not think of themselves as pledging their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren into debt bondage when they vote, but in effect that is what we are doing. In fifty years from now, it is quite likely that many Western citizens will be working longer hours, paying higher taxes, and consuming fewer goods than they might otherwise have done, because I, and my contemporaries, chose to have cheap energy, index-linked pensions, and heavily subsidized health and education services, for which we were unwilling to pay through the tax system. Moreover, when they come to refinance these debts, they will most likely be working longer hours and paying higher taxes, to finance principal payments made to families in Asia and the Middle East, who will be able to retire earlier and enjoy a higher standards of living than their parents and grandparents and great grandparents did, because these earlier generations sacrificed current consumption to fund the savings that bought the public debt that Western governments issued.
One of the great rhetorical claims of the Americans during the War of Independence, was that there should be no taxation without representation. Quite how taxpayers should all be fairly represented has turned out to be a tricky problem, not least in the United States, but as a general principle the claim seems valid: those who pay the costs of government should have a say in what the government does with its resources. If in the eighteenth century, the problem was a contest between metropole and colony, today it is a contest between current and future citizens. Current citizens can vote for low taxes and expensive public services and fund the gap by public debt. Future citizens have no current representation yet run the risk of inheriting significant debt obligations which have the same economic character as debt bondage did in the ancient world. They will be contractually obliged to work to provide for the leisure of others.
In later life Solon was quizzed about the success of his reforms: asked if he had given the Athenians the best laws, he replied, the best that they would accept. The problem we face today is that the best we have chosen to accept is likely to be very bad for future generations, unless we also make some implausibly heroic assumptions about the trend rate of economic growth.