Helen Chandler-Wilde: 2 + 2 = Economic Competence?

Towards the end of last year, I read Breakneck by Canadian writer Dan Wang (as did seemingly every journalist in the UK) — a book about China’s political and economic system. Its main thesis is that Western countries tend to be run by arts and humanities graduates who find legal treatments for problems, like banning things, while STEM-trained Chinese leaders think numerically, and prefer engineering their way out of trouble.

Anyway, this feels relevant today, on the news that the OECD is developing a fiscal literacy “masterclass” for legislators to explain how public finances work. Topics covered would include: guardrails like fiscal rules, what trade-offs finance ministers are faced with, and how economic decisions affect voters. (Hopefully also on the curriculum: how the UK’s gilt yields fell to the lowest level in over a year, cutting the cost of borrowing, according to numbers today.)