A little political history story

From the Talking Politics podcast episode Are We Losing Faith in Democracy? (Jan 29, 2020), here’s a nice little example of how stories are told in political economics.

From timecode 35:57 to 36:45, David Runciman sketches a political economic history of the 1970s to the 1990's: 

"This is going to be much too crude as a piece of political economic history, but you could say: In the Seventies, there is this fear that too much democracy produces a kind of out-of-control inflation, indeed an out-of-control political economy, and therefore you've got to strip some democracy out of it. You've got to make the central banks independent; you introduce more technocracy. And the Nineties are that sort of high watermark where the technocracy is such that people still feel it's broadly a democracy and things are going relatively well. But over time, what you get in these technocratic systems - because they're less responsive to public opinion, among other things - is a build-up of inequality. And that's the story of the last 50 years. So it goes: the satisfaction bit; [then] the dip where we see satisfaction is between inflation and inequality."

Ticking through my three characteristics of stories: 

1. There's clearly a Chronicle: he describes a series of situations and events.
2. There's Causality, i.e. reasons for things happening; for example, fear prompts the introduction of technocracy in the 70s, which then leads to a build-up of inequality
3. But no Character! No agents are introduced that produce or suffer the events, beyond "people".

This is very much in line with the kinds of economic narratives Shiller talks about (cf. my post Narrative in economics: Shiller’s stories).