A tweet from the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb caught my eye last week. Amid the merry-go-round of prime ministers, he told us all to “stop complaining about the turnover in Britain”. It caught my eye partly because I’d done some complaining myself in last week’s column. His argument was that it’s good that such fast turnover can happen and definitely preferable to “other nations that have NO turnover”, ie Russia and Saudi Arabia.
The tweet prompted two reactions. The first and strongest was that, just maybe, we don’t face a binary choice between dictatorship and the recent chaos. But, second, that it’s always good to be reminded of the benefits of our democracy. Being able to dispense swiftly with leaders making big mistakes is important, as a US stuck with Trump for four years demonstrated. And there are some specific advantages for us economic researchers.
