The sugared-almond theory of economic consequence

Let me ease you gently into a big and boring-sounding word for a small dishonesty that today corrupts the language of politics. Doubtless we shall be encountering it (though never by name) in Rachel Reeves’s looming Budget.

If you step away from levying the new taxes you must then cut the goodies they were to pay for

But we’ll start at my mother’s knee. I was five, and she was teaching me reading: an activity I viewed with displeasure. I did, however, like sugar-coated almonds – very much. So Mum undertook to give me one sugar-coated almond for every chapter I read aloud to her from my First Reading Book. It did not occur to me to quantify cost and reward or question the rate of exchange between one sugar-coated almond and one chapter read aloud, nor wonder whether I could quit my studies if we ran out of sweets. The transactionality of the deal, delivered from on high, came to me as a fact. Sweets had duties attached. Drudgery came with sugar.

In boyhood I was to encounter these exchanges frequently, especially when we little Parrises wanted something that cost money. If we were to have a holiday this summer, Daddy would have to delay the arrival of my first bicycle to pay for it. If we didn’t stop for a cream tea on our way back from the beach, Mum could afford to take us to the cinema to see The Wizard of Oz. There were funds for one or the other but not both.

And this goes with the grain of human nature. The linkage between the thing desired and the thing denied may be fanciful but there’s enough truth in the lie to give it an easily grasped plausibility. No pain, no gain.