Wherever you look for comment about the economy, the pundits tell you that George Osborne's policy is failing because there is next to no growth. The impression given is that growth is out there, and it's just Osborne's wilful stupidity which is preventing us from getting any.
Leaving aside a consideration I've often mentioned previously (that growth isn't the only measure of economic success), this is wrong: actually all the evidence suggests that there probably isn't going to be much in the way of growth any time soon, no matter what the Chancellor does.
During the Gordon Brown boom, the main drivers of growth were borrowing by consumers, borrowing to buy houses and, after about 2001, government borrowing. All these debt drivers are more or less exhausted. Government spending is flat, consumers are retrenching and the housing market is stagnant. Even if there were no other considerations, it would be irrational to look for pre-Credit Crunch growth levels.
But there are other considerations. The EU is flat on its back. How are we going to export our way out of trouble when one of our biggest trading partners isn't buying?
And yet despite all that, the commentariat generally assumes that if only the Chancellor could press the right buttons, pre-2007 levels of growth would return (incidentally, those levels of growth were distinctly modest - the trend rate was about 2.5%). They remind me of those fabled South Sea cargo cultists, forever waving at passing aeroplanes from their balsa wood control towers, planes perhaps towing banners marked "Economic Nirvana".
What to make of this? It seems to me that journalists reflect to some degree the views of the population at large, perhaps better informed in some cases but blinkered, prejudiced and lazy in others.
Most people in Britain know bugger all about economics. Most people think "it was all the bankers' fault" without asking themselves what the bankers were doing (finding more and more ingenious ways to lend money to people that couldn't repay it). Most people think we could return to pre-2007 levels of growth without asking themselves where that growth came from and whether the forces that drove it can be repeated.
Most people, in other words, don't understand that 2007 represented a watershed in the West's economic history. We exported our wealth creating capacity to the Far East and the Credit Crunch represents a crisis in our ability to paper over the resulting funding gaps by borrowing from Far Eastern economies.
I worry what will happen when people work out the true significance of what has happened; and I worry a little more about what will happen if they carry on deluding themselves.
So, growth, the elusive pimpernel. Elusive pimple, more like.
