The Economist Jim O’ Neill

THE FORMER COMMERCIAL SECRETARY TO THE TREASURY ON LEVELLING UP, THE MINTS AND LIFE AT GOLDMAN SACHS

doing – and which everyone should do –is to walk, as it’s very good for the mind. During 2021, walking has kept me sane. I actually listened to a programme on Radio 4, and there was an advert about mental illness describing how the best way to combat that condition is to walk. If you ask me the best way to unwind is put on trainers and walk to work. We’ve been in a pressure cooker this past 18 months and I think it’s good for the soul.

The other thing I do is watch box sets late at night. By far the best we’ve watched so far has been Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, which simply can’t be outdone.

I’m asked sometimes which politician is the most misunderstood – I’d say definitely Theresa May. She can be amazingly passionate about a cause, especially on behalf of her constituents.

I saw this in action recently. She came up to me in the House of Commons and said, “Nadhim, I really need to talk to you”. And I thought, ‘Wow, where is all this energy coming from?’.”

When I think back on what we did in the vaccines programme it was extraordinary. It was a truly impressive coming together of institutions, with the NHS at the centre of the core delivery mechanism, but people don’t know how absolutely embedded our Armed Forces were in that whole process. I particularly salute Brigadier Phil Prosser, who is the commander of the 101 Logistics brigade and is brilliant at delivering things to remote terrains and geographies around the world, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I should add that the private sector has played an equally important role, with Boots and Superdrug at the back end of the chain. At the front end DHL has done a great job delivering the vaccines to the primary care networks. It was a real coming together of the private and public sectors. That’s before you count the 80,000 vaccinators that have gone through the training programme – or the 200,000 volunteers that have come forward to be marshals and receptionists.

Brigadier Prosser described it best. He said: “Minister, we’re building a supermarket chain in about a month, and we’re going to grow it about 20 per cent every week.” And I said: “That’s right, Brigadier, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

I’ve never been a great policy man, or a think tanker. I love operational challenges, and I was grateful to the prime minister for picking up the phone in mid November, and saying, “Nadhim, I want you to do this job for your country.” It was a great privilege to do. Of course, the press can sometimes make top-flight politics stressful. But the media have a job to do. This is a democracy. I will take an aggressive free press any day over a dictator. You only have to look at what’s happening to Russia, or to the Uyghur people in China. A free press is what makes this country truly great. Is it challenging? No doubt. Can it be frustrating? Absolutely. But I value that freedom far more than I lament the challenges that come with it.

After my paper published by Goldman Sachs coining the term ‘the BRICs’ – which referred to Brazil, Russia, China and India as crucial emerging markets – I used to engage with other countries’ finance ministers. Occasionally I’d find countries annoyed not to have been included in the acronym.

In 2013, I coined the term the MINTs, to take into account Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey – all of which seemed to me interesting countries. Today, the country that has the biggest viable basis for being irritated that it wasn’t included in the BRICs acronym is Indonesia. It’s a very interesting place – it’s another significant commodities producer, but it has weathered the past decades better than Brazil or Russia. Of course, what makes Indonesia additionally interesting is that it’s a very large Muslim country that practises reasonably openly quite a few aspects of modern capitalism. So it has very positive demographics.

In terms of conceptual potential, I’m also very interested in Nigeria – though there you’re talking not in the next 20 years but in the next 40. If that crazy place could have a proper economic policy framework it would become extremely big in the African context as its demographics are just incredible. It’s an extremely young population with great capacity for productivity. This is where economic outcomes come down to political leadership. Brazil, Russia and Nigeria have all been impacted by poor governance, and we’ve seen that with India this year with the virus. In 2000, I developed the

Global Sustainability Growth Index, which included around 190 countries. We statistically examined hundreds of variables, and ended up including about 15 that seem especially important for economic growth. Among the things that really matter is the strength of a country’s institutional framework.

That index today shows China scoring much higher than any of the other BRIC countries – and interestingly India scores lower than Russia or Brazil in spite of its spectacular demographics. But we have our own inequality and problems here at home – I hope Boris Johnson is genuine about his levelling up agenda. He’s only been in power a relatively short period of time, and because of Covid and for a long time we didn’t have a proper budget or multspending review: everything’s been a policy response. Boris seems to struggle with rhetoric and the whole idea that a prime minister should under-promise and over-deliver. He’s raised very big expectations – and these are things that will take a long time to deliver on. So far, there’s very little evidence that he is delivering on it.

I retain a close friendship with George Osborne, and with Whitehall officials. When I worked in government, to my pleasant surprise I found the quality of the staff in the Treasury to be just as good as at Goldman Sachs – but with greater public spirit. The hard thing for me was that I wasn’t a member of the Labour Party; I was there to execute a technical role. But I was surrounded by ministers who were obsessed with where they were in terms of political horsetrading.

I found their motives troubling. They would decide what to support based on how it would help them in their next job, which is extremely different to Goldman Sachs. Even within the same party, competing ideologies were different - often irreconcilably so. In that sense, I witnessed first-hand the ridiculous developments within the Conservative Party: I was shocked as to how crazy it was.

By comparison, I was lucky at Goldman. They were mad enough to offer me a partnership to join – I was only the fifth. They’d taken on a lot of risk themselves. But I was daunted – then as now, the image of Goldman was intimidating from the outside. It was full of remarkably smart and incredibly driven people. They had 300 people in the place with their own views on the dollar –many of whom were smarter than me. But it really is a meritocracy in there. So long as I delivered the goods, nobody gave a damn about my background.