Economy: Growth

Lord Kestenbaum Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kestenbaum]

My Lords, I begin by expressing gratitude for the generosity and warmth with which I have been received into your Lordships’ House. I have experienced kindness and consideration from everyone I have encountered. I have also discovered that the wisdom residing in this House is quite extraordinary. My sponsors, my noble friends Lord Sainsbury and Lord Puttnam, did much to ease my nerves, and the dedicated staff have been a remarkable source of guidance—in one case literally, as a distinguished doorkeeper gently stopped me from walking straight into a broom cupboard on my very first day here.

Perhaps this challenge of losing and then regaining one’s bearings is an appropriate personal metaphor. As my family name, Kestenbaum, indicates, home until the traumas of the 20th century was Germany. Leipzig and Frankfurt were our origins. At the time when Europe turned dark, our family, together with millions of endangered others, fled. It was a circuitous route, first to the United States and then to Japan, where I was born, then back to the US, and finally, as a child, to Britain. It was here that our community learnt that this country did not expect you to make a choice between loyalty to one’s faith and loyalty to the national interest while both are pursued with dignity.

But as I enter into this debate on economic growth, it is no coincidence that I should reflect on the two economies in which I grew up: Japan and the United States. My parents, while bringing up a young family in Japan, saw at first hand what has since been dubbed the Japanese economic miracle, a transformation in the standard of living powered by growth. But the lost decade of the 1990s, as it became known, is yet to be found. The United States, our family’s pre-war refuge, became the world’s largest economy not least by virtue of new technologies which saw GDP per head grow sevenfold in the 20th century. But despite this, more recently President Obama has said that the US economy, in order to grow, will need to reach a level of innovation not seen since the space race. So I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hollick for calling urgent attention to this matter. We are now learning the same lesson as those other economies—that growth is not a national birthright, and the heady days when economic power was concentrated in the hands of a few are over.

In recent years my colleagues and I have been privileged to back some of Britain’s brightest young entrepreneurs. During my time as CEO of NESTA, and now as chief executive of Lord Rothschild’s family investment interests, we have scrutinised thousands of business plans and met hundreds of young high-tech innovators; and I have watched their concerns, particularly among a group of young entrepreneurs in Manchester with whom I worked closely. Those talented graduates did not just want to build new businesses, they wanted to feel that the embrace of new ideas and new technologies was central to our national purpose. The prize is great. Research published last week by NESTA entitled Vital growth shows that these fast-growing, innovative businesses continue to punch way above their weight, with just 7 per cent creating half of the new jobs. As your Lordships consider ways to increase this number, we might also consider the lessons of those Mancunian entrepreneurs. Innovation has to be embedded in our culture—it must be central to the national story.

This national culture of innovation so often provokes false choices, either a constant flurry of well-intentioned interventions or staying firmly out of the way. After all, say some, Thomas Edison did not need state aid to create the incandescent lamp—a lot of pluck and a little luck was all it took, so the argument goes. Yet an economic culture that produced innovators like Edison and others did not emerge by chance. Edison benefited from a postal service, new roads, public libraries and a stable banking system. All these were the public goods that made innovation flourish and showed how economic growth is built on a tapestry of skills, science, finance and regulation all working in tandem.

So often this interplay takes place where one might least expect it. Many of the high-tech entrepreneurs that I have worked with in recent years took their inspiration from Silicon Valley. The conventional wisdom is that, “There’s an economy entirely sustained by individuals”, and yet, subtle and intelligent public policy is everywhere in Silicon Valley. Defence spending funded a generation of microwave technology there that created the foundations for the semiconductor industry; the procurement strategies of DARPA kick-started hundreds of technology businesses. This combination of technological talent, supportive public policy and effective financing mechanisms is at the heart of great innovation economies.

This debate focuses quite rightly on the conditions for economic growth, but perhaps I may make one final, wider observation. Growth as a public policy imperative can do much: it can create jobs; it can reduce welfare dependency; it can over time help finance public services—it can do all these things at its best. But rapid economic growth simply for the relentless pursuit of wealth alone will do nothing for the long-term health of our nation. Economies never measured progress by the yardstick of growth in isolation, but, rather, how that growth made for a better society. So this debate, I suggest, is as much about the society that we wish to build as it is about the economy which will help build it.

I offer thanks to your Lordships’ House for giving me the opportunity to make my maiden speech on a subject that I feel will underpin many of our concerns in the months ahead.