Edward Heath is a British politician, one-term Prime Minister (1970-1974), and recently-retired Father of the House of Commons at Westminster in London. Heath is mostly remembered by the public for his legendary promise, made before the General Election of 1970, to ``cut prices at a stroke'' if he and his Conservative Party won the election.
As Barry Phelps, in the Dictionary of Misquotations (Macmillan, 1995), puts it: ``It says much about the public that they believed this impossible promise and then damned Heath for failing to fulfil it. Heath - whose main problem is being so intelligent that he can't understand ordinary people - never said anything so silly."
This is what Heath actually said: ``The alternative is to break into the wages/ prices spiral by acting directly to reduce prices. This can be done by reducing those taxes which bear directly on prices and costs, such as the Selective Employment Tax, and by taking a firmer grip on public sector prices and charges such as coal, steel, gas, electricity, transport and postal charges. This would, at a stroke, reduce the rise in prices, increase production and reduce unemployment."
So what did he mean? Mathematicians should get it right, if anyone
can!
He did not talk of cutting prices (P(t) takes a step down), nor
even
of stopping prices rising ([ dP/dt] £ 0). He talked only of
reducing the rate at which prices were rising
([ dP/dt] takes a dip). What does that actually mean? Some
graphs may help:
Or did he, perhaps, mean only reducing the rate of increase of inflation? The second derivative of P jumps down at a stroke - as in this diagram:
But P¢¢(t) may not actually become negative, as shown here. It may simply step down so that the inflationary spiral continues (P¢(t) continues to increase), but (thanks to Heath) not quite so steeply. Can you draw the corresponding graphs of P(t),P¢(t),P¢¢(t)? After all, no other language can approach the precision of mathematics. More controversially, perhaps no politician without a mathematics qualification should be trusted with high office!
For the record, here is Edward Heath's own description of the incident in his Autobiography:
Politicians need to be on constant guard against slips
of the tongue which can help their opponents, but sometimes they can run
into trouble even when they are careful to make their meaning clear. On
the last day of the 1970 election campign there was an incident of this
kind.... [He then quotes the words given above] This was perfectly
true. One hardly needs a First Class degree in economics to see that
removing a tax on an item will directly reduce its market price, thereby
increasing the purchasing power of people's wages and reducing
inflationary pressures. At the time the words made no impact at all. It
took Jim Callaghan six weeks before he raised the matter in the House of
Commons, distorting that phrase into a promise that, as soon as we were
elected, the cost of goods in the shops would go down.