What Britain needs is another museum. No, really. Amid all the hand-wringing about whether Britain’s economic destiny lies in or out of the European Union, there is a clear need for a place to visit that can help people discover how money works.
A Brexit deal may have been passed and this election will be a distant memory whenever the museum opens its doors, but with financial education at such a low ebb, a centre that facilitates the discussion of modern-day market capitalism (and its alternatives) must be worth the relatively small outlay.
It could be called a Money Museum or a Centre for Understanding Economics, but whatever its name, there is a value in such an institution and it’s a value that other nations understand.
In Paris, the French recently opened the Cité de l’Économie, or Citéco. In 2018, Germany’s central bank revamped the shiny glass and steel Money Museum that sits alongside its Frankfurt HQ. And there are several in the US.
Almost 40 years of Thatcherite policymaking, which has dumped the responsibility for curating a secure financial future on the individual rather than the state, has left the country in need of a place that can help people figure out what is going on. And the need is more pressing now that we are in the midst of a climate emergency, and water-cooler conversations cover topics from international trade and customs unions to the rise of electronic currencies such as bitcoin.
Many of Margaret Thatcher’s disciples promised an increase in funding for financial education to put consumers on an even footing with the financial services industry. Unfortunately the sums have been pathetic. At the last count, the Money Advice Service said regulators, banks, and charities spent about £18m a year on educating the young about money.
There is a money museum of sorts in the UK. Its entrance is tucked away up the side of the Bank of England’s imposing headquarters in London’s Square Mile.
The Bank is currently considering ways of revamping the space with a view to giving it a more contemporary feel. At the moment, about 100,000 visitors a year tour the museum (entry is free) looking at assorted displays, mostly in cabinets, that tell the story of how the bank came into being and how it works now.
This is not a place where the public can discover how companies account for their money, how the environmental effects of economic growth can be measured or how economic wellbeing is judged.
By some accounts, the Citéco in Paris, which is housed in a sumptuous neo-Renaissance palace, also qualifies as worthy but dull. Or at least not as exciting as it should be after the French spent €50m renovating the building and installing a range of interactive exhibits.
It expects to attract 130,000 people a year even though it charges a hefty €12 entry fee for adults and €6 for school-age children.
The gold-standard museum is the Interactive Museum of Economics (Mide) in Mexico City, where the central bank recruited sponsors from the finance industry to help transform an old central bank office into the most interactive and innovative museum of its kind.
Billed as the world’s first and only interactive economics museum, it has an annual budget of £2m and a staff of 110 (the Bank of England’s employs a handful).
In one room visitors can immerse themselves in a simulated trading floor, guided by virtual-reality headsets. At the entrance to another, marked Future of Money, visitors are handed a tablet computer to aid their discovery.
A spokesman was keen to emphasise how farsighted the museum is. “We always try to tie economics to nature,” he said, “because economics starts in nature and ends in nature. In this way we try to relate everything in the museum to people as economic actors.”
Entry is £4 for adults and £3 for students, but this hasn’t deterred the 250,000 people who have visited every year since it opened almost 13 years ago.
When both political parties are making huge spending promises, it would be relatively painless to set aside funds for an interactive museum. There are several science museums around the country; why not a proper economics museum?
Like Mexico’s version, it should do more than just explain how the central bank works. Schools would then have access to a crucial resource: something that would promote discussion in times that are, Brexit or no Brexit, economically more uncertain than any we have seen since the second world war.
