A little less bombast and a little more humility, Mr Cameron Sometimes humility does not go amiss. Britain's politicians once understood the worth of self-deprecation. This thought came to mind the other day when David Cameron tipped up in Davos to tell Angela Merkel how to run her economy. Did Mr Cameron really imagine that the German chancellor was ready to be lectured by a British prime minister? A smidgen of self-awareness might have suggested otherwise. Britain's politicians - Tory and Labour alike - are fond of reminding the world how clever they were to stay out of the single currency. The implication is that Britain boasts an economic performance to put the eurozone to shame. Well, not quite. Mr Cameron presides over a budget deficit to rival that of Greece, a fast-rising debt burden and an inflation rate double the European average. Living standards are falling, growth has stalled and unemployment is rising. There is no one old enough in Whitehall to recall the last time Britain ran a current account surplus. If one is to believe British policymakers, the economy's big strength is, well, the ability to weaken further a chronically weak pound. It used to be that central banks took a dim view of devaluation. Nowadays, the Bank of England celebrates sterling's fall. Perhaps it has a point. Few can match the British when it comes to debasing their own currency. Mr Cameron is not the first tenant of Downing Street to tell the rest of Europe how to conduct its affairs. Gordon Brown was always boasting about his superior intellectual grasp of matters macroeconomic. Tony Blair used to nag Gerhard Schroeder about the need for structural reforms. Margaret Thatcher was scathing about the attachment of continental Europeans to the social dimension of the market economy. I don't blame Mr Cameron. His script was written in the Treasury. This is an institution not often troubled by self-doubt; nor one that pays much attention to its own record. Since the 1970s, Britain has been blessed with two great opportunities to transform its economic fortunes. The Treasury has squandered both. The first was North Sea oil. Then came the liberalisation of international capital markets, which turned London into a global financial hub. These windfalls might have been invested in the nation's future - in boring things such as infrastructure and education. Norway put its share of the North Sea bounty into a fund for future generations. Britain has frittered it away to boom and bust. In the years before the global financial crash, the Treasury believed its own rhetoric about abolishing the economic cycle. It overestimated tax revenues from the City and underestimated public borrowing. The mantra of light touch regulation encouraged the banks to take outrageous risks. Germany, of course, has had its share of economic challenges. Reunification brought a decade of sluggish growth. Restoring competitiveness after the creation of the euro meant a ferocious squeeze on living standards. Berlin was among the first to break the Maastricht criteria on deficits. Nonetheless, German industry is the envy of its global competitors. Technological edge and quality have made the country the world's second-largest exporter. More recently, the government has put public finances into better order, growth has been driven by domestic demand and unemployment has fallen. Economies are shaped by political and cultural preferences. The Germans like saving and fear inflation - a natural response to the country's demographics as well as its history. German industry takes a long-term view, prizing investment over short-term returns. The education system values technical as well as academic accomplishment. There is no reason why the British, or anyone else, should share these preferences. As it happens, Mr Cameron also has a point when he talks about Germany's particular responsibilities in the eurozone. If it wants the single currency to survive, Berlin will have to accept more of the burden of current account adjustments. But telling Germans to work less, to borrow more, and to produce shoddy cars and machine tools is not the answer. Does it ever occur to Mr Cameron's Treasury advisers, I wonder, that they could learn something from Germany about economic management?