Andrew Simms, Vicky Chick and I will be discussing the above subject at the Hay Festival. Details are:
Event 302 - - Venue: Starlight Stage
Creeping climatic upheaval and corrosive global inequality are like two threads pulling apart civilisation's fabric. To survive and thrive, we face an unprecedented challenge of rapid transition. But the way we live is locked-in by an economic system, dominated by finance and obsessed with growth. Andrew Simms of the New Weather Institute discusses whether orthodox economics can effect change with Richard Murphy, the architect of Corbynomics, and Victoria Chick, one of the world's leading authorities on Keynes.
See you there?
It's also a launch event for the paperback version of The Joy of Tax.
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Hay-on-Wye is reachable from where I am- I might give it a go, health permitting-it would be good to say hello and shake your hand! Does one need to book well in advance?
Simon
No I idea how busy it will be – but I have sold out other events
Would be good to meet
Richard
@Simon. Events book out early, popular ones are likely to be gone. You will be able to pay to get in though and mill about – atmosphere is wonderful with great food and drink (soft).
That’s an interesting choice of words, and a far more interesting question that it appears: not ‘Economists’, ‘Economics’.
I can give you an easy answer to the former: we can’t change economists. It’s Neils Bohr’s bitter aphorism that new ideas never take hold in institutions by persuasion, they emerge when the old guard retire and die off and stop blocking the career progression of anyone with new ideas.
And I say ‘never’ because the economic incentives among academic and commercial and governmental economists all support the paid post-hoc rationalisation of unearned advantage and the prior justification of damaging policies that profit the few.
Very few academic economists below the age of forty and without tenure would have Picketty’s temerity in pointing out that inequality is damaging. Fewer still, forty-something and tenured, would risk their institution’s funding – or their job – by saying or even believing something as politically inconvenient as Krugman does.
And why would they? If anyone truly believes in economic incentives and a marketplace of rational economic actors in full possession of the facts, it’s an economist.
However, you asked ‘economics’, not ‘economists’, and economics is more than just economists: it’s purchasing decisions by all of us, policy decisions by politicians, strategic choices by executives and – in all we do – a product of politics.
The key, then, is to reveal rentagob economists for what they are: to point out to politicians that the evidence does not support whatever profitable rationalisation they are parroting tomorrow; to form effective back-channels to communicate to businesses that their best interests lie in the common good; and to warn those politicians who pursue agendas set by greedy fools that they are seen, and known, and that they have no monopoly on politics.
And, above all, to communicate the key point of economics: it’s not a spectator sport. We’re all participants and your rents, your earnings, your standard of living and your economic security are not ‘weather’, changing daily at an unseen whim: they are Climate, and effective collective action can change that.
The problem is that although the arguments in favour of austerity and neoliberalism are deeply flawed they resonate politically and politicians espousing them therefore win the political argument. I am not always sure whether Labour politicians espousing neoliberalism do so because they truly believe in it or because they don’t believe they can sell anything beyond neoliberalism with slightly softer edges to the electorate. One of the problems is that the media is dominated by outlets who either have a vested interest in supporting neoliberalism or, like the BBC, have been completely cowed. The other problem is that neoliberalism and austerity rests on some intuitively appealing homespun falsehoods and half truths which the majority of the electorate can easily understand and relate to, such as ‘you have to live within your means’, ‘you can’t spend the same pound more once’ or ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’. This strokes the collective ego of the electorate since they can feel wiser than the politicians.
What we need are stories such as Paul Krugman’s favourite, the Washington Babysitting Co-op, which I don’t feel has been fully unpacked, because it can counter the free-market critique (that it illustrates the evil of price-fixing) extremely effectively.
At a theoretical level I am working with others to show that without more government debt we face much bigger risk….
Shadow banking depends on government debt to work and financial market stability now requires shadow banking
So gov’t debt is at the the core of stability
We need more of it, underpinned by a promise to QE when necessary
You can say that’s sad, but it’s part of a new narrative that rewrites the state / electorate / business relationship
I’m with you. I hope the prevailing narrative can be successfully changed.