A commentator named Andtew R on this blog asked yesterday whether there was academic thought and a literature review that supported the suggestion I have made over the last couple of days that all wars happen as a result of exploitation of an expediently perceived current economic advantage that an aggressor believes that they enjoy at the time that they launch an attack on their opponent.
A part of the comment he made was:
I'm following this with interest, but conscious that there will have been decades (centuries) of study about the causes of war, including economic causes. Any thoughts I have are starting from scratch, but I don't think I want to take an MA in War studies either. Does anyone know of a relevant literature review?
I responded to this one issue as follows:
Let me be clear, I don't care. One of the pleasures of no longer working as an academic is that I will no longer have to do literature reviews.
Nor will I have to fit my arguments into an existing structure of thinking.
Even more so, I will not have to just dot i's and cross t's.
The whole process of academic publishing that now exists is designed to:
1) Crush original thinking
2) Make current academics the slaves of some past model of thinking that long ceased to be relevant
3) As a result, perpetuate the status quo.
Two things follow:
- a) Academia is the last place to look for original thinking. Academics are trained to not do that: you cannot progress if you do.
- b) Academia produces the most extraordinary volume of utterly meaningless so-called research. I have seen recent suggestions that at least fifty per cent of all medical papers are simply wrong: they compare a thesis with a null hypothesis that is so absurd that there is no research contribution from the work undertaken, and so no contribution to learning. I saw the same suggested with regard to accounting research last week as well. I strongly suspect that is also right.
I am doing something quite different here.
I am doing original thinking. These are my ideas.
I am taking the risk that they may be wrong. This is a risk I am permitted to take. No one can deny it to me.
And what I stress is that only by taking the risk of undertaking original thinking, free from the requirement to base it in thinking and frameworks that exist solely to constrain such an activity, can progress be made.
If you want to know why the world is stagnating, this is one of the biggest explanations. The supposed world of thinking not only does not think, but it is also trained not to do so. Of course we cannot progress. I am free of having to try to comply with that constraint now.
Let me summarise this: if you want to change the world, you cannot believe that everything thought about it to date is right. Isn't that pretty obvious?
I might, of course, have added that the fact that this is obvious is well known to those imposing the constraint on academics. They are the older academics who have invested their lives in learning, refining and regurgitating to students ideas that might well be wrong. They have no desire for their comfortable lives to be disrupted in the later parts of their careers. Of course they wish to suppress original thinking, and they have set up a system to guarantee that can almost never happen.
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The archetypal example of constrained academic thinking is (neoliberal) economics.
It has been pointed out elsewhere that Higgs, of Boson fame only ever published one paper which these days would have meant being shown the door BUT of course he was spot on when he did.
These days there seems to be an obsession with ‘publishing’ which the owners of the Journals papers are published in make huge profits from.
I assume that these days Keynes would never have been allowed an academic career.
I think you might want to go away and check that ‘fact’ about Peter Higgs (and in a post about lack of original thought!). He was not what would be considered prolific today, but he did publish ~ 30 papers during his career.
All too true I find. I have over the years kept in touch with some of my professors with whom I did my MBA. When I try to talk about MMT it gets me know where, yet they will always tell me to keep on learning! I find it puzzling. But also with one or two of them I can see that they have been beaten back by the system they are in, especially in more recent times – they have genuinely tried to use some of the methods taught to us without success to improve their own organisations.
Like business and the public sector these days, academia likes change if it results in a reorganising of resources upwards to management. To do anything other than that is impossible because really, unless it is about self interest, things don’t /won’t get done.
Much to agree with
Academia does not like original thinking, because if it is right, then academia is wrong.
Research that supports academia is guaranteed support and praise from the Ivory Tower.
We can perhaps point the finger of blame at John D. Rockefeller for the state we are in. He is credited with saying “I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers,” and then he captured the education system to make sure it pushed his vision of economics, nutrition and pharmaceuticals.
See “The Dark Truth of the Educational System Shaped by John D. Rockefeller” (2023)
https://medium.com/@sofialherani/the-dark-truth-of-the-educational-system-shaped-by-john-d-rockefeller-77bf1b0167dd
Thanks
Good stuff. My own experience with respect to elec market reform is that academics simply parrot conventional wisdom (our market which art in heaven etc). Most of the papers are trash & build circular arguments (“Late Soviet Britain” goes into considerable detail on this). No original thinking allowed & those that try are regarded as Attilla the Hun figures
I was looking at Wikipedia the other day and I see that they have a formal rule preventing the posting of original or unverified opinion.
I can see some logic to that but it does rather protect the status quo.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_content_policies
The issue is, there’s enough crank “thought” out there to overwhelm any system. And now “AI” (plausibility engines) can spam that stuff out faster than you can ever read it. So without a low level “some human must have already considered this worthy *elsewhere*” filter, it would be swamped with crankery.
Or, we reinforce the status quo.
This agrees with the comments Gary Stevenson was making recently about academic economics – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CivlU8hJVwc .
Gary is an interesting one. He clearly knows something is wrong and I admire the fact he’s trying to change system but he was educated at the LSE so his thinking is constrained by neoclassical economics.
That would seem so?
Gary Stevenson seems pretty unimpressed with the economics education he received. He’s focussed on inequality and on making taxation more progressive, also on pointing out that most of our media is paid to try and divert us into division and hatred. I’m not arguing with that.
But he wants wealth taxes – and they can’t work.
He might find the taxing wealth report interesting reading if anyone has him on social media
“If everyone is thinking the same, then somebody isn’t thinking” ?
Special mention for Sabine Hossenfelder. I saw her speak a couple of years ago about how physics – particle physics in particular – has become so obsessed with looking for proof of an elegant, symmetrical, standard model that they have stopped considering any other options and it’s just become a gravy train powered by funding for ever-bigger particle accelerators.
I have to say I saw and immediate parallel with mainstream economics.
This video should give you an idea of what Sabine is fighting againts – https://digital-science.slack.com/archives/C04TEL819AR/p1741104257933719
After comprehensive training as a Surgical Tech in the US and working in the OR at Johns Hopkins for five years, I was expected to retrain to work in the NHS. Our core curriculum in America was based on ‘Alexander’s Care of the Patient in Surgery’ and several other hefty text books. I was truly shocked to discover that university-led training in the UK consisted of finding articles in ‘learned journals’ that you might assume were relevant to the learning objectives that you weren’t being taught! We were expected to submit reading logs based on this random selection of articles. Disgracefully, the lectures to support this format contained more information on referencing the material in these articles and less on imparting the barest minimum of necessary knowledge.
This haphazard system of self-teaching creates massive gaps in the information required by trainees in preparation for safe practice in the NHS. My US training demanded many hours devoted to practicing in the skills lab before we were allowed to enter the hospital setting. However, despite my university here having rooms full of operating theatre equipment available for us to practice the necessary skills, we barely spent more than a few brief ‘show-and-tell’ sessions in these clinical areas. Within a few short weeks of starting into the Operating Department Practitioner program, students were unleashed into the clinical practice setting grossly unprepared!
All of the learning goals and actual basic training of clinical skills relies on mentorship from our already overworked medical personnel teaching ‘on-the-job’ in a busy hospital setting. The UK university’s total abdication of teaching responsibility places a massive unreasonable burden on NHS staff. One of my reading logs analysed a US article on the TeamSTEPPS program that was a precursor to the Surgical Checklist that was being trialed in one theatre in the hospital I was assigned to. Because this one article was from the US, it was used as an excuse to throw out all of my written work. This was the final blow after repeated attempts to sabotage my training in response to blowing the whistle on the serious negligent practice of one of their staff.
I appreciated the dedication of several genuinely excellent practitioners who mentored me during this sadly botched retraining. However, I remain deeply concerned that the costly UK university training of ODP’s, and other practice oriented students including nurses, is following this same quasi-academic self-instruction and learn-on-the-job format. This must change, as it is placing an unacceptable burden on NHS staff who have less and less time for teaching. With the ever increasing course fees, the very least UK universities should be charged with doing is providing the comprehensive knowledge and skills practice training to adequately prepare students before they enter our hospitals.
Referencing. The mist ridiculous academic obsession in 2025. Get it wrong and go down a grade. Do nit use the right version fir a journal and get a rejection. And why? Just because a f***ing convention requires it. Just use a weblink FFS, academia. This is 2025. No one looks at physical journals.
An interesting thread. With academics judged on external fund raising, the prospects of questioning status-quo are diminishing. For publications in peer reviewed journals, one get disciplined by reviewers, editors and gatekeepers who rarely travel beyond the ordinary.
Just to tell one story, I fought a FOI battle with the UK state for five and half years over its cover-up of the collapse of BCCI. This poses questions about what we know, relationship between the state and finance capital and how we can interrogate politics of regulation. I wrote a paper about it and submitted it to an eminent accounting journals. The paper was rejected on the basis that it only contained one case study and the reviewer/editor recommended that you need to do more case studies. Yuh … I needed to spend decades, single-handedly locking horns with the state. Eventually, a version was published in another, not so eminent journal https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Prem-Sikka/publication/323421801_Using_freedom_of_information_laws_to_frustrate_accountability_Two_case_studies_of_UK_banking_frauds/links/5aa2d70245851543e63c2df6/Using-freedom-of-information-laws-to-frustrate-accountability-Two-case-studies-of-UK-banking-frauds.pdf
There is a bigger question about what is the role of academics in a world buffeted by corporate power where so many are available for hire to reduce public choices and consign less powerful discourses to negative spaces. Some thought are here
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228714321_The_mountains_are_still_there_Accounting_academics_and_the_bearings_of_intellectuals
Thanks Prem, and for your hard work.
Thank you and well said.
Having worked as a bank lobbyist, I’m stunned that by that rejection on the basis of a single case study.
The likes of Barclays, BlackRock, Deutsche, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, KPMG and McKinsey generate enough material for single case studies and that is only from activities that I have come across them on or am aware of.
In my time as lobbyist, I came across academics touting their services to Big Finance. They did not shock me as much the Labour centrists, in Westminster and Brussels, touting theirs and explaining how they could undermine the regulatory reaction to 2008 from 2009 – 14.
Speaking of Labour, a former Labour official is now a hired gun for Big Finance. Said former official, who undermined Corbyn from within, recently presented a paper on deregulating certain activities to the Treasury. As the person has worked in politics all their life, they don’t know much of life outside. It got embarrassing when discussions got technical and the lobbyist floundered. It seems the lobbyist was really just on an errand.
I’m not going to defend academic work output but since the late 90s I’ve been aware that the whole higher education sector has been under pressure re funding, research, teaching time, working terms and conditions, etc. I think most people don’t realise how much change much of it damaging has been wrought.
On the subject of Richards “null hypothesis” comment based on work for students and I’m thinking microbiology and experiment design. It is useful as a tool for undergraduates/graduates and tutors alike. I do agree of course it is not always appropriate.