This exchange from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass came up in conversation this morning:
“I can't believe that!” said Alice.
“Can't you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said; “one can't believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
I shared my thought.
The Queen was clearly not a neoliberal economist in that case. They have to believe many more impossible things, well before breakfast, and for the rest of their lives.
They even have a degree in it at Oxford. It's called PPE.
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I laughed first and then I felt depressed. I wanted to study economics from the age of 16, did it by A-Level and by 18 (because of the neo-liberal syllabus) thought the whole subject was a junk science and gave up the idea of studying it further.
25 years later I would love to study the real subject of economics, the one that was taught in universities before neo-liberalism took over, but I don’t think that would be possible in any university, certainly not in the UK.
Are there any books you would recommend as a primer for someone with only a very scant knowledge of the subject?
I know of none, no.
Steve Keen does a course. On the web I don’t know how basic it is/
There are also quite a number of Steve Keen’s old lectures on line eg, :
Alternative economics 1 Credit, Islamic Finance, & Preventing Economic Crises
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lozVUufHXzo
Lecture 07: Why the Euro is destroying Europe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lozVUufHXzo
Crash Course in Non-Equilibrium Economics Lecture 1A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb7Tmk2OABo&list=PLqs7-zw9kiAKld49M_6xpPYL4TK_1XRzp
see his youtube channel ProfSteveKeen for some of his lectures :
https://www.youtube.com/@profstevekeen/courses
When I studied A level Economics between 1963 and 1965 Economic History contributed 50% of the final mark.( probably explaining how I got an A!) Our teacher had been influenced by Keynes, but nevertheless, we were schooled in the traditional graphs of ‘ demand and supply’ etc, but I always regarded them as a branch of logic- once one embraced the idea of the ‘rational ‘ man or woman, then all else followed… The Econometrics of an university course finally put me off economics for many years, while I concentrated on the real world of making sure that ‘micro economics’ worked for me. It is only in the past few years , helped by following Richard Murphy’s blog that I have come to see the bigger picture. However, even now the world of Gilts and Bonds remain shrouded in a complex jargon which I am sure the participants understand, but I am sure few of our fellow citizens know about, however much they might affect their lives. I am now at the stage of life when I am asked to explain the relative merits of the different sorts of ISA’S to my grand daughters- it is not something I can do as I have only ever ‘invested’ in something I know about-land and livestock. I have advised them to follow the two Lewis’s-Paul and Martin!
Thanks, Ann
Sheep will always be more valuable than bonds, in a very real way.
As someone wearing similar shoes, books that have helped me include:
The Deficit Myth, Stephanie Kelton. USA based but generally applicable.
Where Does Money Come From, Various. Got me started.
Macroeconomics, Mitchell, Wray. This is reputed to be the only truly MMT based economics textbook intended for an undergraduate course, written by the founders of MMT. I found the early chapters useful but it soon turns into heavily detailed, academic treacle that I have not the willpower to wade through alone.
I just stumbled over a news this morning that apparently the amercian extreme athlete Rob Lea has managed in 17 years to climb the “7 summits” (the worlds highest mountains” and swam through the “Oceans Seven”, like the English Channel which have distances between 22 and 34 km.
I’m not judging if this is useful or not.
Just looking at it I’d say it’s impossible to do.
Yet he imagined these in my eyes impossible things, thought them possible and then tried his best to do them.
It all starts with imagination.
That’s why I think having an idea of a possible better economy is helping already, an idea a lot of especially neoliberal people seem to deem impossible.
So you can think of yourself as some sort of an extreme athlete of the mind.
That said: for every athlete the pauses between the actions are the most important thing so that a good recovery is possible.
So take care and rest well. 🙂
I would never have thought those things impossible.
Profit maximisation is.
Utility maximisation, more so.
My 1960s Penguin History of the 20th Century school textbook explained very clearly how the Govt ( and almost everyone else ) got it wrong in the 1931 crisis. Very few would have disagreed with the explanation in the 60s.
The early 1960s saw a refusal to devalue, resulting in higher interest rates and a lack of investment until we were forced into it. This was due to the demands of the City.
Then in 1971 Heath introduced the Competition and Credit Control Act which allowed shadow banking. The value of my house doubled in three years -my income didn’t. It was repealed before he left office. Inflation rose.
Then we had monetarism-the answer to inflation in the late 70s. Abandoned before the 1983 election.
1992 the ERM project abandoned with 15% interest rates.
Then both parties adopted ‘light touch regulation’ of the City. Then 2008 and the Global Financial crisis
then ‘Austerity’ which failed to deliver.
Then Brexit.
Today the mantra is ‘we must cut “welfare” ‘.
If only we had not given up on Keynes and developing his ideas, and chose to believe impossible things. The choices mainly came from one section of society.
Thanks, Ian.
Neoliberals need to be subjected to this sort of ridicule. They need to be laughed at.
‘To reassure people (these days), you only have to deny the facts” Robert Bresson.
Indeed. And if you cite uncomfortable facts, you are often seen as part of the ‘problem’.
But I think it goes further than that. Facts nowadays seem to matter less than the beliefs people hold about them. If you can shape those beliefs, you can shape how people interpret reality and, ultimately, how they behave. It seems to me that controlling the narrative has become so important.
Controlling narratives about beliefs looks to be a basic strategy employed in different forms by figures such as Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and Nigel Farage: politics becomes less about engaging with facts than about shaping perception. Once belief takes precedence over evidence, denial itself can become more persuasive than fact, as you point out.
I did not expect, in my later years, to see the Enlightenment treated as a brief interruption in a much longer history in which belief often outweighed evidence. I fear that, in Western societies at least, the balance may, like a pendulum, be shifting again.
But what has scienec revealed that is true?
It is, on the whiole, just another human narrative.
Descartes has a lot to answer for.
Replying to Richard
“Voltaire’s Bastards” by Ralston-Saul does a pretty good demolition of what followed from the “enlightenment”,
Greaber & Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything expose the “intellectual heritage” of “the enlightenment” /fraud of the enlightenment.
& yes, the Red Queen has here uses.
Thanks
Well here we are again. Apparently we need to increase spending on defence. But we are told that the only way we can afford to do it is by cutting spending on social security.
Inequality is returning to levels seen in the Edwardian era – with a new gilded aristocracy and an impoverished mass population – but it is the old, and the young, and the sick, and the poor that have to suffer to pay for guns and bombs and tanks and drones.
It does not have to be like this. There are alternatives.
Agreed
Re Prof. Murphy’s reply to me at 4:35pm.
With the greatest respect I would like to clarify the point I was making in my conclusion. I think what distinguishes science from other human narratives is the falsifiability of its claims.
Following Karl Popper, the key point is not that science delivers certainty, but that empirical scientific claims are structured around falsifiability: they are claims that can, in principle, be shown to be false by observation.
Furthermore science is not just about being capable of being refuted in theory, but about what happens when a claim is refuted in practice. When a claim fails empirical testing, the norm is that it is revised or abandoned. Of course, some scientific claims are difficult to falsify, so competing claims can persist for a long time.
In my view that makes science fundamentally different from narratives driven primarily by belief or identity, where disconfirming evidence is often reinterpreted or resisted rather than accepted as a reason to change position.
The scientific method has also redistributed epistemic authority. Because empirical claims must answer to public, repeatable observation rather than authority or tradition, it has enabled ordinary people to challenge even the most powerful institutions and inherited beliefs. Take medicine as an example. Whether a treatment works should be determined by evidence from well-conducted clinical trials, not by the status or authority of those making the claim.
So while science is certainly a human activity and embedded in culture, for me it is not “just another narrative”. It is a disciplined method for correcting our narratives against reality, letting reality, rather than belief, have the final say.
I did not explain myself well enough.
I have too much experience of verifiability to believe it credible.
I am not alone. Take this from The Guardian:
“Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point
The same issue is found in social sciences.
The issue is rampant: papers have been withdrawn from Nature. Major medical journals admit that they cannot very often confirm verifiability of data, and corruption is real.
So, you are basing your claim – which is just a hypothesis, not a fact – on something without evidence to support it. In fact, I suggest your claim is just a narrative, not a fact, and one which can be shown to be without substantial support in the modern world.
That is my claim. It is rational, and justified. There is only narrative because we create the structures of verifiability.
Love this. It made me laugh. And I could do with a laugh!