I once enjoyed the privilege of spending a year in Germany as a visiting professor, lecturing on my then-new book, Twilight of the Money Gods (and by the way, when it comes to cliches of the beer-and-sausage life of German intellectuals, don’t knock it, there’s something to be said for evenings spent in stone-walled beer cellars talking about philosophy!). In my lecture-series, as in my book, I presented the history of economics not as the science it wants to imagine itself being, but as what essentially became the official religion of the modern state.
My lectures took place on Friday mornings, and afterwards we’d all head to the university dining-hall for lunch where we’d continue the conversation – which later spilled into the evening over beer and schnapps. Among my students were some very bright, idealistic young economists, who initially felt a bit conflicted about my lectures. The content conformed to their worldviews, but they began to wonder if they had chosen the right discipline in which to conduct their studies – if perhaps they should have done one of the more ‘humanistic’ disciplines.
I told them no, they’d done something I consider noble. The truth is, the methods and techniques of economics can offer tremendous utility when it comes to tackling the world’s problems. The challenge for them, however, was to use the tools they had, but employing them with humility, understanding that they were not actually the scientists they’d been told to believe they were, but moral guides with a very important role to play.
When I taught the PhD methods module in Cambridge’s Centre of Development Studies, I gave the students a simple lithmus-test for their theses: if their argument couldn’t be expressed in a way that any literate, curious person would understand, it wasn’t yet ready for presentation. My reasoning was simple. Unlike, say, theoretical physicists, who are apprehending realms that are beyond the grasp of simple observation, and for which data can sometimes only be inferred, all the data and behaviour described by economists are things that play out in our daily lives. Anyone observing human behaviour, and reflecting on it, is capable of crafting a narrative that makes sense of it. Economists with a good solid grounding in their discipline’s methods, like my German students, could then test those narratives rigorously to find out if they can help us to understand reality.
The problem is that economists are not currently trained to operate that way. At one time, they were, but the fetishisation of ‘economic science’ in recent decades has persuaded economics students to ignore all narratives that originate outside their walls, on the grounds they’re not scientific. Sadly, that means the narratives of economics are usually drawn from crude prejudices and dogmatic claims, which have then been put beyond critique on the grounds they are scientific. Students in economics spend years mastering the methodological and mathematical techniques that enable them to construct models. What they currently spend almost zero time doing is pondering the narratives which shape those models – and fundamentally, economics is a moral tale.
Thus, I’ve long believed that poets, novelists, artists and film-makers need to join the conversation on economics – not as substitute experts in economic methods, but as experts in the craft at which economists seldom excel: producing compelling narratives. A good novelist, for instance, will spend an inordinate amount observing people to capture the nuances and intricacies in the way they behave, right down to the way they speak. I’m not going to ask them to build an economic model for me, and economists are entitled to regard with suspicion those intellectuals with no grounding in economics who present what they call complete economic theories. But by the same token, no economist can do this if she isn’t turning to the people who’ll come up with a story that more closely approximates reality than the ideal, sometimes even bizarre worlds dreamed up in university seminar rooms.
And so, I had one of those an a-ha moments while reading Andreea Petre-Goncalves’ critique of economism – one of those occasions when you experience the alternately exhilarating and dispiriting realisation that something you’ve spent the last few years trying to pin down has been captured by someone else in the matter of a few words! What struck me most about her argument is the very perceptive observation that embedded in economics discourse has been the idea of stupidity – the notion that economics is a science, that only people trained in it can understand it, and that failure to do so renders them stupid, requiring that they be excluded from a conversation that will nonetheless have a profound impact on their lives.
If one good thing has happened in recent years in the economics discipline, it is that some of its doyens are calling for students to once again study a wider curriculum, one that includes history, the arts and literature. Of late, economics has been a big part of the problem. But done properly, done with that sort of humility, economics can be a big part of the solution.
Follow the Lockdown Diaries on Youtube and all other podcast platforms.
brixtonsubversity 