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sanity,
humanity and science post-autistic economics review In this issue: Forum on Economic Reform (Part III) - The Reform of Intellectual Property
Two Movements - The Rand
Portcullis and PAE
Forum on Economic
Reform In recent decades the alliance of neoclassical economics and neoliberalism has hijacked the term “economic
reform”. By presenting political
choices as market necessities, they have subverted public debate about what
economic policy changes are possible and are or are not desirable. This venue promotes discussion of economic
reform that is not limited to the one ideological point of view. The Reform of Intellectual Property Dean Baker (Center for Economic and Policy Research, USA)
It is remarkable that economists, who
usually view themselves as advocates of free market transactions,
unquestioningly embrace various forms of intellectual property rights,
especially copyrights and patents. Copyrights and patents are government
granted monopolies. They have their origins in the feudal guild system, not
the free market economics of Smith and Ricardo. In fact, at the end of the 19th
century, Switzerland and the Netherlands actually eliminated patent and
copyright protection, with the intent of promoting free market competition.
In spite of their feudal legacy, and their obvious status as forms of
protectionism, few economists ever question the merits of the patent and
copyright systems. This paper details the ways in which
patents in prescription drugs and medical equipment and copyrights lead to
economic inefficiencies.1 It points out that the efficiency losses
from these forms of protectionism are likely several orders of magnitude
larger than the barriers to international trade that receive so much
attention from economists. The paper also outlines alternative systems
for providing incentives for innovation and creative artistic work. In the
absence of deliberate government policy, there probably would be
under-investment in innovation and creative work, but that is not the
relevant question. The relevant question is whether the existing patent and
copyright systems are the most efficient mechanisms for supporting innovation
and creative work. That would be the question that any honest economist would
pose. The
Inefficiency of Drug Patents and Copyrights The basic argument for patents and
copyrights is straightforward. In a free market, without protections for
intellectual property, there will be under-investment in research and
creative activity like writing or recorded music or movies. As soon as an
innovation is made public, others could duplicate the process and sell a
comparable product, without having to bear the costs of the research that
allowed for the innovation. In the case of recorded music or movies, copies
can be made at minimal cost (zero cost in the Internet Age), which means that
in a free market, the original producers could not sell the products at a
high enough price to allow the creative workers to be compensated for their
work. However, the fact that a free market will under-invest in research and
creative work hardly establishes that the feudal institutions of patents and
copyrights are the most efficient way to support such work in the 21st
century. The economics profession has devoted vast amount
of research and textbook space to proving the inefficiency of various forms
of protectionism. The basic story in this work is that protectionism causes
the price to exceed the marginal cost of production. All of this work is
entirely applicable to patents and copyrights, except the impact is at least
an order of magnitude larger than with most instances of protectionism in
international trade. While tariffs and quotas rarely raise the price of goods
by more than 30 or 40 percent, patents on prescription drugs typically raise
the price of protected products by 300 to 400 percent, or more, above the
marginal cost. In some cases, patent protected drugs sell for hundreds or
thousands of times as much as the competitive market price. In the case of
copyrighted material, recorded music and video material that could be
transferred at zero cost over the Internet, instead command a substantial
price when sold as CDs, DVDs, or licensed downloads. Copyrighted software
commands even higher prices. The distortions resulting from these huge
gaps between price and marginal cost should cause an honest neo-classical
economist great pain. At the onset, the lost consumer surplus from patent and
copyright protected pricing is enormous. The basic rule on this issue is that
the size of the deadweight loss is proportional to the square of the gap
between price and marginal cost. The United States alone is projected to
spend $210 billion this year on prescription drugs. In the absence of patent
protection, the same drugs would probably cost no more than $50 billion. (The
savings would be equal to $500 per person for everyone in the country.) The
United States will spend more than $30 billion on recorded music and videos
this year, material that could be available at zero cost on the Internet. By
comparison, many economists felt the need to comment on the NAFTA agreement
in 1993 that reduced tariff barriers on imports from Mexico. At the time,
U.S. imports from Mexico were less than $40 billion a year, and the average
tariff was already less than 5 percent. Of course the deadweight losses are just
the beginning of the story. As the textbooks tell us, monopoly profits
encourage all sorts of anti-social rent-seeking behavior,
activities that we see in abundance in the case of both patent and copyright
protection. Starting with drug patents, the newspapers
are filled with stories about concealed or distorted research findings by
pharmaceutical companies who are trying to exaggerate the benefits, or minimize
the risks, associated with their drugs. The corruption from companies
pursuing monopoly rents permeates the research process. Medical journals
routinely receive and publish ghost written articles, where prominent
researchers have been paid by the industry to lend their names to company
authored papers. In the same vein, the medical experts who provide guidance
to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on drug
safety are often receiving payments from the manufacturers of the drugs they
are evaluating. The sales effort to doctors is similarly
corrupted by the pursuit of monopoly profits. According to the industry own
data, more people are employed in sales than in research, as the industry
relies on an army of salespeople to push its latest blockbuster drugs to
doctors. Often this sales effort involves dinners, trips to resorts, and
sometimes even outright kickbacks – all ways in which drug companies share a
portion of the monopoly profit that they earn by selling drugs at patent
protected prices. Monopoly profits also distort the
direction of research. According to the FDA's
classification system, roughly 70 percent of new drug approvals are for drugs
that do not represent qualitative improvements over existing drugs. While
there is little social purpose served by developing these duplicative drugs
in most instances, patent monopolies can make the development of copycat
drugs very profitable. A copycat drug can allow a firm to cash in on a
portion of the profits earned by a competitor on a blockbuster drug. In a
world with patents, the introduction of a second drug in the market will have
the beneficial effect of lowering prices to some extent (there is more
competition with two drugs than one drug), however if drugs were sold in a
competitive market, there would be little reason to pursue the development of
most copycat drugs. The fact that most new drugs fall in this copycat
category suggests that a very large share, possible a majority, of patent
supported research is wasted.2 Drug patents also distort the direction of
research by pushing it in the direction of patentable results. Research
directed at finding cures or treatments based on diet, exercise, or
environmental factors will not be pursued in a health care system that relies
exclusively on patent monopolies to finance research. This neglect can be
offset by government funding targeted specifically towards these areas, but
the patent system will direct resources elsewhere. Finally, the granting of patent monopolies
will lead to the development of a gray market, in
which unauthorized versions of patented drugs are sold. The large gap between
the patent protected price and the marginal cost of production creates
opportunities for profit in the same way that the high price of illegal drugs
like cocaine and heroin create opportunities for profit. Since these
unauthorized drugs will be sold outside of regulatory oversight (except when
they are imported from countries with well-developed regulatory systems, like
Canada), there will be limited quality control. Unauthorized drugs are likely
to be less effective than the patented drug, and possibly even harmful. In
either case, the health outcome is far from optimal. To sum up, there are a long set of
complaints against the inefficiencies associated with drug patents, all of
which should jump out of any introductory textbook treatment of protectionism
in international trade. Yet, the economic profession has been virtually
silent on the inefficiencies associated with drug patents.
This silence would be justified if there
were no alternative mechanisms available to support the bio-medical research
that leads to the development of new drugs. However, there are alternatives
and they already exist. The most obvious alternative is direct government
funding of drug research.3 This already occurs on a massive scale.
In fact, the $30 billion that the United States federal government pays each
year to support bio-medical research at its National Institutes of Health (NIH) is approximately 20 percent larger than the $25
billion that its pharmaceutical industry claims to spend on research. While
this research is primarily directed towards more basic science (in order not
to interfere with the efforts of the drug industry), there are many instances
of new drugs being developed almost entirely through NIH
support. It also requires some extraordinary claims about epistemology to
argue that public funding of NIH is an efficient
mechanism for supporting basic research (a contention strongly supported by
the pharmaceutical industry), but somehow would prove to be a boondoggle if
the agency took on the responsibility of developing new drugs and bringing
them through the FDA approval process. The basic numbers are very striking. If
drug prices in the United States were to fall by 70 percent in the absence of
patent protection, it would amount to savings of more than $140 billion a
year, given 2005 spending levels. This is almost six times as much as the
industry claims it is currently spending on research. Since half of this
money may go to research copycat drugs of little social value, the savings
from eliminating drug patents in the United States may be more than 10 times
as large as the spending necessary to replace the useful research performed
by the pharmaceutical industry.4 There are clearly better and worse ways to
structure a system of government financed research. For example, the Free
Market Drug Act, a bill recently introduced in the U.S. Congress, called for
establishing a set of competing government corporations that would be
evaluated at periodic intervals (e.g. 10 years) for the quality of their
work.5 The worst performers would be put out of business with new
ones created to take their place. There are other mechanisms that could be
created to ensure that the funding is spent efficiently, but given the
incredible waste associated with the existing system of patent financed drug
research, it seems that there will be huge payoffs for both the economy and
for public health by investigating alternatives. It is also important to note that this
issue has taken on enormous importance in an international context. One of
the major areas of dispute in recent trade pacts has been the ability of less
developed countries to purchase drugs without paying patent protected prices.
If new drugs were placed in the public domain so that they could be produced
as generics everywhere in the world, then this whole issue would quickly
disappear.6 This would facilitate access to essential medicines
for hundreds of millions of people in the developing world. Copyrights While copyright enforcement may not raise
the sort of life and death issues as do drug patents, it also leads to
enormous economic inefficiency. Furthermore, the extent of this inefficiency
will grow through time, as technology makes it ever easier to transfer
recorded audio and visual material, as well as software. The standard economic texts tell us that
there are large losses of consumer surplus associated with the government
monopolies created by copyright protection. In the case of items like
recorded music, movies, and software, material that could generally be
transferred at zero cost, instead carries a high marginal cost. In addition,
the difficulties of protecting copyrights in an era of digital technology
have led to enormous enforcement costs. These enforcement costs include not
only the costs directly associated with policing against unauthorized uses of
copyrighted material, but also efforts to restrict the development of hardware
and software in ways that could facilitate unauthorized reproductions of
copyrighted material. There is an additional, less widely noted,
cost of copyright -- it impinges on artistic freedom. In the absence of
government intervention, any writer, musician, movie producer or other
creative worker could take any existing artistic work and modify it in any
way that they chose. This could be done for parody or as a creative extension
of an existing work. (Imagine, for example, writers choosing to write dozens
of different endings for a popular novel or to develop new works building off
its fictional characters.) Copyright largely prohibits this practice, unless
the creative worker has the copyright holders’ approval. It is possible to design a system that
compensates creative workers, while still leaving the choice of material to
individuals (rather than some government commission), and eliminates the
economic distortions associated with copyright. The basic point of such a
system would be to compensate the creative worker at the point where they do
their work, rather than compensating them after then fact for the work. If
the creative worker is compensated at the point where he or she produces the
material, then there is no need for copyright, the work can be transferred as
quickly and freely as technology will allow. One mechanism for this sort of
compensation is a system of individual vouchers, where each adult can be
given a fixed sum (e.g. 50 to 100 dollars a year), which can only be used to
support creative or artistic work. These “artistic freedom vouchers” (AFV) could be paid out through the tax filing system, so
that individuals could make their payments each year directly through their
tax return.7 The system of charitable contributions in
the United States provides an excellent model for such a system. Under the
United States tax code, a wide variety of organizations engaged in charitable
work (this includes religious activity, aid to the poor, and even publicly
oriented think tanks) can register for tax exempt status. This registration
allows individuals to make contributions to these organizations and to deduct
the contribution from their taxable income. The role of the government in this process
is to simply record that an organization engages in some specific activity
that qualifies for tax exempt status. The government makes no attempt to
evaluate the quality or appropriateness of this activity. The only monitoring
involved (in principle) is to ensure that no fraud is being committed,
specifically that financial records by the tax exempt organizations are being
properly kept, and that it is fact engaging in the activities in which it
claims to be engaged. The role of the government in the AFV system would be very similar to its role in
monitoring the system of tax exempt organization. Under the AFV system, anyone wishing to receive money through the
system would be required to register as a creative worker, indicating what
sort of creative work they do. Intermediaries could similarly register to
receive funds by indicating that they support specific types of creative work
(e.g. producing jazz music, writing mystery novels, etc.). This registration
entitles the individual or intermediary to receive money through the system.
(An individual would have to be registered with the system to receive money
through an intermediary.) The one other requirement for any
individual or intermediary registered with the AFV
system is that they would not be eligible for copyright protection. The logic
here is simple, the creative worker is entitled to be compensated once for
their work, not twice. If the worker has received money through the AFV system, then he or she has been compensated in
advance for the work they produce. There is no reason that the government
should then also act to provide this worker or their agent with a monopoly
over the distribution of their product.8 Even a very modest sized AFV could support a vast amount of creative work. For
example, a $50 voucher would make approximately $10 billion a year available
in the United States to support creative workers. If these workers received
average compensation of $40,000 a year through the AFV
system, this money would be sufficient to support 250,000 workers. While there is no apriori
way to know for certain whether the money distributed to creative workers
through the AFV system would be more or less
concentrated than the distribution of earnings under copyrights, there is
good reason to believe that it would be less concentrated. The copyright
system encourages entertainment companies to select a relatively small group
of creative workers and to promote them as stars. The rationale is that it is
costly to promote a singer, musician, or writer to the point where they have
a mass following. Therefore, once they have succeeded in developing a star to
this point, it is far less risky to continue to promote the star than to take
a chance with a new prospect. As a result, the vast majority of promotional
money gets spent promoting a very small group of creative workers. Under the AFV
system, there is likely to be less profit in promoting specific creative
workers. Presumably intermediaries will attract support by demonstrating
their efficiency, which is likely to mean minimizing the money spent on
promotions rather than actually supporting creative workers. However, the most important distinction
between the AFV system and the copyright system is
that all the creative material produced through the AFV
system can be transferred at zero cost. Creative workers would promote the
development of technologies that would allow their work to be spread as
easily as possible, instead of insisting that hardware and software
manufacturers find mechanisms to lock it up, so that those who do not pay
cannot get it. There is also no reason that copyrights
could not co-exist with the AFV system. Creative
workers who remain outside of the AFV system would
have the option of getting copyright protection, just as is the case at
present. The only difference is that the copyrighted material would be forced
to compete against a large amount of creative work that is available at no
cost. But copyright only provides a monopoly on the copyright holder’s work,
it doesn’t protect the copyright holder from competition from free work. Another desirable feature about the AFV system is that it requires minimal enforcement by the
government. If a creative worker takes AFV funds,
and then obtains a copyright for his or her work, in violation of the rules
of the system, the copyright simply becomes unenforceable. Any person can
freely distribute this person’s work as though the copyright did not exist,
since it would not in fact be a valid copyright. In this case, enforcement of
the rules simply requires inaction on the part of the government. This is an
enormous contrast with the current efforts to enforce copyright protection,
which have included F.B.I. raids on college dorm
rooms, prohibitions on the development of technology, and government propaganda
efforts on the evils of copyright infringement. Reforming
Intellectual Property: Getting Away from the Middle Ages The alternatives to patent and copyrights
described above may not be the best ways to promote innovation in biomedical
research or creative and artistic work.9 However, it is probably
even more certain that the current patent and copyright systems fail this
test. Given the large and growing costs associated with patent and copyright
enforcement it is imperative that alternative incentive mechanisms be
explored. Clearly there are very powerful interests
that stand to lose from reform of intellectual property rules, specifically
the pharmaceutical industry, the medical equipment industry, the software industry,
and the media and entertainment industries. These sectors include many of the
biggest and most powerful corporations in the world. But the strength of the
resistance to reform does not affect the intellectual argument for reform. It
would be difficult to identify more harmful economic policies than the
current system of patent and copyright rules. They are few cases where the
application of standard neo-classical economics could have such beneficial
effects. Endnotes 1. There
is a distinct set of issues that arises in a case where a patent is issued
for a product sold directly to consumers and accounts for the bulk of the
product’s price (as is the case with prescription drugs and medical
equipment), compared with a patent on an industrial process. In the case of
patents on industrial processes, the expected outcome is that patent holder
will sell the patent to the user, who will then be able to use it at zero
marginal cost, thereby eliminating the distortions associated with patent
protection. 2. A
study commissioned by the PhRMA, the industry's
lobbying group, found that on average, copycat drugs cost almost as much to
develop as breakthrough drugs (see Ernst & Young LLP.
2001. Pharmaceutical Industry R&D Costs: Key Findings about the Public
Citizen Report. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
[http://www.phrma.org/press/newsreleases/2001-08-11.277.pdf]). 3. A
fuller account of the economics of this sort of alternative to patent
supported drug research can be found in Baker and Chatani
(2002), (see “Promoting Good Ideas on Drugs: Are Patents the Best Way? [http://www.cepr.net/promoting_good_ideas_on_drugs.htm]). 4. The
industry estimates that approximately 8 percent of its research goes to
studying production and safety issues. This research would be carried through
even if all drugs were sold as generics, and therefore would not have to be
replaced by the government. 5. A full
description of this bill is available on the website of its lead sponsor,
Representative Dennis Kucinich [http://www.house.gov/kucinich/issues/freemarketdrugact.htm]. 6. It
would be desirable to have some sort of international system that ensured
that countries paid their fair share toward supporting biomedical research.
Hubbard and Love (2004) provides an example of such an agreement (see "A
New Trade Framework for Global Healthcare R&D." Plos
Biology, V2, #2. [http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get- document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020052]). 7. The AFV system is described in more detail in Baker 2003 (see
“The Artistic Freedom Voucher: An Internet Age Alternative to Copyright”
[http://www.cepr.net/publications/AFV.htm]). 8. It
would be important that this ban on access to copyright protection extend for
a substantial period (e.g. five years) after receiving AFV
funds. The point of the AFV system is to establish
a competitor to the copyright system, not a farm system for the entertainment
industry. If the most successful people in the AFV
system could simply leave and immediately become eligible for copyright
protection, then the system would end up just providing a subsidy to the
copyright protected entertainment sector, since it would screen out less
popular artists for it. 9. It is
likely that some sort of direct funding mechanism would be the most efficient
way to support software development, another area in which patents have led
to massive waste, although a decentralized AFV
mechanism may be appropriate for some types of software, such as video
games. ___________________________ ___________________________________________________ Greed (Part II) Julian Edney (1) © Copyright:
Julian Edney 2002-2005 An essay concerning the origins, nature,
extent and morality of this destructive force in free market economies.
Definitions. Paradoxes and omissions in Adam Smith's original theory permit -
encourage - greed without restraint so that in a very large society [USA]
over two centuries it has become an undemocratic force creating precipitous
inequalities; divisions in this society now approach a kind of wealth
apartheid, and our values are quite unlike Smith's: this is an immensely
wealthy society but it is not a humane society. Wealth and poverty are connected, in fact
recent sociological theory shows our institutions routinely design inequality
in, but this connection is largely avoided in texts and in the media, as is the notion that
greed is a moral wrong. Problems created by greed cannot be solved by
technology. We are also distracted by
already-outdated environmental rhetoric, arguments that scarcities and human
suffering follow from abuse of our ecology. Rather, these scarcities are the
result of what people do to people. This focus opens practical solutions. Part I of
Greed appeared in the last issue of this journal and is available at www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue
31/Edney31.htm The Pivot What drives this society? We proudly answer that
what fuels people in this nation [USA] is a competitive drive to be better.
The obvious result is inequality, because the intention is inequality.
Competition deserves a closer look. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict summarized her
overseas work saying the most obvious difference among societies was whether
the living was cooperative or competitive. This was the 1930s. She used the
term synergy. A high synergy society is socially cohesive, cooperative and unaggressive - one person’s acts at the same time serve
his own advantage and that of the group, his gain results in a gain for all.
But cultures with low synergy are highly competitive and the individual gains
advantage only at the expense of another, aggression is prized, indeed humor originates from one person’s victory and another’s
demolition. Low synergy eventually threatens the social fabric. Her example
was the Dobu of New Guinea, whose daily atmosphere
of ill will and treachery among all made it a showcase of Hobbesean
nastiness, and feared among its neighboring tribes.
The Dobu have no chiefs, no government, no
legalities and live very close to the "state of nature"
philosophers propose. Danger is at its height within the tribe, not from
without, and the attitude lives that it is prudent and right to inflict pain
on losers to protect your win. Hierarchy is based on ruthlessness which is
admired, and inequality and injustice are believed to be in the nature of
things 43. Benedict pointed out the world’s societies can be
arranged on a continuum from those with the highest synergy to those with the
lowest. In our own society, we love competition and we
promote inequality. A team of sociologists headed by C.S.
Fisher 44 has recently tightened this argument with a treatise
that first attacks the Bell Curve explanation that inherited differences in
IQ and natural talent can be used to explain our unequal fortunes. They
summarily deny the economist's claim that inequality fosters economic growth.
Third, they state, our inequalities are by design, and they are growing. The
result is that in the last twenty years we have become a steeply hierarchical
society, and this is with popular support. We are choosing inequality through
government economic policies that chronically distributed wealth unfairly. Clearly our own society has lower synergy than we
boast - and it’s falling. Simply, any free market culture that would rather
create a market in a resource than have abundance for all is creating
inequality as it goes. But so long as we can attribute unhappiness to global
limits, or to inherited individual differences, then nature is to blame. We
can hoist a paradox. We can both have our levels of misery and congratulate
ourselves on our modern attitudes and on a humane society. Manipulation
of Hope That last hypocrisy is researched by two Yale
scholars, Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt 45
who argue we practice inequality everywhere while pretending to equality (it
is so close to our notion of justice). This subversion requires a nest of
contradictory customs, a shell game designed to help us avoid and deny the
moral consequences. And a retreat to other standards: sometimes, conceding
inequalities, we will go through contortions to show that at least we are
humane. The cost of all this, of course, is honesty. Calabresi and Bobbitt argue that instead of universal
abundance, there is perpetual scarcity. We calibrate it so. Society
oscillates between two kinds of decisions. A first order decision is how much
to produce or allow of a desirable good, and a second order decision is who
shall get it. If this process were obvious, we would be outraged at the
insight that there is needless suffering, because the scarcity is man made.
Whether the desirable good is shelter, life-saving medical treatment, an
education, or decent treatment by the police, we simultaneously manage the
perception that all is well when in fact it is well with only a fraction of
the population. Seeing certain medications or (in war) draft-deferments only
go to the rich, or seeing that with our aggregate wealth, poverty need not
exist, we search for reasons that suffering comes to some people but not
others. The focus becomes methods of allocation. The central insight is to
see that allocation by itself is an act signifying inequality. We realize
certain methods of allocation are "acceptable," meaning they do not
morally offend, for instance, the free market method acceptably allocates
hunger because it decentralizes choice into individual decisions, and we can
blame the hungry person. So this distracts from the scarcity itself. And hope
is preserved. But each allocation method is rather arbitrary. We wonder if,
keeping the same overall percentages, poverty could just as well be allocated
by lottery. The market does not acceptably allocate the draft, so we have to
shift to another method of allocating that inequality. Mistakes in choosing
allocation method pull back the curtain on the fact of the original
scarcities, creating fear and outrage. But the reality is, the scarcity of
doctors, on whom lives depend, is a result of a human decision how many to
train - and not a limitation of Earth's carrying capacity. Sensation-hungry
Press While we are uncomfortable with the fact that the market
runs an "acceptable" number of auto deaths, cancer fatalities, or
hungry four-year-olds, it allows us to explain each case as personal
misfortune. It will appear there is no other choice, and our morality is
preserved. So while we believe in a strong, happy society, brimming with
progress and good for all its people, we get daily news hinting at our
less-civilized status. The facts are, shelters for battered women are always
crowded, fear permeates some schools, barbarism spreads in our prisons, and in
some precincts it is becoming harder to distinguish police behavior from that of criminals. Calabresi
and Bobbit continue this argument describing a
societal device we use in huge efforts to preserve this contradiction. The perception of humaneness is crucial. It tells
us our system is both strong and good; otherwise glimpses of inhumanity are a
dangerous hint that things are not working. Two examples: some years ago, a
million dollars was spent on the rescue of a single downed balloonist in a
dramatic, highly publicized race of helicopters and boats. The drama proved
our humanity. We make massive efforts for someone in distress. What was never
publicized was the chronic underbudgeting of the
Coast Guard which otherwise would make such rescues routine. In a second
example, heroic amounts were spent to rescue prisoners from a fire in a
penitentiary. But what was never revealed is that the prison's scarce medical
resources meant hundreds of others routinely went without treatment or died
at other times. This type of rare and heavily publicized humane event, fed to
a sensation-hungry press, creates a "sufficiency paradox", an
"illusion of sufficiency" 46 that the goodness is there
for us all. Generalized, this creates the illusion of abundance. The media
deal in demonstrations of sudden and spectacular humanity. But for every
person who gets the rare benefit, many others do not. A life-saving kidney
goes to one of several people in need, and the life-taking decision about the
others is not publicized. The "illusion of sufficiency" device
massively confuses possibility with probability but on a societal level, it
is a media-promoted and effective manipulation of hope. We too use Potemkin
villages. Kafkaesque What about all the people who lose to scarcity? People
hate themselves for failing, but unless society is honest, they must absorb
the original scarcity plus the anguish of not knowing how they failed and not
knowing what to do. To the loser the frustration and humiliation of not
knowing why, creates "the Kafkaesque cost of being in a process without
knowing how to help oneself" 47. If people compared our
national inequities in wealth with the insight that, through decided levels
of scarcity, the aggregate amount of suffering is controlled, public emotion
could erupt. Calabresi and Bobbitt's point is that we must keep examining
our values. Equality and honesty are prime values. But in these machinations,
they are chronically opposed. We must chose honesty, then we can begin the
struggle to reclaim our real humanity. Corporations Next we bring into this mix the vastly wealthy
American transnational corporation. Businesses exist to make profit. Corporations are a
type of business association, ones with special legal powers and durability.
They have been a usual part of the business environment since the fifteenth
century. International corporations were the muscle behind European
colonization in the second half of the last millennium, but in that era of
horse and sail, their power was a fraction of what it is today. Some
corporations have now grown gigantic, actually becoming global forces with
more power and resources than some countries. Actually the largest corporations derive power not
only from wealth but because they can fluidly migrate to whichever nation
offers the least legal restraints, the cheapest labor,
the most amenable economies and the friendliest politics. In this sense they
float above the world's constraints. But as a rule American corporations differ sharply
from the nation which hosts them. They are alien to the notion of democratic
responsiveness, internal or external. In the universe of corporations
everything focuses on the acquisition of resources, labor,
and markets. These are the sources of power. Inside corporations Equality hides
her face. Corporations are not elected, so they are concerned
with nobody's approval. Aside from occasional shareholder meetings, they
never ask the public for ideas or permission. Nor do the workers elect their
leaders. Inside, most business corporations are steeply hierarchical
structures, in which employees' freedom to do what they want is openly bought
for the wage. They are not responsive to the will of those they employ; some
have inner dynamics that are feudal; some of their hierarchies are also
jungles of dysfunction. In democratic America most corporations are
iridescent examples of autocracy, thriving on soil where the Constitution
guarantees everybody's freedom and equality. Nevertheless, the overwhelming portion of our
population denies any problem. Charles Derber,
among several writing on this topic, believes there are specific reasons we
don't even think about corporations. First, we are all educated to look
elsewhere, for instance to unchecked government, as the primary threat to
freedom. Second corporations make and sell our creature comforts, so we can't
tamper with them without threatening our prosperity. Third, we feel
powerless. The concentration of corporate power is inverse to people's
feelings of personal power. Fourth, we see no alternative 48. Powers
without Obligation If wealth is the only standard we use to judge,
then we have to admit corporations are staggering successes and everything to
venerate. They absorb people's lives. We consume their products daily, use
their services hourly, rely on them for information. We are dependent. We
compete to work in them. What protects them is that we are taught the system
is rational. We are also taught that the goodness of a society depends on how
well its topmost members are doing, so the higher our topmost members, the
more they are discussed with awe. The natural foe of corporations is government. But
international corporations are so wealthy they slide over governments. They
have become like tourists in their own country. As they lose national
loyalties, they come close to becoming powers without obligation. As the
largest transnational corporations grow, they
become sovereign and untouchable 49. The
Corporate Personality Roughly there are, I suppose, two kinds of people.
The first divides the world into Good versus Bad. The second divides the
world into the Strong versus Weak. These two types never can communicate.
Among the latter, the concern is never to be caught weak because hell takes
the hindmost, and among them all talk about goodness and ethics is
irrelevant, and every effort is given to staying strong. This second type
infests corporations. They are refractory to talk of humanity and you can
shout all you want and they will not listen; every ounce of their attention
is given to their competition. Their rules of engagement are Darwinian. Large scale competition among these massive
corporations is what upgrades greed from whimsical excess to lethal force. Two Areas
of Corporate Control First, Christopher Lasch
points out that private universities depend on corporations, through
investments, grants, or otherwise; and wherever their money is used,
corporations influence state universities too. Consequently you will find
free discussion on university campuses on almost any topic but one. Academic
debate is not used to deconstruct the corporations that feed them. The News The second important area of control is corporation
ownership of the media. Through corporate competition, we now live in a
system in which a few colossal media conglomerates dominate the news outlets.
A typical conglomerate owns film studios, television studios, publishing
houses, retail outlets, theaters, newspapers, music
studios, cable channels, and in some cases, amusement parks. This oligopoly
of conglomerates is small. It has overwhelming financial power, and it is not
responsive to the will of the public. Corporations exist for profit, so the news has
become a commercial product. Largely, the same mentality making decisions
about entertainment is now making news decisions (and the two, according to
Neal Gabler, are increasingly difficult to tell
apart 50). Analyst Robert McChesney 51
says commercialization of the news has been a slowly growing process,
starting in the 1840s when it was realized that selling news could actually
make an entrepreneur money. Greed rather than journalistic standards took
journalism astray in the era of the Yellow Press when stories were written
for what sold and all the money came in from readers. Later on, newspaper
owners started getting bigger money from advertisers. Nobody objected,
because then as now, the myth is that the prime enemy of a free press was the
government, that competitive free market capitalism would always keep the
media unbiased and democratic. Missing
Topics We do have some control over which media programs
we watch. We still can choose among television channels, but the overwhelming
majority of channels are commercial, and corporations exert fine-grained
control over the consumer's viewing diet. And unlike Canada's and Britain's,
America's noncommercial channels are not guaranteed
by the government. They depend on grants, charity and viewer contributions.
They cannot hope for the stability, size and power of their commercials
rivals. The result? Television news viewers are
carpet-bombed with advertising. Advertisers actually survey for the kind of
news that is interesting to the viewers who have money to buy products.
Advertising firms are so influential that current journalism avoids
antagonizing them and politicians avoid antagonizing them. McChesney says their control extends to blacking out
certain topics. So while education, drug testing, gay rights, religion are
mentioned on commercial television, other topics such as the representativeness of the media system is a topic that is
never aired. Social class issues are avoided. If we live in a society of
inequality, then we can wonder, every time the television shows us the upper
reaches of abundant success, which scenes of poverty have been excised.
Programs about the poor are rare. In effect, says McChesney,"media
firms effectively write off the bottom 15-50 percent of society."52 All of which, he continues, is undermining
democracy. Among McChesney's
remedies: first, make how the media are used a political issue. Second, a
separate 1% tax on advertising would raise substantial revenues (he estimates
$1.5 billion annually) which could be used to subsidize the nonprofit media. Advertising
We absorb from the television, and that is what
advertisers want. We take advertising seriously. Over a hundred
billion dollars is spent annually on advertising. Its goal is to occupy the
drive and psyche of the nation with wants, so that the nation will spend. But the media are doing much more. It is decided not to show on television the
varieties of fear in our rooming houses and alleys where people live in the
lowest reaches of poverty. It is decided not to show our hungry people living
in tilting rural shacks. Nor the ranks of exhausted faces in city sweatshops.
Lost, abject, hostile, desperate, these people's glances are pulled aside by
complicit belief that failure is the lot of the damned. These people are
quite available for filming and quite imageable.
Instead, television is filled with cacophonous distraction. Contradictions are withheld in the news. For
instance, new technology is lionized in commercials. But technology itself is
amoral. For example, it is also making torture easier. No one would
mythologize the kind of free market where people made profits marketing whips
and thumbscrews, but a recent Amnesty International investigation reports
that currently more than fifty U.S. companies manufacture equipment like stun
belts and shock batons designed specifically for use on humans (these devices
inflict great pain but leave little physical evidence) 53.
Difficult topics encourage thought, and they take time away from commercials.
War on
Logic Somehow the painful gap that exists between poverty
and abundance must be anesthetized. Television is the means. We stuff
television reality in the gap. Twenty-four hours every day commercial
television is an ongoing polychromatic display of games, short dramas with
gunplay and florid sex, perpetually interrupted by iridescent advertisements.
Television both provokes fear and promises ecstasy in ultra short attention
spans. It feeds a national obsession with beauty, teasing with glossy bodies,
glossy cars, luscious scenery. What is shown in commercials is overflowing
abundance, specifically in terms of climactic moments. Now a race is run and
now a prize is taken; now a man works for all of a second and a half, then
it's time for beers; now all the cooking has been done, and a sumptuous meal
is ready 54. The troubling theme is that human effort is noisily
trivialized in commercials. This is the narcotic. Television lathers a
bright, noisy blur over anything like sustained effort, perseverance, focused
long term goals, and over a society with chronic stresses. The evening news systematically distorts normal
time. Downtown riots in Seattle are given less than a minute (some of which
is the reporter's talking face), shift to shots of a dog frolicking in a
fountain, shift to minutes of a freeway chase. The picturesque is pursued,
the serious is trivialized. These are moves in a war against logic. And if you
watch television, you are having your thinking disrupted. The busy-ness of
rapid shifts of focus, the effervescent color, the
edgy, dramatic music, all make it difficult for viewers to build independent
ideas. Neuroses But instead of asking what the frenetic distraction
is about, we follow suit, with impulse. It's not just that advertisers say,
you can solve your problems by drinking our wines or wearing this underwear.
It's not just that each product is introduced as if it was the future of
mankind. It's that the commercial saturation has been effective. No one
mentally argues with the advertising. The real loss is that advertising is
now accepted as if it was information. As with any other drug, we need increasing
strengths. The only way to find out what television is doing to you after
years of watching is to turn it off for a month. Turn it on again after
abstinence, and it seems like a television's bid for our attention is like
repeatedly shooting a pistol into a chandelier. Television also grows neuroses in the corners of
its watchers. It grows invidious comparisons in us. Comparison shopping,
comparison socializing - eventually we live life by the method of
comparisons. Television is carefully producing hordes of viewers who are good
at one judgment, namely, whether the neighbor or
the person sitting across the room is a little better or a little worse off.
This powerful judgment, 'I'm a notch better than he; I'm not quite as
attractive as she', is what Alfred Adler diagnosed as a neurotic style 55,
with powerful motives to compensate. Television grows envy in us, and the fix
is to acquire. The result is a powerful narcissism, and an increase in the
rates of depression 56 among watchers who cannot keep up, unable
to match their lives to television's perfection. Greed, like many addictions, is all about the
sudden and spectacular. Advertising is passionately decorative, if thin as a
billboard. It serves the sudden and spectacular. Against images of poverty, fear and hunger,
television also churns routine optimism into its daily programming. All is
delivered in a happy, chatty style. More, each day, television will be
noisily emptied out and reinstalled the same. Sum In a free society, some people's greed inevitably
means deprivation for others. This does not require environmental limits, it
only requires persistent and competitive self-promotion, and in a vast nation
whose economy is two hundred years devoted to these principles, we now
inhabit a society with a small fraction of astronomically wealthy individuals
towering over a growing mass in poverty. America is arguably now more unequal
than any of the original European cultures, yet we cling to and proselytize a
horribly outdated economic theory which implies equality but actually
delivers more inequality. Greed is the outstanding wrong because it reverses
the utilitarian ethic. It produces the greatest good for the smallest number.
Democracy's founding virtues are freedom and equality, so greed without
restraint, producing great inequalities, becomes an undemocratic force. This is an amazingly complex economy but we still
raise our young on sleeveless country myths. They never explain a market's
preferences for ensured scarcities, designed inequalities, and increasingly
segregated economic classes. Our schoolbooks teach, after the demise of
communism, that there is no superior alternative to Smithian
economics. Adherents believe that free market capitalism is the end of
history. Remedies The reflexive defense, of
course, is that we already have remedies. That we protect our poor with aid
and support, that our government provides a safety net for the least
fortunate in the form of welfare and food stamp programs. These programs are a shambling failure. Reports
detail the thin efforts of our sprawling agencies to get food to Americans
who are now hungry. In California, of the millions who need aid, only 45% of
the eligible are able to get food stamps even when they qualify. The other
largest states show similar agency breakdowns. The hungry are trying other
sources, so demand at food banks is rising 57. But Americans
turning to emergency facilities are too often rebuffed. Cities are failing to
meet an average of 26 percent of requests for emergency shelter, 30 percent
of requests by homeless families. Government safety nets are simply broken,
and at this writing some states are cutting back further 58. We do not properly protect our poor. Decades-long
efforts in the Great Society program and the War on Poverty have failed to
improve opportunities for the poorest Americans. As an index of our current
concern, consider the national allocation for Food Stamps. It stands at
0.0017 of the Federal Budget 59. Already tiny, Federal food
assistance allocations actually declined from 1995 to 1999 60. I'll sketch other options that don't work. What about private charity? Since droves of
homeless people (one quarter of whom are children) still roam the big cities,
since we have unfed hungry, and since it has been that way for a long time
and is not getting better, private charity has obviously been ineffective. It
is too little, or sporadic and unreliable. What about the churches? Their purpose for
existence includes helping the weak and needy. Curious for numbers, I divided
the number of homeless (conservatively estimated at 700,000 on any given
night, 2 million sometime during the year) by the number of Christian
churches. This nation is filled with churches: the World Almanac lists over
330,000 Christian houses of worship 61. If each church took in 6
homeless, there would be no more homelessness. (We are taught that God and
money don't mix. But actually the struggle between church and capitalism has
always been subtle.) What about positive thinking? With enough love and
trust and hope and unity and sensitivity and inclusiveness, will antisocial
greed disappear? Well, we might hope that goliath profiteering corporations
will desist in their exploiting, voluntarily come to their knees and want to
be part of godly world harmony. But they will not. Universal tolerance will
not stop transnational corporations wringing their
profit from the sweat of laborers' faces. And these
bromides do not create change, just a lot of weary smiles from well wishers.
On the topic of attitude, we'll treat smiling rationalizations the same, such
as the rationalization that 'greed is the sin that's good for the economy'. This
sort of solution is just a delay which will float us over relatively good
times. At present we have relatively high employment, so the vast majority of
Americans are at least earning some amounts of money. But this is like a tide
risen high, which covers all manner of unsightly things on the sea floor.
They are not gone. Should the tide go out, they will reappear. Opines
business professor Jim Johnson, "If you ask where all this could be
heading, in the event of an economic downturn, we could see another 1992
civil unrest." 62. Stopping
the Gap from Becoming Wider Harvard's John Rawls 63 has a way to
repair a whole society skewed into these inequalities. Rawls asserts the
misery of some is simply not made acceptable by having a greater good, as
proposed by utilitarianism, because that violates the principle of justice.
First Rawls insists that in addition to freedom and equality, there must be a
prior value in democracy, justice. And that economic rationality and justice
should forever be opposed. Rawls insists on a shift in focus. We should not
judge a culture by how its topmost members are doing, but by how it treats
its lowest. His solutions follow. First, this society should decide how low
any member can go. That establishes minimum rights. It requires we identify
the least-advantaged person in society, and draw focus to him. Next, the very
op and the very bottom of society should be (and all intermediate levels
should be) connected, as if by a loose linked chain. Then if the top rises,
it pulls the bottom up with it. If the bottom moves up, that closes the gap
toward equality. This arrangement does not prevent any upward rise; but it
establishes consequences on movements at the top. Other
Remedies We must look down. Even Business Week pointed out
that if the current wave of prosperity recedes, America's many social ills,
with hunger and homelessness, could return with a vengeance, editorializing
that the Federal Reserve and Congress should be guided in their policy
actions by what's happening at the bottom of society, not by the bubble at
the top 64. The mystique of poverty has to be cracked. A
television series 'Lifestyles of the Broken and Hungry' would not top the
popularity charts, but my point is that if media paid attention to the bottom
rungs with one-tenth the insistence in our commercial advertising, remedial
changes would occur. Further, public service messages resurrecting the
concept of the common good, would be a beginning. Actually remedies for greed do not have to be
expensive, nor big, organized programs. Primary education depends on the
skills of individual teachers, and if talented educators can reinstall the
Golden Rule (Do as you would be done by) in their primary classrooms, some of
the damage could be reversed. We need preventatives. Greed has to be
reinstalled as a moral wrong, and in religious circles, as a sin. Up the educational ladder, remedies will be
resisted. Here lives the fashion for nonjudgmentalism.
An extension of moral relativism, this trend to universal acceptance is a
couple of decades old and "Who am I to judge?" is now the standard
of the gentle classes and educated elite, even spreading to exotic healing
practices and 12-Step programs where it is thought that to suspend judgment
of self and others is for the betterment of society. This is nonsense.
Comfort only brings inaction, nonjudgmentalism is
moral vacuum 65, and eventually we will have no conscience to stop
what is happening. High on the academic ladder, of course, is
economics but our best economic theory has delivered us contradictions and
reverses. Volumes produced by economists, all written with graphite
dispassion, seem to promote opposites, and you wonder if a coup was carried
out by those adept at complicated thought. Just drive through any big city,
you will see newsstands sporting magazines with glossy coverage of
billionaires, these newsstands adjacent to people living among girders and
sewage drains, alleys, scaffoldings and grates. Among the social sciences, psychology may provide a
specific remedy. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM IV) 66 is a standard used by all psychotherapists. It is a
compendium of all mental illnesses and it is used as a diagnostic tool in
training psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and social workers. This book
has been expanding through succeeding editions as more and more mental
conditions have been described (which has expanded the domain of clinicians
so far it is now said that about half America's population could be diagnosed
with some mental pathology or other 67). It is time that greed be
listed in DSM IV. With well directed psychological research of course greed
will turn out to be a personality trait with a distribution in the
population, and personality tests will be able to screen for extremes. Moral
Inertia So there is a moral cause here. But the average
person hangs back from active protest. The problem is, even if we are not personally
greedy, we have connections to corporations that are. We are happy consumers.
Challenging the company we work for - would that be hypocrisy? Second, activism, we think, is radical action, and
what about all that street rant "if you're not with us, you're against
us!" - but we cannot rebel because our corporation is also our rent, and
we enjoy the good living we make, and we're not giving that up. Perhaps that explains why our most articulate
writers are so quiet on this topic. They also look within. So, bluntly, we
need a whole new strategy for change, in which a person who feels he is part
of the problem may also be part of the solution. Enter some new thinking. Max Bruinsma
is a sharp critic of the damage wrought by contemporary advertising in the
service of relentless acquisition. But times have changed, he says, and he
argues the polarizing slogans of past social revolutions (you're either with
us or against us) don't apply. We're in a historical shift. The modern
activist is different. The rationale: culture today is driven by commercial
advertising. In it, a particularly worrisome new trend is for advertisers to
soften up our thinking with billboard-size paradoxes. Building-size ads fill
our view and state that buying a very mainstream computer (Mac) is 'thinking
different'. Across the street another billboard shouts that acquiring a
glossy SUV is a singular act of rebellion. Bruinsma
quotes more examples: "Sometimes you gotta
break the rules," (Burger King), "Innovate, don't imitate"
(Hugo Boss), "Be an original" (Chesterfield cigarettes). The
central insistence of these is that conforming = rebelling. And we remember
the Orwellian slogans, Peace = War, Slavery = Freedom which, in 1984, reduced
a future society's minds to value-free mush. Well, we can follow suit. We can generate our own
examples of contradictions. So, perhaps, commercial success and social
responsibility are not incompatible anymore. Everything is possible if you
use self-contradiction; you are able to both work for a company, and rebel against
it. Corporate rebellion = loyalty. This leads to a technique a 'Sixties activist, Rudy
Dutschke, once called "the long march through
the institutions." It is a long term and less bloody strategy. Go in,
behave - and take over. The new culture agent is stylishly dressed, well
paid, and works in an plush ad agency, designing resplendent ads which
promote the return to honesty and social justice, humaneness, equity and the
common good 68 . The next revolution will be inside corporations. Conclusions As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer we
drop our pretenses to humanitarian democracy,
instead salute material excess, accept Darwinian business ethics, and pin up
as our national polestar the most powerful corporations. Money and effort maintains a particular way of
seeing and evaluating our society; we focus on the topmost members, cover
current inequalities with a rotating blur of nearly a trillion dollars of
advertising a year, and by not paying attention to the lowest, we deny them.
But they are there. Inevitably, as our economic tree reaches up, its roots
grow further down. It is not enough to say hopefully we accumulate
layers of experience from error and progress. Technology will not deliver us
equity. Logic has not delivered us equity. We want our morality back. Nuts For readers thinking these themes overwrought, I'll
describe a small game in which you can watch greed in the person sitting next
to you. Three people sit around a kitchen bowl. You, the fourth person, with
a timer, start off placing ten small items in the bowl - quarters, dollar
bills, or nuts. Tell the three players the goal is for each of them to get as
many items as they can. Tell them one other thing before they start: every
ten seconds (you have your watch ready) you will look in the bowl, and double
the number of items remaining there, by replenishing from an outside source (
a separate pile of quarters on the side). In the original Nuts Game, I used hardware nuts,
and the players were college students. You would think the players would
figure out that if they all waited, and didn't take anything out of the bowl
for a while, then the contents of the bowl would soon get very big,
automatically doubling every ten seconds. Eventually they could each divide up
a pot that had grown large. But in fact, sixty percent of these groups never
make it to the first 10-second replenishment cycle. They each grabbed all
they could as soon as they could, leaving nothing in the bowl to be doubled,
and each player wound up with none or a few items. This can be an energetic
game. I've seen the bowl knocked to the floor and I've seen broken
fingernails in the greedy melee. In the original game, players are not
allowed to talk. Even when they are allowed to talk, not all groups collaboratively
work out a patient, conserve-as-you-go playing style, necessary for eventual
big scores. They don't trust each other. This makes a good classroom demonstration of what
greed can do. Actually mathematicians have designed a variety of these games,
microcosms of the free economic process 69. Behind them all is a
problem always nagging at Adam Smith economics. In the short run, what is
good for the individual is bad for the group. The game is a microcosm of a
community sharing a slowly regenerating resource (clean water, timber,
whales) and individual greed can actually destroy the common good. The game
involves two opposing rationalities: what is rational for the individual vs.
what is rational for the group. And the resolution has less to do with reason
than building a shared morality. Details of The Nuts Game.
http://www.g-r-e-e-d.com/Nuts%20Game.htm Notes 43. Benedict, R.
Patterns of culture. 1934/1989 Boston: Houghton Mifflin. The concept of
synergy appeared inunpublished
lectures Benedict gave in 1941 and all references are derivative, such as M.M. Caffrey: Ruth Benedict,l989 University of Texas Press. p.
308-309. 44. Fisher, C.S., Hout, M., Jankowski,
M.S., Lucas, S.R., Swidler, A., Voss, K. Inequality
by design. 1996, Princeton N.J.Princeton University Press. 45. Calabresi, G. and Bobbitt, P. Tragic choices. 1978. New
York: Norton & Co. 46. Ibid, p. 134. 47. Ibid. p. 132. 48. Derber, C. Corporation nation. 2000. New York: St
Martin's Griffin. 49. Lasn, K. and Grierson, B.
American the blue.Utne Reader , September 2000.
p.74. 50. Gabler, N. Life: the movie . 1998. New York :Vintage
Books. 51. McChesney, R.W. Corporate media
and the threat to democracy. The Open Media Pamphlet Series. 1997. New York, Seven Stories Press. 52. Ibid.. p. 23. 53. "Torture
is accelerating globally, report says." Los Angeles Times. October 18,
2000. Part A. p. 10. 54. Leonard, G.
Mastery. 1991. New York: Penguin Books. 55. Adler, A. The
neurotic constitution. 1926/1998. North Stratford, N.H.,
Ayer Company Publishers, Inc. 56. See footnote
18. 57. "Foodstamp program is failing in California." Los Angeles Times 28
April 2001. p. A 15. A second report is "Manymiss out on food stamps" Los Angeles Times 23
June 2001. p. B 1. The second article quotes the average
food stamp allocation at $73 per person per month. 58. "States
cut back coverage for poor." Los Angeles Times. 25 February 2002. p. A
1. 59. Food aid
programs are administered by the Department of Agriculture. In 2000 total
Federal receipts were $1,956,252million of
which $274,448 million went to all food programs, of which the Food Stamp program is one, for
which the outlay was $3,392 million. Statistical Abstracts of the United States. U.S. Census
Bureau, 2000. 60. U.S. Food
Assistance (domestic) The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2000. Mahwah, N.J.
Primedia
Reference, Inc. 2000. 61. The World
Almanac and Book of Facts, 2000. 2000. Mahwah, N.J. Primedia
Reference, Inc. 62. Quoted in
"Study finds widening gap between rich, poor" Los Angeles Times
October 20, 2000. Part B p.3 63. Rawls, J. A
theory of justice. 1999. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Revised edition. (The first edition is better,
in my opinion.) 64. "The
poorest are again losing ground." Business Week 23 April 2001, p. 130. 65. "If I'm
OK and you're OK, are there any bad guys?" Los Angeles Times, 27 January
2002 p. E 1. 66. Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th. Ed.) Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994. 67. J.W. Kalat, Introduction to
psychology. 6th Ed. Pacific Grove, CA: Wadsworth. 2002. 68. Bruinsma, M. "Culture agents: For closet rebels in the inside game, it's
time to speak out." Adbusters ,
Sept/Oct2001. (Adbusters is unpaged). 69. More recent
experimental work focuses on the effects of personal reputation among
players: (1) C. Wedekind
and M. Milinki, "Cooperation through image
scoring in humans," Science, 2000, 288, 850-852, and (2) M.A. Nowak,
K.M. Page,
K. Sigmund, "Fairness versus reason in the Ultimate Game," Science,
2000, 289, 1173-1175. This
essay was originally published at http://www.g-r-e-e-d.com/GREED.htm Author
contact: julianedney@aol.com ___________________________ ___________________________________________________ Tackling greed while recognizing ecological
limits: A reply to Edney
Tom
Green (Rainforest Solutions Project, Canada) © Copyright: Tom Green
2005 Julian Edney’s
essay on “Greed (Part 1)” (post-autistic
economisc review, issue no. 31) raises critically important moral issues
around accumulation, consumption and deprivation, and the relationship
between greed and poverty. Edney sets out some of
the ways in which economic theory has justified greed, a task that
post-autistic economics theorists should vigourously
contribute to. I agree with Edney that greed, and the ways in which economics has
given greed a cloak of acceptability, represent a significant impediment to a
more just economy and a more humane society, and indeed lead us to an array
of social problems and human tragedies. I agree with Edney
that we need to explain and challenge the simultaneous occurrence of
life-threatening scarcity and unimaginable wealth. Unfortunately, in arguing
against greed, Edney simultaneously attacks a straw
man version of the ecological scarcity argument. He thereby seeks to
undermine one of the most compelling practical and moral arguments against
greed and ends up promoting the very type of injustices that he decries. In the section of his essay entitled
“Distraction,” Edney not only denies that
environmental degradation and exploitation is an issue that leads to human
suffering, he argues that it is an already outdated rhetoric, a distraction
from the real issue of poverty being what people do to people, and that
predictions of scarcity have not been borne out. Edney
cites two sources to support this position: an article arguing that people in
rich countries do not consume too much, published in the Atlantic Monthly by Mark Sagoff, a
philosopher; and the controversial writings of Bjorn Lomborg,
a political scientist and professor of statistics best known as the author of
The Skeptical
Environmentalist and a key force behind the Copenhagen Consensus.1 Edney’s sources represent a curious choice for someone
tackling the issue of greed, as both these authors take positions which
weaken arguments for constraints on greed. As a philosopher, Sagoff is hardly the most qualified individual to assess
our ecological predicament. Of the seemingly impressive 128 footnotes in Sagoff’s article, at best 5 can be considered to be
published in the peer-reviewed natural science literature. This same article
was refuted a few months later by five natural scientists, with a long list
of peer-reviewed publications to their credit, in that same magazine.2 Lomborg’s
assessment of our ecological predicament is simply not credible. The Skeptical
Environmentalist was the subject of a detailed rebuttal in the January
2002 edition of Scientific American.
“Misleading Math about the Earth: Science defends itself against The Skeptical
Environmentalist.” Lomborg’s pet project, the
Copenhagen Consensus, involved a panel of respected mainstream economists in
choosing projects on the basis of their economic efficiency to best address
global problems. The outcome of this project was to rate liberalizing trade
as a very good project (the further liberalization of trade would exacerbate
the inequities condemned by Edney3), while improving infant and
child nutrition, reducing the prevalence of low birth weight, and scaling up
basic health services (all projects that would be consistent with decreasing
inequities, improving health, and redressing some minimal aspects of
life-threatening scarcity decried by Edney) were
all rated as merely fair projects. Rather than relying on authors who have
little, if any, qualification to pronounce on our ecological predicament, Edney could have turned to scientifically credible
sources. For instance, the United Nation’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment,
which involved over 1360 experts around the world, was released earlier this
year. Its objective was to assess the consequences of ecosystem change for
human well-being and to look at actions required to ensure that natural
systems would continue to contribute to human well-being. A number of its
conclusions, as summarized in the Statement of the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment Board, Living Beyond Our
Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-being, are particularly relevant to Edney’s discussion of greed: ·
“At
the heart of this assessment is a stark warning. Human activity is putting
such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the
planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for
granted.” ·
“The
loss of services derived from ecosystems is a significant barrier to the
achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty, hunger,
and disease.” ·
“In
many cases, it is the poor who suffer the loss of services caused directly by
the pressure put on natural systems to bring benefits to other communities,
often in different parts of the world.” ·
“The
negative impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately on the
poorest parts of the world...”4 It seems that Edney
believes that when we act to address threats to the continued viability of
ecosystems upon which humanity depends, that we will set aside concern for
issues of poverty, or that we will fail to see that greed and poverty are
linked. The opposite is true. Mainstream economists have fought vigourously against the recognition of ecological limits,
and have been staunch promoters of the concept that the scale of the economy
can keep growing for ever. And for good reason. If the poor only receive
crumbs from society’s pie, and the pie is not growing, the only way to
improve the lot of the disadvantaged is through redistribution. If we can
hold forth the illusion that the pie can grow infinitely, then society is off
the hook for inequity since with time the poor person’s crumb will grow into
a satisfying forkful and eventually a modest slice of pie.5 The
lack of interest on issues of distribution amongst neoclassical economists,
and their simultaneous defence of growth once again shows Edney
to be aligning himself with those who would not support him in his arguments
against greed. Ecological economists have promoted the
concept of ecological footprint analysis to make clear the linkages between
consumption and ecological impact, and how one person’s material standard of
living affects prospects for people in other places or in the future.6
The ecological footprint of the average person in North America is equivalent
to that of a couple of dozen people in most poor southern countries; the
footprint of the millionaires with whom Edney opens
his essay could easily approach that of an entire village in the South. Such
analysis clearly shows that the well-off appropriate more than their fair
share of the Earth’s resources and ecological services, and that the typical
lifestyles of the well-off (or greedy) in rich countries would require
several more Earths were all of the world’s population to live at their
standard of living. It begs the question, “Why should greedy individuals be
allowed to impose such a burden on the Earth, and reduce the opportunities
for other people now and in the future?” In responding to Sagoff’s
Atlantic Monthly article, Ehrlich
and fellow natural scientists clearly take a moral position against greed and
for a more just economy: “For decades in the rich nations increased
consumption has not been correlated with increased satisfaction, and
perpetuating Third World poverty is a luxury that the prosperous can no
longer afford.” Amongst other measures they call for, “reduced consumption
among today's superconsumers” in order to
close “…the rich-poor gap without an
ecological collapse… humanity could create a sustainable global society with
a higher quality of life for everyone.” In the future one would hope that Edney would use to advantage rather than seek to skewer
with broken spears one of the most potent arguments against unfettered greed.
The notion that we are approaching ecological limits is entirely compatible
with the idea that much scarcity and human deprivation is the result of an
inequitable economic system. Nor is it accurate to blame the poor multitudes
for our ecological predicament, or to use scarcity as an argument against
improving the living standards of the poor. Edney’s
characterization of the scarcity argument, “we have poverty and scarcity
because our Earth has limits…” is a caricature of a complex issue. Most
researchers who raise the issue of ecological limits raise the issue of
equity and point to the need to impose rules to ensure market economies lead
to more equitable and sustainable
outcomes. One would hope that future contributions to the post-autistic economic review would
not follow the autism of mainstream economics with regards to the natural
environment. In 2005, the world is faced with a dizzying and still
accelerating rate of biodiversity loss, the wide-scale contamination of water
bodies and groundwater, the already observable harmful effects of excessive CO2 in the atmosphere,
the tragic loss of fish biomass in the ocean, an alarming rate of soil loss,
degraded forests and heavily fragmented natural habitat. All these problems
harm poor people somewhere in the world, while the very well off are able,
for the time being, to insulate themselves from such problems. The time for
arguments within the economic literature about the existence of limits is
long past. Limits exist, and limits imply that greed is unconscionable. Notes 1. See http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/
(accessed June 1, 2005). 2. Paul
R. Ehrlich, Gretchen C. Daily, Scott C. Daily, Norman Myers, and James Salzman, 1997. “No Middle Way on the Environment,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1997. 3. See
for instance: Harris, Jonathan, 2001. “Macroeconomic Policy And
Sustainability” Global Development And Environment Institute Working Paper
No. 01-09, Tufts University. Available at: ase.tufts.edu/gdae/publications/ working_papers/macroandsust.pdf.
(accessed June 1, 2005). 4.
Available at: http://www.maweb.org//en/Products.BoardStatement.aspx
(accessed June 1, 2005). 5.
Herman E. Daly, “The Illth of Nations and the
Fecklessness of Policy: An Ecological Economist’s Perspective”, post-autistic economics review, issue
no. 22, 24 November 2003, article 1,
http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review/issue22.htm 6. Wackernagel, M. and Silverstein, J. 2000: "Big
things first: focusing on the scale imperative with the ecological
footprint." Ecological Economics
32: 391-394. Author
contact: tom@rainforestsolutions.org ___________________________ ___________________________________________________
Adam Smith - the Father
of Post-Autistic Economics?:
A reply to Edney
Andrew Sayer (Lancaster University,
U.K.) © Copyright: Andrew Sayer In his article on Greed (Part 1, PAE Review, issue no. 31), Julian Edney
recycles, with a radical twist, a common myth about Adam Smith’s work that
has long been propagated in mainstream economics. According to this myth,
Smith saw people as wholly self-interested: “Adam Smith’s contribution was
a step further, to give happiness a mercantile slant. In the new philosophy
there is no conspicuous concern with sympathy, compassion, honesty, courage,
grace, altruism, charity, beauty, purity, love, care nor honor.
It accepts that humans are fundamentally selfish and egoistic and that they
don’t care about society-as-a-whole. . . . He simply declared that the
selfishness of each man [sic] and the good of society go together. The
general welfare is best served by letting each person pursue his own
interests.” (Edney, 2005) Edney goes on to treat Smith as a utilitarian
theorist, and accuses him of dispensing with justice. Is this the same Adam
Smith that wrote about “the remarkable distinction between justice and all
the other social virtues . . . that we feel ourselves to be under a stricter
obligation to act according to justice, than agreeably to friendship,
charity, or generosity; that the practice of these last mentioned virtues
seems to be left in some measure to our own choice, but that, somehow or
other, we feel ourselves to be in a peculiar manner tied, bound, and obliged
to the observation of justice.”? (Smith, 1759; II.ii.1.5). The myth is based on an extraordinarily
selective reading of just a few short passages from The Wealth of Nations regarding the invisible hand and motivation
in market exchange, taken out of context. Some versions of the myth
acknowledge that before The Wealth of
Nations (1776), Smith wrote The
Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) but assume that the latter’s deep
analysis of moral sentiments, which include but go beyond self-interest, was
abandoned for a concept of motivation based on narrow self interest. However,
the main arguments of The Wealth of
Nations were included in Smith’s lectures even before The Theory of Moral Sentiments was
published, and the latter was not only his first book, but his last, the
final revised (sixth) edition being published in 1790, a year after the final
(fifth) edition of The Wealth of
Nations. It is inconceivable that Smith could have regarded them as
incompatible, and indeed there is now a large literature arguing that they
are compatible, so that there was, in effect, only one Adam Smith, and that
he bears little resemblance to the caricature recycled by Edney. The last 30 years of Smith scholarship
demonstrates Smith’s lifelong attachment to a thoroughly social conception of
individuals, as beings who are psychologically dependent on the approval of
others, capable of (and indeed requiring) fellow-feeling, concerned for
others in themselves and not merely in relation to their own self-interest,
hence capable of benevolence and compassion as well as selfishness, susceptible
to shame as well as vanity, and as having a sense of justice. Smith was not
Mandeville or Hobbes and his whole philosophy and social theory was utterly
at odds with what we now term the autistic model of individuals assumed by
contemporary economics. It would be a tragic irony indeed if the
post-autistics movement were to overlook this. Here are a few references from
this literature, though a careful reading of both the The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations is indispensable. References Evensky, J.
1993, 'Ethics and the Invisible Hand', Journal
of Economic Perspectives 7 (2) pp.197-205. Fitzgibbon, A. 1995, Adam Smith's
System of Liberty, Wealth and Virtue, London: Clarendon
Press. Griswold, C.L.
Jr., 1999, Adam
Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lubasz, H. 1998, 'Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand - of the
market?’, in R.Dilthey (ed.)
Contesting Markets,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 37-55. Nieli, R. 1986
‘Spheres of intimacy and the Adam Smith problem’, Journal of the History
of Ideas, XLVII, pp.611-24 Otteson, J.R. 2002 Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Sen, A.
1987, On Ethics and Economics, Oxford: Blackwell Smith, A. 1759:1984, The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Smith, A. 1776:1976, An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. by E.Cannan,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press Tabb, W. K. 1999, Reconstructing Political Economy, London: Routledge Weinstein, J. R. 2001, On Adam Smith, Belmont: CA: Wadsworth,
2001; Winch, D. 1978 Adam Smith's Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Winch, D. 1996 Riches and Poverty; An Intellectual History
of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ___________________________ SUGGESTED CITATION: ___________________________________________________ This article originally appeared, under the
title “Post-Autistic Economics”, in issue 29, Spring 2005 of Soundings: A Journal of politics and culture. Over the
next few issues it is having a series of articles on the state of economics
and its impact on society. Details at
www.lwbooks.co.uk
The Rand Portcullis and PAE Edward
Fullbrook (University of West of
England, UK) © Copyright: Edward Fullbrook 2005 These days people like to call
neoclassical economics ‘mainstream economics’ because most universities offer
nothing else. The name also backhandedly stigmatizes as oddball, flaky,
deviant, disreputable, perhaps un-American, those economists who venture
beyond the narrow confines of the neoclassical axioms. In an attempt to
understand how this has happened, the first half of this article very roughly
traces the strange history of economics from the 1870s through to the recent
challenge to the neoclassical hegemony from the Post-Autistic Economics movement,
henceforth PAE. The second half surveys some of the
substantive dimensions of PAE, a movement that
began in Paris in the summer of 2000 and now involves thousands of economists
worldwide in a long-term effort to free economics from its neoclassical straitjacket. Physics
envy The origins of neoclassical economics are
not what an outsider might think. Though today it cavorts with neoliberalism, it began as a honest intellectual and
would-be scientific endeavour. Its patron saint was neither an ideologue nor
a political philosopher, nor even an economist, but Sir Isaac Newton. The
founding fathers of neoclassical economics hoped to achieve (and their
descendants living today believe they have) for the economic universe what
Newton had achieved for the physical universe. Its aim was to fashion an economic model in the image of Newtonian
mechanics - in which economic agents
could be treated as if they were particles obeying mechanical laws. In principle
it would be possible to describe the behaviour of such agents simultaneously,
by a solvable system of equations. This narrative required the treatment of
human desires as fundamental data: like the masses of physical bodies in
classical mechanics, they would not be affected by the relations being
modelled. It was to this end - not to the understanding of economic phenomena
- that homo economicus
or economic man and the hedonistic calculus were invented. Thorstein Veblen sums up the
core metaphysic as follows: *the human
material with which the inquiry is concerned is conceived in hedonistic
terms; that is to say, in terms of a passive and substantially inert and
immutably given human nature … The hedonistic conception of man is that of a
lightning calculator of pleasure and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous
globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him
about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor
consequent. He is an isolated definitive human datum …1* With this construct at its centre, the
dream of a determinate model of the economic universe was realised in the
1870s by William Stanley Jevons and, especially, by
Léon Walras, both of whom
were in part physicists by training: it was called the model of general
equilibrium. And this elaborate mechanistic metaphor, proudly devoid of
empirical content, remains today the grand narrative of economic theory, for
students and economists everywhere. The model, which invariably is expressed
in language so metaphorical that it would make a good poet blush, works by
laying down a priori, like
Euclidean geometry, a set of axioms:
Veblen and Keynes At the very end of the nineteenth century,
Thorstein Veblen launched
a counter-revolution against the growing domination of the neoclassical
approach in economics. Besides critiquing the neoclassical assumptions, he
analysed institutions as well as isolated individuals, emphasised emergent
social phenomena, argued that habit influenced economic choice more than
rational calculation, rejected all forms of reductionism, and stressed the
importance of knowledge in economic evolution. This approach steadily gained
adherents in the years leading up to the first world war, and in 1917 one its
leaders, John R. Commons, was elected president of the American Economics
Association (AEA). The following year this new
school was christened ‘institutional economics’ at the AEA
meetings, and was embraced by the association as a means of making economic
theory capable of addressing the problems of economic development that would
follow the conclusion of the war.2 In the 1920s the Institutionalists came to rival the Neoclassicals
in the US, but in the 1930s their numbers declined. Like neoclassical
economics, institutional economics had no explanation of, or solution to, the
calamity that had befallen capitalist economies. In stepped John Maynard Keynes. He offered
a new theoretical interpretation of capitalist economies, which both
explained their collapse and pointed to practical measures that would -
without interfering with their general principles - get them going again and
keep them functioning smoothly. Given the dire straits of capitalism and the
growing fear of revolution, not even neoclassical economists dared for long
to keep Keynes’s theory from being given a try. When it was shown to work,
that, at one level, ended the argument. Henceforth, in the basic management
of the economy, all American presidents would be Keynesians. But at the
theoretical level, which in the neoclassical tradition means theory that is axiom-led
rather than empirically-led (otherwise their axioms would have been abandoned
long ago), the argument had only just begun. In 1946 Keynes died and
neoclassical economists began their counterinsurgency. This time they would
not be satisfied until most economics departments in the world had been
cleansed of economists who voiced non-neoclassical ideas. The
Pentagon Keynes had trained at Cambridge University
as a mathematician. In his mid-twenties he wrote Treatise on Probability, a book that was lauded by Whitehead and Russell (‘it is impossible to praise too
highly’), and launched what has become known as the ‘logical-relationist’ theory of probability. When he turned his
attention to economics, he was shocked by the way mathematical economists abused
mathematics, especially when they applied them in meaningless ways to
unsuitable phenomena, and he made no secret of his professional contempt for
their empty pretentiousness. But these economists were soon to have their
revenge. Led by Paul Samuelson in the US and John Hicks in the UK, they set
about mathematicising Keynes’s theory. Or, more
accurately, a part of his theory. They left out all those bits that were
inconsistent with the neoclassical axioms. Their end product was a formalised
version of Keynes that is like a Henry Miller novel without sex and
profanity. This bowdlerised version of Keynes, called ‘Keynesianism’, soon
became standard fare in undergraduate courses. Even graduate students were
discouraged from reading the primary text. With the real Keynes out of the
way and Veblen and all the other free spirits
forgotten, the road was now clear to establish a neoclassical tyranny. Following the second world war, the United
States increasingly came to determine (one might say dictate) the shape of
economics worldwide, while within the United States the sources of influence
became concentrated and circumscribed to an absurd degree. This state of
affairs, which persists to the present day, was engineered in significant
part by the US Department of Defence, especially its Navy and Air Force.3
Beginning in the 1950s it lavishly funded university research in mathematical
economics. Military planners believed that game theory and linear programming
had potential use for national defence. And, although it now seems
ridiculous, they held out the same hope for mathematical solutions of
‘general equilibrium’, the theoretical core of neoclassical economics. In
1954 Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu achieved for
this mathematical puzzle a solution of sorts, and it has been the central
showpiece of academic economics ever since. Arrow’s early research had been
partly, in his words, ‘carried on at the RAND Corporation, a project of the
United States Air Force’.4 In the 1960s, official publications of
the Department of Defense praised the Arrow-Debreu project for its ‘modeling
of conflict and cooperation whether if be [for] combat or procurement
contracts or exchange of information among dispersed decision nodes.’ In
1965, RAND created a fellowship program for economics graduate students at
the Universities of California, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Chicago, Columbia
and Princeton, and in addition provided postdoctoral funds for those who best
fitted the mold. These seven economics departments,
along with that of MIT - an institution long regarded by many as a branch of
the Pentagon - have subsequently come to dominate economics globally to an
astonishing extent. Two examples will show what I mean. The
American Economic Review
(AER),
the Quarterly Journal of Economics
(QJE),
and the Journal of Political Economy
(JPE)
have long been regarded as the world’s three most prestigious economics
journals; being published in these journals adds the most value to an
economist’s CV, and most helps an economics department’s ranking and research
funding. A study has been made of the affiliation of the authors of
full-length articles appearing in these journals from 1973 through 1978.5
For the QJE
it found that the eight departments with the most articles were the seven
favoured through RAND by the US Department of Defence plus MIT, and that this
Big Eight accounted for 77.3 per cent of the articles published. In the JPE all of the
RAND Seven were in the top ten and, together with MIT, accounted for 63.1 per
cent of the articles published. In the AER the top eight contributing
departments were again the RAND Seven plus MIT, which together accounted for
59.3 per cent of the articles published. Even within this Big Eight there was
an astonishing concentration of success. In the QJE, which is controlled by
Harvard, 33.3 per cent of the articles were by Harvard-affiliated authors. In
the JPE,
controlled by Chicago, 20.7 per cent of the articles were by
Chicago-affiliated authors. In the AER, nearly half of whose editorial board during these
years was from, in rank order, Chicago, MIT and Harvard, 14.0, 10.7 and 7.1
per cent of the articles were by authors from these departments respectively.
About 70 per cent of the board members were from the Big Eight, as were
nearly 60 per cent of the members of the nominating committees for officers.
As Canterbery and Burkhardt
argue, it is unsurprising that these departments are seen as ‘distinguished’:
‘The “best” departments are those who publish in their own journals, which
are “best” since they publish the “best” departments. As they comment, this
academic incest would be considered genetically unsound if it involved
biological reproduction (p28). A glance through the 2003 edition of
Penguin’s Dictionary of Economics
illustrates the accentuated continuation of this tiny all-powerful closed
shop. The dictionary has entries for 29 living economists. Of these, 26 -
89.7 per cent - are from the US, or have had all or the most important part
of their careers there. Think about that: 26 for one country and 3 for the
rest of world. And that is in a British publication by a team of three
British authors. And what are the affiliations of the 26 US economists? 100
per cent of them have either taught at or received their PhD from one of the
Big Eight. The
post-autistic economics movement In Paris in June 2000, a group of
economics students wrote a short petition lambasting their curriculum and
stating what they wanted instead. They passed their document among friends
and posted it on the web. To everyone’s amazement, especially the students,
their little protest has turned out to be a tipping point of sorts. Like the
late Soviet Union, mainstream economics is caught in a time warp, and when reality
catches up with such worlds the events that follow nearly always take
everybody by surprise. There was a bit of conceptual genius at
work in the French students’ petition. For forty years most critiques of
economics had been filtered through sets of ideas such as Popperian
falsification, Kuhnian paradigms, Lakatosian research programmes and related notions. The
students’ petition ignored all that. Instead it assailed mainstream economics
for failing to illuminate most of economic reality (hence the term
‘autistic’), and identified the causes as the establishment’s commitment to
viewing the world only through the narrow neoclassical point of view; its
prohibition of critical thinking towards that system of belief; and its
preoccupation with meaningless formalism. The solution was simple and
realisable if given the political will: dump most of the maths, drop the
prohibition on critical thinking and introduce ‘a plurality of approaches
adapted to the complexity of objects analysed.’ The students were making - they may not
have realised it but their mentor Bernard Guerrien
must have - a major epistemological point. They were breaking with the
previous century’s philosophy of science (which had included its application
to economics), which had preoccupied itself with situations of transition -
transition between theories that highlighted the same aspects of some corner
of reality, but offered different conclusions and agendas. Thus Karl Popper’s
The Logic of Scientific Discovery
argued for falsification as the ideal and operative criteria for change of
theory allegiance; others, most notably Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn, argued for other criteria. The
epistemological concern of the French students is a fundamentally different
one. They have identified a situation in which one theory illuminates a few
facets of a domain, while its practitioners suppress other theories that
illuminate some of the many facts that their theory leaves in the dark. In
such a situation the solution is not abandonment of a theory or research
programme, or a paradigm shift, but pluralism. The history of economics is diverse, but
the idea of pluralism is nevertheless anathema to economists. Beginning with
the French Physiocrates in the mid
eighteenth-century, economists of all varieties have been inclined to believe
that their approach to economic phenomena reveals, if not the whole truth, at
least all of it that is worth knowing. It is with these broad
conceptualisations, which are called ‘schools’, rather than with subject
areas, that economists form their primary professional identity. The assorted
teachings and members of these schools are labelled orthodox or heterodox
depending on whether their school is the dominant one or not. Until very
recently economists of all varieties have been comfortable with this
quasi-theological scheme of things. The French students asked that their
economics education be oriented primarily toward understanding the world’s
economic problems (globalisation, inequalities, environment, technical
progress, etc). Any ‘school’s’ teaching would be welcome to the extent that
it threw light on the real world. Likewise, implicitly, a school’s members
would not be welcome if they did not place the pursuit of empirical
understanding ahead of the inculcation of articles of faith. Furthermore, and
this is extremely important, the inclusion of different ‘schools’, with their
different conceptual viewpoints, would neutralise the ideological
implications that every conceptual system, by design or accident, contains. No
strong precedent existed for this demand, and its novelty, coupled with its
self-evident reasonableness, came as a shock for economists, orthodox and
heterodox alike. Traditionally non-neoclassical schools of
economics have quarrelled among themselves hardly less than with the
neoclassical. But in the mid-1990s a peace movement began. Under the banner ICARE (Confederation of Associations for the Reform of
Economics) (later changed to ICAPE, with
‘Pluralism’ substituted for ‘Reform’), it sought ‘to promote a new spirit of
pluralism in economics, involving critical conversation and tolerant
communication among different approaches’. ICAPE’s
pluralism in the mode of a council of churches was several giant steps away
from what the French students were proposing, but it helped to decontaminate
the p-word and breakdown blind acceptance of the simplistic Popperian and Kuhnian, us or
them, notions of science. So when the ideas of the French students were
spread through the profession internationally by the Post-Autistic Economics Newsletter (now Review) they fell on partially prepared ground. The speed with which the free
email-delivered PAE Newsletter/Review picked up
subscribers and became a focal point for the radical reform of economics surprised
everyone, especially its editor. Nor does the momentum show signs of
decreasing. The journal now has 8000 subscribers, mostly academics but also
many economists employed in other capacities. Its website - www.paecon.net – receives 5,000 visitors a
month. Policy
implications The neoclassical monopoly in the classroom
and its prohibition on critical thinking has meant that it has brainwashed
successive generations of students into viewing economic reality exclusively
through its concepts, which more often than not misrepresent or veil the
world, especially today’s world. Nearly all of these neoclassical notions
have a bearing on judgements about social, cultural and economic policy.
Consequently, if society were to learn to think about economic matters
outside the neoclassical conceptual system, it would almost certainly choose
different policies. One of PAE’s projects has been
to expose some of the many conceptual lunacies of today’s mainstream, both in
terms of the concepts it uses and the concepts it lacks. Drawing on recent
essays by PAE economists in A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics (especially the chapters
by Michael A. Bernstein, Geoffrey Hodgson, Peter Söderbaum,
Hugh Stretton, Richard Wolff, Robert Costanza, Herman E. Daly, Jean Gadrey,
and myself), I am going to briefly consider some of these concepts.6
Neoclassical economics regards competition as a state rather than as
a process. It defines perfect competition as a market with a large number of
firms with identical products,
costs structures, production techniques and market information. But in real
life competition is a process by which firms continually seek to re-establish
the conditions of their own profitability. To compete in a market requires
firms to seek out and exploit differences between them in production,
technology, distribution, access to information and awareness of trends in
consumption. These differences are the essential dimensions in which
competition takes place. However, once the neoclassical conception of
competition becomes embedded in the student’s mind, appreciation of
real-world competition, and hence the policies that might enhance it, becomes
logically impossible. Neoclassical economists love to talk about
freedom of choice. But this is pure
rhetoric, because they define rationality in a way that eliminates free
choice from their conceptual space. By rationality they mean that an agent’s
choices are in conformity with an ordering or scale of preferences. The
‘rational’ agent chooses from among the alternatives available the one which
is highest on his ranking. Rational behaviour simply means behaviour in
accordance with some ordering of alternatives in terms of relative
desirability. In order for this approach to have any predictive power, it
must be assumed that the preferences do not change over some period of time. So the basic condition of neoclassical
rationality is that individuals must forego
choice in favour of some past reckoning, thereafter acting as automata. This
conceptual elimination of freedom of choice, in both its everyday and
philosophical meanings, gives neoclassical theory the hypothetical
determinacy that its Newtonian inspired metaphysics require. Without
indeterminacy there can be no choice. Without determinacy; there is no
neoclassical model. This is far from just an academic matter, because society
needs an economics that is able to address questions regarding freedom of
choice. No terms in
neoclassical economics are more sacrosanct than rational choice and rationality.
Everyone identifies with these words, because everyone wants to think of
themselves as rational. But few people realise that economists give these
words an ultra eccentric meaning. Neoclassical economics begins with an a priori conception of markets and
economies as determinate systems that, by the action of individual agents
alone, tend towards an efficient and market-clearing equilibrium. This
requires that the individual agents, like the bodies in Newton’s system,
behave in a prescribed manner. Neoclassicalists
have then gone on to deduce the particular pattern of behaviour that would
make their imagined world logically possible, and named it ‘rational choice’
or ‘rationality’; they have then declared that that is the way real people
behave. But, thankfully, they don’t. Everyday economic actors do many things
that, in the neoclassical meaning of ‘rational’, are ‘irrational’. Many
common consumer behaviours are prohibited under the neoclassical notions of
rational choice and rationality, including: looking to the choices of other
consumers as guides to what one might buy; buying a stock because you believe
other people will be buying it and so increase its value; spending your money
in a spirit of spontaneity rather than stopping to calculate the consequences
and alternatives up to the limits of your cognitive powers; indulging a taste
for change, that is, buying something that you did not previously prefer. All
these actions are considered outside the scope of analysis of neoclassical
economics. These failings all
connect with another. For neoclassical economics is by its own axioms
incapable of offering a coherent conceptualisation of the individual or economic agent. It cannot explain where the preferences that
supposedly dictate the individual’s choice come from. The preferences cannot
be explained through interpersonal relations, because if individual demands
were interdependent they would not be additive, and thus the market demand
function - neoclassicalism’s key analytical tool -
would be undefined. And they cannot come from society, because neoclassicalism’s Newtonian atomism translates as
methodological individualism, meaning that society is to be explained in
terms of individuals and never the other way around. This leaves an awful lot unexplained. For
in the main, despite the neoclassical axioms, we all tend to categorise and
classify according to prevailing cultural norms. Likewise our tastes and
preferences for this and that reflect the social conventions and institutions
with which we interact. Consequently individual choice is unavoidably and
inextricably bound up with historically and geographically given social
worlds. An economics that has nothing to say about the formation of economic
tastes and preferences is silly and irresponsible, especially in an age of
consumer societies, and in a world now threatened with climate change or
worse. For half a century neoclassical economics
has hidden its ideology behind the notion that it calls positive economics. This is the idea that it contains no value
judgements because it mentions none. Of course such a notion belongs to an
intellectually more naive age than today, but it nonetheless persists as an
effective tool of indoctrination of undergraduates. The fact that
neoclassical economics requires a highly restricted focus in order to
maintain its atomist and determinist metaphysics compels it to make many
extreme judgements about what is and is not economically important. There is
not space here even to list them. But one key example is its notion of
‘economic man’ - an acutely ideological term, as it emphasises some roles and
relationships and excludes others; by allowing only decisions based on
utility maximisation, it excludes other forms of ethics. As an economic
agent, each individual acts in many roles, not just market ones, and is
guided by his or her ‘ideological orientation’. That orientation may be
founded on utilitarianism or not. It may, for example, be based on social and
environmental ethics. PAE economists do not believe
that economists have the right to select one ethics as the ‘correct’ one for
framing economic analysis. Furthermore, the neoclassical insistence upon the
utilitarian ideology legitimises a kind of ‘market ideology’ and
‘consumerism’ that increasingly appears dangerous to society, and sidelines
the debate about sustainable development. Like rationality, nearly everyone thinks efficiency is a good idea.
Neoclassical economists adore using this word, especially when addressing the
public. But the meaning of ‘efficiency’ always depends on what you choose to
count. For example, suppose five firms all manage to lower by the same
amounts the production cost and selling price of a standard product that they
all produce. One does it by cutting its workers’ pay, another by working them
longer hours, another by getting materials at lower prices from a poorer
country, another by replacing some of its workers with robots, and another by
inventing machinery improvements that allow it to cut work hours with no loss
of output, profit, jobs or pay. Are all of these changes equally efficient
(or inefficient)? A neoclassical economist will answer yes, because the five
firms all end up producing the same product at the same cost and selling it
at the same price. For them that is all that matters. The prevailing mainstream also holds that
in the realm of public affairs this concept of ‘efficiency’ can and should
determine the net balance between the positives (total benefits) and
negatives (total costs) that would result from an economic policy or act. In
place of public debate, economists would substitute ‘cost-benefit analysis’.
But any such analysis depends on the consequences selected and the kinds of
‘measurements’ made. No efficiency claim is ever based on an identification
of all the consequences, and quantitative guesstimates of the future
inevitably have a crystal-ball dimension. In the final analysis, ‘efficient’,
like ‘beautiful’, is little more than a way of expressing a positive opinion. Mainstream economics, and in consequence
most policy dialogue, also conflates two very different meanings of economic growth that are in common
usage, with GNP mistakenly taken to be a measure of both. There is quantitative growth, meaning an
increase in the quantity of production and consumption, and there is qualitative growth, meaning an improvement in
well-being. For example, an epidemic may lead to growth of medical
expenditure and hence increase GNP but not well-being. Pollution and
congestion lead to huge expenditures to escape them (e.g. commuting from the
suburbs, double glazing, air filters, security measures), the creation of new
industries and an ever larger GNP, but they also decrease well-being.
Quantitative growth that causes negative qualitative growth can also be
called uneconomic growth. This is
both a reality and a concept with which policy-makers must come to terms, the
sooner the better. Closely related to these new
anti-neoclassical concepts is another one, sustainable development. This refers to the physical scale of the
economy relative to the ecosystem. Ecological economists view the economy as
an open subsystem of the larger ecosystem which is finite, non-growing and,
except for solar energy, materially closed. This point of view compels asking
questions regarding scale. How large is the economic subsystem relative to
the earth’s ecosystem? What is its maximum possible size? What is its most
desirable size in terms of human welfare? These questions, around which
policy decisions will and must increasingly be made, are not found in
standard economics textbooks. Neoclassical economics can not accommodate the
concept of sustainable development, because, if it was adopted as a goal it
would require that goods be valued in part by their contribution to that goal
and not solely on their contribution to individual utility maximisation. The close to monopoly position of
neoclassical economics is incompatible with normal ideas of democracy.
Economics has some of the qualities of a science, but because of the very
nature of its subject matter, it is forever and fundamentally ideological. It
is best not to deceive oneself and others about that. The preoccupation of
economics with values and worldly acts means that in a democratic society it
has a moral responsibility to promote the exploration of economic knowledge
from more than one point of view, so as to make possible the informed and
intelligent debate and discussion that democracy requires. But the hegemony
of neoclassical economics means that departments of economics have become
political propaganda centres. In 2002, Joseph Stiglitz,
a recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote in The Guardian that economics as taught
‘in America's graduate schools … bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over
science’. Is this a legitimate use of public funds? What is certain is that
it is a dangerous state of affairs, but one that is now being challenged. The
PAE movement immodestly seeks over the next ten
years a revolution: the transformation of economics into a genuinely
pluralistic enterprise wishing to contribute to, rather than subvert,
democratic processes. The success of this movement depends in part on other
disciplines and professions withdrawing their patronage from the neoclassical
hegemony, in favour of the now thousands of economists working for the new
order. Notes 1. Thorstein Veblen, ‘Why is
Economics not an Evolutionary Science?’, Quarterly
Journal of Economics, Vol. 12, 1898, p373. 2.
Geoffrey M. Hodgson, How Economics
Forgot History, Routledge 2001, p155. 3. This
paragraph draws heavily on Michael A. Bernstein, ‘Rethinking Economics in
Twentieth-Century America’, in Edward Fullbrook (ed), The Crisis in Economics, Routledge
2003. 4.
Kenneth Arrow, Collected Papers of
Kenneth J. Arrow: Volume 1: Social choice and Justice, Harvard University
Press 1983, p1. 5. E. Ray
Canterbery and Robert J. Burkhardt,
‘What do we mean by asking whether economics is a science?’, in Alfred S. Eichner
(ed), Why Economics Is Not Yet a Science,
Macmillan 1983. 6. Edward
Fullbrook (ed),
A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics, Anthem Press 2004. ___________________________ SUGGESTED CITATION:
___________________________________________________ This article originally appeared in
French in L'Economie Politique, no. 26, Sommaire
2005 Details at www.alternatives-economiques.fr/ecopol>www.alternatives-economiques.fr/ecopol Perestroika in American Political Science Kurt Jacobsen (University
of Chicago, USA) © Copyright: Kurt Jacobsen 2005 Does democracy, or the lack of it, affect research methods? Philosophers of science Paul Feyerabend, and, less flamboyantly, Thomas Kuhn are among those who have implied such a link. In the superpower that advertises itself as the world's greatest democracy (despite the precipitous Iraq invasion, the Patriot Act, Abu Graib and suspicions of electronic and other forms of vote rigging in the 2004 US election) one might imagine that the American Political Science Association (APSA), which represents 15,000 scholars and teachers of the art of politics, preaches the gospel that the best system of government, despite all its faults, is democracy. Actually, as with any group fancying itself an elite, many eminent APSA members harbor grave doubts as to how far this unruly form of government ought to go not only in the world but inside their own club. From inception the Association has never entertained the subversive notion of conducting internal elections through a secret ballot, that is, until recently. Does this situation exert any impact upon the content of political science research? A rebellious group of US political scientists explicitly connect the recent dominance of a stultifyingly formal and quantitative view of political life to the absence of internal democracy in the APSA. What governs the APSA is a cozy arrangement where a committee chosen by the president nominates his (eighty times "his" versus four times "her") successor who then picks the governing council who pick the next president who picks the next Council, and so on. APSA officers are answerable to people whom they themselves appoint, a splendidly regal arrangement. What does this coziness mean for the vitality of teaching, research and democracy? An ancient academic joke has a surly scholar complain about a successful experiment: "That's all very well in practice but how does it work in theory?" The joke is only a slight exaggeration about the otherworldly plight of American political science. Today it is the elegance and artificial neatness of models - not relevance to real world activities - that reap the greatest kudos. Other sorts of scholars have gotten the clear message that they need not apply. This disturbing trend would not have come to light except for a sudden surprising revolt against what disgruntled scholars claim is the suffocating grip of mathematical models and of formal theory (rational choice, public choice) in economics as well as political science. Rational choice theory derives from an especially abstract version of neo-classical economics, which political scientists cannot help but enviously notice win Nobel Prizes, though often for no intelligible reason and with no discernible benefit to mankind. The theory deploys an arid set of assumptions about human behavior which reduce complicated lives and societies to prioritized "rational" choices that we supposedly make in order to maximize our patently obvious "utility" in any given situation. In this dusty chalkboard universe people are viewed as specimens of 'homo economicus,' a stern concept wherein any trace of culture, history, personality, accident, whimsy, self-reflectiveness or any other impurity that might smudge the model's tidiness is erased. In the political science discipline the equation of 'empirical' with 'quantitative' is a commonplace and, indeed, increasingly compulsory error, as Peri Schwartz-Shea of the University of Utah, among others, notes . Although some dissidents exclude statistical techniques from their critique of the hubris of formal theorizing, Greg Kasza of Indiana University insists that it is "radical quantifiers" who "popularized the study of politics outside of its historical and cultural setting, who made methodology into the core of graduate education while degrading political philosophy and foreign language study, and who spawned the trend toward method-driven rather than problem-driven research." Kasza observes, with a good deal of justice, that American graduate students are forced to "earn their passports to the clouds in qualifying exams that grill them on multiple regression, most-different-systems analysis, and the small-n problem" when many have yet to master the history, economics, social structure, and politics of even one "n" . . ." Few critics deny that rational choice, and the statistical apparatus that often accompanies it, has merit if employed with a bit of humility, especially in studies of collective action. The chronic trouble is that formal models dangle the tantalizing appearance of explanations for almost anything, although these explanations, critics retort, either are trivial or reinvent (and rephrase the invention of) the wheel or fail to display even a nodding acquaintance with recognizable reality. Unscholarly citizens especially in the UK and US may well wonder why recent economic growth consistently generates a maldistribution of wealth or why the best and brightest market economists encouraged the Russians to send their economy, so far as the average Russian is concerned, straight to hell. Few economists or rational choice connoisseurs pay any serious attention to such vulgar everyday policy questions. Can this serene disengagement from public life go on forever? 'Beyond generic group death and disability insurance, discounts on otherunreadable scholastic publications, cheap tickets to APSA meetings, and periodically-issued surveys of what many academics pretend is 'cutting edge research,' the APSA does very little," Professor Timothy Luke of Vermont drolly accuses. "It no longer aspires to guide the nation's public life, it bars members from making political pronouncements in any collective manner, and it produces a fairly apolitical and largely unscientific run of self-referential literature by, for, and of college professors.' Like the "post autistic economics" movement erupting in France in 2000 against formalistic "excesses" of economics, the American perestroikans too advocate a "plurality of approaches adapted to the complexity of the object studied." American economics proved fiercely resistant and so the reform movement ignited instead within political science, which zealously imitates economics. The clarion call of the US revolt came in October 2000 in an e-mail circulated by "Mr. Perestroika" - perhaps a junior faculty member or group of junior faculty and graduate students- who lashed out against "poor game-theorists who cannot for the life of me compete with a third grade economics student" yet are able to stifle the "diversity of methodologies and areas of the world that APSA 'purports' to represent." Perestroika, according to its - ahem - original sponsors, promoted the "vital creativity" of society's members; development of democracy, "initiative and independence" and "the widening of criticism and self-criticism in all spheres of social life" in the long gone Soviet Union. Mr. Perestroika recently stated that the goal of the movement is providing "a forum where people can discuss and debate methodology, politics, theory, and the world in such a manner that APSA and APSR (American Political Science review) and our discipline become more open and more diverse in gender, racial, ethnic, and methodological terms - in teaching, publishing and hiring practices.' The anonymous 'Mr. Perestroika' became the elusive catalyst for a lively reform movement. Within a month of the original e-mailing an enthusiastic movement of insurgent professors crystallized, led by a bevy of eminent scholars whom APSA authorities simply could not afford to ignore. By January 2001 more than 200 tenured faculty signed a slightly toned-down version of the original petition, charging that formal modelers are slowly but surely elbowing out other valuable forms of research. Signatories included 24 named chairs - luminaries ranging from Yale's political ethnographer James Scott to University of Chicago's South Asia experts Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph to Penn's political semioticist Ann Norton and American studies scholar Rogers Smith. Political science has "been taken over by methodological parochialists who believe that the only worthwhile scholarship in political science speaks the language of mathematics," stated Chicago security specialist John Mearsheimer. Only counting "counts" inasmuch as mathematics conveys a seductive and illusory sense of precision. Numbers cannot lie. Just ask vote tabulators in Florida, accountants at Enron or any tax attorney. The dubious, indeed daft, belief that quantitative data are not themselves an interpretation has become widely institutionalized, a sad fact which forecloses many potential analytical insights. One consequence is that economists and political scientists have less and less to say about anything that mere mortals recognize as the actual world they move in. Young scholars, like it or not, bend to prevailing disciplinary winds. In America rational choice modelers rapidly became notorious for forming potent coteries intent on expanding their paradigmatic presence. This imperialistic behavior has not gone unnoticed in Britain either: "The governing principle in most sensible political science departments is that rational choice theorists should be on tap but not on top," the former Chair of a top UK politics department, who preferred diplomatic anonymity, told me. "They should exist, be permitted to flourish, but never be permitted dominance. Once dominant they are incapable of appointing other than their own; the more vulgar they are the more this is true." Dissidents complain that rational choice/mathematical modelers cannot admit that equations are just as much metaphors as any lofty literary image deployed by supposedly "soft" (and , therefore, second-rate) social scientists. Giandomenico Majone, who lectures in the US and Europe, believes the fault lies not with formal models in themselves but with the excesses of undereducated disciples: "You should know more than the tool you use," he observed. Indeed. One side benefit of this strenuous hyperspecialization - what Thorstein Veblen long ago labeled a 'trained incompetence' - for acolytes (at least those without any sense of intellectual adventure) is that whenever they encounter flak from more broadly (multi-disciplinary) educated colleagues, they just retreat along a trail of numerological platitudes into the APSA institutional fortress where like-minded number crunchers rule the roost. Other fields are virtually off-limits. The result is that they can punish anyone who knows more than they do. It is all too common for formal modelers to take a framework derived from a Western context and apply it blithely and blindly. An example I witnessed is a paper by overly numerate academics who imposed a one-size-fits-all conflict framework upon Northern Ireland where, among other howlers, they asserted that the Irish Republic could pressure the Reverand Ian Paisley to endorse the fitful peace process, which is akin to calling on the Pope to control Osama bin Laden. A graduate student in the perestroika list serve recalled an ambitious faculty modeler who decided to incorporate India into his data set without developing any grasp of its history or culture. "Isn't Dehli the national language of India?,' the undaunted chap asked. Everything looks like easy prey if you never tried to capture it and just need to look as if you have. Practitioners often slip into the touristic assumption that American values and practices are, or ought to be, universal. They often get away with flawed concoctions by invoking the axiom that numbers and their allegedly neutral formal theories make whatever they do scientific. The American reform movement has two prongs. One is opposition to the non-competitive process by which political scientists in the world's second largest democracy have chosen to organize themselves. The second is opposition to the hegemony of formal and quantitative work in the journals and fori of the Association, and support for diversity in forms of knowledge. Opposition has taken several forms. The most severe criticisms of monopolistic formal-quantitative approaches have targeted the American Political Science Review, flag ship journal of the Association. The journals of regional associations likewise have come under scrutiny. These august organs are used by many departments as a certifying authorities for faculty recruitment, promotion and tenure, which is useful particularly for departments who wish to relieve themselves of the onerous burden of personally reading and evaluating the work of prospective candidates. In an initial dismissive response to perestroikans Ada Finifter, APSR journal editor in 2001, evinced her belief that only sordid ambition was at stake, and was unable to imagine why so many prominent dissenters were upset since they are so successful at publishing their work anyway. Finifter was wholly oblivious to the ominous ambiguity inherent in claiming that all is well so long as scholars provide "high-quality work using methods appropriate to the research problem" - as if the very definition of those estepmed methods were not the major issue. Still, in 2001, a conciliatory APSA announced the selection of a Perestroika-backed candidate as President, Harvard's Theda Skocpol. Even this move was viewed with some suspicion out of concern that the APSA honchos reckoned that Skocpol, despite renown for being no pushover, might be co-opted into the tight coteries of the East coast network and so opt to preserve the old undemocratic mechanisms. Everyone has read their Machiavelli - in which case, of course, it is rather harder to be successfully Machiavellian. Most dissidents were pleased that, as Mr. Perestroika put it, there was a tantalizing prospect of a "dismantling of the Orwellian system that we have in the APSA." Yet it speaks volumes that junior scholars today still fear to reveal identities in a profession that purports to prize vigorous open exchange. When lifelong students of the way power works express surprise, and in some cases dumbfounding indignation, that some perestroikans must conceal their identities for fear of reprisals, one gets a whiff of apparatchiki or else naifs at work, even among some perestroikans. 'One does not need to be a rocket scientist - or a political scientist - to see that transparency does not always serve insurgency well,' Anne Norton replied to a few indignant perestroikans who primly demanded that Mr. Perestroika disclose his/their identity. "If P 'came out of the closet' and turned out to be a graduate student at Michigan State, a junior faculty member at Los Angeles Community College, a recent PhD with no job and no book contract, one esteemed recent PhD from Chicago with a visiting post at a small college, and some senior scholar somewhere, how many of us would give their collective opinions equal weight with those of Anne Norton, Rogers Smith? Sure we all would," pointedly writes Michael Bosia. "But talk to graduate students and recent PhDs (and many scholars) about why they don't post on Perestroika, and you might learn that we don't weigh all voices equally. The group P, then, equalizes the discussion. Perestroika or P is a disembodied voice with no more power than the ability to remind and recall." Since 2001 the network has undergone two 'constitutional crises': one over whether to become a formalized institution with officers (rejected) and the other whether to become a forum for general political criticism (mostly rejected). Apart from the decision not to become a formal organization, the e-mail net-work, which continues to be brokered by the mysterious Mr. Perestroika, has become semi-institutionalized. It has given rise to relatively coherent project collaboration by colleagues who often have never seen each other. In 2003 a committee of major scholars was formed to oversee list serve traffic while at the same time protecting Mr. Perestroika's identity. A list serve, or course, cannot be free from foibles. Discussants often get diverted to hobbyhorse concerns of a few garrulous members. The list serve recently seemed in danger of takeover by prominent conservatives who, in a hard era spanning Reagan, Bushs senior and junior, and a Southern Democrat who scuttled the US welfare system, complained that they suffer awful discrimination inside the liberal Academy. Theda Skocpol was succeeded as APSA President in September 2003 by perestroikan Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. Rudolph, Skocpol and predecessor Robert Putnam appointed perestroikans to various decision bodies of the Association. An initiative set in motion earlier to launch a new journal as an alternative to the parochialism of the APSR, and give members a choice, was accelerated by the Perestroika presence. Jennifer Hochschld oversaw the first few years of 'Perspective on Politics.' New APSR editor Lee Siegelman acknowledged the grievances concerning absence of diversity in his journal. Issues of the APSR under his watch have shown improvement. From the September 2002 to the February 2004 issue, an inquisitive Perestroikan found that twice as many qualitative articles (10 - 14%) appeared as in the prior decade. A self-nominated committee on reform of Association governance also was busy formulating proposals for competitive elections.. Not everything smacks of sweetness and light. A "Mr. Pravda" intervened in the list serve to suggest Perestrokans were motivated by sheer careerism. There is a grain of truth to this, as no movement is made up entirely of saints (not even saints). Still, association with Perestroika hardly wins you points from most hiring committees. Skocpol testily chided Perestroika itself as being unrepresentative while APSA nominating committee member Joan Vecchiarelli Scott opined that many reforms were in the pipeline anyway. Rudolph received many letters warning of sinister cooptation, that the reform agenda might well be buried by sly inertia and resistance. One prominent Perestroikan warned of Thermidore. Some fear that the new journal is fated to be deemed a second-class repository of non-formulaic manuscripts. Studies of the regional journals show they "continue to represent a narrow section of the scholarship and a small section of the membership in our profession." During Rudolph's term, which concluded last Fall, plans for elections were stymied within the Election committee. Current President Margaret Levi of the University of Washington, the third woman in a row, is not regarded as a perestroikan sympathizer, favoring instead a somewhat left-wing variant of rational choice. However, President-Elect Ira Katznelson of Columbia University, who assumes office in September, very much favors methodological pluralism. One formidable problem that Perestroikans haven't solved is how to introduce diversity into departmental hiring processes, which are said to be largely controlled by the hegemonic formalist persuasion. Recent discussions in cyberspace raised the possibility of an informal process to rank departments according to degree of diversity, relying on the information process itself as a form of critique and consciousness-raising. So far, the discussion is held up by finicky questions of, you guessed it, methodology. Perestroikans certainly do not oppose formal methods or mathematical models, Susanne Rudolph stresses, but only resist their consecration as holy devices, squeezing out rival cultural, historical and psychological approaches. Rudolph asserts that the essential objective is "high-quality work using methods appropriate to the research problem," but follows fellow dissident Margaret Keck of John Hopkins University in believing that "the problem dictates the method" - not the other way around. Like much else in the world of American politics, the Perestroika movement is many-stranded. The objectives of several marginalized demographic groups within the Association overlap with those of Perestroika. Skocpol was supported by the women's caucus while Rudolph was supported by the women's caucus, the black caucus, the lesbian and gay caucus, and the Hispanic caucus. Ironically, when the September 11 attacks occurred a ferocious debate erupted that was sidetracked quickly to other websites. Most perestroikans are shy of provoking splits within their fragile melange of methodological approaches and political leanings. In contrast, Chris Howell of Oberlin argues that over-reliance on quantitative methods are only a symptom and that the "real goal is a critical and engaged political science that does not readily conform to what the powers that be want of it." Certainly, a key "purpose of education is precisely to promote reflection on preferences," Mark Graber noted. Timothy Luke observed how "formally inclined rational choicers look down on others as story tellers and journalists" Indeed, no single epithet is more damning. A rigidly self-defined political science department in North Carolina some years ago contemptuously discarded a young academic as being little more than a mere journalist -- just months before he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a political biography. Mr. Perestroika sees the nature and organizational form of the insurgency as aiming to retain "the amorphous character of this movement and list group. However, we will form working groups in democracy, publishing, future initiatives to broaden intellectual base. In the same vein, perestroika as it stands needs to make a real effort to draw in people of color and other oft-marginalized communities if it is to make any valid claims to representativeness." There is always a lurking danger of serious rifts among a delicately constructed coalition of scholars who are up against a cohesive set of opponents. There also is always room for humility. "I rarely encounter any political scientist," said Professor Rogers Smith during an online chat, "who is 100 percent versatile in all the methods that are employed within political science." A discipline that is "methodologically dexterous is bound to advance more effectively," observed former president Skocpol, "than one becoming overly specialized in narrow or fixed techniques." The hard tasks now for the rebels are to consolidate gains, decide an agenda, mollify various factions, debate strategy, and maintain a perestroikan presence at regional and national conferences. All rebels do agree that diversity of methods must be encouraged and that APSA elections must be democratized. They are looking into and contestng NSF and SSRC funding practices, which some believe have uncritically backed the rise of quantitative hegemony. There is also some attention trained on the permanent non-elected APSA bureaucracy who, as perestroikan Ido Oren found, have a rather intriguing history of links to the national security establishment. The overwhelming practical challenge remains inducing changes in hiring and promotion criteria, which are controlled not by the APSA but by individual departments. So there is a long struggle ahead on literally hundreds of fronts. The dissidents hope that the effort to improve democracy within their profession will also help improve democratic practices outside. The increasingly otherworldly methods of "the social sciences make it difficult to communicate with and make our work relevant to the wider public," laments Chicago's Lloyd Rudolph. "We have to know and live with differences within our profession as well as in the world." Or, as Forrest Gump might aptly have put it, "rational is as rational does." ___________________________ SUGGESTED
CITATION: ___________________________________________________ EDITOR: Edward Fullbrook |
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