Post-truth: an alumni economist’s perspective

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon 50 years as an academic economist, this lecture to alumni of SOAS’s Department of Economics reflects upon the continual ‘post-truth’ aspects of mainstream economics, ranging over its substantive, if shifting, content, and its treatment of methodology and interdisciplinarity. It draws upon a wide range of theory, empirical analysis, policy and anecdote to highlight both the need for alternatives and the continuing, even increased, failure of the mainstream to engage with criticism and alternatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Heterodox economics
• economics imperialism
• pluralist economics

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• B2
• B4
• B5

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Note that research students, and colleagues, have been a rich source of joint research and collaboration. But, with one exception, apart from referencing publications, I have refrained from mentioning individuals in what follows despite a huge debt of contribution and gratitude (hopefully deservedly felt in both directions).

2. I have had the chance on two previous occasions to write about my life as an economist, see Fine (2001a, 2012a). In the former, I was tickled to realise I was the youngest living contributor!.

3. In the good old days of hard copy, accessing a PhD thesis required the reader to sign a form, Fine (1974). Decades after I finished my thesis, I went back to get a copy for myself and found only one person had ever requested it. Nonetheless, it gave rise to a stream of publications as such (and beyond in investigating consumer norms, see below) and exercised my technical skills subsequently to allow them to continue to tick over and provide some mental exercise and pleasure. See Fine (1975a, 1975b, 1985, 1995, 1996) and Fine and Fine (1974a, 1974b). I even have a technical problem that I have yet to resolve concerning whether ordinality of individual preference imposes any constraints on social choice, given utility sum rule, as is the case for cardinal preferences (e.g. some alternatives cannot come first even though Pareto efficient because some other, not always the same, alternative dominates contingent on the choice of interpersonal weights in adding utility)!.

4. For a recent take on social choice theory (as economics imperialism), see Fine (2018a).

5. See http://oecdinsights.org/2011/10/11/comparative-advantage-doing-what-you-do-best/for example.

6. See Fine (1980, 2003a, 2016a).

7. The articles did ultimately appear as Fine (2002b, 2009).

8. For this work, see Fine (1983a, 1992), Fine et al. (1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1992d, 1992e, 1993), Fine and Simister (1995).

9. On the SoP approach, see Fine and Leopold (1993), Fine (2002a, 2013c). It has since been extended to public sector SoPs, PSSoPs, and to finance and financialisation. See Bayliss, Fine, and Robertson (2018) and Bayliss et al. (2019), and for a list of contributions around the Fessud project, fessud.org, see Appendix to Fine (2017a).

10. See Fine (1998a) and Fine, Heasman, and Wright (1996), and NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (2017) and Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission (2017).

11. See Fine (2013a).

12. For all work on the coal industry, see Fine (1990). This includes a telling critique of McCloskey on total factor productivity in the industry at the end of the nineteenth century. I also taught a course with him when she was a visitor at Birkbeck, then Don not Deidre.

13. See Fine (1994).

14. See Fine (2010b, 2010c, 2011a, 2011b, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d,, 2014), Bayliss, Fine, and Robertson (2018) and Bayliss et al. (2019), and other work from fessud.org, listed in appendix to Fine (2017a).

15. See Dymski (2015) although, unsurprisingly, diluted (suspended, see below) understandings of financialisation have begun to appear within mainstream literature.

16. For the trajectory of mainstream macro, see Fine and Dimakou (2016).

17. See Romer (2016).

18. For the arrogance of economists, see Fourcade, Ollion, and Algan (2015).

19. See Fine (2000, 2003b, 2006b).

20. Yet he petulantly concludes in terms of what he perceives will be seen as the stigma attached to his breaking ranks with orthodoxy:

 When the person who says something … is a revered leader of a group, there is a price associated with open disagreement. This price is lower for me because I am no longer an academic. I am a practitioner, by which I mean that I want to put useful knowledge to work. I care little about whether I ever publish again in leading economics journals or receive any professional honor because neither will be of much help to me in achieving my goals. As a result, the standard threats … do not apply.

So, the way to get economists to tell the truth is to allow each to establish a new field, publish in the major journals, become Chief Economist at the World Bank, get a Nobel Prize, and then not give a damn.

21. MERG (1993). For a full account of the rise and fall of the MERG project, see Padayachee and van Niekerk (2019).

22. See Fine (1997b) and for a prescient account of the steel industry, Fine (1997c), a report commissioned because, such was the monopoly pricing on the domestic market, South Africa was importing fridges made of its own steel at a price lower than its own manufacturers could buy that steel to make its own fridges.

23. On the developmental state paradigm (and South Africa and illegal capital flight), see Ashman et al (2010a, 2010b; 2011b), Fine (1999, 2010d, 2010e, 2013b, 2016b), Fine and Rustomjee (1997), Fine and Pollen (2018) and Fine, Saraswati, and Tavasci (2013). And for South Africa and financialisation, Ashman, Fine, and Karwowski (2018).

24. See https://therealnews.com/stories/daniel-ellsberg-on-assange-arrest-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-press-freedom and closing image.

25. See Fine (1983b).

26. This is like a Black Swan event in which you pretend it has not happened rather than continuing to insist all swans are white. Consider Eugene Fama, leading and continuing proponent of the efficient market hypothesis, with over one-quarter of a million downloads of his academic papers. He continues to deny that bubbles exist or even to know what they are but is modest enough to confess, ‘We don’t know what causes recessions. Now I’m not a macroeconomist so I don’t feel bad about that’, https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/interview-with-eugene-fama.

27. See Fine (1998b).

28. It is often assumed I am South African, because of my work but also through confusion with sociologist Bob Fine (including what might have been some fall out from his being the first man to bring a restraining order against a woman for sexual harassment). I was also offered South African citizenship by Joe Slovo, indicative of the height of appreciation prior to the MERG fall from grace.

29. See Fine (2006a).

30. Fine, Lapavitsas, and Pincus (2001), Fine and Jomo (2006) and Bayliss, Fine, and Van Waeyenberge (2011).

31. See Fine (2001b, 2010a) and, most recently, Fine and Ortiz (2016).

32. See Fine et al. (2016).

33. For the full story and the paper, see Fine (2004a).

34. I will say no more beyond this footnote about Marxist political economy. My introduction to Capital, first published as Fine (1975c), is now in its sixth edition, with Alfredo Saad Filho having come on board as co-author to add some freshness. It has sold more copies and been translated into more languages than all of my other books put together, Fine and Saad Filho (2016). My contributions to Marxist political economy have been dedicated to correcting and developing Marx’s insights and as a coherent body of work against the misinterpretations of his friends and foes alike, and to apply corresponding analytical principles in investigating the shifting contours of accumulation through economic and social restructuring and reproduction. For recent contributions in this vein, see Fine (2017b, 2019b). Despite the more than usually, even for me, excessive self-referencing in this piece justified, or at least apologised for, in light of the occasion, there are other areas of my work that I scarcely cover or not at all, not least methodology, history of thought, social policy, industrial policy, the British economy, privatisation, other topics arising out of critical takes on the mainstream, and many topics in and around ‘development’.

35. Initially, Fine (1997a), in detail Fine and Milonakis (2009) and Milonakis and Fine (2009), Myrdal and Deutscher prize winners, respectively, and most recently Fine (2019a).

36. For asymmetric information economics as Kuhnian paradigm shift, see Fine (2001c, 2002c, 2004b).

37. As just one index, upon consulting the website of the University of Chicago in 2010, I found the claim of connections to 25 laureates in economics out of a total of 64 – compared, for example, with three in literature and sixteen in chemistry but with the latter two over a period of 108 rather than 40 years, http://www.uchicago.edu/about/accolades/nobel/ For peace, there is just one connection, to Barack Obama! As we are on criteria, it is widely acknowledged that Elinor Ostrom is the first, and only, woman to receive the award (although a political scientist, not an economist) – the only female economist to receive a Nobel Prize, for peace, is Emily Greene Balch. Otherwise 60% of the economists have been of US origin, and only four laureates by birth or naturalisation have come from outside the USA or Western Europe (Arthur Lewis, Leonid Kantorovich, Amartya Sen and Robert Mundell), with corresponding implications for racial composition.

38. See Fine and Van Waeyenberge (2006).

39. I am acutely conscious that I have had little to say about why mainstream economics should be so extreme and inappropriate and remain the way it is. Although there are disagreements over what is the current nature of economics, Fine (2016c, 2019a), its trajectory and nature are much easier to specify than the reasons for this to which, institutionally, the Americanisation of the discipline from the 1950s to extreme proportions currently, has much responsibility. By the same token, reform from within and merely by critical commentary from without are not liable to be effective in exerting major change rather than reinforcing suspended heterodox orthodoxy. Only when broader social demands are made upon the discipline is there any chance of major change, in line with serious challenges to neoliberalism after which our economists will surely follow their own dictum of responding to incentives.

40. See Fine (2018b).

41. See the centenary history of SOAS, Brown (2016).

42. And, to add insult and injury, the School set-up a new department around finance and management that was a patent and blatant initiative to create a rival mainstream department of economics to the prevailing heterodox department within SOAS itself.

43. Radice’s (2017) own poems have been published, marking SOAS’s centenary, referencing the poetic debate with me but not including my contributions which I only discovered in hard copy upon clearing up my office in anticipation of retirement.