ABSTRACT
In Part 1 of this interview, Professor Patomäki discussed his work and career up to the Global Financial Crisis. In Part 2 he turns to his later work. Questions and issues range over the use of retroduction and retrodiction, the degree of openness and closure of systems, and the role of iconic models, and scenario-building and counterfactuals in social scientific explanation and the exploration of possible and likely futures (distinguished from desirable futures). Patomäki suggests that a variant of his ‘scenario A’ captures significant features of an increasingly competitive and conflictual world. Among other matters, Patomäki also discusses his recent work on the war in Ukraine, his ‘field theory’ of global political economy, and the possibility of world statehood. The interview concludes with Patomäki’s views on the imperative of hope.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
3 Note from Heikki: Patomäki (Citation2004a). Around this time, I became interested in the connections between the long downward phase of the capitalist world economy and future crises and wars and this appeared in Finnish as Patomäki (Citation2004b, Citation2004c) and English as Patomäki (Citation2005a).
4 Note from Heikki: my reading list was long; for example, in the process of exploring connections, I realised that Friedrich Hayek, for one, had written that ‘though we neither can wish nor possess the power to go back to the reality of the nineteenth century, we have the opportunity to realize its ideals’ (Hayek Citation1944, 240).
6 Note from Heikki: it is worth also saying Bhaskar associates retrodiction with applied sciences and retroduction with theoretical sciences and incorporates retroduction in a DREI procedure (description, retroduction, elaboration and identification). See Collier (Citation1994, 163). In many contexts, not least in cosmology, this distinction fails to hold if the universe as a whole is historical (which I think it is, as is the solar system, planet Earth, biological evolution on Earth, and so on).
7 Note from Jamie: Rescher suggests that counterfactuals that make use of ‘fact-contravening suppositions’ may have logical form but often lack practical traction and even in logical form amount to conjecture that involve problems of unaddressed complexity (tenacity of the world in the face of individual changes to predicates, but also overwhelming inconceivable change from the same), inconsistency and paradox (Rescher Citation2017).
8 Note from Heikki: as Menzies and Beebee (Citation2020) note, David Hume conflated event-regularities and counterfactual analysis, though ‘it is difficult to understand how Hume could have confused the first, regularity definition with the second, very different counterfactual definition’.
10 Note from Jamie: the subject of prediction is often mixed up with critique of econometrics, analytical statistics and economics more generally. However, see Næss (Citation2004, Citation2019), the latter is a response to Fleetwood (Citation2017). See also (Derbyshire and Morgan Citation2022).
11 Note from Jamie: higher standards of living disguises a great deal in terms of ‘catch-up’ and so on. See, for example, the work of Robert Wade or Jason Hickel.
12 Note from Heikki: In 2008, the former prime minister Paavo Lipponen (social democrat) published a book entitled ‘Reason wins: Finnish identity in the age of globalisation’, in which he listed me as the no:1 ‘public anti-intellectual’ of the country. Not long after Lipponen himself was criticising the policy of his successor Matti Vanhanen’s government as neoliberal. As a reward, Lipponen received the ‘leading anti-intellectual 2009’ award, which was granted by Attac Finland.
13 Note from Heikki: my thinking elsewhere on EU disintegration involved conflicts with the UK and the new Central and Eastern European members in the context of a legitimation crisis of the EU stemming mostly from the lack of democracy and problems caused by the EMU; this was published as Patomäki (Citation2007b).
14 Note from Heikki: the 1996 book was the first time I had developed systematic scenarios (three in total). The three scenarios concerned the future of Russia, cross-tabled with three ways in which the EU (and the West more generally) could shape developments in Russia. The West has committed most of the mistakes I drew attention to in these scenarios and the outcome has been as catastrophic as anticipated.
17 Note from Heikki: Big History is a multi- and cross-disciplinary project that aims to identify general patterns or trends of change. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity, relies on empirical evidence, and makes causal claims.
18 Note from Heikki: the third and last edition were published in autumn 2013.
19 Note from Heikki: as well as new ideas that emerged in the course of writing book, e.g. transnational trade union solidarity and its potential role in sustaining aggregate global demand and labour’s share of incomes (e.g. European and Chinese workers).
20 Note from Jamie: see also Gills, Morgan, and Patomäki (Citation2019).
21 Note from Heikki: The following passage from the Dialectic summarises the basic idea of Big History: ‘[…] the biological history of the human species, inserted into the global history of species and genera, itself inserted into the geophysical history of the solar system (and ultimately the universe)’ (Bhaskar Citation1993, 145).
22 Note from Heikki: in Economics and Reality Lawson criticises the use of the term ‘stylised fact’ for strategic reasons, because it encourages the practice of mathematical modelling. In formal modelling, a supposed ‘stylised fact’ is intended to express a partial regularity, which is then in effect reformulated as a strict one, as a ‘law’, possibly only to facilitate model tractability, or some such.
23 Note from Heikki: from this perspective, the standard (post-)Keynesian criticism of the fallacy of composition can also be taken to be a form of ideology-critique.
24 Note from Heikki: this is not, however, the first time I have tried the dialogue format, see Guzzini, Patomäki, and Walker (Citation1995); Held and Patomäki (Citation2006); Brincat and Patomäki (Citationforthcoming).
25 Note from Heikki: these markets are sometimes real (e.g. competition for student fees) yet constructed, but oftentimes they are merely imagined or simulated e.g. through the university rankings that emerged in the early 2000s.
28 Note from Jamie: for scope in recent years see also Patomäki (Citation2005b, Citation2009b, Citation2010b, Citation2011b, Citation2012a, Citation2013b, Citation2014b, Citation2015a, Citation2015b, Citation2016a, Citation2016b, Citation2017a, Citation2017c, Citation2018b, Citation2019c, Citation2019d, Citation2020a, Citation2020b, Citation2021); Morgan and Patomäki (Citation2017c); Patomäki and Kotilainen (Citation2022).
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Notes on contributors
Heikki Patomäki
Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics (Global Political Economy), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of numerous books and articles. Additional detail is given in the interview.
Jamie Morgan
Jamie Morgan is Professor of Economic Sociology at Leeds Beckett University. He co-edits the Real-World Economics Review with Edward Fullbrook. He has published widely in the fields of economics, political economy, philosophy, sociology and international politics.
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