Will the World End in 2012?

The millenarian prophecies of doom that have rumbled on since 2000 are coming to a head this year, with the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world receiving serious news coverage. Often these reports run alongside statistical analysis of the state of the global economy and appear to have much the same level of credibility. Both encapsulate the feeling of powerless of the modern citizen and the give the lie to the notion of ourselves as rational economic men.

Apparently it was the Slovenian social critic Slavoj Zizek who questioned why we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. If we want a better economic system then we must have the courage to do this and must spread the word to our friends that 2012 is the end of one corrupt and destructive economic system, not the end of the world itself. And we must propose our alternative with confidence and grace. We are not speaking about revolution but revulsion against an economy that is destroying our mother the earth and blighting the lives of humans and other species.

There are three central aspects of capitalism which I think we can all decide to end in this year. First we have the way the system creates money and uses it to concentrate power in the hands of the few. The creation of money as debt in the private sector ensures the engorgement of the 1% at the expense of the 99% while simultaneously creating a pressure for economic growth that is causing the ecological crisis. We can share this message as well as taking steps to use our own money differently: switching our bank accounts to the Co-operative Bank or the Nationwide, making sure our mortgages are with mutual providers (the old building societies) and if we have any accumulated money investing it in local eco-projects rather than depositing it to gain interest from the corrupt system we are seeking to change.

Secondly, we can reconsider how we work and how the dominant economic system shares the rewards of work unfairly and also removes our autonomy and our self-respect in work. This is where I began as an economist, challenging the Seven Myths About Work which persuade us to give our creativity to the system that is destroying our happiness. We need to counter the lie that says that all wealth is generated in the private sector with the public sector parasitic upon it and to encourage the growth of co-operative enterprise, where work and rewards are shared fairly and the business is democratically controlled. It is perhaps no coincidence that the UN has declared 2012 the Year of Co-operation.

Finally, we need to undermine capitalism at the level of culture and ideas. My book Market, Schmarket described how capitalism operates through a system of mantras that encourage us to behave like selfish individualists. Every time we do something for nothing, or buy something that is more expensive because we value its maker, or give away something we could sell, we are undermining the hold of the mean-spirited culture of capitalism on our lives and in the world.

So, 2012 offers tremendous hope to the world and all its peoples. If we believe that the world will end then it will, but if we believe that the world will change fundamentally and positively, then this also becomes possible. It is profoundly untrue that the alternative is not clearly articulated: a green vision of economic and social life has been developed over the past 30 years and is ready to be tried. 2012 is the year when we need to make this humane, balanced and joyful expression of human possibility the path to our future.
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Rational choice?

The rise, and now fall, of David Laws genuinely merits the over-used journalistic adjective meteoric. The man had moved from relative obscurity to the position of Lord High Executioner in a matter of weeks. His story seems to have the mark of a mystery play; his character is the rational economic man.

In the past month, much has been made of David Laws's double-first in economics from Cambridge. This has been touted as a reassuring indication of brilliance: here is a man who understands the workings of the market and can therefore save us from our financial travails. His rise to prominence in the Liberal Democrats was the result of his persuading them to leave behind their days of beards-and-sandals economics and wholeheartedly embrace the market, through the publication of the Orange Book.

I always ask my students why they chose to study economics. Over the years I have found that they are often vulnerable, shy, and socially dislocated. In the iron laws of the market they find a sense of security. Learning to read the movement of finance markets or the mathematical formulae of a regression equation brings power to those who have often felt powerless. In the rational economic man they see an icon to aspire to: a role model of elegance and control.

The ecofeminists detest the rational economic man. As Mary Mellor writes:

'Economic man is fit, mobile, able-bodied, unencumbered by domestic or other responsibilities. The goods he consumes appear to him as finished products or services and disappear from his view on disposal or dismissal. He has no responsibility for the life-cycle of those goods or services any more than he questions the source of the air he breathes or the disposal of his excreta.'

Rational economic man is ashamed of his own embarrassing body, his sexual idiosyncrasies, his dependence on women, his need for rest and sleep. These are interpreted as weakness, rather than humanity, and must be hidden ever deeper within a shaved and moisturised skin, a sharp and expensive suit. Once they are revealed he has become, in the words of today's headline, 'a broken man'.

Yet it is this very dislocation of our identity from our physical existence that is writ large in the way our economy is dislocated from nature. As we hide our weakness and our illnesses, so we deny the planet's need for rest. The superficial manifestation of the late-capitalist world is impressive, but behind the facade the earth itself, and the indigenous peoples who still live close to it, are slowly dying.

The loss of David Laws from the Treasury is a mixed blessing. His competence in understanding the crisis we are in was a counterbalance to the crass ignorance of Boy George, although both, as wealthy men, have faced a problem of credibility when trying to persuade us to live on less. Did he make a rational choice to deny his need for love, to conceal his lover, to deceive the world about the sexuality that made him ashamed? The door has been left open for him to return, but before he does, in the style of a true mystery play, he must learn the lessons of his own humanity, and the greater wisdom that the earth teaches. Tweet

The Beautiful Game for Beautiful Minds

I enjoyed Larry Elliott's game of Fantasy Economic Football, if only for the entertaining mental image it conjured up of all the economists I have ever known in shorts. The scene would only be enhanced if they were forced to show their intellectual colours by choosing from the range of shirtwear available from Philosophy Football. Danny Blanchflower was sadly overlooked - the Monetary Policy Committee rebel who taught me briefly years ago before I was an economist.

Larry's problem may be that he is looking for his world-class players in the wrong place. Although the intellectual Premier League might be expected to be at Cambridge and Harvard, the control of publication, esteem and promotion by research assessment exercises of various types has in fact ensured the advancement of the mediocre while creative thinkers are showing off their paces in the intellectual equivalent of the Sunday morning leagues - campaign groups, think-tanks, lower level Universities and colleges, and within other faculties.

Who is an economist? Larry Elliott cites two contemporary examples, both of whom are academics. Yet the list of defunct economists he sets on a pedestal achieved their best work in a role that is more like that of a public intellectual. Unconstrained by the need to impress colleagues and succeed in a system of blind peer review they could think freely and address the important issues of political economy that troubled their times.

Larry is right - and I know this to my cost - that considering the world as it is, rather than as it can be represented in a mathematical equation, represents a serious handicap when trying to work as an academic economist. The 'world outside the window' holds you back from elegant theorising and professional advance. Making reference to the fleshy substance of human existence - far less, the gross and energetic mass of nature - disturbs and disorientates the tidy world of the econometrician. My own proposals for funding research into a re-embedded bioregional economy based around human interactions and natural resources are met with apoplectic incomprehension.

Academic economists could, in fact, learn much from playing more football - a venture into the outdoors would be salutary, not to mention the move from 'rational economic man' to 'emotional physical men'. The more open-minded might come to share Albert Camus's view, 'All that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football' Tweet

Go Forth and Quantify!

Having worked at a modern, 'metropolitan' university for six years I have finally started teaching economics. The resistance was more my choice than theirs, since I felt reluctant to teach the holy writ I didn't believe in. This term I'm sharing the applied economics course with a true believer. He does the graphs; I do the real-world horror stories.

My content has focused on climate change, food security, localisation and trade. Yesterday, perhaps to convince them that I really am an economist, I drew one of the classic economics graphs myself for the first time in years. It was the usual two lines, one sloping up, the other sloping down. Something magical and meaningful and mysterious was supposed to happen at the point where the two lines cross: equilibrium.

Of course the flaw with this method of representing the world in a system of initially straight and then, in the more advanced courses, curved lines, is that there are no numbers! Axes are labelled capital P and Q while points on the axes are labelled with lower-case ps and qs. The point of equilibrium is represented by p and q with an asterisk.

On one level I can see the funny side of this. In a rather dry and Puritanical sense, the signs and symbols of economics speak to the ritualistic side of proponents of the most positivistic of the social sciences. When I write of 'holy writ' it is only partly a joke. The jargon of economospeak carries power just as the words of the Nicene creed do. We shall not resist the command to compete, to achieve economies of scale, to avoid moral hazard. The true economist is convinced that s/he has some sense of order and some grasp of meaning in the world of uncertainty and unpredictability. What else is a religion for?

But beyond the humour something very serious is going on. The lines I was drawing were taken from the Stern Review and represented the costs and benefits of taking action to tackle climate change. They were literally matters of life and death. In this case numbers did emerge; numbers which gave justification to the continuation of the economic system that is eliminating our species and harming our planet. My question is whether something of such depth and importance should be left in the hands of economists.

*Thanks to Rupert Read for the title for this post. Tweet

What is Green Economics?

I recently consulted the wikipedia entry on Green Economics to discover that it has been eliminated. Somebody has translated it into a forwarder to 'ecological economics'. Whether this occurred through ignorance or political manipulation is not clear to me. What is clear is that we need to rebuild a decent entry on green economics. I'm going to start the process and would appreciate your support.

A rather glib phrase we often use as a short-hand for what green economics is about is 'Economics for People and the Planet' - what does this mean? For me a key difference between environmental, ecological and green branches of economics is that, while all three take the environment seriously (in contrast to neoclassical economics), green economics puts social justice at the heart of the discussion.

The typescript for my book which is also called Green Economics (imagination failure here I'm afraid!) is now with Earthscan and due for publication later this year. Producing it has made me think long and hard about what green economics might be, and I'm going to offer some tasters of the content of the book in this blog over the next couple of months.

So, to begin at the beginning, we need a definition. One that establishes why it is worth having green economics in the first place, and what distinguishes it from other branches of the subject. Here are some of the key pointers so far as I am concerned:

Green economics broadens the perspective of ‘economics’ beyond the concerns of the ‘rational economic man’. It seeks to include the perspectives of those who are marginalized within the present economic structure — primarily women and the poor of the world—as well as taking seriously the needs of the planet itself.

Green economics has not grown up as an academic discipline but from the grassroots. It is distinct from environmental economics, which uses conventional economics but brings the environment into the equation; and ecological economics, which is still a measurement-based and academically focused discipline. Green economics is rather about people and the planet.

Green economics seeks to move the target of our economy away from economic growth and towards flourishing, convivial human communities which do not threaten other species or the planet itself. In place of economic growth we should move towards a steady-state economy.

Green economics is the first significant alternative to capitalism that is not communism. It offers a different economic paradigm to challenge neoliberalism. Tweet