Knowledge, Power and the Research Excellence Framework

Far beyond the arcane reaches of the Basel capital requirements, touched on in my last post, lies the swampy territory of the Research Excellence Framework, its very name bringing a whiff of fascistic thought control and striking terror into the heart of the nation's academics. Measuring research excellence is the sort of activity that creates an appealing soundbite for politicians of the ilk of Michael Gove but rapidly evades the mind, escaping into a realm of subjectivity and confusion, once it becomes an actual policy.

Thus have we, who labour in the mines of knowledge with sweated brow, attempted to resist the suggestion that there is anything meaningful about assessing a certain research paper as be 'worth' 3.25 or 2.75 according to criteria such as rigour, originality and significance. Sadly, it is often the papers that are particularly heavy on meaningless theory, or that are of the politically unchallenging variety that should find their way into the Journal of Overnight Discoveries, that score highest in these exercises.

The fact that the research evaluation system works against radical work has been a longstanding prejudice held by those of us who believe that quality cannot be enumerated and is unlikely to be clearly apparent until 50 years after a paper has been published, but at last we have some evidence to support our case. In the field of economics Fred Lee, professor of economics at the University of Missouri, has analysed the way in which economics papers are ranked and reached some disturbing conclusions. He has unearthed a self-referential and self-reproducing elite of economists who review each others' work, publish each others' work, and largely agree in terms of their conclusions about how the economy works.

As Lee correctly points out, this sort of groupthink amongst economists is a prime explanation for the disastrous nature of the financial crisis in 2007/8 and the fact that it was 'not foreseen'. But these charmed circles also work to control research funding, since work that is published in the most highly ranked journals, those with a 4* rating (yes, really) will ensure that their authors receive three times more research funding than those that only receive a 3* rating. Since the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the highest ranking economics journal that includes heterodox work and the site of Lee's paper, only scores a 3, heterodox economists are limited terms of the time they can spend writing and publishing and are unlikely to obtain jobs in the highest ranked universities.

Lee and his co-authors reach some startling conclusions, arguing that the control of the economics discipline is no less than an attempt to eliminate alternative views: 'the going concern model of UKeconomics puts into focus what others have identified as cultural, political, language, or social genocide of the "other"'. When in this case that 'other' might be the suggestion that capitalism can never be sustainable or that a debt-based money system will inevitably lead to global injustice, it becomes evident that this is a debate that needs to find its way beyond the walls of the academy and into the public domain.
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Why I am Not a Communist

Hell, I am not even a socialist and have never claimed to be. As a Green it is my firm opinion that we are part of a new ideology and one that my Green House colleague Andy Dobson has helpfully labelled 'ecologism'.

Since I am not a great fan of theory you may be wondering why I am setting out in this somewhat defensive way. The answer is that I am responding to an article in this morning's Guardian from the lovely Zoe Williams who has helpfully put the citizens' audit proposal in front of the nation's liberal readership while they enjoy their Saturday morning croissants. Zoe quite rightly suggests that we are in need of revolutionary changes to our economy and especially in the area of finance.

She begins with Ha-Joon Chang, the highly influential economist based in Cambridge, where you are still allowed to work without subscribing to the tents of neoclassicism. To his credit (and according to  Wikipedia) Chang has been an intellectual influence on Ecuador's President Correa, so he should be familiar with the idea of a citizens' audit and the suggestion that some of the debt we are carrying is odious and should not be repaid. But when Zoe put this question to him he responded by expressing concern about ideas that might result in one being labelled as a communist.

I have no such fear, which probably arises from the fact that I have never found communism appealing. My proposals have always included a strong element of private, community, and co-operative ownership that negates and dilutes the centralised ownership of productive capacity in communist regimes. I am still struggling with the reality of the fact that many people seem more highly motivated by individualist financial return than community benefit: have the learned this as children of capitalism, or were they born that way?

But it is the vision of the world as a a dichotomy between capitalism and communism that is most limiting, as though we had so little imagination that we could not think of countless other ways of organising our economic affairs. Not to mention the fact that it would be inaccurate to describe the global economic system of our contemporary world as capitalist. The last time I looked in my economics textbook capitalism was a system where a large number of companies competed in each market, with thrusting and innovative entrepreneurs rapidly entering to keep the competition fierce. The whole rationale for such a system, and the reason it is justified as superior, is to prevent the pattern of concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few that we see around us.

So Zoe is right: we do need an economic revolution. We need to find the courage to challenge capitalism and replace it with a different vision of economic life. In Green Economics I offered my vision of an economy with social and ecological justice backed up by greater political involvement. With a patchwork of self-reliant and democratic local communities this is far from a communist vision, although it does raise urgent questions about the ownership and control of resources. In The Bioregional Economy I extend that vision to explore how it could help us to deepen our relationship with our local places and how this might offer an attractive substitute for the consumer culture.

It is exactly these sorts of alternative visions that the communist-capitalist dichotomy seeks to outlaw.  So if you really want an economic revolution it is time to emancipate yourself from mental slavery and start working out your own alternative.
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Economics in University: Teaching or Propaganda?

In spite of the utter failure of academic and professional economists to predict, explain or find solutions to the financial and economic crises sweeping the globalised, marketised world they have created, there is still little challenge to the narrow and one-sided way that economics is taught in our universities. In spite of the fact that economics is about complex human relationships, and is therefore bound to be the subject of debate and disagreement, there is no problem with university courses that only teach the neoclassical pro-market approach.

A list of universities that offer 'pluralist' components in their courses, that is to say that they include approaches other than the neoclassical orthodoxy, does exist, but it is short. The Association of Heterodox Economics is doing great work here, but it is unfunded and run by people who know that their commitment to dissent and debate will limit the success of their careers, their opportunities for promotion and publication, and their chances of finding research funding.

In the US, the website Remapping Debate is running a series of articles on the limitations and political bias of economics education in universities. In the latest Martha Starr, professor of economics at American University, makes the obvious point that it is not helpful to teach students about economics as though all the problems have been solved. Not only does this make it less likely that they will come up with new solutions, but given the mayhem they see all around them it is likely to be unconvincing. In any other subject this proposal of dividing up the curriculum between different schools of thought; only in economics could this seem dangerously radical.

This is not an internally focused debate revolving around a bunch of disgruntled academics. Politicians and policy-makers have generally studied one year of economics, which means that they have learned the biased system of thought and the mantras they repeat throughout their lives, limiting options and closing down debate. Teaching orthodoxy rather than reality is dangerous and is against the academic freedom which our universities should set as their highest standard.
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Creating New Economists

I had a very interesting experience over the weekend while attending university open days. I was enquiring from a young woman encouraging people to take economics how pluralist her course was. She really seemed unable to understand my question. She responded that they taught 'normal' economics. I asked her if this meant neoclassical or whether they also had space for classical or Marxist varieties. She was simply unable to answer.

This is the problem the discipline faces: really nice, well-motivated people who have no conception that there might be other ways of thinking about economics than in terms of supply and demand curves and the marginal analysis. To address this problem the Association of Heterodox Economics is running training in alternative methods for economics, beginning with a course of training for researchers.

The postgraduate workshop on research methods will take place at London Metropolitan University on 10th and 11th February next year. It is funded so places are available free for students. Workshop topics will include:

· Reorienting economics to match method with social material

· Open system methodology in Economics

· Grounded theory in Economics

· Mixing quantitative and qualitative data

· Qualitative data analysis

To book a place you need to contact Andrew Mearman: Andrew.Mearman@uwe.ac.uk.
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Economics Students on the Move

How our economy will be organised in the future relies heavily on how our future economists understand the world and its workings, as well as their values. Economics education is obviously, therefore, of fundamental importance. The movements to reform economics education, shifting it from the realm of theology into one of pluralism and genuine debate, have been followed with interest by this blog.

So it is with delight that I heard this morning of the revolt by Greg Mankiw's students. Manikiw is the author of one of the most widely used introductory textbooks, as described by Geofrey Hodgson:

'Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, in its five versions, has internationally been the dominant basic text for more than a decade. Also its author was chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005.'

Here is the letter his students at Harvard, paying $40,000 for the privilege of biased and distorted information, presented to accompany their walkout from his introductory economics class, according to a US blog:

'Dear Professor Mankiw

Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society.

As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.

A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.'

The students undertook this action to express solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Mankiw is a populist, using his own blog to blandly reassure about the existing economic model, blithely ignoring its destructive impacts and its lack of connection with reality. The fact that his own students are alive to this and are following the example of students in Paris and Cambridge in calling for an economic education that takes seriously the problems of the world we live in is hugely encouraging.
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Elite Syncopations

For those not familiar with the working of universities this post may seem rather obscure, but in reality it explains one crucial mechanism used by neoclassical economists to ensure that the routes to publication and promotion are controlled by their own. It explains how orthodoxy maintains its hold on the economics profession.

This is a large claim made for a research paper presented at the recent Association for Heterodox Economics conference in Nottingham by Harry Bloch, from Curtin University in Perth, Australia. It traced how Australian economists were involved in the process of deciding the quality of different pieces of research produced by their peers. In Australia this process is transparent; in the UK it is not. Hence the focus on scholars on the other side of the world.

The academics were told to rank the journals they commonly read into four categories; it was suggested that they should have 5% in A* (Nobel Prize material), 15% in A, 30% in B and 50% in C. The first conclusion from Table 5 is that economists are very hard on themselves: they considered a full 60% of journals in the also-rans category, a much lower percentage than other disciplines.

But it also demonstrates the domination of the field by proponents of econometrics. The method of regression analysis is the fast route to promotion. A mathematical model is always ranked more highly in terms of esteem than a paper which relates to a real-world problem, such as the financial crisis for example. Theory is rated well, with applied economics – that area which deals with policy – less so. Meanwhile ‘other economics’, such as that which actually questions the status quo, receives the lowest rating, with no journals featuring in the A* category at all.

It is also important to note that these were not everyday academics but Professors and members of professional societies. These are the guardians of orthodoxy, and their own work is likely to be in the field of econometrics and economic theory that presently dominate. As the table shows, none of the journals that covered heterodox economics was included in the A* ranking, making it extremely difficult for those outside the mainstream to achieve research funding. The process of ranking specifically excluded heterodox economists, although they were identified as a specific group - the only group to be excluded.

The second table (Table 7) illustrates the effectiveness of the gatekeeping by the orthodox. It shows the domination of the field by conventional economics while the majority of economists with different views languish at the lower tiers.

Bloch concludes his article as follows:

'The processes employed in the 2010 round of research evaluation under Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) did not provide a fair assessment of heterodox economics research in Australia. The rankings used as the indicator of the quality for journal articles were unbalanced in favour of economic theory and econometrics and against applied economics and other economics (which included heterodox economics).'

We can expect no better form the UK's Research Excellence Framework process.
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Dissident Economists on the Warpath

As an academic economist I find I am living in interesting times. Yes, really. The profession is in crisis, and much blame is being laid at the door of those who teach politicians how the economy works, and who engage in research to support this teaching. The fact that the financial crisis was predicted only by dissident economists, and the lamentable failure of mainstream economists to explain what has happened, much less provide solutions, has led to severe criticism.

Now we have a box-office documentary, Inside Job, which provides a comprehensible analysis of how the financial crisis happened, and fully implicates the academic economists who were complicit in the bankster capitalism that lay at its heart. Apparently they were asked for interviews to consult their expertise, and then ambushed. According to a review of the film by the Guardian:

'When Glenn Hubbard, George Bush's chief economic adviser and dean of Columbia Business School, is shown as a partisan advocate of deregulation, we have one of the movie's punch-the-air moments. During the interview, Hubbard, who denies he was corrupted by his paid-for relationships with government, angrily barks: "You've got five minutes, mister. Give it your best shot."'

A letter in response also implicates the 'self-referential circulation of authority' found in the peer-review publication system. This gives access to promotion, fame and respect within the academic establishment and is a key part of the Research Excellence Framework, here retitled the 'Research Exalting Finance'. Those wishing to find other ways of measuring the contribution of economic research might consider submitting a proposal to a special issue on 'dissident scholarship' in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. The dissidents, it would appear, are getting themselves organised.

Another practical step towards the radical restructuring of economics would be to support a new generation of heterodox economists. It is therefore very cheering to see a post advertised that specifically excludes neoclassical economists. The Joan Robinson Research Fellowship in Heterodox Economics is named in honour of our own Sister Joan, disciple of Keynes, and a scholar cheated of her Nobel Prize merely for having the wrong genital design. Girton College Cambridge should be congratulated for funding the post, and for paying tribute to their illustrious alumna.

The existence of the concept of heterodox economics implies that the nature of economics as studied and taught is more religion than science. Perhaps we should rather be arguing for pluralism: for economics to accept the sort of lively debate that is common in all other disciplines. Let us hope that the researcher at Girton will be a key player in these debates, and will be followed by many more.
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Anti-Textbooks, not Anti-Economics

For those who teach economics life can feel fairly limited. The most popular textbook in the Anglo-American world is Principles of Economics by Gregory Mankiw, now in its 5th edition. This was the book I was given to teach from when I first taught economics some ten years ago. It is still the most popular textbook today. An incalculable amount of damage must have been done in that intervening decade through the distorted perceptions of reality that cohorots of economists students have been left with. Probably not as damaging, though, as Mankiw's spell as President of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors from 2003 to 2005. In this case we really could have hoped that the voodoo economist had failed to practice what he preached.

But the days of presenting the holy writ and then sharing one's misgivings with students who have seen through its other-worldly inanities are over, because Zed have produced The Economics Anti-Textbook. As the authors say, 'This book is not "anti" economics or even "anti" mainstream economics. It is "anti" mainstream textbook economics' with their 'narrow range of world-views'. This is immensely refreshing. I particularly enjoyed the boxes containing 'Questions to your professor', which the authors claim to have included 'to stoke the fires of revolution'. This book seems yet more evidence that such a revolution against orthodox economics theory is building.

You may be surprised to learn that reading this book is actually fun. It addresses a series of issues that make anybody teaching economics uncomfortable because they are clearly not an honest portrayal of reality. Beginning with the theory of perfect markets; then moving on to efficiency; externalities (the costs of economic activity that are not included in the firm's accounts and are therefore routinely ignored, pollution being the primary and most threatening example); the absence of power from the conventional account; and ending with a critique of the assumption that material stuff is a cause of well-being and that people are 'rational calculators'. In a concluding tour-de-force, the authors explain the 2008 financial crisis in terms of all of these factors that are absent from the orthodox economics textbook.

If you are not already au fait with standard economic theory but would like to understand what TV pundits are on about, this book could be a good place to start. Tweet

Russian Orthodox Economist Runs Amok

I spent the weekend at a proper economics conference, one where people had different views which they discussed heatedly over coffee, where we used the phrase 'crisis of capitalism' rather than 'credit crunch' and where I saw barely any equations. Most economics conferences are halls packed full of socially dysfunctional people who generally sleep through each other's presentation which are incomprehensible and address irrelevant subjects through the medium of mathematics. So much for the neoclassical paradigm.

At the Association of Heterdox Economics conference you find Marxists and Austrians (followers of Hayek) discussing sustainability over lunch, while elsewhere institutionalists (followers of the North American economists who had the temerity to introduce social understanding into economic theories) and Keynsians consider how best to deal with the banks.

In other words there is debate, diversity and a sharing of views. There is exchange and learning. This is not how economics usually functions. Academic economics is not a discipline, far less the science it yearns to be. It is much more akin to a religion, a system of beliefs that are imposed with totalitarian strictness. You may not advance through their hiearchy unless you undergo the scourge of crucifixon by regression.

Some aspects of the conference were disappointingly predictable. Questioners, especially in plenaries, reconfirmed what I call the Cato Inverse Law of Verbosity: the longer it takes you to ask your question the less insightful the question is. I also learned the concept of the 'Microsoft moment' which I've found invaluable since. Analogous to a 'senior moment' it helps to identify the near-clinical sickness of the software we are forced to rely on - and provides an excellent metaphor for the state of the economics profession as a whole.

Green economics is one strand amongst the heterodox, who would do better to call themselves pluralists. In what other discipline do you have to define yourself as heterodox just for daring to ask questions and challenge orthodoxy? It reminds me of an email I received recently letting me know that my book called, unconfusingly, Green Economics, is to be found in the geography rather than economics section of Waterstones.

At one level this introverted, autistic behaviour by economists can provide a source for humour, but it is also desperately serious. The narrow and misguided focus of neoclassical economics has allowed the collapse of the world economy and the destruction of the earth. The call for a public enquiry into the economics profession that was made at the conference should become a campaign to demand that the public money that pays for research into this most important area of life should no be controlled by the cartel of market maniacs. Tweet