Neutralising Democracy

The pensions, special conditions and remuneration of eurocrats serve to insulate them from the general public – making them a breed apart. And I’m not just talking about the officials and the politicians – it’s also the judges, generals etc (whose pay levels have a profound knock-on effect on the relevant systems of countries like Romania and Bulgaria)

Let alone the hundreds of thousands of consultants and officials who work in bodies (like municipalities and institutes) funded by the hundreds of billions of euros of European funding. The morally corrupting effect of the special interests this develops was strongly argued by Robert Michels more than a hundred years ago

Most people are familiar with the Yes Minister" television series  screened by the BBC in the 1970s – less so with this magnificent short satirical article by its author, Anthony Jay - ”Democracy, Bernard, it must be stopped!” - the best analysis of power I know (apart from Lord Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt. And absolute power corrupts absolutely”).

The article takes the form of the advice given by Sir Humphrey (the retiring Head of the Civil Service) to his replacement – who, amazingly, turns out to be the guy who 30 years previously was the hapless Bernard. It captures the mechanisms which have been used over the past 50 years to undermine democracy far better than any book.

The first two rules for neutralising democracy are:

1.Centralise revenue. The governing class cannot fulfil its responsibilities without money. We, therefore, have to collect as much money as we can in the centre. In fact, we have done this with increasing effect over the years, with three happy results. The first is that we can ensure that money is not spent irresponsibly by local communities. By taking 80 or 90 per cent of the money they need in central taxes, we can then return it to them for purposes of which we approve. If they kept it for themselves, heaven knows what they might spend it on.

The second happy result is that the larger the sum, the harder it is to scrutinise. The ₤6,000 or so spent by a rural parish council is transparent and intelligible, and subjected to analysis in distressing detail. By contrast, the three or four hundred billion of central government revenue is pleasantly incomprehensible, and leaves agreeably large sums for purposes which the common people would not approve if it were left to them. It also means that a saving of ₤1 million can be dismissed as 0•0000003 of annual expenditure and not worth bothering with, whereas it can make a lot of difference to the budget of Fidelio at Covent Garden.

The third result is that the more the government spends, the more people and organisations are dependent on its bounty, and the less likely they are to make trouble. 

2.Centralise authority. It goes without saying that if Britain is to remain a country of civilised values, the masses cannot be trusted with many decisions of importance. Local government must be allowed to take decisions, but we have to ensure that they are trivial. Meanwhile, we must increase the volume of laws made centrally. We have an enviable record of legislation growth, with hardly any laws being repealed, which it is now your duty to extend. If you are under pressure to provide statistics showing your zeal in deregulation, you will find many laws concerning jute processing and similar extinct industries which can be repealed without too much harm. …

You will also want to ensure that every Bill contains wide enabling powers, so that unpopular provisions can be brought in later as statutory instruments which MPs rarely read and virtually never debate. You should be able to achieve three or four thousand of these in a good year.

The rest of the rules flow from the first two –

Rule	Reason
3.Capture the Prime Minister	Given the promises a PM makes, it is not difficult to persuade him that he needs more revenue and power
4. Insulate the Cabinet	They must be kept, as far as possible, well away from any contact with the sweaty multitude. This means avoiding public transport by use of private cars, avoiding the National Health Service by private health care etc
5. Enlarge constituencies	In the name of democracy, we have increased constituency size to 50,000 or 60,000, so that no MP can be elected on voters' personal knowledge of him. They vote for the party, and if the party does not endorse him, he will not be elected. His job, therefore, depends on the Prime Minister's approval and not on the respect of his constituents; a splendid aid to discipline
6. Overpay MPs	Even when MPs depend on the party machine for re-selection and re-election, some are occasionally tempted to step out of line. This risk can be significantly reduced if rebellion means not only loss of party support but also significant loss of income.
7. Appoint rather than elect	Government appointment is critical for control of society - so that proper care can be exercised in their selection of the thousands of positions available in Quangos - and so that the incumbents, when chosen, will know to whom they owe their new eminence, while those hoping for such posts (as with honours and peerages) can be trusted to behave responsibly in the hope of favours to come
8. Permanent officials – rotating Ministers	We have built an excellent system of a few transient amateur ministers who are coached, informed, guided and supported by a large department of permanent, experienced officials who enable them to take the correct decisions.
9. Appoint more staff	There are three reasons for this: it increases the volume of government revenue, it extends the area of government control, and it enlarges the pool of voters who have an interest in preserving the system that employs them.
10. Secrecy	Our success is based on the principle that no information should be disclosed unless there is a good reason why it should be. From time to time, opposition parties press for a freedom of information Act, but oppositions become governments and it does not take long for a government to discover that real freedom of information would make their job impossible.

The satire concludes by casting an envious eye at the European system -

Beyond this, I can only point you towards the breathtaking achievements of our colleagues in Brussels. To be frank, I do not see any prospect of our rivalling them.

• Their commissioners, like our permanent secretaries, do not have to endure the ignominy of grubbing votes from the plebs, and, unlike us, do not have to pretend to be subservient to a political master.

• Being answerable to 27 ministers from different countries, most of whom are hostile to each other, and would be even more hostile if they could understand each other's languages, gives them almost complete independence of action. They have also ensured that only the Commission can bring forward legislation, thus avoiding the tedious, irritating and ill-informed ministerial scrutiny we have to endure drafting Bills.

• And since the European electorate speaks so many different languages, it is impossible for genuine European political parties to form, thereby making any serious danger of democracy quite inconceivable.

Obviously, success on that scale is out of our reach, but we can look on Brussels as a guiding star which we must follow, even if we know we cannot land on it.

Further Reading

European Integration as an elite process – the failure of a Dream?; Max Haller (2008)

The Complete Yes Minister – the diaries of the Rt Hon James Hacker; Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay (1989)

Does the European Union still warrant the support of “progressives”

Left wing circles in Britain such as Jeremy Corbyn have never deviated from the view that the EU is a bastion of capitalism. One week after the UK has ceased to be a member of the EU, I wanted to explore whether “progressives” can still argue, as did a Dutch friend recently, that-

“At this point the EU is the only world player that at least tries to set some norms to protect the environment, restore equality, maintain product safety, provide some protection against the abuse of power by governments within and beyond the EU zone”. 

It was some time ago that people started to suggest that the European Commission had been poisoned by neoliberalism. Danny Cohn-Bendit, for example, would jokingly call EC Chairman Barrosso and his colleagues “the Chicago boys” and the “neoliberal Taliban”

I have, therefore, been remiss in this blog in not giving more coverage to the extent to which corporate interests have infiltrated the operations of the European Commission. The last post on the subject seems to have been years ago when I referred to a 2010 study Bursting the Brussels Bubble – exposing the corporate lobbying at the heart of Europe

So I am delighted to be able to update that analysis by encouraging readers to look at Captured States – when EU governments are a channel for corporate interests (Corporate Europe Observatory 2019)

But at this point, I have to confess I got slightly distracted by the Netflix series The Crown each of whose episodes focuses on a specific incident – whether political or personal – and nicely captures how the “Establishment” tried to deal with it. 
Anyone wanting to get a sense of the Key Players and Events in Britain’s post-war period could do a lot worse than view its (so-far) 30 episodes.

Last night I watched the first 3 episodes of the latest series (number Three) – the first dealing with the rumours that Harold Wilson (who had, in October 1964, just won a narrow victory) was in fact a Soviet spy.

Some mystery had surrounded the sudden death of Wilson’s predecessor - Hugh Gaitskell – in 1963 and some in MI5 actually thought this was part of a Soviet plot to plant Wilson. The irony is that the Kremlin spy was not in fact to be found in Downing Street but rather in Buckingham Palace in the person of Sir Anthony Blunt who was the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. The tensions between the royal and political leaders are superbly caught in the performance of the two actors – particularly in the third episode which deals with the Aberfan disaster of 1966.

As someone who graduated just a few months before Labour finally won office in 1964 - ending 13 years of Conservative rule - these were stirring times.

Discussion about the country’s future role was at its height – and the mood for “modernisation” widely felt. 
The “European option” was being actively explored and I was by no means the only person who adopted a fairly utilitarian approach – asking basically whether it would benefit us or not.

I still have a vivid memory of Hugh Gaitskell’s voice coming from the radio in the family living room in 1962 as he delivered his powerful and emotional anti-European speech about such a step representing the end of a thousand-year history. 
The Labour party in those days had real “heavyweights” – and Peter Shore, Barbara Castle, Douglas Jay and Tony Benn were strong voices against the idea of European membership. But they were not strong enough to convince us younger modernisers although 20 years later their opinion did prevail and the official Labour policy, for a few years from 1983, was one of withdrawal from the EU. 

In future posts I hope to –

- Indicate how the EU cannot help but stifle democracy

- investigate the extent of influence of neoliberalism in Commission policies and how much freedom this still leaves left-wing governments
- Explore how anyone can hope to make sense of the overwhelming amount of text which has been written about the nature of the European Union – and where the Union might be heading

- ask why there is so little public and journalistic interest in the scale and purpose of European funding and its effects on both employment patterns and, in newer member countries, the integrity of its state bodies and public trust

why the British masochists did what they did

The last post was, as always, too long. It did, however, elicit a friendly gesture of farewell and solidarity from an old (Dutch) friend who, very reasonably, commented that the Brits have been a bit obsessed by european technocrats.

He then went on to make the important point which I’m sure he’d allow me to reproduce here that- 

“the same bureaucrats have been able, the last decade or so, to develop a number of norms and rules that provide at least some constraints to the unfettered capitalist forces of the larger than life global companies. And some protection against the abuse of power in Poland or Hungary.

“At this point the EU is the only world player that at least tries to set some norms to protect the environment, restore equality, maintain product safety, provide some protection against the abuse of power by governments within and beyond the EU zone”. 

Readers will know that I am embarrassed by Brexit and Brexiteers. The British novelist Ian McEwan put it pithily recently when he called it “the most pointless, masochistic” event in British history.

But there is a reason why 52% of those who bothered to vote in the 2016 Referendum voted to leave – which cannot be dismissed as populism, hostility to immigrants or a right-wing press. As far back as 2011 I tried to articulate what it was about the “European project” which rubs Brits up the wrong way – and repeated the attempt a few months later

I want in the next few posts to explore my Dutch friend’s point of view but first let me try to summarise, in bullet-points, the argument of the article from the “reluctant Brexiteer” which was the focus of my last post –

- The European Union has been able to use geo-political muscle to negotiate benefits for both consumers and citizens

- trade issues are secondary to those of accountability and democracy

- the “european project” has always had a technocratic drive at its core. The “Monnet method of treaty creep” is a rather opaque way of expressing an important truth…

- the “nation-state” remains an important concept – despite the abuse federalists have thrown at it

- the Laeken Declaration of 2001 admitted that Europe’s peoples had come to see the EU as "a threat to their identity" and that there was no appetite for "a European superstate or European institutions inveigling their way into every nook and cranny of life." It spoke of returning powers to the member states and restoring "democratic legitimacy" through a convention.

-  The “European Convention” headed by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in fact continued the federalist thrust and, when treaty revision was rejected in 2005 by the French and Dutch, the Lisbon Treaty simply brought most of it back in

- the contempt this shows for the voter is the force which has released the populist backlash in so many European countries – not least the UK

Please note – this is simply my summary of the article as I understood its main points. 

But there is very little here I can disagree with – save, perhaps, the casual dismissal of the economic aspects of the argument. I have a feeling that many of those who argued this way will live to rue the day….

The only real point of dispute I have with the article is with the overly optimistic, if not nationalistic, note of its conclusion. The British direction of travel in the last 40 years does not warrant the complacent sentence about

“the same tolerant free-thinking UK, under the rule of law, that it has mostly been for 300 years” 

I'm afraid British tolerance and openness went out of the window decades ago!

The end of a doomed relationship

Marriages with egoists are doomed. The relationship the Brits sought in 1973 with what was then called “the Common Market” was driven by a combination of despair and cold economic calculation. The 1960s had seen a profound critique of the state of Britain and of british industry and a feeling that joining Europe was the only option. 
But enthusiasm for that cause was muted and limited indeed to a few individuals such as Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins.

Margaret Thatcher may have had an initial enthusiasm but was ultimately horrified by what the Single Market (which she had allowed Lord Cockfield to negotiate) produced – and turned strongly against the European project in the late 80s.

Blair may have danced more to the European music but was never an  enthusiast and Brown, of course, was so embarrassed by the Lisbon Treaty that he refused to join the final signing ceremony. This history is nicely captured in this podcast

The poor Brits could never make sense of the talk of “ever-closer union” - let alone of federalism – which they tended to write off as excitable rhetoric.  

My posts last year tried to explore what it was about the Brits that made them such difficult partners….….(see pages 133-196 of To Whom it may Concern – the 2019 posts) I tended to blame the English - who have always played the “balance of power” card in their relationships with Europe but have to admit that we Scots, with our looser but nonetheless fervent sense of nationhood, did play a rather promiscuous role – not least with our French friends and our more nomadic role as mercenaries. 
I happen to have strong Germanophile feelings – but am highly critical of the current English political class for its total loss of geopolitical sense of the future risks from a German-dominated Europe – let alone one with Russian links….

With departure from the European Union being only 30 or so hours away (although things will remain broadly the same until the end of December), now seems a good time for a more measured statement of what has been at stake…And this, I am amazed to confess, I find in an article in the outpost of high Conservatism – the Daily Telegraph newspaper which I have only lightly edited -

Sadness, foreboding, and dismay that it ever came to such a point: these are the emotions that this reluctant Brexiteer feels as we finally leave the European Union on Friday.  

I feel no satisfaction in the traumatic moment. Yet I stick to my view that this dysfunctional marriage had to end. Such is the Brexit paradox.

There has been much commentary over recent days dividing us (again) into opposed camps: Remainers still angry or in mourning, set against triumphant foes of Brussels. But what about the rest of us with more subtle feelings and in many cases a deep affection for l’Europe des patries? 

Of course we recognise the advantages (for some) of being able to live and work anywhere in the EU. We know Brussels did a good job breaking down the cartels, opening up cheap air travel and (belatedly) ending the racket of roaming fees. 

We can see that if you are dealing with a Chinese Communist Party that sees itself in “existential struggle” with the West, or with a pathological predator like Vladimir Putin, it is better to club together in self-protection. Mark these down on the good side of the ledger. But they are not the heart of the matter.

It has been a particularly irritating habit of the British establishment, aligned with a nexus of vested interests, and their army of academic and media auxiliaries, to reduce Brexit to a matter of trade above all else. If that were the case, then one would wish to stay in the EU.  

Brexit is political – not economic

But Brexit is not about trade, and nor are the details of customs clearance or rules of origin as important as we keep being told. They are not trivial but they are second order issues.

The elemental question is who runs this country. Do we wish to be a self-governing democracy under our own courts, or a canton of a higher supra-national regime that keeps acquiring more powers – beyond its ability to exercise them competently – through the Monnet Method of treaty creep? 

There is no mechanism for removing this overweening hybrid executive in Brussels, even when it persists in error as did in nearly accomplishing the extinction of North Sea cod by sheer ecological vandalism, or when it forced half of Europe into a debt-deflation spiral from 2010 to 2015 based on economic doctrines discredited a century ago. 

How do you dislodge the European Council from the Justus Lipsius when it behaves outrageously? Can you impeach it? No, you can’t. 

Why the Brits object to the very essence of the EU

Commission fonctionnaires may be urbane, talented, and hard-working, but they are not a civil service. They can launch dawn police raids. They can impose vast fines on their own authority. They have quasi-judicial powers and the prerogative of legislative initiative. 

They are more like the Roman Curia. Nothing like this has existed in British political life since the Reformation. How do voters hold this Caesaropapist structure to account? They cannot do so. That is what Brexit is about.  

There are great numbers of us in Britain, France, Holland, the Nordics, or the Czech Republic, who think the precious liberal nation state – inspired by the redemptive values of the English Bill of Rights and the Déclaration des droits de l'homme – has been a resounding success.

We think it is the only forum of authentic democracy, the agent of the greatest moral progress the world has ever seen. We think the systematic attempt to discredit the nation state by blaming it for two world wars is an historical sleight of hand, a lie fed to two generations of European school children though the co-ordinated Franco-German curriculum in a systematic brain-washing exercise.

We see it as the guarantor of social solidarity and a bulwark against religious agitation, fracture, and the unforgiving clash of communitarian identities. We think it should not be discarded lightly. 

Why no sensible person should believe that the EU technocrats have learned their lesson

……..We are told that the EU has learned its limits and has stopped accreting power. Another Conference on the Future of Europe is planned: a two-year vox pop foray to rebuild trust and show EU citizens that their voice counts.

Forgive me for wincing. I was the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent when Europe’s leaders – chastened by the torching of Gothenburg – published the Laeken Declaration in 2001. This mea culpa confessed that Europe’s peoples had come to see the EU as "a threat to their identity" and that there was no appetite for "a European superstate or European institutions inveigling their way into every nook and cranny of life." 

It spoke of returning powers to the member states and restoring "democratic legitimacy" through a Philadelphia convention. What happened? EU insiders hijacked it. A praesidium under super-elitist Valéry Giscard d'Estaing picked Commission lawyers to draft the wording. 

The final text called for an EU president, a justice department, a supreme court with jurisdiction over all areas of EU policy for the first time, and for scrapping the national veto across further swaths of policy. 
It became the Lisbon Treaty, pushed through by executive nod without a referendum, except in Ireland where voters promptly rejected it – to no avail obviously.

Sure enough, the insiders are already subverting this new attempt. The European Parliament – a self-promoting corporation as much as a legislature – has picked the arch-integrationist Guy Verhofstadt to lead the charge and is already talking of stripping states of their tax and foreign policy vetoes.

Nor can the EU retreat as long as the euro exists. The logic of monetary union is fiscal union, and that path leads to a unitary superstate. The euro cannot be made to work successfully any other way, as the German professoriate warned a quarter century ago. 

Either the eurozone moves towards an EU treasury with shared debts, fiscal transfers, and federal tax powers, or it will stumble from crisis to crisis with each cyclical downturn until it blows apart. But to assume those powers is to strip the Bundestag and its peers of their core tax and spending prerogatives, without which democracy is a sham.

My readers know that, as a Brit in Romania, I am no friend of the Brexiteers – but, equally, I have always been critical of the ambitions of the European technocrats and opposed to their deliberate obstruction of democratic control. 
But I did find the  author's optimistic conclusion sadly typical of the English sense of superiority - which was vividly on display for me this week when I attended a (n...otherwise very impressive) briefing session in the British Embassy in Bucharest. On the back of the official visiting card I picked up on the reception desk for the event were two words – "GREAT Britain" - with the first word blazoned in capitals and a union jack at the edge of the card! 
How crass! But how typical of an egoist1

How the article concludes

My fond hope, the article concludes, is that by saving our democratic nation state from slow asphyxiation we will head off a drift into anomie and dangerous political waters. The dust will settle and the world will wake up to find the same tolerant free-thinking UK, under the rule of law, that it has mostly been for 300 years, and wonder how it misread Brexit so badly.  

It is Europe that the liberal intelligentsia should worry about. The EU has choked off the political breathing space of its members. It risks succumbing gradually to the Salvinis, the Orbans, and the neo-Falangist syndicalism of the AfD and the Rassemblement, as voters rebel against globalist cultural nihilism.

A liberal-minded Briton does not have to apologise for Brexit and the restoration of democratic self-rule, but that does not make it a pleasant exercise. The sadness is that Europe’s hard-driving ideological elites have led us to this regrettable juncture.

I will drink my toast on Friday to fellow souverainistes across the Channel. Join us soon.

Further Reading

- “The Missing Heart of Europe” is an excellent book produced by Thomas Kremer in 2005 which goes a long way to explain british exceptionalism

- Jonathan Storey is an historian and a Brexiteer - with long experience of Europe. This the most recent of a series of extensive blogposts he has produced on the constitutional aspects of the relationship

- UK Economic policy in the 1960s and 1970s and the challenge to learning; Oliver and Pembleton (2006) A very good extended essay on how exactly the economic issues were interpeted

- Kenneth Morgan is another historian who produced recently this very useful analysis of the UK  policy developments of the 1970s
- Chris Grey is an academic whose Brexit Blog has, each week, mercilessly dissected the arguments of the Brexiteers. On the last day before the UK left, this post summarises the 200 plus posts to help understand “how we reached this point – and where it might be taking us” 

- Collapse of a Continent – a 2014 post which contains useful excerpts from Perry Anderson’s essential but neglected The New Old Europe (the hyperlink gives the entire book) which contains a penetrating outsider’s analysis of how various types of academics have tried to make sense of the European project
- an interesting assessment of the experience of the various individuals who have since 1973 headed the British team in Brussels

- The Observer’s political correspondent gives a brief assessment of the past 47 years of UK membership

The Perils of Leaving Economics to Experts

One of the books in the list of “best reads of 2019” was a little one –  The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; - which I had, as I tend to with most economics books, dipped into briefly and returned to intermittently. But it was worth the wait – being a

concise and well-researched critique of modern economics and how it is taught in universities as well as the broader issue of public engagement with economics as part of the democratic process.

The authors define the ‘Econocracy’ as

‘a society in which political goals are defined in terms of their effect on the economy, which is believed to be a distinct system with its own logic that requires experts to manage it’. 

Since the financial crisis of 2008, there has been an endless stream of books and articles about economists’ failure to predict the crisis, and more recently a sense that the subsequent economic response in the form of austerity policies has done more harm than good. Is it any wonder then, the book asks, that the public might be left questioning economic ‘experts’, and economics students their education? In fact, as I noted in an earlier post, student reaction to the overly mathematical nature of economics (and its lack of pluralism) began before the financial crash  

The Post-Crash Economics Society has its origins in this disenchantment, and one of the book’s strongest contributions is its critique of the highly stylised and homogenised curriculum that would be familiar to economics students worldwide. The authors contend that despite attracting capable students who are interested in the world around them, economics as it is taught at university has little to do with the real world, uncritically setting out a model based on rational individuals and an economic system that tends towards equilibrium, while also being insufficiently pluralist, downplaying debate between different schools of economics or relegating these to the History of Economics.

This argument is supported by a useful analysis of the final exam questions on core and elective economics courses at various universities. These rely heavily on what the authors call ‘operate the model’ problems: asking students to uncritically apply the taught model to a stylised situation, with no thought to whether the model, situation or answers are realistic or useful. Overall this analysis finds that 76 per cent of exam questions required no ‘critical or independent thinking whatsoever’ (51).  Even if exams aren’t perfectly representative of course content, they will very much influence student efforts, so it is concerning that critical engagement is neither valued nor rewarded. The authors lament: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that it is now possible to go through an economics degree without once having to venture an opinion’ (p51).

This disheartening state of affairs is blamed on a combination of factors that come under the umbrella of ‘Econocracy’: the increasing marginalisation of heterodox thought from the discipline, for example, starting with the kinds of articles that are accepted into the major journals. This, in turn, influences what research is prioritised by universities and funding bodies (currently through the Research Excellence Framework), and inevitably who is hired or promoted (the ‘curse of the top five’ journals was discussed at this year’s American Economic Association meeting).  This is compounded by the increasing financial pressures facing the Higher Education sector, with reduced funding per student leading to ever-larger class sizes and time-poor lecturers and graduate teaching assistants.

That economics discourages students from thinking and expressing opinions would have Adam Smith turning in his grave – he was, after all, a Professor of Moral Philosophy. But is hardly a new argument - Stefan Collini, for instance, has long spoken out against the worsening outcomes not just for students of the modern university, but society more broadly. 

It was only last week that I reminded readers of the 36 types of capitalism one could discern in 12 academic disciplines. And one of the most important parts of the book for me was therefore the table (at page 61) which identifies 10 different “schools” of thinking which can be discerned within economics itself…

Pluralism in Economics

Name of “school”	Humans….	Humans act within…	The economy is…..
Old “neo-classical”	Optimise narrow self-interest	A vacuum	Stable
New “neo-classical”	Can optimise a variety of goals	A market context	Stable in the absence of friction
Post-Keynes	Use rules of thumb	A macro-economic context	Naturally volatile
Classical	Act in their self-interest	Their class interests	Generally stable
Marxist	Do not have predetermined patterns	Their class and historical interests	Volatile and exploitative
Austrian	Subjective knowledge and preferences	A market context	Volatile – but this is generally sign of health
Institutional	Have changeable behaviour	Instit envt that sets rules and social norms	Dependent on legal and social structures
Evolutionary	Act “sensibly” but not optimally	An evolving, complex system	Both stable and volatile
feminist	exhibit engendered behaviour	A social context	Ambiguous
ecological	Act ambiguously	Social context	Embedded in the environment

This is an excerpt only – the full table is from Ho-Joon Chang’s “Economics – a User’s Guide” but can be viewed at diagram at p61 of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)

The authors note that economics degrees are seen by many universities as a particularly useful money-maker (used to cross-subsidise other departments), being most compatible with large lectures and exams relying on stock answers and multiple-choice questions. In spite of this, the authors observe that a growing number of universities are dropping their economics degrees completely, which is a worrying trend if decreasing public engagement with economics is to be addressed.

The authors have clearly dedicated a lot of thought to the question of how to improve university economics and do offer some concrete suggestions, which mainly revolve around a more engaged style of pedagogy (for example, peer-to-peer teaching and alternative forms of assessment).  In fact, one of the most interesting contributions of this book is its account in Chapter Four of the authors’ experience lobbying their own university for reform, making this a valuable case study in campaigning and network-building for similarly motivated readers.  However, despite their tenacious optimism, even the authors have to admit that ‘reforming economics education to better serve its students, the discipline and society will be extremely difficult without a change of direction in university and government policy’ (p140).  Incremental change at the level of the curriculum can only do so much, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted (the book provides a good overview and critique of one such attempt, the CORE project).

But the broader problem of the ‘Econocracy’ beyond how economics is taught is surely the growing public disenchantment with the discipline. While much ink is yet to be spilt trying to explain the rise in populist movements worldwide, public engagement with economic debate is surely a key issue. The authors argue that while many of the factors associated with this new wave of anti-globalist sentiment are economic (including stagnant middle-class wages and the loss of blue-collar jobs), the rhetoric of these movements is decidedly non-economic, emphasising instead questions of national security and sovereignty. 

This is a crucial insight: that combatting the appealing messages of populism might not be a case of simply ‘winning’ the economic debate (the rhetoric around Brexit being a clear example of this failed strategy), but instead creating a new kind of discourse that addresses the concerns of a disengaged public and, more importantly, actively involves this public.

The book concludes with a rousing call for a new kind of ‘citizen economist’ who can facilitate this engagement, decoding the ‘econobabble’ of economists and policymakers and empowering citizens to be part of the debate. Economics has for too long been seen as a set of tools for use only by the experts.  But economics, as this book argues, is for the public, and they too can pick up these tools and decide how they want to use them.