United Kingdom Anarchoblogs

Last week we got the news, hot out of Cambridge, that nutritionists could no longer say that giving up or cutting down on well reared, fatty red meat, and dairy fats would do us any good.  Over the years they have extolled the benefits and alternately the dangers of red wine. Eggs were rehabilitated after several decades on the naughty step. I distinctly remember in the seventies that we were told that kippers and smoked fish, coffee (particularly black) and toast were carcinogenic. Carbs good, fats bad, oils bad, cooking anything, bad.

And each time there is a volte face on what is or isn't good for us, depending on how far the advice catches on, it has wide ranging ramifications for public health. Years may even be cut from millions of lives if we've been doing the wrong thing for a long time on scientific advice available at the time, liberties unnecessarily curbed by politicians. But you know, that's how a science works. It tries one thing, sees how it works, tries another, retraces its steps as something new is discovered and so on. Not scared of contradicting its previous theories where necessary. We learn about many of the most important in the most basic school science classes. We celebrate the names of those by whom breakthroughs were made. We do children's Christmas Lectures about them. They appear in pub quizes.

Even in social sciences, specifically as I have been studying them, poolitics and international relations, we are taught from the start about various schools of thought, their history and relevance, we have the opportunity directly to study the works of significant figures in historical political thought, and almost all our work involves trying to understand and explain different political subject areas from several of these perspectives.  When one type of system goes wrong, we debate better, replacement, systems from amongst alternative vision.  Again, many of these figures are in the public consciousness, though probably less so than natural scientists.  But still often in pub quizes.

But in economics? No such luck, especially in taught economics at anything, it would seem, up to and including undergraduate level. It hardly seems a comprehensive enough basis for practicing economics, understanding the shades of opinion in policy debates, not knowing the history of those policy debates. And let's not forget, just as with nutritional advice, economic policy has far reaching human welfare implications. People starve when their countries' economic plans go awry, the imbalanced distribution of wealth and properity around the world must tell us that something hasn't worked. And that something is the standard neo-classical models we are all taught without exception or much debate about alternative views.

Maybe it's unusual for an undergraduate student to have read much economics before university, and I know little about the GCSE and A level curricula. But the number of well known economists who have even had a name-check during my course, including simply having some kind of economic model named after them where we have learned about the model is miniscule, and they're generally all of one broad school of thought. So we know, say, about the Mundell-Fleming model or the Phillips curve, but know very little, if anything, about Bob, Marcus or Bill themselves.

I was shocked last year, in a third/final year module, for example, to hear that nobody else (willing to speak up in seminar at least) had heard of David Ricardo or even Comparative Advantage.  Adam Smith got a mention, once, in an early compulsory Micro module or something. But Say, Marx, Ricardo, Walras, Marshall, Bates have had no mention at all to say nothing about less orthodox economists like Boehm-Bawerk or Menger, Sraffa, Minsky. Even Hayek, I think, got only one mention in all of my modules.  Schumpeter got several mentions, but again, just for the words "creative destruction" not about studying the man and his ideas in any more detail than that.

Now, sure, one problem for ecnomics and economists is that there really isn't a laboratory setting in which different ideas can be tried under controlled conditions and then applied to the real world. All experimentation is done on real economies with real human reactions to the policy changes that themselves might change the parameters of the experiment by reacting other than expected.  There is a distinct lack of "discursive" economics of the form that Sraffa, Minsky or J K Glabraith preferred (even Keynes didn't think a concentration on mathematical modelling and predicting was useful). But really, with the seemingly intractable economic issues the world is beset with most of the time (and particularly after 2007/8's crash) you would have thought we would be taught how to debate the different possible ideological responses to those issues - the closest we have got is an essay specifically on monetary and fiscal policy as enacted after the crash in the UK, the only thing I would say has been a rigorous "academic essay" in the whole of the economics side of the course, probably.

There are, of course, signs of change. Student groups and lecturers have begun to get fed up of the monopoly neo-classicalism has on the curriculum, but the suggestions I have seen do not particularly, it seems, move away from an obsession with models over dialectic. In fact, I get the impression that some proposed curricular reforms want to see a more mathematically rigorous discipline which only partly addresses the problems with the current set up.

The current curriculum must be incredibly frustrating to teach as well. From what I can gather, most of my lecturers would probably self-identify as heterodox in some way, but are, effectively, prevented from teachig their ideas. The orthodoxy stifles real debate, making policy questions one-sided and leaving current undergraduates unprepared for a world of more open debate, schooled in models but not educated in economics.

In a brief respite between coursework and dissertation deadlines, I feel the need to reflect a little on the Ukraine situation. Actually it's not such a big diversion as it directly relates to two of my modules this semester as well, on democracy, civil society and governance and on human rights. I feel about as close as it is possible to be to have considered the issue, read and heard people on both "sides", and actually not be able to hold an opinion either way. That's not to dismiss it as insignificant: in the back of my mind I always recall General Sir John Hackett's Third World War beginning in the recently independent Ukraine! I am genuinely conflicted. I have no idea what the "right" answer is.

Firstly, and I think a fair few strident "western" commentators need to appreciate this too for a bit of humility when pontificating what people half a world away should do, I and most of the people I know have no experience of being a geopolitical pawn (welll we do, we just don't usually recognise it as such!).  That means people in the UK and the USA primarily: we simply have not in living memory been invaded, annexed, carved up and redistributed, our people force-marched 3,000 miles as collective punishment, been starved in one of the biggest instances of democide in history.  

I mean, let's face it, sixty years ago or whatever it was, moving the Crimea to Ukraine would have been something akin to moving Grimsby back to Lincolnshire instead of Humberside, an administrative thing, done for who knows what reasons of course, but nonetheless. Maybe they thought the Ukrainians were always too independent minded so the territory called Ukraine should have more Russians in it. Mere gerrymandering on a grand scale? Who knows. You can be sure they then didn't envisage these Soviet Republics ever being anything other than part of the Soviet Union, so these were administrative internal issues. On the other hand, you would think that experience of the Holodomor and then of internal exile would make the Tatars totally against siding with Russia, so whose country is Crimea anyway? Should the (minroity) returning Tatars have some prior say, or should it be the ethnic Russians who were presumably also more or less forcibly moved into the Crimea in the fifties, as "current occupiers"?

It's bad enough having one "master" in the form of a state, but having several fight over you, swap you for something else, demand that one day you are loyal to one regime and the next to another, perhaps accompanied by enforced changes in language, legal system, religious freedoms and so on must be truly awful. I of course don't understand why they cannot simply go it alone - with a population of around 2 million Crimea is not dissimilar in size to sovereign Slovenia and Latvia, somewhat bigger than eight other independent European nation states.

Anyway, all of that is by way of saying I really cannot imagine, living in a country that has not ostensibly "changed hands" for the best part of a millennium, what all that historical baggage, much within living memory remember, does to communities.  But what of the political dimension, what is it that one side, Europe and the US are getting all moral high ground about?

Okay, so I paid only a passing interest in the street battles in Kiev, celebrated a little when the Yanukovych government fell (all governments falling are a cause for celebration, for there is the briefest opportunity that people might reject government entirely!). I mean, from the outside, it looks like Ukraine has had a series of pretty gangster governments. Yushchenko and the bizarre poisoning incident, Timoshenko the oligarch turned politician (rarely a good combination IMO). For better or worse the current legally, however dubiously, elected gangster-in-charge happens to be Yanukovych. And he has been forced from office by a mob. Amazingly a mob demanding closer ties to the European Union: Brussels can't see that strength of feeling in their favour very often!

The new government is, naturally, dominated by western-oriented Ukrainians so even the flimsy nationwide democratic consent to the Yanukovych government can no longer be counted upon. I'm not clear when we started supporting coups d'etat, but it seems to me that people pointing out that's exactly what we're doing have a good case.

On the other hand there is the unseemly haste with which all this is happening. One would expect a neighbouring country, especially one with crucial assets in the territory concerned, to have a position on the legitimacy or otherwise of a change in government next door, but is there anything to suggest that even if Ukraine were about to be more politically divided on ethnic lines anyone was in such imminent danger as to demand (let alone justify) immediate deployment and de facto annexation of the Crimea by Russia? You know, Scotland's been planning a vote on independence for what, three centuries, Crimea's could surely have waited a few months and allowing time for legal challenges and so on? I don't trust Putin at the best of times, and the swiftness of his intervention stinks of planning and takeover not protection.

I hear people comparing it to Kosovo. But I'm not sure the comparison works, or at least I hope it doesn't. In Kosovo, a rebel government had been going for some time, it had already turned bloody, and the remarkable aspect of the NATO intervention was bombing Serbia to make them give up their grip on Kosovo. So if Putin is not suggesting that large scale bloodshed on ethnic lines was imminent, from which the Crimean people needed immediate protection, is he really saying that he's prepared to bomb Kiev in order to defend the rights of self-determination of Crimea? An independent Crimea, by the way, that would be slightly larger in population than the current "independent" Kosovo.

And oh, as I was writing this last night, news comes in of some alleged phone conversation with Timoschenko apparently quite casually talking about nuking ethnic Russians.  Maybe Putin has a cause for swift intervention after all.  Either way, I cannot bring myself to think well of either side in this, and it seems to me that from the western point of view, rarely has there been as good a reason to keep one's own counsel as when the greenhouse windows are in full view of the incoming stones.