REVIEW: Good Economics for
Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, by Abhijit Banerjee and
Esther Duflo
A recent
YouGov survey confirmed that economists are the least trusted
professionals in the UK today. Brexit is only the latest contributor to the
public’s understandable rejection of a profession that has either failed
spectacularly to raise the alarm over impending crises or have provided
theoretical justifications for the inexcusable practices of bankers and the
wild claims of politicians.
Who can forget the Queen’s
devastating question, in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, to members of the
Royal Economic Society: “Why did no one see it coming?” How can Nobel Prize
winning economists be forgiven for providing the theoretical sermons that
steadied the financier’s hand concocting the structured derivatives that Warren
Buffet would later describe as “weapons of mass financial destruction”?
A new book, entitled Good
Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, is the latest
attempt by professional economists to defend the profession. It is, happily, an
excellent antidote to the most dangerous forms of economics-bashing: the
attempts of opportunistic politicians to weaponise understandable discontent
with mainstream economics and politics and to press it into the service of a
xenophobic ideology that denies facts and serves the interests of a nativist,
global oligarchy.
The book’s authors, MIT
academic economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, write beautifully while
in full command of their economics – a rare combination of skills. They look
into the most crucial issues humanity faces (migration, trade wars, the scourge
of inequality, climate catastrophe) with a combination of humility over what
economics cannot tell us and pride over its contributions to our limited
understanding. In every page they seek to shed much needed light upon the
distortions that bad economics bring to the public debates, while methodically
deconstructing their false assumptions. In their words, the book’s noble and
urgent task is “…to emphasise that there are no iron laws of economics keeping
us from building a more humane world”.
Serendipity would have it
that, as this book was in the pipeline, Banerjee and Duflo, who are also
partners in life, were awarded (jointly with Michael Kremer) this year’s Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Even if only for the good wind it will
blow into this important book’s sails, the Prize Committee’s choice must be
considered an inspired one.
Banerjee and Duflo are a new
breed of economists. Unlike previous Nobel winners who were mostly older white
males producing grand theories built upon mathematics of dizzying complexity,
this year’s Nobelists are young and have made a name for themselves by studying
poor brown people’s circumstances up close and personally. Most interestingly,
they have specialised in borrowing the methods of randomised trials from
medicine and deployed them in developing countries to ascertain what policies
can alleviate suffering with given resources.
Their own conception of what
economists should be doing is disarmingly down to earth. They see themselves as
society’s “… plumbers: we solve problems with a combination of intuition
grounded in science, some guesswork aided by experience and a bunch of pure
trial and error.” A comparison with John Maynard Keynes’s conception of the
study of economics is telling. Keynes thought that good economics required of
us that we aim to be, at once, “mathematician, historian, statesman,
philosopher”. That we must “…contemplate the particular in terms of the
general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought.” That we
must remain “…as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet some-times as near
the earth as a politician.”
While such lofty ambition
implanted a dangerous delusion of grandeur amongst many of the economists whose
theories have caused many people great hardship (for example, grand theorisers
of the financial market’s supposed self-correcting capacities), there are
passages in this book when this reader would have liked a little more of
Keynes’ ambition. For without it the plentiful useful facts do not go far
enough to expose the deeper causes of our current predicament. Similarly, while
it is refreshing to encounter a genuine admission of ignorance (e.g. when the
authors admit that economists are damned if they know what causes economic
growth spurts in some places while other places remain stagnant), the umpteenth
time I encountered the usual transition from “on the one hand” to “on the other
hand”, I found myself yearning, like President Truman once did, for the…
one-handed economist.
The book’s greatest contribution
is the methodical deconstruction of prominent fake facts on the day’s critical
issues: Migration, the reader finds out, is not on the rise – indeed, at 3% of
global population it is exactly at the level it was in 1960. Natural
experiments (involving Finns expelled from the USSR in 1945, Cubans flocking to
Miami in 1980, Jews settling in Israel in the 1990s) prove that migrants do not
steal the natives’ jobs, but only help expose the holes in public services and
social housing left by austerity. As for trade liberalisation that economists
treat as super-important, Banerjee and Duflo dare suggest it brings relatively
small benefits while doing a lot of damage to the poorer and the weaker in
countries like the United States and India. The resulting discontent in
developed countries turbocharges racism: The moment white blue-collar men lose
hope and apply for disability welfare benefits it is no longer enough to
denigrate blacks and Latinos as “welfare queens”. They must now be depicted as
gang members or rapists.
In the chapters on growth,
inequality and climate change the reader comes closer to encountering the
authors’ politics. While firmly on the side of progressives, and fully
sympathetic with figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, their own policy stance is much more mainstream. They support
schemes to help the victims of globalisation, e.g. by paying firms in declining
areas to keep older workers employed. They want government in developing
countries to help people move to areas with better jobs but also to help those
who want to stay to look after their elderly or their village. In keeping with
their academic work’s focus on things that work on the ground, they favour the
smaller picture where they can be sure that public investment can make a
difference. But what about the larger stage on which humanity’s drama unfolds?
Banerjee and Duflo consider
Sanders’ Job Guarantee scheme but reject it because they do not believe worthy
jobs can be produced by the state in such big numbers. Correctly, they point
out that Warren’s wealth tax, while good and proper, cannot raise more than 1%
of US national income, even less Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% marginal tax rate for the
super-rich (which will simply motivate firms not to distribute profits but
place them in trust funds). Alas, the fact remains that any serious tackling of
climate change, or attempt to give social justice a chance, require spending in
the vicinity of at least 5% of total income. So, where will the money needed
for the International Green New Deal and the redistribution (both global and
local) of wealth that humanity needs so desperately come from? Banerjee and
Duflo do not say.
At some point they welcome a
change of heart amongst IMF staffers: “The IMF now requires its country teams
to include inequality in factors to take into consideration when providing
policy guidance to countries and outlining conditions under which they can
receive IMF assistance.” When I read this, I laughed thinking that someone must
have forgotten to send this email to the IMF’s Greek mission! The reason I
mention this titbit here is that it points to an explanation of their silence
on how the Green New Deal will be paid for: A reluctance to break cleanly from
the gravitational pull that the established institutions exert on successful
academic economists, preventing them from countenancing public finance
innovations that require an ambition closer to that of bigger picture thinkers
(e.g. Franklin Roosevelt and John Maynard Keynes)
Every book as important as
this one must include a theory of change: By what means shall we use the book’s
insights to bring about a more humane world? The authors’ offering is
enlightened selfishness by the rich (“The rich may eventually see that it is in
their self-interest to argue for a radical shift toward the real sharing of
prosperity”) and razor-sharp analysis that is disseminated to the public (“The
only course we have against bad ideas is to be vigilant”).
This is unconvincing. But it
could not be otherwise. To provide a persuasive internationalist progressive
policy agenda at a time when the usual fixes (e.g. quantitative easing,
taxation) no longer work, the deeper causes of capitalism’s economic stagnation
and flirtation with climate catastrophe must come to the surface. To do this we
have to reconsider that which polite society bans respectable economists from
interrogating: property rights over the means of production, especially robots,
AI etc.
It is a remarkable sign of the
times that, as my friend Slavoj Zizek once said, even the brightest minds would
rather fathom the end of the world than plan for the end of capitalism. Perhaps
the greatest contribution of Banerjee and Duflo’s excellent new book is
precisely this: It demonstrates both the brilliant insights that mainstream
economics can make available to us and its limits – which a progressive
internationalism has a duty to transcend.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/11/good-economics-for-hard-times-abhijit-banerjee-esther-duflo-review?CMP=share_btn_tw#comments
No comments:
Post a Comment