Purposeful Renegade: As an economics student, not only was Kate Raworth (above) never told the ultimate purpose of economics, but also, she told Kathryn Ryan on RNZ's Nine To Noon, she and her fellow students were never encouraged to ask.
KATE RAWORTH calls herself a “renegade economist”, by which
she means, I can only conclude, an economist who makes sense. If you’re keen to
discover exactly how much sense, then read her book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist,
or – better still – purchase a ticket to hear her speak at the Auckland Writers Festival on 13 May.
Listening to Raworth being interviewed by Kathryn Ryan on
this morning’s (14/3/19) edition of Nine
To Noon was a rare treat. RNZ has become such a timorous wee beastie these
days; utterly determined to remain as inoffensive as possible to as many of its
listeners as possible. So much so, that interviews with renegades of any sort
are depressingly infrequent.
It would be encouraging to discover that Raworth was invited
on Nine To Noon because Ryan is
genuinely interested in discovering what might supplant the increasingly
threadbare neoliberal economic paradigm which has, for more than three decades,
been relentlessly transforming New Zealand society.
Equally encouraging would be a “progressive” government
peopled with Raworth devotees. A government chock-full of Labour, Green and NZ
First politicians who all “get” the Oxford professor’s new economic thinking.
Imagine party conferences and caucuses alive with debate about the best way of moving
New Zealand out of its neoliberal capitalist present, and into a radically democratic
eco-socialist future.
Why don’t we have such a government?
The answer is, in large measure, supplied by Raworth
herself. She described to Ryan the peculiar narrowness of the economics
discipline. As an economics student, not only was she never told the ultimate
purpose of economics, but also, she and her fellow students were never
encouraged to ask.
Like the rest of us, students are urged to look upon
economics as a science. Its practitioners are charged with describing the laws
of motion of economic reality. To demand to know the “purpose” of economics is
as absurd as demanding to know the “purpose” of reality. Reality doesn’t have a
purpose – it simply “is”. Economics just “is” too.
Except, of course, the “science” of economics isn’t a science
at all. Political economy: the name people living in the nineteenth century
gave to the many and often conflicting explanations of how the new phenomenon
of industrial capitalism worked, before these (minus those who prophesied its
destruction) were codified and re-christened “economics”; was a much more
honest intellectual exercise. Political economists at least recognised that how
production, distribution and consumption are organised in any given society is
both a reflection and an expression of who has the power – and who does not.
Raworth argues that the true purpose of economics under
capitalism is to persuade people that who gets what is not decided by powerful
individuals and groups but by the “law” of supply and demand. That the
distribution of wealth and power is not guided by the all-too-obvious hands of
the wealthy and the powerful (in which there is usually some sort of weapon)
but by the “invisible hand” of the market. An agency as innocent of malign – or
even conscious – intent as the weather.
Listening to Raworth respond to Ryan’s questioning, I was
drawn to the conclusion that people either see through this attempt to hoodwink
them into thinking that deciding who gets what is best left to the rational,
utility-maximising and self-interested decision-making of homo economicus – or they don’t.
That conclusion led me, inexorably, to another: that all of
the people who really matter in the present government are to be found among
the hoodwinked. They just don’t “get” that the way an economy is run is the
product of conscious political choice.
It is just about possible to forgive the members of NZ First
for this failure. They are, after all, conservatives and therefore biased in
favour of “organic” explanations of social relationships. There is, however, no
excuse for Labour’s and the Greens’ failure to understand that they could
change this country’s economic settings in a heartbeat – if they wanted to.
Labour, in particular, should grasp this. After all, it was
the Fourth Labour Government which consciously, ruthlessly and radically
changed New Zealand’s economic settings in 1984. They had help, of course:
Treasury, the Reserve Bank, the Business Roundtable, most of the news media;
all had a hand in the neoliberal transformation of New Zealand – and none of those
hands were invisible.
It is a tragedy that in the eighteen months this government
has been in office there’s been so little evidence of the renegade economics
made popular by writers like Raworth. The Finance Minister, Grant Robertson,
schooled by his mentor – the former Finance Minister, Sir Michael Cullen – is a
ploddingly orthodox economic manager. The economic settings he has chosen to
steer by, being virtually identical to those the previous National Government
chose to steer by, will inevitably deliver New Zealand to a very similar
destination.
Listening to her expound her renegade economics on Nine To Noon, I could only wonder what
life in this country would be like if Kate Raworth was New Zealand’s finance
minister. Compassionate, equitable, sustainable and, above all, radical.
As every progressive government should be.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Friday, 15 March 2019.
