chadkoh

The CITED podcast is back! It has been a few years. I’ve previously enjoyed their work on the reproducibility crisis in scientific publishing and many of their critical episodes on their original run in the 2015-2018 era. Gordon Katic and the CITED team have an engaging narrative technique for introducing listeners to complex topics, so I know this new series is going to be good.

This time they are taking on the issue of expertise in economics and how it is abused.

A quick, illustrative personal story: back in the early 2000s I met a professor at a tiny coffee shop tucked away behind an ivy wall north of my university in Kyoto. The flower print ceramics and doilies made me feel like I was taking tea at an English nan’s house. In this setting I asked for advice: “how can I prepare to study regional conflict in grad school?” He was quick with an answer: “Study economics.”

I did go on to study regional conflict and counter-terrorism in grad school, and encountered much economic thinking, including a prof who worked for NORAD using complex mathematical models to fight the Soviets during the arms race in the 1980s.

Economics is the science with an answer for everything. That does not mean those answers are right. In the past few years there have been a new raft of books challenging mainstream economics, and the power of economists and economic thinking in our political life. This is in some part due to society slowly coming out of four decades of neoliberalism. (I first came upon that word a decade ago reading things like Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century and Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years — another pair of books that make you question economics as a field — but finally that word has entered the mainstream, even being denounced by global leaders like former Japan PM Kishida and US President Joe Biden. This just goes to show how things had evolved over the past few years).

One of my favourite recent books is The Economist’s Hour: The Rise of a Discipline, the Failures of Globalization, and the Road to Nationalism. That was my fav book of 2021. While that book exams how economistic thinking weaseled it’s way into our political system, I recently finished The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality which examines the legal methods used to prepare the soil for those seeds of thought.

In terms of what society reaps when you sow such seeds, I really recommend Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (my GR Review and chapter notes) which very much brings this debate into today’s political reality. There are still reactionary elements out there, many active in my are of the internet and startup-land, so read Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (my GR Review and chapter notes) to understand where they are coming from. And if you want to imagine an alternative to global capitalism as driven by the thinking of mainstream economic thinkers, take a walk into the forest and read The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

Okay, so this turned out to be a giant book recommendation post, but it is also a podcast recommendation. Check out CITED. I will be listening along. So far the first ep on Simon Kuznets and the history of the econometric measure of GDP already has me angry. Let me know what you think, and what we can do to have better ways to think about social political issues today and tomorrow.