Saturday Suggestions: Moffat, the Iran Deal and DC on TV

My top reads from the past 7 days

What Steven Moffat Doesn’t Understand About Grief, And Why It’s Killing Doctor Who by Sarah Siegel (Tea Leaves and Dog Ears)

“Joss Whedon, Steven Moffat and George R.R. Martin walk into a bar and everyone you’ve ever loved dies.”

Why Hawks Should Love the Iran Deal by David Rothkopf (Foreign Policy)

“For the hawks to suggest that the deal freezing Iranian uranium-enrichment efforts above the 5 percent level, halting work on the heavy-water reactor near Arak, and granting daily inspections to Iran’s centrifuge-laden facilities at Natanz and Fordow makes matters more dangerous in the short term is just indefensible on its face. Absent such a deal, all enrichment and technological advancement efforts would continue unabated and without inspections. Iran would almost certainly move more quickly toward having a bomb without this deal than with it.”

America’s Least-Favorite City Has Become Television’s Favorite Subject by T.A Frank (New Republic)

“Veep” is also, in its odd way, the most sympathetic of the shows toward those it depicts. It understands that Washington’s politicians join a fraternity of those who know the difference between symbols and real policy but who must report back to constituents who see only the symbols. If you talk to voters as if you’re explaining things, you’re condescending, but if you talk to them as if they’re on your wavelength, you’re aloof. It tends to make you either a cynic or a hypocrite—and, in either case, a bit of a bullshit artist.

Brave New World seems prophetic; it’s not

Huxley’s masterpiece is better at seeming prophetic than actually seeing the future

“In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organised society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of a chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by the nightly courses of sleep-teaching – these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren. I forget the exact date of the events recorded in Brave New World; but it was somewhere in the sixth or seventh century A.F. (after Ford)….Twenty-Seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less optimistic than when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 and coming true much sooner than I thought they would.”

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (1958)

While listening to the audiobook of Brave New World (BNW), I kept running into a problem. Listening to music on an MP3 player or spotify has accustomed me to having a virtually unlimited supply of it. Therefore, whenever I get somewhat indifferent to a piece of music I skip to the next one. This habit becomes rather an irritant when listening to an audiobook because I’m regularly skipping to the next chapter and then having to spool back to find my place. This technologically induced impatience is ironic given that one of Huxley’s themes is a society that has dispensed with delayed gratification.

BNW does this. It has an uncanny ability to speak to our contemporary fears. It can be related to any number of current debates: consumerism, feminism, genetic engineering, secularism, permissiveness, technology and the role of the arts and humanities. But that doesn’t make it an accurate prediction.

When Huxley came back to the ideas in BNW in non-fiction form with Brave New World Revisited, he identified two trends that he thought were pushing the world towards dystopia: overorganisation and overpopulation.

Huxley associates overorganisation with Fordism and the regimentation and standardisation it implies. He subscribes to the thesis of  William Whyte’s “the Organization Man” about how workers sacrificed their individuality to the needs of their firms. BNW essentially imagines these principles extrapolated from the corporate world to society as a whole. Humans are literally manufactured in batches to fill a preordained role, and autonomy is systematically suppressed.

However, the reality turned out differently. Rather than becoming the organising principle of society, Fordism is in retreat. Mass production now co-exists with an increasing number of firms that focus on producing goods tailored for specific consumer tastes. Many companies especially in finance and technology actively seek out not ‘Organization Men’ but misfits who’ll bring unconventional thinking to problems. Ford’s city of Detroit is now a bankrupt mess.

Huxley seems to think that overpopulation is the route by which overorganisation would come about. That a highly powerful and controlling state would be needed to prevent unchecked population growth from leading to ecological disaster. He feels that no other kind of government can prevent people having large families. But again history has not turned out as Huxley expected.

Population increases seem to be leveling off of their own accord. Family sizes have been dropping for decades. While the number of humans on the planet is still rising, this is driven not by parents having more children but by there being more parents to have children.  We are seeing the aftereffects of people in the past having large families as the offspring of those prodigious breeders now reach child bearing age themselves. We are regulating our own fertility without the need for a totalitarian state. In fact, many more recent dystopias like the Handmaid’s Tale or Children of Men feature the reverse kind of demographic challenge – a population in decline.

This is not to say to say that Huxley’s predictions will not come to pass. The future is unpredictable after all. However, I see no reason to predict that it will. That’s not to say it doesn’t have a messages worth listening to. Rather we should see it as what Huxley originally intended it to be: a satire on the utopian novels of men like H.G Wells, a warning that ‘progress’ can move us towards hell as well as heaven.

The unfortunately realistic economics of the Hunger Games

One of the criticisms of the Hunger Games is that it’s not plausible that in a futuristic sci-fi world with extremely advanced technology, much of the population would still be on the edge of starvation. Matthew Yglesias argues that the extreme inequality between the Capital and the Districts is not only plausible but has actually existed and that Collins has identified how it would come about. He illustrates this by reference to the work of two economic historians:

Acemoglu and Robinson’s general theory can be grasped through the lens of the “reversal of fortune” they observe in the Western Hemisphere and originally described in an academic paper co-authored with Simon Johnson. If you plot per capita income in the Americas today, you see a clear pattern with the United States and Canada ahead, the southern cone around Chile and Argentina in second place, and the middle portion much poorer. It turns out that if you turn the clock back about 500 years, the pattern was reversed. The places that are rich today were poor then, while those that are poor today were generally rich in the past. This, they argue, is no coincidence. When Spanish conquistadors showed up in the prosperous areas of Latin America, they stole all the gold they could get their hands on and then set about putting the native populations to work. They set up “extractive institutions” whose purpose was to wring as many natural resources (silver, gold, food) from the land as possible while keeping power in the hands of a narrow elite. These institutions discourage savings and investment, since everyone knows any wealth can and will be arbitrarily expropriated. And while the injustice of it all led to periodic revolutions, the typical pattern was for the new boss to simply seize control of the extractive institutions and run them for his own benefit.

………………………………………………….

District 12 is a quintessential extractive economy. It’s oriented around a coal mine, the kind of facility where unskilled labor can be highly productive in light of the value of the underlying commodity. In a free society, market competition for labor and union organizing would drive wages up. But instead the Capitol imposes a single purchaser of mine labor and offers subsistence wages. Emigration to other districts in search of better opportunities is banned, as is exploitation of the apparently bountiful resources of the surrounding forest. With the mass of Seam workers unable to earn a decent wage, even relatively privileged townsfolk have modest living standards. If mineworkers earned more money, the Mellark family bakery would have more customers and more incentive to invest in expanded operations. A growing service economy would grow up around the mine. But the extractive institutions keep the entire District in a state of poverty, despite the availability of advanced technology in the Capitol.

……………………………………………..

But Collins is right in line with the most depressing conclusion offered by Acemoglu and Robinson, namely that once extractive institutions are established they’re hard to get rid of. Africa’s modern states, they note, were created by European colonialists who set out to create extractive institutions to exploit the local population. The injustice of the situation led eventually to African mass resistance and the overthrow of colonial rule. But in almost every case, the new elite simply started running the same extractive institutions for their own benefit. The real battle turned out to have been over who ran the machinery of extraction, not its existence. And this, precisely, is the moral of Collins’ trilogy. [Spoiler alert: Ignore rest of this story if you haven’t finished the trilogy.] To defeat the Capitol’s authoritarian power requires the construction of a tightly regimented, extremely disciplined society in District 13. That District’s leaders are able to mobilize mass discontent with the Capitol into a rebellion, but this leads not to the destruction of the system but its decapitation. Despite the sincere best efforts of ordinary people to better their circumstances, the deep logic of extractive institutions is difficult to overcome, whether in contemporary Nigeria or in Panem.

Sesame Street parodies Catching Fire

Orwell in Panem: What the Hunger Games owes to 1984

*Spoiler warning: this article reveals lots of plot points from all three Hunger Games books and 1984*

Now that it is venerable enough to merit inclusion on school curriculums and lists of the greatest ever novels, it’s easy to forget the horror and revulsion it initially generated. During the broadcast of a 1954 BBC adaptation of the story, a 42 year old housewife housewife named Beryl Merfin was so disturbed that the shock killed her. And an Early Day Motion was tabled in parliament decrying “the tendency, evident in recent British Broadcasting Corporation television programs…to pander to sexual and sadistic tastes.”

There’s something similar in the reaction to the Hunger Games. Many are appalled by the violence it shows or by the premise of teenagers fighting to the death.

It is strange that connections are not drawn between these two dark dystopian novels more often. Fans and admirers of the Hunger Games tend to locate Collin’s inspiration in the classics or Lord of the Flies. While her detractors claim she ripped off Battle Royale. However, I’d suggest that 1984 seems like a significant influence as well. Especially given that Collins is apparently a fan.

So where can we see this influence?

The Brutality

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley conceived of a regime that ruled not through fear but by providing its population with a string of amusements to keep them perpetually distracted.

That’s emphatically not how President Snow maintains his power. He relies instead on a rather Orwellian dose of terror.  While the Hunger Games may be set in a land whose name comes from the latin phrase ‘panem et circenses’ (bread and circuses) there is no sense its rulers are trying to buy off their people or earn their affection. Rather it is the threat of violence from Panem’s paramilitary ‘peacekeepers’ that keeps them in line.

While Games themselves may at least in part have been inspired by gladiatorial games and are occasionally described by characters as being meant to serve as a ‘distraction’, that doesn’t seem to be their real purpose. Rather they are a commemoration of a failed rebellion against the Capital and an implicit warning not to try again.

Nuclear Weapons

1984 was written at a time when nuclear weapons were a new phenomenon and is in part Orwell’s attempt to work through their consequences. As David Aaronovitch explains:

“Orwell saw the beginnings of a…carve-up of the globe into superpowers and told friends that this was what initially set him going on the novel.

Less than two years later, the Americans dropped atom bombs on Japan. In an essay for Tribune magazine called You and the Atomic Bomb, Orwell argued that the A-Bomb threatened to bring into being….[a] world of super states governed by totalitarian hierarchies of managers.

It’s often missed that Nineteen Eighty-Four is set a few decades after an atomic war. The managers administering the book’s three super states, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, have tacitly agreed not to try to destroy each other but to continue forever in a kind of cold war.

Indeed, it was Orwell who coined the phrase “cold war” in that 1945 essay.”

A similar situation emerges in the Hunger Games where the Capital and the rebellious District 13 are locked in a state of mutually assured destruction because during the rebellion each acquired part of Panem’s nuclear weapons stockpile. That creates a situation where the Capital can exert its control over the remaining districts. Until Katniss shows up that is…..

The Names of Places

Real places have acquired impersonal nomenclatures. So Britain becomes ‘airstrip one’ and West Virginia morphs into ‘District 12.’

They can make you hate the one you love

Orwell dramitises the Thoughtpolice’s power and the fear they can evoke with their ultimate torture instrument, Room 101, by showing how they get the lovers Winston and Julia to betray each other. Confronted with his personal nightmare of having his face eaten by rats, Winston cries out that “torture Julia instead.”

In Mockingjay, the final Hunger Games book, Peeta whose adoration for Katniss has been unwavering throughout the trilogy is hijacked (i.e. brainwashed) to hate her with a murderous ferocity.

The Tarnished Revolution

Ok, this is from Animal Farm not 1984 but I’ll bet that if Collins is a fan of the later book, she’ll have read the former too.

Both books feature revolutions that betray their ideals in very fundamental and symbolic ways: Napolean and the other pigs start walking on two legs or President Alma Coin’s proposal to continue the Hunger Games with tributes from the Capital.

Dystopias old and new

When young adult fiction is drawing on ideas from a classic political fable, the distinction between high and low culture really does not make a great deal of sense.

I do wonder how long debates over the threat of totalitarianism will remain dominated by the language of 1984. There’ve been a huge number of dystopias since: Fahrenheit 451, Blade Runner, the Handmaid’s Tale and now the Hunger Games. I wonder how long it will be until they begin providing at least part of the vocabulary we use to talk about tyranny.

Coming up on Matter of Facts – Dystopia Week

As Catching Fire, the second Hunger Games film, is now in cinemas I thought we’d take a look at dystopias.

So look out for posts on:

• What the Hunger Games owes to 1984
• Brave New World is not prophecy
• Why totalitarianism is so fragile
• Seasame Street’s take on Catching Fire

Thoughts on Dr Who’s 50th

1.       The BBC knows how to make Dr Who into an event

The BBC’s manipulation of different media to build the show’s brand has become formidable enough to be a subject of academic study: my sister’s degree included her writing an essay on it. The buzz they created around announcing the 11^th (or should that now be 12^th) Doctor was formidable but for this anniversary they pushed it towards hysteria. Expect mini episodes and the like to become more common from now on and what are essentially program length trailers to become more common.

2.       An Adventure in Time and Space and the Culture Show were sublime

Some of the programmes that made up this barrage of buzz building were excellent. Mark Gattiss’ drama about the beginnings of Dr Who was surprisingly moving but the surprise champion (in my opinion) was Matthew Sweet’s unconventional take on the cultural impact of the show. Both were essentially fans’ loveletters to their childhood televisual loves.

3.  Brian Cox is a superb actor

Playing the renegade head of BBC drama and Dr Who mastermind Sydney Newman he stole just about every scene of an Adventure in Time and Space he was in. Why he’s not mentioned alongside people like Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan and Simon Russell Beale I don’t know.

4. I hadn’t realised quite how primitive TV drama was in 1963

So primitive in fact that it seems to have been more like theatre to a camera rather than a live audience. The early Dr Who serials were apparently shot on a single set, with a strictly rationed number of cuts and only 90mins on that to shoot 30mins of film.

5.       The Doctor may be old but Bruce Forsyth has been around longer
Apparently part of the rational for commissioning Dr Who was to see off the damage being done to the BBC’s Saturday night audiences by Sunday Night at the London Palladium hosted by Bruce Forsyth. What was on immediately before the Day of the Doctor? Strictly Come Dancing hosted by Bruce Forsyth!
6.       The US is learning to love Dr Who
Or part of it is at least. The highbrow American magazines whose website I regularly scour devoted a quite surprising amount of space to it. But I think it’s adoption in America has been a bit like the Killings rise in the UK: something mass market has become bohemian and upmarket in the journey.
*Spoiler Warning: I’m now talking about the Day of the Doctor itself and giving away key plots points*
7. Clara remains a plot point not a proper character
Even now the mystery of who she is has been cleared up, she still seems to only be there to instigate the Doctor to do the things the plot requires. She’s very far from feeling like a rounded character in her own right.
8. Maybe that UNIT scientist with the Tom Baker scarf could replace her
With a new Doctor on the way, we are surely due a new companion? Especially given that the current one is so underwhelming.
If so, based on her short time on screen the new UNIT scientist – apparently called Osgood – would seem like a good choice. She’d be like the fans version of themselves on screen and be quite different from any of the companions since the show returned.

9. It seems rather mean spirited of Christopher Eccleston not to appear
I mean how much would it have taken to show John Hurt regenerating into him? Like a day’s work if that.

10. Moffatt knows how to delight geeks
Zygons, lots of in jokes and TOM BAKER!!!

11. Saving Gallifrey makes NO sense!
Unless I’m missing something this is dumb. Wasn’t the reason the Doctor destroyed the Time Lords in the first place that they had become monsters who wanted to destroy the universe? Wasn’t the 10^th (or 11^th) Doctor killed trying to stop them from bringing Gallifrey back? Didn’t the mini-episode the BBC released earlier this week say that they were now as bad as Daleks?! Why save them?

A Church bleating about “Christianophobia” – Screwtape’s Dream

Courtesy of Anglican Memes and Humour

In the CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letter, a senior demon writes to his junior that:

Any small coterie bound together by some interest that other men dislike tends to develop inside itself a hothouse mutual admiration and toward the outer world a great deal of pride and hatred.

Even when the little group exists originally for the enemies own purposes this remains true.  We want the church to be small not only that fewer men may know the enemy but also that acquire the uneasy intensity and defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or clique.

The church itself is of course heavily defended and we have never yet quite succeeded in giving her all the characteristics of a faction.

This now seems prophetic. Screwtape would be delighted to see the Christians who’ve become convinced they are victims of Christianophobia.

In one of the first posts on this blog I discussed how a majority of Christians believed themselves to belong to the most discriminated against community in Britain, even though statistics on hate crimes indicated otherwise.

We saw this week a particularly striking example. Premier Radio, a Christian broadcaster, was challenging a ban on airing an advert that read:

Surveys have shown that over 60% of active Christians consider that Christians are being increasingly marginalised in the workplace. We are concerned to get the most accurate data to inform the public debate. We will then use this data to help make a fairer society. Please visit CCPmagazines.co.uk and report your experiences.

Various lower courts had ruled this fell foul of the ban on political adverts on TV and Radio. Premier appealed claiming that the purpose of the advert was to not to promote a political objective but gather information. The Court of Appeal rejected this because there was an implicit political message within the advert. At no point was it suggested that a non-Christian group in an analogous position would have been treated differently. In fact, the case law on this point was developed in a case involving an animal rights group. However, in their press release relating to the judgement they still labelled this “an attack on freedom of speech for Christians.”

This is just the latest example of how the court cases tangled in the controversy over Christianophobia don’t bear out the idea that the law discriminates against Christians.

• The courts are quite prepared to uphold the religious rights of Christians. For example, finding for a BA employee banned from wearing a cross because it contradicted the airline’s brand image and a man demoted for voicing opposition to equal marriage on his personal facebook page.
• When they don’t there’s a clear rational for not doing so. For example, a nurse isn’t allowed to wear a crucifix lest it come into contact with open wounds and a civil registrar has to perform civil partnerships despite her religious objections because a council was entitled to expect its employees to treat customers equally.
• It’s a canard that Christians are treated differently from other faiths and especially Muslims. Courts have allowed employers to ban the wearing of veils in the workplace.
• Discrimination law already gives religious organisations including Christian ones more latitude than secular ones.

What we are hearing in the cry against imagined ‘Christianophobia’ is not a horror of discrimination but a demand for it. It assumes that Christian’s beliefs are legal ‘trump cards.’ So that rather than balancing their rights with other considerations, they should be preeminent. This reached its bizarre apogee with a former Archbishop of Canterbury – albeit George Carey – demanding special courts to deal with religiously sensitive cases.

Why I found this dispiriting – and guess Screwtape would be delighted – is that this is not what the Church should be about. Surely its a distraction from its proper role of proclaiming the gospel and fighting for justice. It also seems that demanding special favours for its members will sap its moral authority.

Talkin Bout Their Generation: the Insufferable Sixties

Baby Boomers should stop subjecting the rest of us to their solipsism

Two American anniversaries: the one you’ve heard about and the one that matters

As you have likely noticed yesterday was the 50th assassination of John F. Kennedy. He is still a subject of massive fascination and a sizable industry. The most obvious aspect of this is the continuing obsession with the imagined conspiracy that killed him but it’s far from being the only one. For example, an article in the New Republic accused the up market Vanity Fair of having “an absurd preoccupation with the Kennedys” and noted that:

Since Michelle Obama became first lady, Jackie has merited more attention—20 mentions to Michelle’s 19. Since August 2008, when John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, searching for “Kennedy” in VF in Nexis yields twice as many results as searching for “Palin.” The “politics” section of VanityFair.com has a header for “The Kennedys”—an entire digital section devoted to political figures who are, save a few, no longer alive. Surely readers looking for political coverage would rather find, oh, say, a tab marked, “Presidential election 2012”?

When the American public are polled about who they think the greatest president is JFK is invariably near the top and a recent poll named him as the most popular president of the past sixty years. This stands in contrast to surveys of scholars who tend to give JFK a rather more middling rating.

The focus on the 50th anniversary of the JFK anniversary is all the more striking given that Tuesday was the 150th anniversary of a milestone in the presidency of the man who usually tops those scholar lists. On the 19th November 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. This was probably the most important speech ever in American history and followed the decisive battle of the Civil War. Yet somehow this was overshadowed by the death of a mediocre president who happened to be rather handsome. I would suggest that this disparity can be explained by the fact that JFK was a figure from the Sixties, a period with an outsize role in our collective imagination.

Sixties Mania

Our obsession with the Sixties manifests itself in many ways. There is, for example, the adulation that attaches itself to Mad Men or the latest 1000 pages of Robert Caro’s oil tanker length biography of LBJ. We could also observe that while Vietnam remains a cultural touchstone, the war in Korea is largely forgotten. Or we could point to the massive followings still enjoyed by the Rolling Stones, the Who or Bob Dylan.

It seems to me that what has happened is that now Baby Boomers – now firmly ensconced at the top of the media and cultural institutions – have been treating the events that were especially interesting and formative for them as being so for the world in general. And in the process they have managed to convince many of the rest of us that the Sixties were particularly significant.

Was the Sixties all that?

Stepping back and looking at the 20th century as a whole, the Sixties don’t seem that seminal.

If we look at the arena of politics and international relations, then important things did happen in the boomers formative years: the revolution in Cuba, the 1968 uprisings and Vietnam. However, these seem less significant than say the Depression, World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, the consolidation of postwar European democracy, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of China.

In terms of economics, the Sixties looks like a time of stasis between the emergence of Keynesian social democracy and it’s displacement by deregulation and deindustrialisation that began with the OPEC crisis in 1973.

And while it might have been a time of cultural tumult, it was intellectually arid. As Tony Judt observes in his masterful history of Postwar Europe, the Sixties was almost wholly devoid of great thinkers or movements. It produced no Durkheim, no Einstein nor a Wittgenstein.

Even in the changes in sexual politics were not as dramatic as often imagined. Phillip Larkin said that “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three …..between the end of the “Chatterley” ban and the Beatles’ first LP.” However, an alternative narrative would be that the boomers rebelled against the sexual mores of their parents by embracing those of their grandparents.

What WAS unique about the Sixties was the boomers sense of their own importance. To again quote Judt:

Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own own times – was one of the special features of the age. A significant part of the Sixties was spent in the words of The Who: ‘talking about My Generation’

I can’t be alone in thinking that it’s time for the generations that came before and after the boomers to tell them to see beyond their own formative years: if they can’t see that Gettysburg 1863 was more significant than Dallas 1963, they really need to learn to get some perspective.

No, economics departments are not full of right-wing ideologues

Guardian columnist Seamus Milne seems to think that some kind of academic spring is going on in economics departments:

From any rational point of view, orthodox economics is in serious trouble. Its champions not only failed to foresee the greatest crash for 80 years, but insisted such crises were a thing of the past. More than that, some of its leading lights played a key role in designing the disastrous financial derivatives that helped trigger the meltdown in the first place.

Plenty were paid propagandists for the banks and hedge funds that tipped us off their speculative cliff. Acclaimed figures in a discipline that claims to be scientific hailed a “great moderation” of market volatility in the runup to an explosion of unprecedented volatility. Others, such as the Nobel prizewinner Robert Lucas, insisted that economics had solved the “central problem of depression prevention”.

Any other profession that had proved so spectacularly wrong and caused such devastation would surely be in disgrace. You might even imagine the free-market economists who dominate our universities and advise governments and banks would be rethinking their theories and considering alternatives.

After all, the large majority of economists who predicted the crisis rejected the dominant neoclassical thinking: from Dean Baker and Steve Keen to Ann Pettifor, Paul Krugman and David Harvey. Whether Keynesians, post-Keynesians or Marxists, none accepted the neoliberal ideology that had held sway for 30 years; and all understood that, contrary to orthodoxy, deregulated markets don’t tend towards equilibrium but deepen the economy’s tendency to systemic crisis.

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and high priest of deregulation, at least had the honesty to admit his view of the world had been proved “not right”. The same cannot be said for others. Eugene Fama, architect of the “efficient markets hypothesis” underpinning financial deregulation, concedes he doesn’t know what “causes recessions” – but insists his theory has been vindicated anyway. Most mainstream economists have carried on as if nothing had happened.

Many of their students, though, have had enough. A revolt against the orthodoxy has been smouldering for years and now seems to have gone critical. Fed up with parallel universe theories that have little to say about the world they’re interested in, students at Manchester University have set up a post-crash economics society with 800 members, demanding an end to monolithic neoclassical courses and the introduction of a pluralist curriculum.

As one would expect from Milne this is all rather overstated. Academic economists are not all free market fanatics. I’m not aware of any British studies but research from America suggests that 75% of economics professors vote Democrat.

I took first year economics back in 2007/08 as the credit crunch was beginning to bite. Therefore, the curriculum I learnt was written before the crisis. And yes, As Milne would have suspected it was very neoclassical. However, that doesn’t mean what he thinks it does. The macroeconomics we were taught reflected what was called the “neoclassical synthesis” which was essentially Keynesian economics expressed using the mathematical models of neoclassical economics. And our microeconomics courses included a large section which explored why markets often produce undesirable consequences by looking at the incentives of the agents involved. In short what I learnt was neoclassical in terms of its methodology but could lead to a variety of political interpretations.

Is there an argument for a wider variety of methodologies? Absolutely. I dropped economics after my first year in part because I was frustrated with the limitations of the prevailing mathematically driven approach.* I have over time come to think there is much to be said for behavioural economics does away with the assumption that humans are ‘rational‘, and instead uses insights from academic psychology to build its models. However, the existence of other schools of economic thought is not an argument against an undergraduate curriculum that focuses on neoclassical methods. Any wannabe iconoclast ought to know what they are setting out to smash.

In fact, I’d suggest that other social sciences are in greater need of an overhaul than economics. That mathematical modeling that so annoyed me has its benefits. As Paul Krugman – one of the economists who Milne cites (incorrectly) as an outsider – explains:

Economists may make lots of bad predictions, but they do have a method – a systematic way of thinking about the world that is more true than not, that gives them genuine if imperfect expertise. (That is also, of course, why lay commentators and other social scientists tend to hate them). Other social sciences haven’t yet found anything remotely equivalent. Oh, there are bits and pieces, and some of them are very exciting; try taking a look at Robert Axelrod’s stuff. But basically when it comes to most of the questions that I am really interested in, one man’s view is as good as another.

And far from being a discipline that crushes ideological dissent economics actually embraces considerably greater political diversity than the rest of the social sciences. The research I cited earlier about the politics of academics, shows that there are significant numbers of both right and left wing economists. By contrast, 21 out of 22 sociology and anthropology professors vote Democrat. I would therefore suggest that the softer social sciences need to examine their political biases and methodology more urgently than economics.

*And also because I failed my mock exam but let’s not dwell on that.