Real-World Economics Movement has been getting lots of media coverage in Germany
Thomas Duermeier reports that in Germany the Real-World Economics movement has been getting lots of media coverage.
Crisis pushes German PAEcon movement into mainstream news.
The German Press is increasingly supporting the German movement for real world economics. Numerous journalists from newspapers, radio and television have reported about the make-believe nature of neoclassical modeling and the failures of the economics mainstream. Their baseline is that economists have learned nearly nothing from the financial crisis.
The German public radio “Deutschlandfunk” interviewed us.
http://ondemand-mp3.dradio.de/file/dradio/2012/01/04/dlf_20120104_1446_797e3124.mp3The leading monthly magazine, “Der Spiegel” had a leading story about us: http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/0,1518,803953,00.html
And also German public television reported on us with 3 minutes in the main program and 13 minutes in the information channel:http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/hauptnavigation/startseite/#/beitrag/video/1493466/VWL-in-der-Krise/
All this positive major coverage has led to the creation of numerous new local real-world economics groups in Germany. In addition to ones in Heidelberg, Göttingen, Berlin and Erfurt, which were active before the attention of the German press, there are now active groups in Tübingen, Regensburg, and other places. Meanwhile our mail suggest that further groups may soon emerge.
After 10 years of effort, like the annual lecture series in Heidelberg (http://hd.real-world-economics.de/?p=324) and the conference in Kassel, but with little sign of progress, there is now in Germany a mounting way of support for Real-World Economics.
For historians who believe that cultural traditions affect current behavior, this is no suprise, although it has been some time coming. The German historical school opposed the neo-classical takeover of economics in the 19th century Methodenstreit. The loss of two world wars had more to do with the neo-classical “conquest” of German thinking in economics after 1945 than the merits of the neo-classical thinking in economics, just as the fall of the Berlin Wall facilitated the transformation of the German finance sector along US-UK lines more than the intellectual prowess of UK & US investor capitalism. It is much easier for the Germans to look for solutions to the the recent crisis in their own past than it is for the financial economists to do so in Anglo-Saxonia.
This is encouraging news, so how come non-Germans seem to have so little interest in it?
As a Catholic I too have an interest in history, particularly, of course, of events influenced by Catholic culture. I thus personally remember the start of what has become the EU as firstly an agreement between Catholic Adeneur’s Germany and Catholic Schumann’s France to share rather than fight over Iron and Steel resources, and from that the development not of an American-style European Union but a European Economic Community, pledged to ensure peasant farmers got a decent living and help poorer countries develop their infrastructure. In the US, Catholic cooperation in getting the Keynesian reforms in place was behind the scenes and something I’ve only recently been made aware of, but in Europe, the Catholic General de Gaulle blocked the inclusion of Britain in its Community, well aware it would be used by American economic interests as a Trojan Horse.
I agree with Robert, then, ” It is much easier for the Germans to look for solutions to the recent crisis in their own past than it is for the financial economists to do so in Anglo-Saxonia”. However, to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater I would date the effective start of the neo-classical conquest of European economic thinking somewhat later than 1945. It seems to me that an outward-looking Catholic Keynesianism prevailed until the 1970′s, and the trouble really started with the acceptance of Britain into the community after the deaths of Adeneur and General de Gaulle.
Dave, you might like to take a look at this written by another Catholic on the land issue: http://henrys-rants.blogspot.com/2006/12/land-and-catholic-church.html.
Well yes, but as I was taught long ago, the medieval Catholic position was that land belonged to God and could not be sold, only passed from person to person. Curiously, the sermon at Mass yesterday pointed out that this was the Abrahamic tradition, and how by the time of Jesus people had become enslaved by debt just as we are. Seen in that light, as Peter Selby points out in “Grace and Mortgage”, the Good News is full of economic language about ways out of and living with the predicament, including “turning the other cheek”.
I agree with you the disagreement between Henry George and Leo XIII was very unfortunate. Having a wife who invariably misunderstands my motives (see “Men are from Mars, Women from Venus”), I imagine there was some sort of personality clash.
Dave, as an atheist I couldn’t care less about “the disagreement between Henry George and Leo XIII”. I just wanted to link you up with Henry Law, a devout Catholic and georgist.
Wow! So Henry Law’s still about. We shared correspondence back in the days of my Amstrad word processor, when he lived where one of my sons is living now! Thanks, Carol, for remaking the connection.
Have you come across Roy Bhaskar’s phrase, “referential detachment”? Leaving aside personal disagreements here, and the chaos among the “old women” in the Vatican at the time, as the mainly gifted endowments they lived on were siezed by the new Italian state, their failure to resolve the conflation that you have drawn our attention to, of the concepts of Land and Property, still (in my view) weakened the significant contributions of both parties to our understanding of economics.
Perhaps RWER influence is percolating through Britain, too.
I got this from the Economy section of “Second Spring” (http://www.secondspring.co.uk/, a http://theeconomyproject.blogspot.com/), a Newman/Chestertonian Catholic blog I treasure. The original of the article referred to, coming as it does from the right-wing newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, is a “must read”:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9027846/The-rise-of-the-overclass.html.
Even more a slightly earlier and longer version in a different context:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100100708/the-moral-decay-of-our-society-is-as-bad-at-the-top-as-the-bottom/.
Robert at #1: “For [German] historians who believe that cultural traditions affect current behavior, this is no surprise, although it has been some time coming.”
So I’ve added my pennyworth from the Catholic cultural tradition, but I’ve just discovered in my son’s library a discussion – surprisingly relevant of the UK and the USA today – of why it has been “some time coming”.
Anticipating World War II, it seems Winston Churchill wrote a book in 1938 called “While England Slept”, inspiring a young John F Kennedy to write another, “WHY England Slept”. The forewords to this and my son’s 1961 edition, by when Kennedy was President and about to be confronted by the Cuban Missile Crisis, was Henry R Luce, founder of magazines Time, Fortune and Life. Luce imagines Kennedy rereading the book he wrote in college and not being embarrassed “by having it exposed again … It is as good today as it was twenty years ago, good – very good”. In 1940 he had written: “there is every reason for serious Americans to learn a little better than they have the lesson of the painful and degrading things which can happen to those who sleep or half-sleep. . I hope [a million] Americans will read this book… In doing so, they will have performed an act of national preparedness quite as valuable as the easy flip-flapping of another appropriation bill through Congress. ‘Why England Slept’ is a remarkable book …”. Kennedy himseff concludes his Introduction by saying: “In studying the reasons why England slept let us try to profit by them and save ourselves her anguish”.
The reasons had been pre-occupation with National Debt, “need for economies”, and Britain “so hating the thought of war that she could not believe it was going to happen”.
What has changed? In a globalised economy, the enemy is inevitably within.
Did you know that Churchill was a georgist?
“The roads are made, the streets are made, the railway services are improved, electric light turns night into day, electric trains glide to and fro…and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of these improvements is effected by the labour and at the cost of other people – yet his [the landlord’s] land value is enhanced. When the land is eventually sold, it is sold by the yard or inch at ten times, twenty times or even fifty times its agricultural value…(1)”
I didn’t know Churchill was a Georgist; I knew him as a traditionalist in the traditions of imperialism, monetarised gold and pugnacity, yet despite these limitations, as an astute judge of significance and the man for the job when he was needed. Here you remind us that he was a suberb writer.
In Britain, time has passed, land has been built on, residents have acquired freeholds and Land valuations have merged into Property values. We started here with RWER getting a hearing in Germany. Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear back how Germany valued property-less land in the aftermath of Hitler and Churchill?after the war?