A good year (World Economics Association)
from Edward Fullbrook
It was a year ago today that the World Economics Association was launched with the emailing of a letter signed by 140 economists from around the world.
That was the start of a good year for beginning to build an institutional foundation for the reform of economics and the economics profession. The WEA now has 9,936 members, widely dispersed around the globe and with all continents well represented. Although IT difficulties have delayed the launch of the WEA’s two new journals (World Economics Journal and Economic Thought) their strong first issues are now set to be published in the next two months. The fourth issue of the WEA’s lively 12-page bi-monthly newsletter will appear in June. The WEA’s inaugural online conference (Economics in Society: The Ethical Dimension) was successfully held in March, its second (Rethinking Financial Markets) will begin soon, and four more are scheduled.
Following the appearance of the first issues of the new journals, there will begin a drive to raise funds from the membership and hopefully also from one or more foundations. Money is needed to hire people to do some of the work now being done by volunteers. Moreover, as the WEA grows and expands its activities, the workload will also increase.
Already the World Economics Association is the world’s second largest professional association of economists. Another 8,500 members will make it the largest. One estimates that the WEA is on course to gain that position within 18 to 24 months.
Hopefully a year from now, with funding in place, with the three journals established, with the conferences as part of the profession’s calendar, with the newsletter a focal point of discussion and with a significantly expanded membership, elections of WEA officers and board members can he held.
If you have not yet joined you can do so here: http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/
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When fhe new President took over in France, I sent the following statement to a Management consultant and head of the Boostzone Institute in Paris, Dominique Turcq — .
with the following remark. “Don’t know if it would be appropriate for your group but here is a comment that I have composed, which might be advisible to send to US & English educated people a propos of President Hollande.
“When the new French President is presented to the English speaking world the presentation is invariably accompanied with the words “he is a socialist.” For Americans especially that means he is an adherent of a an outmoded devil system over which managerial capitalism triumphed in the post WW2. But Frenchmen see more; he might be socialist, but socialist in France is not anti-capitalist; moreover, they also see a graduate from elite French grandes ecoles (Science Po, HEC, ENA), which makes Hollande a member of an elite club of civil servants who run France or, as one of them once told me, who “are” France. This idea people of Anglo-Saxonia have trouble bending their minds around. Anglo-Saxonia is the main force behind the triumph of neo-classical economics; economics mostly ignores management science. Americans did invent the modern business school and the multi-divisional international corporation, staffed with managerial hierarchies. But this managerial hierarchy and its elitist schools are, as much as neo-classical economics, menions of private enterprise and enemies of the state functionnaries.
So when President Hollande talks about growing the economy he is also talking about the visible hand of the public civil servant acting as a driving force in managing this transformation. For people outside Anglo-Saxonia the idea makes sense: Graduates of the grandes ecoles in France guided the modernization of France after WWII, Japanese civil servants presided over the development of Japan into a major manufacuring nation after the war, Chinese functionnaries have been involved in the transformation of China into a modern country, and German civil servants have been partners with trade unionists and business leaders in promoting German growth and prosperity. In Anglo-Saxonia the elite relied on the private sector and on markets to promote the general interests. Both failed, economics as an explanatory system about how markets work, private managers as public servants. It is time they step aside and let the visible hand of the hauts fonctionnaires,that Hollande represents, run things.”
Here is Dominique’s response.
“Dear Robert,
You put your finger on a very important cultural problem in the US and, partially, for the relations between US and France.
You also put your finger on a very important economic problem, a political science one, which is what should the role of State be in this new world (liberalism and visible hand) as well as “who” is representing the State (Elite of ENA or other).
A series of very interesting questions. They dont deal with corporate management per se but they deal with economic management absolutely”.
I think economists includiing real-world economists need to put these questions on their agenda if we are ever going to get anywhere solving the Greek or any other crisis in Europe.
Good for you, Robert. Back in 1964-7 the UK had problems within its Civil Service due to precisely to the fact that its dominant group was an extremely clever Oxbridge educated bunch indoctrinated with Greek and Renaissance political philosophy (empirical Humean, not continental Cartesian) rather than up-to-date science. The Fulton Report of 1967 tried in vain to get the scientific, professional and technology groups given the same status as the administrative group, who simply prevaricated until they could get the science privatised and scientific supervision smothered in what sometime Labour politician Herbert Morrison called the “aristocratic embrace”. As a low-status civil servant on on the science side my attempts to contribute to internal discussion of this got nowhere; my 1982 essay reviewing the issue after a few years of Thatcher won second prize in the prestigious Haldane Essay competition but was of course never published.
Even dissidents in the Administrative Class couldn’t get a hearing. There is a curious parallel to my story in the case of James Robertson, sometime aide of Macmillan, who ten years before me gave up, tried banking and eventually wrote a book Reform of British government, founded the New Economic Foundation and (as the crisis continues) is at 85 still advocating monetary and banking system reform via analysis and concrete proposals. His “Future Money: Breakdown or Breakthrough” has just been published. If you gave politicians a choice between Trond’s parallel money and Robertson drawing the line not geographically but between cosumer and investment spending, they might go for Robertson’s.
As a Catholic I’ve also been highly aware of the Anglo-American led transition from the Adeneur-Schumann (Catholic-inspired) European
Economic Community to the present religious ethic refuting European
(political) Union. Frederick L Schuman’s “The Commonwealth of Man” was in 1954 already predicting this, but Noam Chomsky’s “Imperial Ambitions” scathingly explained how Britain came to be America’s Trojan Horse in the process:
“During the Second World War, Britain recognised – we have plenty of internal documents about it – the obvious: Britain had been the world- dominant power, but the United States was going to become the dominant power after the war. Britain had to make a choice. Was it going to be just another country, or was it going to be what they called a “junior partner” of the United States? It accepted the role of junior partner. And that’s what it’s been since then”.
At this critical moment in the Greek crisis, do we have any Greek speaking members of the Real World Economics movement who can do what Robert has done in France to get through to the politicians to make them aware of the history of the Reserve Banking fraud (“The Money Masters”), and the strategic option of realigning their politics round deciding between Trond Anderson’s and James Robertons’s proposals?
Edward, I am sorry, I’m not convinced the WEA’s first on-line conference on ‘Economics and Ethics’ WAS “successfully held”. Papers like my own were not only suppressed (its organisers could at least have published our abstracts) but I wasn’t even able to log in to comment (and judging by how few comments there were, nor were most other people).
There were indeed some excellently written and very interesting papers, but the comment I wanted to make and couldn’t was that none of them defined what they understood by ‘Economics’ and ‘Ethics’. There is a big difference by what was intended by the construction of words and what is left of that to pick up by the end of a game of “whispers”.
Re #2 above, apologies as usual for my irritating typos.