by From David Ruccio I cringe when I listen to or watch these interviews. But here it is, with the Real News Network. The interview was based on my recent blog post, “Economics of poverty, or the poverty of economics.” [embedded content] I also want to recommend a recent piece by Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven [ht: ms], who argues that The interventions considered by the Nobel laureates tend to be removed from analyses of power and wider social change. In fact, the Nobel committee specifically gave it to Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer for addressing “smaller, more manageable questions,” rather than big ideas. While such small interventions might generate positive results at the micro-level, they do little to challenge the systems that produce the problems. For example, rather than challenging
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from David Ruccio
I cringe when I listen to or watch these interviews. But here it is, with the Real News Network.
The interview was based on my recent blog post, “Economics of poverty, or the poverty of economics.”
I also want to recommend a recent piece by Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven [ht: ms], who argues that
The interventions considered by the Nobel laureates tend to be removed from analyses of power and wider social change. In fact, the Nobel committee specifically gave it to Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer for addressing “smaller, more manageable questions,” rather than big ideas. While such small interventions might generate positive results at the micro-level, they do little to challenge the systems that produce the problems.
For example, rather than challenging the cuts to the school systems that are forced by austerity, the focus of the randomistas directs our attention to absenteeism of teachers, the effects of school meals and the number of teachers in the classroom on learning. Meanwhile, their lack of challenge to the existing economic order is perhaps also precisely one of the secrets to media and donor appeal, and ultimately also their success.
Exactly!
It’s the revenge of neoclassical economics, as reflected in this year’s prize in economics, which focuses attention on poor people’s “bad” decisions and away from the structural causes of poverty.
As I argued the other day on Twitter, it’s like saying the climate crisis will be solved by individuals turning off lights and recycling their garbage. Not bad things to do, certainly. But, together, all those individual efforts make up only 1-2 percent of the solution. The climate crisis cannot be solved unless and until we direct attention to the real, structural causes. Here, I’m thinking not only of the fossil fuel industry, but also the way the rest of contemporary capitalist economies are organized around the use of fossil fuels—in the production of goods and services, cars as well as digital information. Such a system generates enormous profits, which flow to a tiny group at the top, and continues to destroy the commons, where most of us live and work.
It’s that system that needs to be radically transformed. And as long as economists are lauded for focusing on technical issues around the margins and not on the real causes—of Third World poverty, global warming, and much else—the discipline of economics will continue to be impoverished.