by Brexit — a rejection of mainstream economics If, as a result of Brexit, the economy crashes it will not vindicate the economists, it will simply illustrate once more their failure. We, at Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME) call for an urgent, independent, public inquiry into the economics profession, and its role in precipitating both the financial crisis of 2007-9, the subsequent very slow ‘recovery’; and in the British European referendum campaign … Economists have once again proved themselves not only irrelevant, but a dangerous irrelevance. For too long they have resisted call after call for reform. If they will not do it themselves then it is time for others to take control. The profession should be brought to account through a public inquiry into the this failure. While it is risky to second guess public opinion, it may just be that the prospect of hardship to come might not have been very compelling for those already suffering the hardship of low wages, insecure low-skilled jobs, bad housing, high rents, an under-resourced and increasingly privatised NHS, and other forms of public sector ‘austerity’. With this historic vote, the British people have not just rejected the EU. They have done something that should worry the British establishment, and their friends in the City of London, and internationally, far more.
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Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Economics, Politics & Society
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Brexit — a rejection of mainstream economics
If, as a result of Brexit, the economy crashes it will not vindicate the economists, it will simply illustrate once more their failure.
We, at Policy Research in Macroeconomics (PRIME) call for an urgent, independent, public inquiry into the economics profession, and its role in precipitating both the financial crisis of 2007-9, the subsequent very slow ‘recovery’; and in the British European referendum campaign …
Economists have once again proved themselves not only irrelevant, but a dangerous irrelevance.
For too long they have resisted call after call for reform. If they will not do it themselves then it is time for others to take control. The profession should be brought to account through a public inquiry into the this failure.
While it is risky to second guess public opinion, it may just be that the prospect of hardship to come might not have been very compelling for those already suffering the hardship of low wages, insecure low-skilled jobs, bad housing, high rents, an under-resourced and increasingly privatised NHS, and other forms of public sector ‘austerity’.
With this historic vote, the British people have not just rejected the EU. They have done something that should worry the British establishment, and their friends in the City of London, and internationally, far more. They have rejected economics – and in particular the dominant economic narrative …
The “experts” and the economic stories they tell, have been well and truly walloped by the result of this referendum. And rightly so, because while there is truth in the story that international co-operation and co-ordination is vital to economic activity and stability, there is no sound basis to the widely espoused economic ‘religion’ that markets – in money, trade and labour – must be unfettered, detached from democratic regulatory oversight, and must be trusted to ‘govern’ whole countries, regions and continents.
The British people have today rejected this mainstream, orthodox economics, a strain of fundamentalism that they may rightly judge has proved deleterious to their own economic interests.
And in case you — like e.g. Simon Wren-Lewis — think this kind of critique is only coming from ‘heterodox’ economists like Ann Pettifor and yours truly — well, then maybe you should read what a former Governor of the Bank of England has to say:
Since the crisis, many have been tempted to play the game of deciding who was to blame for such a disastrous outcome … A generation of the brightest and best were lured into banking, and especially into trading, by the promise of immense financial rewards and by the intellectual challenge of the work that created such rich returns. They were badly misled. The crisis was a failure of a system and the ideas that underpinned it, not of individual policy-makers or bankers, incompetent and greedy though some of them undoubtedly were. There was a general misunderstanding of how the world economy worked …
If we don’t blame the actors, then why not the playwright? Economists have been cast by many as the villain. An abstract and increasingly mathematical discipline, economics is seen as having failed to predict the crisis. This is rather like blaming science for the occasional occurrence of a natural disaster. Yet we would blame scientists if incorrect theories made disasters more likely or created a perception that they could never occur, and one of the arguments of this book is that economics has encouraged ways of thinking that made crises more probable …
Brexit — and its disdain of the establishment — will send well-earned warnings to politicians all over the world …
Brexit has structural similarities with Trump’s rise. It is the logical outcome of the Conservative Party’s political strategy of the past twenty years. Conservatives used the European Union (EU) as a whipping boy to help smuggle in their “Thatcher – Reagan” neoliberal economic policies. The Labor Party spoke out in defense of minorities, but it did not defend the EU and nor did it adequately confront neoliberalism.
In the US, Trump is the analogue “exit” candidate. His rise is the logical outcome of thirty years, during which Republicans used dog-whistle racism and the culture war to smuggle through their neoliberal economic agenda that has wrought the destruction of shared prosperity. Democrats resisted racism and the culture war, but were complicit in the promotion of neoliberalism.
The lesson for the Clinton campaign is it must move beyond rhetoric criticizing neoliberalism and adopt serious remedies that tackle its legacy of inequality, economic insecurity and loss of hope. Neoliberalism is the ultimate cause of the establishment’s rejection. Racism, immigration and nationalism may be the match for the anti-establishment fire: wage stagnation and off-shoring of jobs are the fuel.