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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics & Beyond I’m Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I’m here today with two very enterprising young individuals. Sam de Muijnck, Joris Tieleman are from the Rethinking Economics world, but they have decided to take us beyond understanding what’s wrong and start to direct us towards what’s right in the future of economics. There are a lot of things, there are a lot of dilemmas to explore. Their forthcoming book, Economic Studies: A New Vision for Economics Education comes out in October of this year. I want to encourage you to read it. I’ve had a chance to look at the galleys. My friend and, how would I say, a great illuminator of economics, Martin Wolf, wrote the preface. He’s very enthusiastic when we’ve talked. My Young Scholars Initiative is very enthusiastic. Guys, thanks for joining me. This is a delight to be able to explore with you here today.
Joris Tieleman:
Thanks for inviting us.
Sam de Muijnck:
Yeah, thanks.
Rob Johnson:
No, my pleasure. Let’s start with what you might call the origins, the history, the inspiration. What did you guys see? What inspired you? What was your diagnosis of what was needed that set you in motion on this path and to where this book is going?
Joris Tieleman:
Yeah, that’s a good question. We come from the Rethinking Economics movement which is, for those who don’t know, a big international student movement to change economics education, to bring it into the 21st century you might say. What we noticed in the Rethinking movement, we’ve done a lot of critiquing of existing programs, so there’s been tons of curriculum research mapping what is being taught today. What are the main textbooks? What are the main theories? We did a research like than in the Netherlands as well, where we live close to Amsterdam. We found that if we take that to the faculty, to the economics professors, a lot of them would say, “Okay, you’ve got some good points, so what then? What do you want? What would you like us to teach?”
We’d come up and say, “We want more pluralist theory, more pluralist methods, more real world economics,” but it remained a little bit vague, a little bit abstract. Especially if you’ve been teaching more or less the same material over the past 20, 30 years, of course updated now and then, but the same basics, it’s really hard to think outside the box. It’s really hard to step completely away from all that material and imagine something new. That’s the void we wanted to fill with this book, to give people the building blocks to really redesign the economics education.
Rob Johnson:
Okay. Well, Sam, how would I say. I love blues music and rewriting the interpretation of blues music might be a delight for me. But I remember the epigraph of your manuscript which said, “I do not care who writes a nation’s laws if I can write the economics textbook.” That was one of my former teachers at MIT, Paul Samuelson. But what he’s talking about is how important getting it right is. How influential it is in the structure, outcomes, experience of our lifetime and our society. When you look at this notion of pluralism, can you just zoom in on that for me a minute? What do you mean by pluralism?
Sam de Muijnck:
Yeah, sure, sure. I think for me it would be a pluralism of hip hop, that’s that’s my kind of music. I’m making it myself as well. [crosstalk 00:04:37]-
Rob Johnson:
I mean, with a name like Robert Johnson, you got to forgive me for liking the blues, right?
Sam de Muijnck:
Of course, of course. I like the blues as well, but. Yes, indeed. The motivation also for us in this book and being a part of Rethinking Economics is not so much of changing our personal education. When I became a student at the university I was frustrated myself and I thought I want something else from the courses I got, but obviously that’s not the end goal. I’m graduated by now so also my own economics education is finished for now. But the goal is really the next generation of economists, to prepare them for their future roles because, yeah, the world is pretty much often, unfortunately as well, on fire. There are many, like the biggest world challenges that we have today, economics and the economic challenges are core part of them, whether it’s the coronavirus right now, or whether it’s climate change, or whether it’s growing inequality. A lot of these issues, economics is a huge part of it.
What we feel is that currently the economics education doesn’t really prepare students for their future roles to really tackle these wicked problems that there are. We are really afraid that, often the example is given of the financial crisis 10 years ago of what can happen once economists are not well prepared in terms of their thinking, in terms of their habits of research for a world challenge like that. We really want to make sure that in the future this becomes better, and that’s the core motivation for this look. Pluralism is a key aspect of this where we think it’s important that as economists we are able to use different perspectives. Once a challenge comes to us, we are able to look at it from one perspective and from another.
When we, for example, think about climate change, we can think from it from a neoclassic point of view and think about the externalities and how these should be priced and costing, whether it’s a carbon price or a emission trading scheme. This is a very valuable insight and perspective to use, but it is not the only perspective we should have. We should, for example, also think about the more planetary boundaries, which ecological economics often emphasizes that. Actually, it’s not just the cost that is incremental, but at some point there is just a boundary. Whether we think of the circular economy and resources, for example, this is a useful way of thinking. But also you thinking about evolutionary economics, like how do sectors evolve? How do new technologies emerge? How can we make sure the green technologies emerge in the future?
Which is a different way of thinking and just helps us as economists challenge or tackle all these challenges. We think that pluralism is really just an approach where you are openly asking a question like, how can I tackle this issue? And are willing to explore different answers to that question.
Rob Johnson:
How would I say, using the history of economic thought, there’s obviously Marxism, neoclassical economics, some of the institutional economics, Thorstein Veblen, people of that nature. There’s the Cambridge, England Keynesian system, Luigi Pasinetti and others. I mean, what I find, there are a few scholars like Steve Marglin, who’s at Harvard University, who have integrated these into books and presented courses which create what you might call comparative perspectives around a particular issue. You pick a real world issue and we’ll bring all these things to bear. What I think unnerves some people is it leaves you with a set of dilemmas rather than with a sense of certainty. But that false comfort may be very dangerous.
I think your pluralistic exploration means you got to honestly earn your confidence. You can’t create a false confidence or a coercive confidence through test curriculum and learning a subset. But when you talk about, I think I recall three things, pluralism, real world, and values. We’ll say, real world is you’re not studying some fictitious model. You’re studying the planet, its challenges. There’s a purpose here. But where do the values come in? How would I say? What is your thought? Why did you bring values to the table?
Joris Tieleman:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a good question. I think this is one that arises for a lot of, let’s say, mainstream economists. Because most of the economists that taught me and most that I know say, economics is a positive science and there’s also the normative side and that’s for politicians and citizens, and-
Sam de Muijnck:
Public debate.
Joris Tieleman:
… philosophers. Yeah. Economists, in this view, are technical people who do, let’s say, the calculating and don’t go into values. We think that this is a false distinction. We think it’s good that economists don’t secretly sneak onto the chair of the politician and try to put their values into the research. Say you are quite a leftist economist, that you try to let that come out of your research. Economists should try to be politically neutral, but it’s impossible to be politically neutral if you don’t have attention for values. If you don’t learn to discuss values. Put them above the table and say, “Okay, we have this problem of rising unemployment. What different values are at stake? What social values, what geopolitical values? What’s at stake here, and how do different solutions that are being proposed to the problem at hand affect those different values?”
If you teach young upcoming economists to actively discuss this with each other, they have the chance to learn a language for this and to then also effectively present this to either politicians or the general public. Rather than leaving the values that are embedded in a lot of theories, also neoclassical. Their values embedded and leaving them unspoken is a very dangerous thing we think.
Sam de Muijnck:
Yeah. Maybe shortly adding on that. I think the aim to be as objective as you can, as I think we wholeheartedly embrace. But indeed the reality is that in practice it’s often impossible to be completely objective and completely neutral. Recognizing that and allowing students and enabling them to talk about it in a sophisticated, meaningful way. Also informing others, because as economists we are often advisors to politicians, to businessmen, to bankers. Being able to explain to them what is the moral dilemma in this situation that we are in or for this issue. Because we should know the details of the economic cases, so we should also be able to explain the moral issues and normative questions that arise from them.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I want to add a little bit to perhaps why we got into this place that you’re resisting. We did a conference in 2017, Edinburgh, Scotland. In the year and a half leading up to that I spent a lot of time consulting everybody who knew a lot about the history of Adam Smith, David Hume and others from the Scottish Enlightenment. My mother’s maiden name is Douglas, she’s from Scotland, so they gave me a little extra fuel. But when I got into it, one of the things that I really learned from some of the dialogue that surrounded Adam Smith, including some of his own, was there was a tremendous feeling in a time of feudalism that the state and the church were being corrupted by the feudal lords. That moral discourse from, say, Protestant Reformation and various different others was viewed as corrupted.
Now the Industrial Revolution is a challenge to the structural power relative to the landed aristocracy. But if you wanted to go to work in the government, you did not continue to use the language of moral discourse because it disqualified you as probably being party to corruption. Scientific value-free technocracy becomes the, how do I say, language of the day for those who were to be put into office or into positions of influence. The second frame, and I’ll speak of a man who I have great admiration for who I’ve worked with just a little bit named David Colander, who I know you’ve cited in your book. I once said to him, “Somebody called me and said, “Why would you want to be an economist? Everybody reads the paper. Everybody thinks they’re an economist. How do you discriminate between what really is an economist and what’s not.’”
I thought that David was very lucid in saying, “Yeah, a whole lot of people get whipped up in emotion and fashion of the day and this and that.” An economist has to be a little more, what I’ll call, distanced, reflective, dispassionate, deeper. It didn’t mean not history of economic thought. It didn’t mean not values. But he was essentially saying, there’s a real problem with the signal to noise ratio when everybody thinks they’re an economist. What makes you value added? I think some of the tension about bringing values in relates historically to the echoes of the corruption of the Christian Church in late feudalism, and also to the rough and tumble of political discourse. You may be right that people downstream and politicians and whoever can fight about whatever they want, but where is the North Star? Where is the guidance system? As we’ve talked about already, providing them a false one doesn’t help.
Joris Tieleman:
No, exactly. I mean, I like the background you put on this. I think I agree with this danger. If you bring in values in the way that you… let’s assume you teach students these are the right values to have, that would be wrong. We’re absolutely dead set against that. But in fact, this is also how this point, values, ties into the earlier point of pluralism. If you teach people only one way to think, and it’s a broad way, it includes several sub tools, but it’s only one way to think, there’s a danger that they’ll mistake the map for the territory. For example, if you teach people to think only about market mechanisms, and not just perfect market mechanisms but also market breakdown, then the only solution people will have is one where you consider everyone as an individual consumer and where you see markets as the only possible arrangement in an economic question.
That’s where the values are also creeping in under the table in a dangerous way. We say, “No, that value is there anyway. Put it above the table and put different perspectives beside it so that students will be able to really tell the difference and tell which part of what they’re seeing is their tool and which part is the reality.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. One of my friends used an analogy. He said, when they teach you economics, in the sense that you’ve been critiquing, it’s like being on the Titanic. All of the values consciousness is kept down in the bilge, in the hold. It’s not brought on deck to discuss, and that’s why you hit the rock or hit the ice. You hit the iceberg. But when you bring it up on deck, people learn how to change course. Maybe not to please the powerful at a moment in time, but it’s respectful. Now, I want to bring something to this because I’m really enthusiastic about what you’re doing. Some might say it’s just opening a can of worms, but here’s the other side of this. We call these things democracies.
I work with this group, [inaudible 00:18:19], who’s been working with now Pope Francis for many, many years. They are concerned that many people don’t go to college around the world, but then they’re asked to participate in governance, learn how to have faith in expertise and other things. They are concerned that a, what you might call top down, and I won’t call it education, indoctrination is alienating something that avoids the dilemmas of power, is sterile, and then people drop out of school. They say, “I’d rather go get a wage, help my family,” particularly in the global south, “… than put up with this stuff, which is irrelevant.” What that group has often talked about is what I will call, it’s an American analogy, econo-civics.
We used to be taught civics about the institutions of governance and the American Founding Fathers and principles and how it evolved to US Treasury, Federal Reserve System, Environmental Protection Agency. The idea that people, even 15 to 18 years old, should be taught how these things called corporations, or government agencies, or cryptocurrency affect your life will maintain their curiosity. The way to figure out their curiosity is to go ask them what they want to learn, not tell them what they will learn, which runs the risk of alienation. I think you’re bringing everything back up on the table, values et cetera, is going to generate much greater interest in economics from the 15 to 10-year professor.
Joris Tieleman:
Yeah, we hope so. This is also, when we discuss the third principle, so we mentioned pluralism and values, and then real world is the third one in a row. When we discuss that, something a lot of professors say, understandably, is, “We don’t have time for that. We have only a brief period.” The same applies to secondary school level, “We don’t have time,” they say. “We have only a brief period to teach these people and they can read the newspaper in their own time and do even economic history. It’s attractive enough to buy a book and read it in your evening, but they’ll never do the mathematics on their own.” In a sense we completely understand, but we think that this is a false dichotomy. Because if you trigger people with knowledge of the actual economic system around them, and if you trigger people with actual economic challenges and knowledge of existing economic sectors and how they grew and how they declined or imploded, the interest for all the other stuff, and also the ‘dry theoretical stuff’ it stops being dry. It becomes lively and it becomes fascinating.
We think that if you invest in teaching people real world knowledge about the economy, it triggers so much more interest and so much more citizen participation throughout life and engagement. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, it’s counter to this kind of alienation that we’re seeing today.
Sam de Muijnck:
It also helps just real understanding. Because being able to link it to something that happens around you or in your personal life helps you to really understand what the model and the equation might mean. Because otherwise it’s just a simple exercise of remembering the equation and then you do the math, but then you have no clue what it would mean in terms of an economic process or phenomenon.
Rob Johnson:
Yes. I’ll attest to that. Our preparation, we talked a little bit about my background. When I was a young boy my father was a championship racing sailor. I wanted to be good like him. I went and taught myself meteorology, trigonometry for navigation, aerodynamics, hydrodynamics was calculus. The math was a tool with a goal. The tools are our means to an end. The end is what is your passion, your heart, what you want to do. When I got to college, I walk in, my first economics course and the guy starts talking about equilibrium. I grew up into Detroit, Michigan. That’s like growing up in a cauldron. This is the ’60s, ’70s, to the early ’80s. I said, “Equilibrium.” I raised my hand, I wasn’t trying to be a smart aleck. Raised my hand I said, “Isn’t that like assuming a happy ending?”
Because it was just like, how would I say, I was a guest. Because the real world I was observing didn’t feel like what you might call the closure that those models brought to the table made much sense, or at least in the timeframe that I was familiar with. But I think obviously these economic issues are very important. Another one I want to ask you both about, when you read the existing economics texts there’s a notion we might call public goods and externalities. It almost feels to me like we do so much energy in introductory economics of teaching people almost to worship markets that we’re not asking how pervasive are externalities, and do the textbooks bring… more and more Wendy Carlin and Sam [inaudible 00:24:08] and other books are now bringing the challenges, the environment, et cetera, to the table.
But don’t we have to ask, in light of your real world vision, how sufficient are markets as a deity to defer to? For that matter, to take it over to the left side of the spectrum, when political economy is not separable markets and politics, the role of money politics as Tom Ferguson, who’s my research director, who I know you credited in your early notes in the book, who thinks that you can just trust government. There’s all kinds of evidence in the United States, in Gallup polls and stuff going back through the Obama administration, that said, “We don’t trust government anymore,” among people from the left. I think we’re facing a dilemma about what’s the challenge and what can you trust, and what’s the real model of how all these processes, including markets and governance work.
It’s not like the old days of communism as an ideal or free market capitalism as an ideal. Everybody’s got [inaudible 00:25:30]. It’s very difficult to be dogmatic in light of what we can see right before our eyes.
Sam de Muijnck:
Yeah. I fully agree. I think within the book one thing we really try to address is this focus right now on markets. If you want to understand the real world and you just look around you, there is a lot more than just markets. We also have this quote from Ha-Joon Chang that the economy is much larger than the market. There is a normative aspect to this debate as whether it should be all about the market, but there’s also just the practical. For example, today I cooked lunch for Joris, I didn’t ask him to pay money for this in terms of a market exchange. This was more reciprocity as being a friend. But it’s also an economic relationship and process that is going on here, and this happens all the time. But in our economics education we often don’t talk about it, so we learn not to think about it.
We’ve become blind to large parts of our economy and we think this is really not helpful for whatever political preferences you have. It’s not helpful to ignore a large part of the economy. This is just one example, but obviously there are many more with creative comments online, with Wikipedia, that these are different kinds of ways of organizing the economy. We say before debating also the normative, the policy debates, just start with giving students some basic knowledge. What economic organizational forms are there? You can have a corporation, a family firm, a small firm, a stock-traded firm, a public institution like a school. What exists and what kind of economic mechanisms are there? Hierarchy, [inaudible 00:27:16], markets, reciprocity, all these different things.
Really have an idea of the sort of diversity of options that there are in the world. I think that’s, at least for me, learning about all these different things indeed made me far less simplistically thinking. One is the best thing, we should do everything by one, because if you look around there is so much going on there. I think we can, as economists, become way more sophisticated in our policy thinking and advice as well thinking creatively of how to combine and what makes in what situation what works best.
Joris Tieleman:
I want to add something to this. We have, in the book, 10 building blocks where we say these are areas of knowledge or skills that any economist should have a little bit from each of the 10 blocks at least in different proportions for different audiences. One building block is economic organizations and mechanisms, which speaks to what Sam just discussed. When we were writing that we were thinking, okay, what different types of organizations do we have? What different types of commercial firms, what different type of nonprofits organizations and so on. We basically tried to do what biologists would call a taxonomy of the economic system. What different kinds of animals and plants do you find in the economic system?
This was really, it was really hard to find suitable material to teach this with. It was surprisingly difficult to find economic writing which had structured this multitude of organizational forms and economic mechanisms into a comprehensible matrix. Actually, to any listeners out there, if you know of good work in this area, which teaches the students, in a comprehensible way, the matrix of different types of organizational forms, please reach out because we haven’t been able to find something good in that area.
Sam de Muijnck:
I mean, we have some stuff-
Joris Tieleman:
Some stuff, definitely, but it’s surprisingly sparse.
Rob Johnson:
Well, my colleague, [inaudible 00:29:20], who I know is a friend of yours, said to me that he took your 10 categories from the book and he said, “I think there are five things going on. One is an introduction to the challenge. Second is looking at history, both of the economy and of ideas. Third is, what are the concepts around understanding contemporary organization, then analysis, including data-related analysis. Finally, what’s your contribution of the world if you want to be an economist? Why are you doing this stuff?” I think all of these elements are very, very, how would I say, important.
We’ve been talking about your inspiration and a lot of what’s going on in what you’re trying to build. But I want to focus on two things. First is, what does the change in the profession look like if we adopt your way of teaching economics and building economists? Because as I reference David Colander’s thinking, if you’re, how would I say, not very good at anything but exposed to everything, what are you adding? That’s a tension. But if you’re only narrowly focused, you’re missing everything that’s going on and it’s just flying by and you’re irrelevant. A lot of people think, a lot of the high end game theorists and all that, are beautiful formal. They’re like during the Thirty Years’ War, being up in the monastery talking in code, but avoiding the controversy.
I find it very difficult to understand, when I try to project, what are people hiring, what are people tenuring, what are people doing if your vision of economics is adopted? Then I’ll come back to let’s address some of the current problems from an economist like you’re envisioning in contrast to the economist we have, financial reform, climate change, and things like that. But let’s start with, what does the profession look like? What does an economist look like who’s, how do I say, adopted and evolved through the vision that you impart?
Sam de Muijnck:
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I think the first thing to say is, in our vision there are a lot of different kinds of economists. There is not just one program. When we started writing the book, the initial idea was to write this one perfect curriculum and we very quickly found out there is no such thing as the perfect curriculum that is perfect everywhere. Because there are always different options and specialties that you can choose. What we really advocate is actually that different programs can also tailor to different kind of skills. For example, right now if you are not good at mathematics but you are really good at doing interviews and qualitative research, it’s really difficult to become an economist, especially a high ranked economist. But we think that these kind of economists could add a lot of insight into how the economy works and our research.
What we would argue for is not that there should be no econometritian. There should still be someone really good at econometrics. But next to that kind of an economist, there should also be someone who is really good at doing interviews, understanding the institutions, the relationships between different actors. In practice, that would mean that different programs could, for example, focus on different things, so rather than… in the Netherlands, over the last years also when I was choosing where to study economics, it was pretty much the same almost everywhere. I didn’t have a lot of choice. We would argue that’s wrong, there should be a choice. I should be able to choose, for example, whether I would become more of a quantitative economist or a qualitative.
This can, of course, also be after the first year so you give everyone a broad basis, and after that you let them choose which topics, which skills to focus on. But in practice that would mean that economists become this broad group that are all focused on studying economic issues and challenges and that they learn. I think that’s also a big thing that we hear from a lot of employers right now that they are complaining that economists are not being taught to communicate and collaborate, especially also across disciplinary boundaries. Whether they work with together with lawyers, or political scientists, or sociologists, they should be able to communicate what they have learned about their economic models with people who have not studied them.
I think part of what we are aiming for is that this profession becomes people who are still specialized because they’ll have something to contribute. But a really also part of this broader field which has a broader knowledge. So I think-
Joris Tieleman:
Yeah, specialist with a shared foundation you can say.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Going back into the history of ideas realm, not economic history, I was very attracted in my learning to two books that I would recommend to our audience. One was a man named Mason Gaffney, and he and Fred Harrison later joined and they wrote a book called The Corruption of Economics. It was about how Henry George talked about the common good and the market fundamentalists of the time wanted to know narrow that down and corrupted economics. It’s a beautiful discussion. Though my favorite book is by a lady from California named Mary Furner, and the name of her book is Advocacy Versus Objectivity. It’s really set in the late 19th century on how the Marginal Revolution, which you might call scrubbed clean or sanitized economic from institutional detail or human values, and how it set us off on a course that formalization took hold of and left us, how you say, in a place that perhaps now needs to be readdressed.
Elinor Ostrom won a fantastic, I thought, Nobel Prize. Her work on how the common good or public good’s activity is really manifest in society rather than some abstract metamathematical architecture. I think there are plenty of what you might call vehicles to work with in the realm that you’re putting together. Yet I find it uncomfortable given what you might call the known structure for professors, how to get research grants, how to get tenure, what they can publish and so forth. Something’s got to change in that structure. I once went to someone in a major American university and I said, “It looks like you guys make a mathematical recipe. You have five star, three star, one star journals, and you take everything someone’s published and weight them by the stars, come up with a number, and there’s a certain threshold for tenure.”
You know what that, he was a gentleman, he said to me, he said, “That’s right, because we get sued so often in America. When we don’t give someone tenure we have to have an objective measure.” But in the texture, the deliberation, can you imagine sitting around with people like George Akerlof at University of California, Berkeley and David Card and all these people who’ve come from different vantage points, but to act like they got to submit to a number based on a somebody gaming things. It doesn’t make sense. In other words, it doesn’t use all the intelligence that the faculty has in making those judgements. But the customs of what you might call what survives when you’re finishing a PhD is your advisor contributing, what you might call an assisted suicide professionally, by nurturing you to do these textured and beautiful things when it won’t get accepted in the peer review journals and you won’t get a three or five or a one star.
I worry about this. As you know, INET, with people like Jim Heckman, Lars Hansen, George Akerlof, Angus Deaton have explored, studied, and held sessions on the role of the control system, the habit system. But on the other side, you’ve got these young economists. I would like, if I’m going to join a profession, to know how I can succeed. The question becomes, what are the ways in which the profession, the more textured, the more diverse profession that you guys bring together, how does that crystallize? One of the people that I want to encourage you all, if you don’t know he’s no longer alive, but Sir Ken Robinson, he’s got the most just viewed TED Talk of all time, it’s called, How Schools Kill Creativity.
But his talk essentially about preparing the individual in isolation is in contrast to a knowledge-intensive service economy. It might have been fit for being on the assembly line in the 19th century, but now work in teams. You go work for a place like Apple, you work in teams. People make different contributions but it’s like you guys were saying, all these different ingredients are necessary to creating what you might call the design. Working in teams is a different process than working individually or being educated and evaluated individually. I’m thinking, essentially when I was reading your book, I kept feeling like you’re creating a team sport. It’s not about what the individual guy or the woman is at a department, it’s what the team of the department creates collectively together.
I think it’s a great challenge that you bring. Let’s look at issues. You’ve got your team now, they’re educated in all these ways. It’s not 19 neoclassical economists all in some narrow methodological constraint. How would they look at finance? How would they look at climate change differently?
Joris Tieleman:
Well, I mean, that’s a very big question. There’s one thing I want to make clear is, we wrote a book about education in an entire discipline which is an insanely broad topic to take on in one book. We don’t want to extend ourselves into the field of policy because that’s just not our contribution, not with this book maybe later. But of course we can definitely talk about how a team like this would approach [crosstalk 00:40:53]-
Rob Johnson:
That’s my question. Thank you for clarifying. That’s my… I’m not asking you for your policy recommendations, I’m asking you how this team addresses the challenge as distinct from what we’ve experienced.
Joris Tieleman:
Yeah, yeah. I think, okay, so you mentioned climate change. I think one thing there would be, so on this team I imagine you would have neoclassical economists, you would have institutional economists, you might have evolutionary economists, you might have some post-Keynesians-
Sam de Muijnck:
Or people who are able to jump between the different perspectives themselves.
Joris Tieleman:
Yeah, absolutely. I think these different parts of the team would approach the challenge from their own perspective. For instance, the neoclassical economists might start to figure out, “Okay, is there some way we can adjust the market mechanisms on this? How about a carbon tax? Is there a system in place? Could there be a system in place, an emission trading scheme? Could that work? What are the market incentives that work right now and how can we put in place policies that make those work towards the common good?” Which is a big contribution. Ecological economists, on the other hand, might start working from what you might call the interface between the economy and the ecology or nature, and start from planetary boundaries and say, “Okay, right now the economic system is producing this and this kind of CO2 output, for example. What are the planetary boundaries? When will we hit them? To what degree do we need a hard stop before then?”
Which is a question that doesn’t really arise in the neoclassical approach, commonly known as environmental economics rather than ecological economics. That’s about adjusting the markets and changing the market mechanisms, but it assumes you don’t put a hard stop somewhere and ecological systems do have breakdown points so at some point you do need to do that. Then you might have the evolutionary economists who look over longer term at how certain industries develop and how certain industries adjust and who are able to think in a more medium to long term. Okay, so we have this coal and gas industry which is on a certain trajectory. How is that rooted in society and what different industries would need to come up besides it to replace it?
Also looking at historical examples, how could a clean energy industry arise? Because we can’t just say, from next year we’re going to do 50% clean energy. It’s got to grow. How does it grow? In this way I think the different, you might say, subdisciplines of economics or different approaches or schools of thought would have very distinct contributions to a big three-dimensional, well, more than three-dimensional problem.
Sam de Muijnck:
Yeah. Also in terms of the methods I discussed earlier, and I think also knowing the history of a sector, knowing the real world institutions and details. I think it would be a mix between really technical people, really abstract theoretical thinking, but also people who are perhaps just better at seeing what are the concerns of the different stakeholders and to really connect that to the policy options. I think then it becomes a lot broader than just different methods of different theories. But as you say, recognizing that just different people on the team have different skills and learning how to work together.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I think, how would I say, you can see in the challenge of climate change. People with a different mindset that are quite brilliant like Naomi Klein have emerged. Looking prescient, looking like she identifies a problem but is daunted because we’re not addressing it. If she were part of the team and the other four people were truly teammates, it might inspire a study. It might inspire a working group that brought this to bear and augmented, complemented the kind of things that Naomi’s vision or pattern recognition put on the table, and what do we do about it. If you brought in Tom Ferguson to that team, you might understand how people in the fossil fuel industry are trying to defend the value of their assets, maybe whole countries like Russia, and their balance of payments.
The quality of those lives are an issue and why they might resist these transitions. You develop what you might call a multidimensional or different vantage points, like everybody’s looking from a different angle but is being part of the team. Then you want some guys, men, women, who are excellent with data. You want some people who are excellent with historical analogy. All of that together could really teach people. One or another is a valuable contribution, but each is only, say, 20% of the whole pie.
Sam de Muijnck:
Man, I like this vision.
Rob Johnson:
I think I like how you’re seeing, how do I say, a collaborative approach. At some level, if things were organized more as teams and less as individuals, I think people would recognize what you might call positive externalities more easily too. The ways in which other people help you, the way in which you can help them, becomes part of what we call your utility function and your preferences.
Joris Tieleman:
Yeah. Actually, this is something we didn’t mention yet, but in the book we also spend some attention on, not what you teach but how you teach. One thing we suggest, so out of interviews with employers of fresh graduates comes that collaboration, communication, that these are important skills that are insufficiently taught. For example, one exercise you might do with students is let them represent different sides of an argument. Then at some point swap and say, “Okay, now you represent the other person’s arguments, so you got to get inside them and really understand them.” In this way, not make it a battle who’s the best argument, who wins. But train people in, you can call it mental jujitsu or something, getting into the different perspective and moving around them.
Of course, everyone might have their personal preference where they come from and what they represent best, but you got to teach people to move through the different mental positions and mental perspectives. As far as we’re concerned, that’s the foundation of an academic education maybe in any field. I don’t want to speak broader than economics right now. But yeah, if you teach an academic education, the mental flexibility of changing perspective is the foundation I’d say.
Rob Johnson:
Back in 2009 when I was exploring the development of INET, we decided to do it. I was traveling around the world and meeting with people about what they thought was right and wrong in light of the, what you might call, traumatic birth experience or the great financial crisis. One of the things that was recommended to me was a series of multidisciplinary studies run by a Canadian institute of advanced research and another one run by the MacArthur Foundation. Almost all of the economists, and many famous names were included, I was able to speak to confidentially said, “I learned so much from being with psychologists and anthropologists and so forth.” Because they got shaken out of the customs, the presuppositions. Yet they were with minds and imaginations that they respected and the teams evolved.
Many of these people are Nobel Laureates or John Bates Clark Award winners in the United States. Some of the younger ones really got an uplift. How would I say, they had a formative experience, which is almost like a postdoc in teamwork that’s multidisciplinary, that looks like the path you would set us on. I think it’s really encouraging. Now, I want to come into this back, talk about what inspired you. There was a huge need for what you’ve done, that I believe. But there wasn’t the careers to market for it. There’s another ingredient in this, which comes from something that inspires you that is manifest as courage. Where did you guys get the courage to go do this with your time at this stage in your career and life?
Sam de Muijnck:
Good question. There are definitely moments where I also switch from the feeling, “Are we just being arrogant right now trying to create an overview of the whole field? I just graduated myself. Is this courage or is this arrogance?” That question was sometimes, definitely, over my mind.
Joris Tieleman:
Amen.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I’ll just say one thing. When people think Rome is burning, it’s not arrogant to pick up a fire hose. There’s a whole lot of sense that things are out of balance, but nonetheless, you’re leaping outside of the conduits of the institutional structure and you’re innovating, you’re catalyzing understanding that’s in the literature in your book. You’re catalyzing the understanding you have out from being in groups like Rethinking Economics or the INET Young Scholars Initiative, and you’re bringing that to the surface and that’s courage.
Joris Tieleman:
Thanks.
Sam de Muijnck:
Yeah. For me personally, I think the last point of being part of a movement, at least for me, did a lot. In my first year I was talking to some classmates, but they were all like, “Yeah, shut your mouth. The professor is right, you’re wrong. He knows best, so don’t ask these critical questions.” That was really making me quite insecure and feeling not confident at all to do anything. Then after a year I met Joris and the rest of the Rethinking Economics group in the Netherlands. For me, that was enabling me at least as a person to step, to become more confident and also enjoy the process of… yeah. Often it is also can be tough, can be a fight, and you get some setbacks or you get in an argument and sometimes you don’t do right.
But then, because you’re part of a team, I think coming back to the, I guess the topic we are discussing all the time, that that really helps me at least to do this whole process. Then yeah, it feels more like a joy and a hobby that that becomes a bit out of hand and becomes your work. But doing it alone wouldn’t have been an option for me at least.
Joris Tieleman:
No, absolutely not.
Rob Johnson:
Let’s talk about that in a world of pervasive externalities, both positive and negative. You got nourished, as I’m listening it, by your comrades, by your colleagues, and by fellow students who shared concern. You guys hit the accelerator and you went for it to give to that process, a beacon, a leadership, a North Star to inspire the evolution. It’ll take courage to hear the critiques and the refutation, but you’ve step up to that and there’s nothing wrong with learning after you’ve offered something. But the courage to offer something you did, I applaud, but I’m hearing you say you were nourished by the notion of doing that for those people who had nourished you. That feels more like a world that has common good and has positive externalities than one where everybody just keeps score with the market.
Joris Tieleman:
Yeah, absolutely. I think on both sides, so let’s say [inaudible 00:54:23], this student movement Rethinking Economics and its predecessors, but Rethinking Economics is the one we really grew up in you might say. Has a small dedicated staff team and a lot of volunteers who’ve been organizing meetings all around Europe and in the rest of the world increasingly. I think these meetings provided a giant inspiration for us and the impetus to do this. From the start, we drew a lot from that group as we kicked off the writing process with a long weekend with people from seven different countries gathered in the Netherlands. Throughout the process we’ve been drawing on that. On the other side, you can honestly say that we were both dissatisfied with our education.
Joris Tieleman:
At the same time, we had dedicated professors who, you could tell that this is their passion. Even if we are missing important things in our education, they put across the skills and the knowledge that they have to offer with a passion and are really open to rethink that if something else serves better by now. I mean, not all, certainly, but I know a lot of professors, a lot of the people who taught me, who are really open to that, and yet were scrambling for materials. Knowing through the Rethinking international network of all the good textbooks that were coming out, bringing together a pluralism of ideas, bringing real world knowledge and so on. Knowing that all these material is out there and that established academic staff members often don’t have a good way to find it and bring it together into courses-
Sam de Muijnck:
Or don’t have the time to.
Joris Tieleman:
Yeah. Don’t have the time because they’re pressed in the publish of perish rat race. Yeah, I don’t know. I think that also helped give us the courage to put on big shoes.
Rob Johnson:
Well, in my exploration I mentioned some of the formative people, Charles Kindleberger, [inaudible 00:56:49], a man named David Abraham who wrote a lot of economic history of Weimar, Germany. Subsequently left the academic profession. Tom Ferguson. All kinds of people contributed. So did people like Alan Blinder and Joe Stiglitz who sit within the profession. But what I’m celebrating today listening to you is that I can find those beacons. I can find people, like we’ve mentioned David Colander. I read studies that he and Bob Solow co-chaired which said, “When you survey people that want to do graduate work in economics…” what did they say? 80? I think it was 84% said you got to be good at math and statistics. Only 11% said you have to know anything about the real world. All of these facets, all of these dimensions, all of the illumination and some of the guidance from rebel elders that I’ve gotten is now coming in to interface with a younger generation that’s rising up and taking the lead, and that’s you guys.
Joris Tieleman:
Well, thanks.
Rob Johnson:
I celebrate that. The guiding lights are there, Bob Skidelsky, Ha-Joon Chang, Perry Mehrling who did a wonderful course on money and banking and guided the analysis of the US economic profession. How do they choose curriculums? How do they do things? Just like Bob Skidelsky did for us in the UK. But what’s really nice for me, what’s a very satisfying 13 years into this process, is seeing people stand up as strong as the two of you.
Joris Tieleman:
Thanks a lot. [crosstalk 00:58:35] to hear.
Rob Johnson:
You’re a fabulous example. I wouldn’t say this with the conviction that I do if I hadn’t read the book, so I’m teasing my audience, but I’m teasing them when I they’re going to thank me having read the book. Whether they disagree with this or that, it’s an exploration. It’s encompassing, it’s challenging, it’s deep. You guys are an excellent example for what I hope more young scholars will join, imitate, and do. I want to thank you for the taking the time to explore with me today.
Joris Tieleman:
Thanks so much.
Sam de Muijnck:
Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Rob Johnson:
After the book comes out, let’s wait a few months. I want to have another session with you here on what feedback you got and what you’ve learned from stimulating the world.
Sam de Muijnck:
Great. Let’s do that-
Joris Tieleman:
Nice.
Rob Johnson: We’ll do. Check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
