PUNK ECONOMICS WITH SCHOLARSHIP
IDEAS IN ADBUSTERS ESSAY COLLECTION HAVE A LOT OF HOLES
THERE IS PERFECT SENSE in Kalle Lasn and Adbusters, the B.C.-based agitprop publication that inspired/called for the Occupy movement, attacking the central subject of the current conversation, economics. When your goal is to light a global fire, choose the driest tinder; and to most citizens, economics is the kindling of social sciences.
As you curl up with Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics, you will find it demands nothing less than dismantling half a century’s worth of free-market neo-liberalism; to obliterate the mainstream economist credo that all things that are not money — nature, psychology, etc. — are “externalities.” To savage the very notion of economics as science.
It is of course apposite to attack the orthodoxy and validity of neoclassical economics: They do it all the time on Bloomberg Radio, amid the flag-waving for it. You’ll also hear the Marxist term “creative destruction” there, although without the sweeping insurgency of its use in Meme Wars. This is punk rock economics with scholarship ballast, 10 chapters of essays starring thinkers including Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerlof, offset by disruptive photos in the graphic novel-style, full of ironic juxtapositions, consumerist iconography and Look What We’ve Done to the Earth alarmism.
Big ideas, philosophy, denunciations, Hallmark sentiments, sedition, juvenilia — these are all part of the Meme Wars/ Adbusters message. And as you read it, you will be soothed by the jargon of Natural Capital, Steady-State Economy, the death of growth, object-oriented ontology, bioeconomics, psychonomics, PAECON …
The form is certainly crucial, hewing to the Adbuster ethos, deploying the Adbuster quirks. The unwieldy title tells us they are confident of a (small) readership but greater radiant influence. There are no page numbers because those are too conventional to include in this doorstopper. Sometimes, there are drawbacks to content and form. An early graffiti history of economics might seem useful, but is a little curt. There’s the quickie trajectory from Gain to Usury, and a denunciation of European plunder, as though the Sumerians and Phoenicians hadn’t plundered (we get “spoils” from the Latin word “spoliare”). A staff writer offers, “During the Christian era in Europe, privilege and power came with great moral costs” because of “frescoes, woodcuttings, architecture and murals” depicting “merchants, moneylenders, popes, cardinals and kings in shackles being carted off to hell.” Well, no, privilege didn’t come with great moral costs. That art was not some lethal warning, rather an attempt to censure the papal/ kingly wealth that was everywhere. Not the same thing at all. And anyway, what’s the “Christian era”?
Some essays are heavier than others. Michael Hudson offers dense tonnage on credit and debt and allowing the financial sector to make public policy. Manfred Max-Neef has a knee-slapper limning “wealth” and “debt” in environmental terms. Theme: old, or neoclassical economics bad, new, holistic heterogeneous economics good. Sometimes the message includes painfully lefty titles like “the Department for Depatriarchalization at the Ministry for Decolonization.” There are snippets of gaudy half-thoughts on how “communism doesn’t work because we’re too selfish.” With “demonic industries and squid-like megacorporations” as your inter-lecture commentary, you know where you stand. You are in a hand-held Zuccotti Park, an Occupy of the Mind.
And that park is a good launching pad to assail the conceptual lunacy of speculative transactions and credit default swaps, or to blast Harvard/Bush economics prof Gregory Mankiw and his pro-markets idea to fight extinction by “privatizing endangered species.” The rhinos are already privatized, Greg. It’s called “poaching.” The very best section in the book is its history lesson featuring Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Kenneth Boulding, E.F. Schumacher and Herman Daly, radical economists all, including Frederick Soddy’s pithy line that money is “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”
Inherently, there are accidental issues raised. There’s praise for the Islamic Finance model, and the China model. The Islamic world and China — where, funnily enough, you might not be permitted to read this book. A photo of a woman’s highheeled foot (I’d cite the page number …) subverts their subversion, capturing one of the impediments to the seismic change advocated: We’re not giving up our Manolos or iPhones easily. Is there a single instance in human history of something we knew, made or owned being surrendered for a Greater Good? Or would this require some type of … enforcement? There isn’t much on how the West’s “moral culpability” for CO2 emission would be halted or a decrease enforced … but that is the point of the hectoring. The U.S. and Canada will never volunteer to reduce per-capita emissions from 20 to 2.8 tons annually, nor can anyone compel them. So it’s to be nagging that gets the job done.
I cite all this not to mock the movement, but to illustrate its challenges. There are a lot of ideological, acquisitive, status-bound, comfort-driven Brontosauri to be moved. Meme Wars is a Molotov cocktail tossed into the boardroom, but not an end in itself. On the positive side of the ledger, to borrow a line from Gilles Raveaud’s brilliant essay herein, the neoclassicists should appreciate Meme Wars: after all, it’s competition.