skidelsky154_wildpixel_getty Images_cancel culture

الاقتصاد والحرب الثقافية

Jul 20, 2020 Robert Skidelsky

لندن ــ ظللت لفترة طويلة أنتقد علم الاقتصاد لافتقاره إلى الواقعية، ولأنه ينتج "نماذج" للسلوك البشري أشبه بالرسوم الكاريكاتورية في أفضل تقدير أو محاكاة ساخرة للشيء الحقيقي في أسوأ تقدير. في كتابي الأخير بعنوان "ما هي مشكلة الاقتصاد؟"، أزعم أن أهل الاقتصاد، في محاولتهم وضع قوانين عالمية، تجاهلوا عمدا خصوصيات التاريخ والثقافة.

يعبر رجل الاقتصاد وعالم الاجتماع ثورستين فيبلين ببراعة عن هذا التعامي الأحمق. في مقال نُـشِـر في عام 1908، تخيل فيبلين أهل الاقتصاد وهم يشرحون سلوك "عصابة من سكان جزر ألوتيان يتعثرون عبر الحطام ويقلبون الأمواج بجرافاتهم ملقين تعويذاتهم السحرية لالتقاط المحار" من أجل تعظيم المنفعة.

في القرن الثامن عشر، قرر ممارسو علم الاقتصاد ــ الفرع الذي يدرس الكيفية التي يزاول بها الناس الأعمال الاعتيادية لكسب معايشهم ــ المواءمة بين تساؤلاتهم وبين ما يسمى العلوم "الجامدة"، وخاصة الفيزياء، على عكس العلوم "البشرية" مثل التاريخ. كان طموحهم يتلخص في بناء "فيزياء" المجتمع حيث تكون الهياكل الاجتماعية خاضعة لقوانين ثابتة مثل الهياكل الطبيعية. وعلى هذا فقد وجد قانون الجاذبية، الذي يشرح دوران الكواكب حول الشمس، نظيره الاقتصادي في قانون المصلحة الذاتية، الذي يضمن توازن الأسواق.

To continue reading, register now.

As a registered user, you can enjoy more PS content every month – for free.

Subscribe now for unlimited access to everything PS has to offer.

Already have an account? Log in

Subscribe to Project Syndicate

Enjoy unlimited access to the ideas and opinions of the world’s leading thinkers, including long reads, book reviews, topical collections, short-form analysis and predictions, and exclusive interviews; every new issue of the PS Quarterly magazine (print and digital); the complete PS archive; and more. Subscribe now to PS Premium.

Robert Skidelsky

Writing for PS since 2003
195 Commentaries

Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, was a non-executive director of the private Russian oil company PJSC Russneft from 2016 to 2021. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

new comment has been posted. new comments have been posted.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 10 Comments on this article

dapo alani Jul 28, 2020

The idea that economics is color blind is a trick in poor taste played by Wesern academia carefully excerpting its canonical text. Adam Smith is reprinted in Books 1-3 . However it is in Book 4 that he discusses people of different colors. Though he lived in an era where the anti-slavery movement was vociferous and wrote Wealth of Nations a few years before the French abolished slavery 1794, he praised the ruthless and brutal exploitation of Black slaves in Haiti only a few years before the start of the successful insurrection. Color blind? I don't think so. But for traditional Western economists and western academia - Black lives do not matter. More detail: https://african-century.org/skidelsky-is-economics-color-blind/
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Waleed Addas Jul 26, 2020

The eminent author maybe surprised to know that there is a highly likely possibility that history and/or culture both follow ‘prescribed’ laws of nature as well but have not yet been fully understood or discovered! I personally believe so.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Jay Kay Jul 26, 2020

"....Thus the law of gravity, which explains the orbit of the planets round the sun, found its economic counterpart in the law of self-interest, which ensures the equilibrium of markets."

Let's be clear, the point of real science is not to explain anything.

The point of real science is to construct experimentally tested abstractions that accurately predict future real world events to a useful degree.

Any fool abstraction can explain explain almost anything in retrospect. This is after all the stock-in-trade of the: The Abrahamic Religions, The Sociology Religion, The Political Correctness Religion, The Global Warming Religion, economics, stock market commentators, and purveyors of horse racing betting schemes.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Michael Public Jul 20, 2020

Culture and economics - all of the following once had a very strong and ascendant economy, but a sick culture - leading to their demise - Egypt, Rome, the Catholic Church, the British Empire, WW2 Germany, the USSR and today, the United States of America.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Michael Public Jul 20, 2020

In the Vietnam War, the US followed this idea in the war of attrition - leading to loss of the War. Leadership thought if they accurately measured and obsessed over enemy body counts they would win the war - but the body counts were often faked by soldiers to please superiors. The more comprehensive their body count measurement the more they convinced themselves that they were winning.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Michael Public Jul 20, 2020

He was just early. Today, Neural Networks - which are considered universal algorithms - essentially use only the laws of physics contained in a silicon chips to predict accurately enough the economic future from models with a billion parameters - which is why nearly all trading is done by machines today.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Prashant Kotak Jul 20, 2020

I see no problem whatsoever with Economists (or anyone else) having *personal* political opinions (however dubious) which they express as something separate from their field. What I am against is the blurring of the personal and the professional which seems to be such a feature of modern academia, and not just in the humanities but also has somehow crept into the sciences - a continuation of what happened in the past, with a half century interlude when it didn't, but now seems to be back but with a flipped political spectrum. So where someone who fitted in in terms of class, culture, race, gender, would be given covert preference for promotions, advancement, chairmanships and the like, we now have the situation where you must fit in *politically* to be offered the same, otherwise you are effectively sent to Coventry because of pressure from the activist mob (notwithstanding how fine an institution Coventry University I'm sure is). It is still an excluding of a grouping, just a different grouping. All it is is another othering (quite proud of coming up with that quip).

Eminent Physicists (for example) have always expressed political opinions, from those whose opinions our current society considers welcome (e.g. Stephen Hawking) to those whose opinions would be considered completely unacceptable (e.g. William Shockley). The thing is, notwithstanding those political opinions, in the long term they fade into insignificance and what endures is the science. Ultimately, you can't argue with a bunch of equations (unless you are one of the rare few who can come up with another bunch of equations to overthrow the older ones). Economics on the other hand, has no such grounding, so that self-alignment with the hard sciences is bogus. Economics is not deterministic and has no calculus for those aspects of itself that are not deterministic like Physics does. Perhaps it is time for someone to acknowledge that Economics is fractal, and invent (or rather discover if Economics is a true science) such a calculus.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Bryan Atkins Jul 20, 2020

Like the Sky & Ocean, economics is broken. Its problem are vast and fundamental.
One fundament ignored by most economists is understanding code, including monetary code, in a physics, evolution & complexity context.

I challenge Robert Skidelsky or any Project Syndicate columnist to a written discussion / debate re economics, and more fundamentally, human culture's current manner of relationship, internally, and with the Geo—Eco—Bio & Tech networks.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Prashant Kotak Jul 20, 2020

"...Another unsettled question of particular salience today is what causes the gap between rich and poor within all countries to grow..."

It is easy to point to inherited wealth etc, but let me just point out that each of the current great tech fortunes belong to people who are self-made and who mostly came from bog standard middle class backgrounds - the wealth of Zuckerberg, Musk etc is literally just a decade old, and even Gates, Ellison etc, are fortunes just three decades old. And the miracle is: everything they used to create their companies is available, right now, to you. To anyone. For free. Because as a direct example out of my profession, for anyone wanting to learn coding or any aspect of IT, there is an absolutely vast quantity of free training material out there, pdfs, websites by the bucketload, absolutely dazzling free tech: IDEs, compilers, databases and a zillion experts willing to help you (eg stackoverflow) all for free. All it requires is a laptop (~£300), a good connection (~£100) and the will (~priceless).

And while access to computers and tech infrastructure is trivially easy in the developed world, the situation is not that difficult in the developing world - anyone based in an urban setting and willing to make an effort can get access to the necessary tech as well.

Which then begs the question: why don't they?
A new reply to this comment has been posted.