My strong focus on economic matters this weekend is partly due to the current issue of AdBusters, "Thought Control in Economics". While some of the pieces are little more than comments, and could have been written decades ago, others help put together a picture of possibilities beyond the conventional thinking in economics, which still seems incapable of really coming to grips with the financial crisis we're still struggling to get out of. Journalist Deborah Campbell's piece The Post-Autistic Movement provides a brief, episodic history of this decade's emergence of an heterodox opposition to the model-obsessed market fundamentalist establishment, tracing developments that are clearly political as much as they are intellectual, from France to Britain and America.
Someone called the reigning neoclassical dogma "autistic!" The analogy would stick: like sufferers of autism, the field of economics was intelligent but obsessive, narrowly focused and cut off from the outside world.
(The Post-Autistic Economics Review--eventually renamed the realworld economics review--is up to issue 48. This is no mere passing fad.)
On the flip, I focus on two of pieces mentioned above that deal directly with the hegemonic stranglehold of conventional economics and its limitations. Another diary later today will focus on prosperity vs. growth.
There's a triple pun in the title of this diary, which is the dominant theme of the diaries I'll be posting this weekend. And yeah, I know, if you have to explain it, 'tain't funny McGee. Oh, the sacrifices I make!
(1) In mathematical physics, renormalization is a process of getting rid of infinite quantities that would make various equations physically non-sensical. Inifinite growth on a finite planet is very definition of "physically non-sensical."
(2) "Norms" also refer to values. "Renormalizing" economics in this sense means putting values back into the equation.
(3) In a third sense, "renormalizing" simply means "getting back to normal"-whatever that is! And I'd suggest that it's at least a 3-fold thing. First, it means getting back to an economic order that's not based primarily on plundering, one in which prosperity is broadly shared, not hoarded by the few. That would take us back to New Deal economic order, which continued up through the early 1970s. At second level, it means getting back to where the market economy was seen as the servant of society, not the master. That's what the market signified to early market theorists like Adam Smith and Condorcet. At a third level, it means getting back to where we live in a sustainable relationship with our environment. The original model for this was our 50,000 years or so of primarily nomadic existence as hunter-gatherers. It's possible to restore that sort of equilibrium with a much higher level of technology and material well-being-but not without seriously rewriting the economic code we live by.
If this all sounds a bit abstract, well, that's to be expected. It is abstract without concrete things to talk about. And I'll be writing about those as well this weekend, starting with the housing crash, and a comparison of income growth under Bush and Clinton. But first, I want to fill in a bit of detail in what I've written above. And to help me do that, I've got a couple of Nobel Prize-winning economists lurking in the shadows on the flip, sort of like Marshalll McLuhan in Annie Hall.
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