Remember this?
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The last few years have proven that this was not just a glib comment from an arrogant neo-con. It was an accurate description of the way most global elites see the world.
We now know that the financial crisis has produced a depression in many Western economies, which will destroy lives and many cherished public institutions. According to the figures of the UK government, living standards in 2015 will be lower than 2002. One of the ingredients of this crisis was that the financial system (including its regulators) was a mineshaft crammed with canaries, scarcely any of whom had any inclination or ability to sing. Those that did, such as Nassim Taleb or Nouriel Roubini , have since acquired the status of gurus for this single reason.
And yet, five years on from the origins of the crisis, the power (if not the authority) of economics in public life is, if anything, greater than it was before. Credit-rating agencies make governments shudder with their risk models. The UK government’s austerity programme was backed up by zany claims from conservative economists (especially in the think tank Policy Exchange ) that rapid cuts in public spending would result in economic growth. When these predictions turned out to be false, few even bothered to register their surprise.
As Woolfgang Streeck recently argued ↑ , there has always been an implicit tension between the demands of economic experts and those of democracy, but the crisis has elevated this to a new level. We are used to elected politicians (such as Ruth Kelly and Vince Cable in Britain) being trained economists or to economic advisors shaping undemocratic regimes (such as Milton Friedman in Chile in the 1970s or Jeffrey Sachs in Russia in the 1990s). But, until 2011, we had never witnessed the phenomenon of economist as unelected Prime Minister.
It is time to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about the public status of economics as an expert discipline: it has grown to be far more powerful as a tool of political rhetoric, blame avoidance and elite strategy than for the empirical representation of economic life. This is damaging to politics, for it enables value judgements and political agendas to be endlessly presented in ‘factual’ terms. But it is equally damaging to economics, which is losing the authority to describe reality in a credible, disinterested, Enlightenment fashion.
Read on. It’s fascinating. It’s just another indication of how post-modernism has been put to use for nefarious purposes by the very people who decry it. (And the depressing compliance of many who should know better.) It’s diabolical.
On the other hand, there is a lot of attention and thought being put into this these days so perhaps we’ll find a way out of the morass eventually. I’m particularly looking forward to Chris Hayes’s forthcoming book on the subject: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. (Available for pre-order at the link, if you’re so inclined.)
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