Over at the NYRB (photo by Katherine Cecil):
On March 14–15, 2015, The New York Review of Books Foundation, Fritt Ord, and the Dan David Prize held a conference, “What’s Wrong with the Economy—and with Economics?” at Scandinavia House in New York. We are pleased to present the following video footage of the event.
The Crash of 2007-2008 was an acute crisis of market disequilibrium which has imposed itself upon an economics discipline still giving pride of place to models where market forces nudge economies in the very opposite direction—towards equilibrium. Crises of disequilibrium have occurred with increasing frequency over the past thirty years: with the Latin American debt crises of the 1980s, the American Savings and Loans collapse of the late 1980s, the Scandinavian banking crisis of the early 1990s, the Asian and Russian financial crises of the late 1990s, the American “dot-com” bust of 2000, and the Crash of 2007-2008 itself which has been global in impact.
Yet treating these crises as a series of near-identical events susceptible to economic modelling does not, on the face of it, do justice to the complexity and singularity of the forces which combined to bring them about. Many of these influences seem to have had their origins well beyond the home territory of economics. Doing justice to these outside forces may require a knowledge of ethics, anthropology, contemporary history and politics, public policy, and an understanding of the beliefs, frequently delusional, which seized many of the economic actors before and during the crises.
Among these disciplines it is, unsurprisingly ethics which intrudes questions of value deepest within the territory of economics, and forces a reappraisal of where the discipline stands in the disciplinary continuum between the humanities and the natural sciences. The overwhelming preference of economists themselves is to be as closely aligned as possible with the natural sciences. But with the intrusion of such ethically charged issues as the human fallout from the Crash, and the unrelenting growth of economic inequality in the US and most European countries, the scientific and the normative in economics are becoming increasingly difficult to keep apart.
Disputes between economists which seem to derive from disagreements about data and methodologies may on closer examination be rooted in profound disagreements about values.
Videos of the panels can be found here.