On this week’s episode of the Governance Podcast, our Director Mark Pennington interviews Dr. Danielle Guizzo from University of Bristol. This episode is titled “Cultures of Expertise in Economics”. This episode explores the way in which the discipline of Economics has evolved over the years, the way economists achieved their status as scientific experts, and how pluralism and diversity may be promoted within the wider discipline.
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The Guest
Dr. Danielle Guizzo is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Bristol. Her research expertise is on the History of Economics, Political Economy and Economics Education. She is currently working on topics such as the intellectual communities in economics and the sociology of the economics discipline, educational policy and economics education, the history of policymaking and economic expertise, and diversity and decolonisation in economics.
She is also a co-founder and steering group member of of D-Econ (Diversifying and Decolonising Economics), and an affiliate researcher at Autonomy.
Transcript
Mark Pennington
Welcome to the Governance Podcast here at the Centre of the Study of Governance and Society at King’s College London. My name is Mark Pennington, I’m the Director of the centre. Here at the centre, we’re currently working on a project titled The Political Economy of Knowledge and Ignorance. One of the objectives of that project is to explore the relationship between claims of knowledge and scientific authority in the social sciences, and the exercise of power. We’re concerned to explore the epistemic basis of the truth claims made in fields such as economics and political economy, and how these interact with the exercise of political authority. I’m delighted to have with us today, Dr. Danielle Guizzo. Danielle is a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Bristol, and has been working on some of these issues in a recent project on Rebuilding Macroeconomics. Danielle, it’s great to have you with us here today.
Danielle Guizzo
Thank you very much, Mark. It’s a pleasure to be here today.
Mark Pennington
Okay, so I wonder if we could start the conversation with you telling us a little bit about this Rebuilding Macroeconomics project? What’s the project about and what inspired this project?
Danielle Guizzo
Of course, so Rebuilding Macroeconomics is this research initiative that was founded in 2017. And it is funded by the UK ESRC, the Economic and Social Research Council. Rebuilding Macroeconomics is an umbrella research group that fosters a range of projects that are related to the study of Macroeconomics. And this also includes how Macroeconomics can become a more socially relevant discipline and offer better tools to understand economic and social issues.
So to give you some context, Macrooeconomics is, I would say, one of, if not the most traditional and hardcore and prestigious field within Economics, and macro is known to be the field that better offers the link between economic theory analysis and the policy relevant – so the policy advice side of things. So many of us, when we think about this image of the economist, we will think normally, of a man in a suit offering neutral and practical government advice about things like monetary policy, the government’s budget, how to control inflation, etc. And this is quite a traditional, old fashioned stereotype that was shaped since the 1940s about how economists look like. And this has really stuck into the public, the public imagery of what an economist is. And I would say that this imagery is also connected to Macroeconomics. So really, it has been shaped by what macroeconomists do.
So in the research project that I have led with rebuilding Macroeconomics, we try to understand what is behind the cultures of expertise that exist in Macroeconomics, and how this knowledge or the research created by Macro is created, valued, and how Macroeconomists do this and what is considered to be good research and how this happens. So we try to analyse if Macroeconomics has been narrowed down by the existing structures that we have within higher education, so we have a primary focus on the UK. But this can be extended to other contexts as well. And this includes current research evaluation systems, broader academic practices, which include things we call the publish or perish culture. And what our results have shown is that these cultures of expertise that we seek in Macroeconomics, they can be quite performative. So they really shape knowledge production in the case of Macroeconomics, and from the point of view of the sociology of science and the broader political economy of knowledge, I would say, this is quite important because they create truths and they create forms of conduct of what an academic should do, and how they should perform to enter and remain within that field.
So within what, I would say, some academic archaeologists would call the academic tribe. So how they entered the group and how they remained that way, we could say that this will lead into certain practices, so symbols of prestige, the cultures of expertise, what is considered to be a good academic etc. So broadly, we can say that there are intellectual forms of conduct or intellectual governmentalities one can say, that are going to create a set of rules of what one should or should not do to succeed and become an expert in that field. So in the case of Macroeconomics.
Mark Pennington
It sounds as though you’re actually looking at the field of Macroeconomics as a kind of root and branch sense that you’re, you’re looking at the role it plays in the sort of policy world, the sort of expertise that it’s perceived to have in that domain. But you’re also looking at it internally, in terms of the way that expertise is defined within the discipline, sort of who speaks within the discipline and the way that they speak about economic questions and macroeconomic questions in particular, is that right?
Danielle Guizzo
That’s correct. So I would like to read Macroeconomics as a broad field. So I said in the beginning, while Macroeconomics is probably one of the most hardcore and prestigious fields within Economics, because it is that field that really offers, it transcends from the economic theory, hardcore analysis, but it offers the policy relevance. So I would say it’s probably one of the fields that is more highly seen within Economics because it offers that bridge that many would like to be there. So to be able to offer the government advice, coming from this very strong academic background. So I would tend to look into Macroeconomics as this quite broad field that would help to shape economic policy. So the big questions that normally macroeconomists look into regarding monetary policy, fiscal policy, economic growth, inflation. So I think it all pertains to this group that we would call Macroeconomics.
Mark Pennington
Well, I think what we have, what we can do, we can later in the conversation perhaps talk about some of these kinds of internal mechanisms about how the field works as a discipline.
But before we get into that, I wonder whether you could say a little bit more about why it is that Economics and Macroeconomics in particular has this sort of aura of expertise around it in the policy domain. So Economics is often seen as a sort of preeminent social science going into the methods it uses. And some people would argue that those methods result in having a sort of privileged position in policy debates and decision making. So you know, economists are often seen almost as physicians, with a role analogous to that of adopters in proposing cures for various economic ills. Do you think that sort of understanding of what economists are and what they do is still very much relevant in the way that people see economics today?
Danielle Guizzo
Absolutely. I think Economics is considered to be a superior social science. I see it within the sciences, and especially within socio social sciences, that there is quite a hierarchy in terms of which fields are considered to be better or more rigorous or more highly ranked. So Economics, not that I would agree with it, but I would see it, as considered by many, to be a superior Social Science, given the scientific rigour that it has, mainly founded in the idea or in quantitative analysis, and its connection to policy relevance, and this ability to solve “the practical issues in our everyday lives”.
So we have, you know, interesting metaphors that come from that. So, Keynes said, Economists are like dentists, you would go to them when you have a practical problem, and they would solve it. Or one of the winners of the Nobel Prize, Esther Duflo said, “Well, let’s think about, again, as the economist as plumbers, so they solve the practical issues.” So I think it’s interesting for us to understand how that status came to be.
So I see this as a combination of three main factors within the history of Economics, and the relationship between, let’s say, the political context of a certain time and also the and how science was evolving at a certain time. And we have to look into what was happening in Economics as a discipline after the Second World War, which I think is really the turning point. So I would actually point out two, three main things, three main factors that would lead to Economics to achieve that status of superior social science.
So the first one is actually the historical context itself. So the context of the Second World War. So if we look into the history of Economics, up until the late 1920s, Economics was quite different as we know today, so Economics was considered to be much more plural. The majority of economists didn’t really use mathematical models, or they didn’t really employ heavy statistical analysis on their research. So the main method that economists used at that time was merely narrative or the interpretive hermeneutic analysis with some reference to mathematics and arithmetic. But it was the science that was much closer to moral Social Philosophy, Political Science, and really aimed to understand broader questions in terms of creation of value distribution, relationships between social classes, how firms and consumers behave, and so on.
So no wonder it was called ‘Political Economy’ before ‘Economics’, then after the interwar period, so after the 1930s, and after the Second World War, we know that this has begun to change. So with the war, this created important public demands from economists. So this helped to shape the discipline as we know it today. Economists, they entered the government to provide things regarding planning, war strategy, how to deal with scarce resources and how we allocate them to immediate needs, how we can forecast production and demand patterns, how we can better account for the government’s spending and revenue how to ensure countries can grow and how we can actually model and forecast that so that it’s there’s an important change on how we perceive economists in the public domain and how governments are going to demand economists. So this really shapes what economists have to do from now on.
The second thing, which I would point out, is about this change in the broader field of science, and what is considered to be good science and what is considered to be scientific rigour. So what happened with the history of science and how this really impacted Economics, so there is a historian of science, Mary Ferner, she says that up until the 1920s, the view of what we call good science meant really to approach something from a compare and contrast perspective. So it was much more plural. So for instance, you would compare in Economics, you could compare interventionism with free trade, point out which are the arguments for one and another, how they are applied in different contexts. And then you would demonstrate why free trade is preferred, in a given context in a certain time and place. And we know that this has changed. So it has changed with the methods that economists began to adopt. So with the increased usage of mathematical language with the increased use of abstract reasoning, this narrative interpretive approach has lost space. So we know that this comes from the view of science that you would think about in terms of quantitative methods, and bringing more mathematics that would offer you better truths are more neutral truths.
So I would say, number one, the context of the war. And number two, this idea of the history of science. And associated with that, my third point, which is also the political context of what happened after the Second World War. So the context that we see happening in the history of economics, in the United States, in the Cold War period, this was really crucial to see how we, how economics has been shaped as we know today. So in the US, there is a period that we known as McCarthyism, so known with Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, which is the period that was really known as this witch hunt, that went against the social sciences and the humanities to try to remove anything that would resemble communist ideology or more left wing forms of thought. And this also has impacted Economics. So we know from histories of historians of Economics of how this took place. So for instance, in the case of Paul Samuelson, one of the most important names that we have in modern Economics, who wrote Foundations of Economics, our first textbook in Economics. So Paul Samuelson has suffered a lot of backlash from the time in the 1950s, to remove passages from his book that would resemble something that would be more socialist or more interventionist. So that political context that period also has shaped economics. So some historians of Economics claim, well, if you think about how Economics is presented, if you present it in a mathematical way, or if you put it in, let’s say, a diagram shown as an equilibrium, like ISLM it, it looks much harmless compared to a discourse. It looks …
Mark Pennington
… it looks more neutral.
Danielle Guizzo
Exactly, it would look much more harmless and much more neutral, much more scientific, compared to, let’s say, a paragraph, a narrative paragraph on how we should intervene on the market, or how we should think about the government controlling prices, for instance. So showing it in a mathematical language helps to really, you know, wash away any ideology from Economics, and this really is what started neutralising economics with core foundational principles that we know that came from neoclassical Economics, which really became the benchmark, so the emphasis on the free market as a form of social organisation emphasising perfect competition and individual rationality became a perfect marriage for the usage of mathematics and mathematical modelling. So I would say that this is where, this is the moment where we would see Economics becoming the science where we would see solving practical issues with this rigorous technical apparatus seen to be as ideology free.
Mark Pennington
And you could see that, I mean, I can see how, as you, you know, you say, I think you’re right in the context of McCarthyism, that was a sort of anti left wing kind of move that took place. But you can also see this focus on technique as sort of being political in the sense that people who, whether people are making arguments for markets or against markets, the issue is really about the style of presentation. So you know, you do have people in the Austrian tradition, for example, who reject the use of statistics and mathematics, who are sort of free marketeers. And their arguments are ruled to be ideological in the same way that certain socialist arguments might have been. So this is actually something that cuts across the political divide where it’s about, if you present your arguments in a mathematical or econometric form, that’s neutral, irrespective of the conclusions that you might arrive at. Whereas if you rely on a narrative explanation, that’s political, and therefore we need to be more suspicious of it?
Danielle Guizzo
Absolutely. I think this really boils down to a more fundamental question that we have in science, which is “what is rigour?”. So can we really wash away ideology? Can we really bring in neutrality? Because this is what we see in Economics? And I know the conversation is only starting, but we’re going to unpack this a bit later. Which is to think “is quantitative analysis more rigorous?” or is it just really a different form of ideology? You’re just really presenting information in a different way? So it’s really the question “why do we think that this narrative, interpretive approach is not rigorous, whereas if you run an econometric model, this is considered to be rigorous?” when we know that you can just torture the data to reveal certain truths that you want?
Mark Pennington
Yeah. Okay, that’s great. So maybe we could say a little bit about. I mean, given, you’re saying very much that Economics still does have this sort of aura of expertise around it. How has that been able to maintain itself? Because we’re only 14 years since the financial crash of 2008. And after that, there was certainly a kind of sense that a lot of people were very dissatisfied with Economics as a field that it hadn’t anticipated the crisis. It seemed to indicate that all these claims to be able to predict or forecast the future were questionable. You know, there was that, I forget the exact quote, but the sort of Queen asking a group of economists, you know “why didn’t you see this coming?” sort of thing, I forget the exact details of it. But there was a sense at that point in time that, you know, we needed to have greater pluralism or a range of different approaches coming in that may be don’t just use forecasting and econometric techniques that look at different ways of thinking about economic problems. But my sense is that that’s pretty much dead, you know, there were two or three years when people were talking about this pluralism, but we’re now pretty well back to where we were before the financial crisis. And that Economics, at least in the policy field very much maintains this prestige and not just economics, that particular techniques that are associated with it.
Danielle Guizzo
I agree completely. It seems that the 2008 momentum, so when the Queen said “how come nobody saw this coming?”, it was that moment of crack. A lot of people thought, Okay, this is it. We’re going to see a paradigm shift. This is one of the moments we’re going to see something changing. But I think that momentum to rethink Economics, or to rethink at least what was wrong with Economics, I think was completely lost, which shows how that imagery and the cultures of expertise that we see in Economics are so strong and so enduring in the discipline. So I think this really challenges much of what we know as this paradigm shift, or what is really this epistemology that we see in Economics. And I wonder if the crisis is enough to cause this paradigm shift or not, and why the foundations of science, or at least the foundations of our discipline managed to survive that moment of crisis.
So I think this really shows how knowledge is important. But it’s nothing without the two holding powers, the power and the truth. So really thinking about a simple coding system, knowledge, power, truth. Of course, we want to understand how knowledge is created and how knowledge is shaped. But we cannot understand this in an isolated way, we have to understand the power relations and how this creates truths. So I think that economists still hold power and prestige within policy circles, with their complex analytical tools and their mantra of policy relevance to shape and understand reality. And they were clearly under pressure and scrutiny from the general public after 2008. No doubt about that. But they’ve really managed to maintain their power structures quite well, at least within the ivory tower. So at least within academia, we know that nothing really has changed.
But actually, they rely on a strategy that I like to call softening the edges. So you try to address some of the issues. So for instance, we know that after 2008, some things may have changed, or they really scratched the surface. So now economists are much more concerned with better communication with the public, some, at least some attempt or some discourse to try to democratise economics a little bit, more data driven analysis, increasing the diversity of economics, and things like that. So it is really softening the edges, but you are going to maintain a certain core within the discipline that is never going to be questioned.
So for instance, I know a lot of economists in the civil service. So I can give the example of the UK, which was recently in an event that I attended, and I was quite surprised to share some information with the economists in the civil service, when they said that they still rely on quite basic neoclassical tools to address policy analysis. So cost benefit analysis, or the benefits cost ratio, the idea that evidence based policy is something that you cannot question. And that’s how you should do it. So we know that it has very serious flaws when we compare, let’s say, use evidence based policy, which came from the biological medical sciences. And then you try to push that and implement that into economics or in social sciences. And we know that can be extremely flawed. But then why is that the case? So it seems that at least the way that I see it, the demand for what economists do, or what the public and the government expects economists to deliver has really not changed. And that, of course, is going to help to maintain those power structures that I was talking about, and it’s going to bring some validity to them. So they are under pressure, they are under scrutiny. You soften the edges, and then nothing really changes.
Mark Pennington
You mentioned Foucault a couple of times. I wonder if we could just follow through on that a little bit. Because I think one of the interesting things about him is that, you know, he has this idea that power isn’t something that’s actually necessarily projected from a centre. So in this case, it’s not just Economists who are sort of embedded in projecting their own power. It’s also in a sense that the discourse of Economics or in this case, Macroeconomics, and the expertise that’s associated with it circulates in the general sort of population, to the point where people themselves sort of demand, the public, if you like, demands the treatments or the expertise that the economists are offering them, in the same way that we might sort of, you know, go to doctors. So it’s not just a sort of top down thing where it comes from the economist, it’s also sort of circulating in the ether as it were. Do you think that’s part of what explains what you just described during the civil service event? Is that just a sort of, you know, path dependency type thing where people have just been thinking in these terms for such a long time, but they can’t really maybe sort of break out of it? Or maybe those things are interconnected?
Danielle Guizzo
I would go with the first one, probably my own bias, which I cannot hide. But I think looking into how science evolves and looking into how Economics has evolved through time, I would say it’s quite surprising to see that we haven’t seen a paradigm shift in quite a long time. So as I’ve mentioned earlier, political economy has been transformed into Economics. So we had a revolution with the rise of Neoclassical Economics, and Economics becoming something more technical, there was a paradigm shift. And this has been quite enduring. And nobody has really managed to break that cycle over the last many decades. So I think it is because we are seeing this, let’s say network of powers, which I agree it’s not top down at all, I think, many of the powers that we see coming from what governments expect economists to do, the public, this imagery of what economists do, and how we sort of perpetuate that. And I think it’s so interesting to kind of bring that full codium framework and to extend it because, you know, Foucault talks a lot about the normal abnormal dichotomy, so everything that conforms and doesn’t conform, we can use that to Economics as well. So economists that think differently, that think outside the box. So you’ve mentioned Austrian economists, for instance. So Austrian economists, they conform thinking about, let’s say, the importance of the market, and the market is a good form of social organisation, but they don’t use econometrics. And they don’t agree with mathematical modelling. And that is considered to be abnormal. So you are, all of a sudden you sit within the fringe, so the margins of the discipline, you’re not within that nice core where …
Mark Pennington
… you’re disciplined by the discipline.
Danielle Guizzo
Exactly! So it’s, I think, here, the difficulty of the framework is quite useful for us to understand what happens within the discipline, and how this network of powers and how it shapes behaviours. So I, I call this, I play a little bit with Foucault’s governmentality concept. And I say, “Well, those are intellectual governmentalities, because they really shape how we have to behave and how we have to conform to certain things. And we just reproduce those patterns, and they are quite productive”. So it’s not the punitive power, we’re actually reproducing those behaviours, and it becomes quite an extensive network.
Mark Pennington
And I think what’s interesting to me about this is also that, as I say, we’ve seen before, the public as well, it seems to me associates expertise today, certainly in the economic field, with people who speak in statistical terms, not necessarily perhaps mathematical terms, because perhaps people wouldn’t understand the mathematics, but they do associate the sort of aura of science with people who present statistics or data in a certain way. And they wouldn’t associate a narrative, for example, in the same way, they wouldn’t consider it to be as rigorous or scientific in the same way. So that’s something that again, is not something just within economics, although it’s policed within economics, it’s also sort of policed by the public, in a sense.
Danielle Guizzo
Absolutely, that policing the truth comes from the public as well, no doubt. And this view, I, I really think about this, when we think about Foucault’s text on what is enlightenment and how we have to rethink this idea of the intellectual, you know, the ivory tower, and how intellectuals may have this ultimate truth. So we are the owners of truth, any questions, everything. So we are seeing maybe a moment of rupture of that. But we still maintain a lot of those structures. So we expect economists to act and to provide information in a certain way, even though that could be an intelligible word nobody really understands, but we expect it to be it, we expect the economists to be very neutral, value free, provide that really rigorous technical government advice, even though we have to make, let’s say, serious compromises. So we saw that during the COVID crisis, you know, when governments were trying to stimulate the economy, and they would say, “Well, we know that we’re going to have to pay back the bill at some point and we’re going to have to make tough decisions and tough choices because that’s what we do”. So that demand for knowledge and what is expected I think is quite interesting, and maybe I don’t have an ultimate answer for that. But I think it shows how complex the problem is and how we have to look into it through different lenses.
Mark Pennington
But I mean, in your own work, you have worked with some quite, what would be considered, I guess, to be heterodox type themes. What is it like, you know, for you in an Economics department to be working with those kinds of more narrative or interpretive, perhaps forms of method in a context where, you know, most of the colleagues probably aren’t, I don’t know, in detail about how your own department operates, but just maybe not talking about your department specifically, but working in the profession generally. How do you experience that? As someone who’s working in one of these, in these more sort of heterodox areas?
Danielle Guizzo
I find it quite challenging. It’s that idea of the normal abnormal dichotomy that I’ve used. I think it fits really well, because I consider myself a non traditional economist. I really like this interplay between Economics, the Social Sciences, and Humanities is almost this sort of PPE analysis, bringing history, trying to understand this interplay between Economics and more of, let’s say, qualitative narrative forms of analysis. And I understand that I am very aware of that, that most, I would say 99% of my colleagues wouldn’t call that Economics, because I don’t do what people expect me to do. So I don’t do quantitative analysis. I don’t do econometric modelling. I don’t offer policy advice in a traditional way. I am not a white man in a suit talking about monetary policy.
The Economics police are going to chase me. So I mean, dissenting thought, we know it exists in all disciplines. Dissenting thought exists, those that do not conform, for some reason exists. But I think in the case of Economics, and bringing back some of the conclusions that we had from the project that I was mentioning, on Macro, the project of rebuilding Macroeconomics, so something that came from from the conclusions is, so the project, we did a large scale survey with economists in general. And then we gathered the answers just from people who identify themselves as the broad fields of Macro. And then we did some interviews with leading macro economists. And something that was really striking for me was that most of these economists were quite open minded. And some of them actually said, well, Economics is quite open minded in terms of topics. So things like disequilibrium or uncertainty, or bounded rationality, complexity, instability, endogenous shocks, most of us would say, “we do acknowledge that”, so that idea that we just do neoclassical analysis doesn’t really exist or is really a minority. But you have to present those concepts in a certain framework to be accepted. So that hierarchy of method and the higher the hierarchy of rigour and what good science should look like, really dominates and really determines what good Economics is and what good Economics is not. So I think that the policing of truth exists in that sense. So the authority to say what is truth in rigour and what is not. And this really disseminates within the cultures of expertise in Economics. So I keep saying cultures of expertise coming from the anthropologists of academia, where they say, well, they’re really tribes where you have the practices and you, you have the certain rituals and symbols of power and prestige. And people want to be part of those clubs, those groups, so they’re going to do whatever it takes to reach a position of power. And that includes accepting how you should do Economics. So you publish in top journals, you have to be associated with top departments, you have to do things in a certain way to be accepted.
Mark Pennington
And this, I mean, you know, critics would say that this has a very constraining effect, because although you say that people would, perhaps accept pluralism in terms of the topics that are covered. They would insist on the same kind of method or form of presentation to discuss the topics, but arguably, that does pose serious limits. So if you take, you know, ideas about radical uncertainty, for example, or the notion that maybe people are predictably unpredictable, that isn’t real. At least something that lends itself to a mathematical explanation. Or even if it does, it’s not clear why you couldn’t be considered to present those ideas rigorously if you didn’t use mathematics. So there seems to be a sort of inherently exclusionary logic about that, that sort of state of affairs if the suggestion is that you have to present things in a certain way that automatically sort of narrows the field of discussion.
Danielle Guizzo
Absolutely, I think, I mean, the way that we think about research questions, so normally, or the, let’s say, the most traditional way of doing research, so we start, maybe look into reality, and then we see an issue. So we see irrationality, we see instability, we see uncertainty, and then we derive research questions from that. And then we think about how we are going to analyse this using a certain method. And what we see in Economics is actually people are expected to use that method. And then you think about the question, so you cannot present research that doesn’t use certain methods. And I agree that that’s going to limit the sorts of questions that you can ask. And that also really limits if you think about, let’s say, quantitative research, so the method could be mathematical modelling, the sort of economic theory, way of presenting ideas or it could be more data driven econometrics. I’m not saying that it’s not, it’s not good, or it’s not helpful. I think it answers many important questions. The problem is when we only use them they’re not going to give us certain answers. Let’s say that qualitative research can give us intentions, discourses, broader power relations, the cultures of expertise that I mentioned, let’s say broader social structures, that is not coming out from an econometric analysis, it will show you a good correlation, it would show certain limitations on the data. But that’s it. So that really limits also our explanatory power of reality. And I think that’s one of the problems that we have in Economics. Are we really trying to understand reality? Or am I really just trying to legitimise a certain discourse of how good the science is?
Mark Pennington
Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting. I wonder if we could stay on the same theme of pluralism, I guess, but move to think about within the Economics discipline itself, I know you’ve done quite a lot of work, or you’ve been involved in attempts to increase diversity, not only in the sense of intellectual diversity, but also, you know, addressing some of the challenges that some people have levied against Economics as a field, but it’s not that welcoming to women, or to people in various ethnic minorities. I know you’re doing some work on decolonization ideas. I wonder if you could say a little bit about whether Economics is plural and diverse in those senses? And if it isn’t, you know, what are the obstacles to making it more so?
Danielle Guizzo
Yeah, so I have been involved in certain initiatives to discuss and try to open up Economics a bit more, both in terms of gender and ethnic diversity. So who’s actually doing Economics, so as to diversify the professional field of Economics, as well as thinking about broader diversity in terms of thought and methods? So I tried to approach diversity as this very umbrella thing. So we want to diversify who’s doing it. But we also want to make it a bit more plural. So we know that Economics is known to perform quite poorly when it comes to diversity. Not many economists know the history of the discipline to understand that this is actually a product of a certain view of what Economics should look like. And it’s also a product of a certain Anglo / US form of thought. So there is a reason why, let’s say we use American textbooks to teach principles of Economics in Latin America, or in Africa or in Southeast Asia. So there is this form of hierarchies of knowledge and how knowledge is created in the Global North. Certain countries in the Global South are going to use that. So this really narrows down the type of questions economists are going to ask. This narrows down the sort of policy solutions that we can offer, and how economists are going to understand reality in a more accurate way. So given how diversity and decolonization really became buzzwords in other disciplines. So we have this broader movement that is existing within the sciences in academia, so stem sciences, I’m pushing towards more diversity in the Humanities, especially in Europe, you have this big debate about decolonizing, history decolonizing, sociology decolonizing, political science. So I think this is also a good opportunity to bring it to the Economics debate and think about our own condition as a science and question the power relations. So the problem, as I see it, is that it mostly can become a tick box exercise. So it can be just implemented from a top down perspective, or diversity only being framed as we’re going to increase the number of women or non white economists, whilst maintaining the boundaries of the field untouched. So we maintain that the knowledge is very limited. We maintain the hierarchy of methods, we maintain a sexist culture, we maintain the male aggressiveness, we maintain, or at least we ignore key diversity issues. So we have to make sure that it’s not just bringing people in, we have to think of diversity or increasing diversity as this wider perspective, I normally use the metaphor of the iceberg. So the fact that we see little diversity is just the tip of the iceberg. So we have to look into actually what’s causing that, why aren’t we seeing more women in Economics? Why aren’t we seeing people of colour in Economics?
So second, diversity and decolonization also can be seen at the expense of a positive or a positivist culture of science and the policing of truth. So in Economics, there’s still quite a lot of significant backlash against that, because opening up for diversity, or bringing the question of colonialism and trying to understand the roots of Economics is seeing at the expense of making Economics less rigorous, less scientific, or it shouldn’t be discussed, or economic economists through them really discuss that. So the core really remains untouched. So the thing I was talking about softening the edges can become an issue. And then diversity, seeking diversity will only be a race to the bottom, really. So my hope is to try to open up the discipline in a broader sense. So we want to bring people in. So there are some, there are many initiatives that talk about, let’s present Economics in a different way, for teenagers. So let’s bring more women to study Economics. Let’s try to reframe the subject in a different way. Let’s try to broaden up some policy questions. Let’s show the public that economists can do more than that. So I hope that those initiatives are going to open up and help us to bring more diversity. But I would emphasise that this has to come with a broadening of topics and methods as well. Otherwise, we are really just, you know, reproducing the same system of ideas. But then whoever is doing it just looks a bit different. But the system of knowledge remains the same.
Mark Pennington
I think that goes back very much to what we were saying previously. I’m slightly uncomfortable with the term decolonization, I personally prefer this idea of pluralism. But I can understand why people want to use the term decolonization in the sense that, you know, they’re not just talking about changing the colour of people who are represented in departments. They’re talking about having pluralism of epistemologies, of ways of looking at problems that don’t just come from one tradition. And if, as you were saying, previously, Economics is quite resistant to that, then, you know, that is a problem, that it’s actually not allowing rival epistemologies to exist, it’s sort of dismissing them as not being scientific. What that agenda is really about is trying to say, well, there are different understandings of what might be science in a sense.
Danielle Guizzo
Absolutely, there is a survey that I saw, which is a survey, I think, from YouGov, relating to the question of decolonization. So it asked people “do you agree or disagree that we should decolonize certain subjects at university level?”, and then most people would say “no”. So the majority, I would say about two thirds of the respondents, said “no”, and then they reframed and rephrased the question. So they said “do you agree that knowledge should present a variety of approaches? Do you think we should open up knowledge?” and then most people would say “yes”, so I agree that the buzzword causes a lot of people to get really anxious and don’t really know what it means or it looks quite ideological. I agree that the bottom of it is actually we need to make it more plural, we have to uncover the histories, we have to uncover the diversity of thought that exists. And that includes showing the power relations or why a certain, why only one approach has become the dominant one. The problem is that when we open that box, people start to question. So maybe some people don’t want that box to be open.
Mark Pennington
Yeah, well, I wonder if we could just, as we move towards the final part of the conversation, you did mention various points, the notion that even now within Economics as it is, there has been some attempt to try to improve the communication of economic ideas to the general public, I wonder if we could explore that in the context of maybe some of the recent or contemporary policy dilemmas that are sort of out there. And whether or not Economics has anything useful to say about them and how that’s being presented. So if we, if we take something like the COVID-19 pandemic that we’ve all been living through, how would you think Economics has done in communicating the relevance of some of its ideas to that particular sort of policy problem? Has it played a role? Has it not played enough of a role? I mean, I guess some people would say, you know that there hasn’t been enough attention on the kind of cost-benefit ways of thinking about the policies. Is that something you’ve got any thoughts on?
Danielle Guizzo
I think that that’s quite a complex issue, because it goes back to what we were talking about on the demand for economists. So what do we expect economists to do? And are they really just providing neutral knowledge? Or do we have ideologies and other relationships of power behind it? But the COVID crisis has really exposed and in the case of the UK, for instance, is that well, expert knowledge would say one thing, when we look at public health advice, well, experts would say one thing, but the government actually would do something else. And then we as the, you know, studying cultures of expertise, and studying the power of intellectuals would say “wait a second, that goes against maybe some of the things that we would normally expect”. So it is quite a complex relationship. And it’s not an ultimate truth that is always going to behave like this or that. But we have different approaches on how we understand this idea of economists communicating to the public and how ideas are picked up by policymakers.
So normally, I would emphasise that we have two dominating approaches when it comes to Economics affecting policy making. So one is the system of supply and demand for economists. So people like Andrew Abbott. So we have economists as this group, they offer expert knowledge, and then the government will come and pick it up. And economists normally are the holders of truth in certain areas. So economists, they have the monopoly of the knowledge, policymakers need some expert advice, they will go pick it up, the economist will say you do x, and then they will just replicate that to the government. We know that that has limitations, because normally it doesn’t function that way.
So another approach talks about the market of ideas. So people like Peter Hall say “well, actually, what we have is, we have many ideas that are floating around, they may be competing, they may be, they may disagree with each other”. So that’s what we see in Economics. So we have so many different points of view for one problem. And what policymakers will do is that they will pick it up. And this may be through a trial and error system. So for instance, what happened in the Great Depression is one example, the oil shocks and stagflation in the 1970s is another example. And maybe we’re seeing something similar with the COVID crisis. So you try one thing it doesn’t work out, then maybe this opens up a chance for picking up some other ideas. So we saw this recently, when, initially, in the UK, the government said “well, we’re not actually going to do much, we’re not going to try to intervene”. But then it became so bad that “oh, actually, let’s bring fiscal policy back, let’s bring interventionism back again”, and the government will actually try to make up for some of the damage caused by the crisis. So there is an important political economy of knowledge behind that process. And really, we have to really understand how this decentralisation of knowledge works. The public demands for what economists do, this public scrutiny is very important. And we also have to think about this interplay between experts as the holders of knowledge, and the interplay with that with political interests. Because we know that really this plays out in a certain way.
So to answer the question, I know that I’m quite going apart. But can economists offer good ideas when it comes to the current challenges that we have? So the climate change energy crisis? COVID? I think economists do. But I think that we are not, we are not offering, let’s say the appropriate conditions for all the solutions that economists can provide, we actually don’t see that. So I think there are many economists doing many good projects and interesting work, using, for instance, mixed methods using complexity, using different forms of models, using narrative analysis, that actually is not known. So we would have to actually make that market of ideas, by bringing Peter Hall’s perspective, again, we actually have to make that market of ideas more democratic to be able to kind of flesh out all the policy options that the manual options that we have to try to tackle these issues.
Mark Pennington
So if you take one example that that sort of comes to mind to me, if you think about climate change, and the idea of a of a carbon tax, I mean that to me, I mean, obviously there are debates within Economics about whether you use carbon taxes or cap and trade rules, or whether you use direct regulation. There are lots of debates about that. But a carbon tax, in principle, you think is something where economists would be able to present to the public the idea that there needs to be a signal sent to people, that we are using too much of something that we’re producing too much something like CO2, and the tax is there to reduce the margin, the amount that people produce. So it isn’t necessarily that we’re going to eliminate all carbon dioxide that’s produced, but we need to remove those sorts of excess elements. Now, you don’t need to have technical mathematics to present that idea to people. But it strikes me that if you just listen to the debates about the way that the public talk about responding to something like a carbon tax, economists have completely failed to communicate this very basic idea. Is that fair?
Danielle Guizzo
I completely agree because I have so much at stake in that case, I think economists in general, do not do a great job in communicating that, because we are not a democratic science, we are not accessible, we are not interesting to most people, we want to hold the dragon, we want to, you know, hold ourselves to the knowledge that we have. And that makes people lose interest. And we don’t do a good job in presenting all the options and trying to show what can happen and why we need a carbon tax, why we need to shape behaviour. So implementing a tax means we’re going to change people’s incentives and behaviours. But the tax, again, is the tip of the iceberg. So we try to shape the immediate behaviour and we try to make people let’s say, you know, walk or cycle to work rather than drive. The problem is that we don’t actually think in the medium and long run, how are you actually going to support this and really change people’s long term behaviour. So for instance, institutional economists, they do a good job in analysing that. But are not necessarily heard by the mainstream, let’s put it that way. They are heard by those that actually want to implement the policy, because that will require a broader structural institutional change to try to change that behaviour in the long run. And then may not be interesting for those that want to implement the political decisions. So it could be just easier to implement a tax, then, in the long run, we see what we do. So it also requires a broader societal change. I know I’m becoming quite fundamental in what I’m saying. But I think it really requires a broader societal change of how we think of policy and how we think of this idea of social betterment, dealing with the climate crisis, dealing with inequalities and things like that.
Mark Pennington
Great. So Danielle, I wonder if we can just finish off by just letting you know what your forthcoming projects are. What are you going to be working on next in the coming months and years? What’s next for you?
Danielle Guizzo
Yeah, so I think this episode really showed what I’m working on at the moment. So I have a few upcoming projects on the history of women in Economics. So I have an ongoing project about Barbara Walton, who helped to shape the welfare state in the UK in the 1950s. So trying to uncover these, I’ve mentioned the abnormal, so the dissenting voices in Economics and how they, how they went through history. But also I have projects coming up on this interplay between the cultures of expertise, knowledge, and what is rigorous good science in Economics. I think this is something that I keep stumbling, every time that I do a project for some reason that question keeps coming back. So it is something that I would like to work on further over the next few upcoming months, this idea of decentralising knowledge because we really have this dual system where we have this quite traditional view of what intellectual looks like, the ivory tower and how experts provide, you know, what a layperson doesn’t know. But we are seeing such an important change in the constitution of knowledge, the moment of post truth social media, people being able to, let’s say, educate themselves or understand certain things without accessing formal education or without hearing the experts. So how is this interplay actually happening for Economics? And how is it going to help us understand policy advice? How is it going to affect, for instance, the future of universities and formal higher education? This is something I’m quite interested in. And I hope to come back and share some news over the next few months.
Mark Pennington
Now that sounds fantastic. So it’s been great to talk to you, Danielle, thank you very much for doing this with us. And I know you’re going to be doing one of our workshops actually, in person at King’s, at the end of May. We’re very much looking forward to that. So thanks once again for talking to me today on the Governance Podcast.
Danielle Guizzo
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Thank you!
