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I’ll start with the review of Political Economy which I have edited from its
inception 25 years ago and I was there when the journal was actually started
and we consciously made a decision to call this Political Economy as opposed
to Economics to make clear the link between the journal and the grand
tradition in political economy stretching back to people like Adam Smith, David
Riccardo, John Maynard-Canes and trying to bring this up to date by including
various sort of social issues, political issues, sociological issues, and how
those impact the economy and how those impact people’s lives and one of
the issues that we are very interested in are issues, the macro-economic
economy and high unemployment and why the world economy is not doing
well, and probably one of the best articles that have been published in the
past five or six years was our lead article for 2013 by French economist
Robert Boyar, which was on great recession and why we had a great
recession and what can be done about it, and Boyar was in the grand tradition
of political economy, a great pessimist, which is why the economics is called
the dismal science originally and Boyar was just very pessimistic about how
we might be able to get out of our current economic problems and pessimistic
that standard macro-economic policy would be able to help and he saw our
current problems as really the end of a great epoch in economics and the
problems that he saw were problems that rising inequality, rising debt, rising
power by business forces, particularly forces in finance, which are generating
the rising inequality regulatory capture by firms over the government so that
the government can’t really do what is necessary to improve the economy and
ends fortunately on a slightly positive note, which is vision of a snake eating
its own tail, which is vision of finance sort of destroying itself unless something
is done to reform the power of finance over the rest of the economy.
Well let me just say from the relevance perspective the journal Feminist
Economics was born in part because it seemed like much of economic theory
was completely irrelevant to the lives of most women and children, that it left
out the bulk of their experience by not including work that was done and was
fundamentally economic in nature and was unpaid. So we began early on
with a special issue, particularly looking at unpaid work. The way in which
economic life is essentially moderated much of it through the way women and
men interact with each other in their relationships with each other, which are
not all wonderfully harmonious, I mean as gain theoretic models of the family
would say, because there is actually a lot as we know from the news a lot of
abuse of women in domestic violence is a major problem, so one area in
which Feminist economists has pioneered has been to look at ways in which
women attain financial independence through ownership of property or
independent incomes as made it possible for women to live lives where they
are not beaten every day and I would say that the journal and its parent
association the International Association for Feminist Economics, widely came
into being because many economists, mainstream and non-mainstream were
simply not giving priority to these fundamental questions so many of our
special issues have focused in particular on areas that have been also
similarly neglected and one of those was financial crisis and perhaps you’d
like to say a few words about that?
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Sure, so basically this summer we published a special issue on crisis, on the
economic crisis. That issue sort of, I think reflects the nature of our journal in a
number of ways, obviously it goes beyond the employment and
unemployment crisis that the financial crisis has sort of started, looks into the
labour market effects, differentiated by gender, race, ethnicity and national
origin but beyond that of course the picture would not be complete if we didn’t
pay attention to what goes on inside the household and how these labour
market effect reverberate in terms of the time allocation issues in the house
when one member becomes unemployed and the other takes up more
additional hours at work, so we have articles in this issue that covers a range
of countries China, Canada, Spain, UK, US, Turkey, developing countries as
a group, Latin America region, they address various aspects of this labour
market unpaid poor household relations, they deploy all these methodologies
that are you know more in the purview of mainstream, co integration and
simulations, multi varied progression as well as trend analysis and descriptive
analysis type of methodologies, they also examine the policy responses to the
crisis in various countries, I think you know on the whole you can sort of
derive the message from this issue that the crisis is not at all gender or race
neutral, that these effects that are damaging to wellbeing everywhere will
have feedback effects back on the macro economy, so in other words we kind
of, the issue sort of as a whole shows that we need to be the mainstream as
well as all of us need to be attentive to the unequal impacts because they will
come back and haunt the economy.
Well relevance comes from in the organisational dimension it comes from the
broad editorial board we have from the larger network we have, so if we look
at these people we are reading papers and the authors come in or the special
issue editors come in with all kinds of relevant questions from all over the
world, I mean that is we share that property with our dear colleagues here, but
it is different than it was 5 or 10 years ago. You really get a number of new
questions, papers with new authors and new board members who are diverse
in terms of gender, age, nationality, and global region, so we have Asian,
Iranic, African authors even now a days, so in terms of theoretical perspective
and substantial questions, we are here to do real world economics other than
large parts of the mainstream. I mean it is socio economics; the economy is
social in the sense of the societal process and event. It is inter dependent
among the agents, it is complex, agents are really strongly uncertain, it is
process based, it is open ended, and it is open in terms of a never ending
process, and we cannot talk on any pre-determined equilibrium, or something
like that. Just to give a little example, one of the recent special issues was on
the economic relevance of trust, general trust, what is the level of trust, in an
economy and how relevant is it for the economic performance, we know it is
extremely relevant and what are the mechanisms here that is something that
is traditionally considered non-economic like just among agents, turns out to
be highly economic what is going on here in the deep structure of society and
economy, another special issue recently was on teaching economics, so we
consider how economics should be taught nowadays and in the near future.
Then we mention a little last issue, we have adopted the so called fairness
and transparency policy and we will publish the adopted text in the next issue,
that is something that the mainstream officially has adopted as well, the
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American Economic Association has adopted a nice declaration early 2012,
and many doubt that the mainstream journals really can follow that
demanding approach, we do not have problems with our authors, we do pedal
that flexibility of course not to deter any author, we can really deal with affairs,
policy, a policy where the data and the analysis and the data are given and
stored, at the publisher and basically economic research can be reproduced,
or should be reproducible so we by that we try to introduce and try to
contribute to more transparency and with that more relevance, social
relevance of economic research. Thanks.
So it appears to us that social values and the way in which ethics and
economics, both can conflict and can coincide, of course sometimes mutually
reinforce each other that these things are really in many people’s attention
nowadays, if you look for instance at the way in which the finance and the
finance industry has been discussed, that has become really clear so we had
a special issue on that, what can ethics and also philosophy mean for that in
terms of providing oaths and codes, but we also look at the role of corporate
social responsibility, fair trade, justice, inequality issues, these are all
instances of ethics and economics either being in conflict many coinciding
along each other but without much interaction, or sometimes usually being
reinforcing each other, so I think these things are you know all over the place
and these themes are being published in the issue.
Just like Wilfred was saying I think there is a considerable currency and
relevance to the publications that were in the review of social economy, there
is considerable relevance concerning teaching materials and Wilfred talked
about a corporate social responsibility, obviously social economists have a lot
to say about corporate social responsibility, indeed the journal has fairly
recently launched a speakers corner where we invite our, invite submissions,
or people are free to submit on a contemporary issue their views and a fairly
short piece that goes through the review process, a recent example of this
would be a discussion of fair trade, where there was one of the authors spoke
about the real issues that concern the promotion of free trade vis a vie fair
trade, also I think there are considerable issues that social economists are
interested in, a couple of examples I think but the saliency of this about how a
society can tolerate the persistence of poverty for example, in the UK the
issue of food banks has reached the political classes, politicians like to be
photographed next to food banks, which is worthy of comment in its own right
that use, the provision of food banks has increased by 1200 per cent in the
last three and a half years, now that for me is a profound ethical and
economic issue, indeed another item relating to Wilfred and I having lunch
today, in downtown Philadelphia in a shopping mall, we were approached by
someone who was clearly impoverished, not begging for money but begging
for food and this is downtown Philadelphia, now can an economic system in
the wealthiest country in the world tolerate this, this persistence of grinding
poverty and I think the relevance of the review in Social Economy is that its
focal point just to reiterate what’s been said and I think its complements what
other editors have been saying is that we investigate, we wish to interrogate
the relationship between ethics and economics, something that seems at the
moment at least to be beyond the mainstream.
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I think we are the only journal that does that, so in that respect we are quite
unique.
Good for that
Well we are a specific focus maybe that is something to add as well.
Well I would simply say that ethic is sort of like a big kind of philosophical
concept, its actually very much part of the human capabilities approach, which
is an approach oriented towards, what does it take to live a life of humanity
and that is very much the rubric under which feminist economics has been
moving forward and the idea that it is impossible to tolerate people being
abused in their homes, people being treated unequally, there is a focus on
poverty is in some sense many feminist economists sort of agree with the
idea that, what is money, it’s a means to an end, what people want is to live a
life where they are able to live a life of dignity and respect where they are able
to have an equal shake in the world, this is a fundamental ethical issue and so
it’s you know what language you use to kind of talk about this is different
journals may you know focus specifically on different types of issues but also
thinking about the interception between race and gender for example, how do
people get poor in this world, in the US it primarily often has to do with lack of,
bad health can then leave you penniless and so thinking about how social
safety nets work is absolutely fundamental towards trying to make it possible
for all people to be able to retain their full potential in life and so I guess I
don’t, I would say that feminist economics at least very much considers itself a
journal that moves forwards thinking about what do we need to have an
ethical…
I think we all are saying in a sense the same thing, that there are lots of
problems out there, that mainstream neo classical economics doesn’t deal
with all of them and doesn’t deal with them well and I think all of the journals
are just taking a different angle or approach into the set of problems right,
some journals focusing in on race, gender issues, other journals focusing in
on ethical issues, other journals focusing in on behavioural issues, but really
we are all part of the same team and we are all part of the same approach
which is an approach about really trying to understand the problems we are all
facing now in order to make the world better.
I agree.
I think it’s more an issue of relative emphasis that we place
Well I don’t entirely agree because I think it’s not like just saying one person
is an Episcopalian and the other is a Presbyterian, but I do think that really
thinking about what the priorities are in different journals matters, in terms of
thinking about what does one see as the fundamental obstacles towards
greater equality, in the world and you know where are people everywhere
disproportionately left behind and one of the aspects of this actually is known
to be true is that in our societies women disproportionately in societies around
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the world are the poorest of the poor, so one cares about poverty, but sort of
doesn’t perhaps have sessions with no women, or has articles, special issues
where there are no women authors or no emphasis on gender which I am not
saying that you do, because I know the other associations definitely do pay
some attention to gender, but I think that its more than just different angles, its
fundamental that there are some differences in terms of priorities that we you
know have our different approaches to, which we all care passionately about.
Yes, but also all heterodox and heterolystic journals share the same church,
that is the church by the mainstream, the mainstream cites only itself it is
cumulative, autistic in some sense, it is obvious, it is obvious by the data that
the mainstream ignores alternative approaches, it ignores largely research
relevant research given in our journals, we do cite the mainstream because
we really interact with the mainstream and try to criticise and improve, they
know only their own journals, don’t cite us, so if we look at the big challenge
that we all face that is the challenge of ranking, so the usual rankings of
journals is something that is a self-referential system of the mainstream and
they cite each other and rank each other high, in that sense and we have to
find a common strategy towards that otherwise all the academic recruitment
processes in all universities and all departments will more and more focus on
just publication in the leading mainstream journals, that is a common
challenge we have to force, that forces us we do want to collaborate anyway
and this is another motivation here, as I see it to consider common strategies.
Journals of the world unite.
Yes and I think the advantage that we have is we are focusing on relevant
issues that people care about and again I think we are taking different
approaches and different focal points, but just because somebody doesn’t
take the same focal point that Feminist Economics takes or Social Economics
takes, doesn’t mean that there is not a whole lot of overlap.
Yes, I think you are right and I’d also, I wouldn’t argue necessarily in terms of
overlap but emphasis complementarities, so for example just based on the
discuss that you had in terms of somebody, an author with their view of social
economy for example may wish to emphasis a particular ethical approach to,
for example the toleration of the persistence of poverty in society and that
may well relegate, not a, may well relegate but not entirely ignore the
important issue of gender, and of course it may at the same time by doing so,
emphasise social class and or race and of course these are issues that are
perennial and always I would say in the future will always be of some
resonance.
Take Robert’s excellent point about complimentary further we need to have
more discussions among journal editors and different organisations about the
complementarity and about sort of what we have to offer that neo classical
economics doesn’t have to offer.
So we are actually trying very hard not to preach to the choir and to have an
influence on the mainstream and we have been undertaking a number of
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initiatives to try to keep that focus, so what we have tried to consciously do
has been to interest scholars and particularly people in positions of policy to
pay attention to the research that we are publishing and so by paying a lot of
attention to the wording of the article, so we just have a very labour intensive
in house style editing of manuscripts particularly by non-native English
speakers to try to make articles more readable, so when people pick them up,
they are just find them less heavy going to go through, then in addition to that
another initiative which we call feminist economics research notes, Ferns, in
which we try to give a short 1 page synopsis of articles that are particularly
oriented towards policy relevance with the idea that these could be used and
read and easily understood by under graduates, by non-economists, with the
goal of these ideas being taken up by people in positions to change policies
and through that route we hope that they will also become read more the
papers will be read more by people in the mainstream, because when policy
makers for example start implementing the policy then as part of the
economic world out there, they need to respond to it, so that is what a lot of
the things that we are doing to try to, plus tweeting, the results of our articles,
we are working on that, and so that I think that it’s very important to try to
develop as many strategies as possible to actually have the research turned
into action.
I think that is a very, very important point, in terms of learning those strategies
in terms of outreach, because what you have just described has some
resonance with what we have endeavoured to do in review in social in terms
of speakers corner in terms of policy relevance, if they look at bite size easy to
digest arguments and analytical pieces, its similar, and I also think we try to
engage in terms of the review of social economy I know Wilfred in particular
and myself we engage in a considerable amount of coaching, especially the
younger scholars,
That is what we share, the commonality in that we care for young scholars,
and we have, you have I know that, and I assume you indicated that as well,
we have a clear young scholar policy where the young scholars with their, at
the beginning of their career with perhaps their first journal paper, get extra
advice and coaching, so that their papers in the end are really double blind
reviewed and they can’t really show it and go back to read on that, because in
the end it will be a full-fledged full valued double review paper, academic
publication in the back we have invested more time and help the young
scholars doing that, performing.
Basically in doing so I think we don’t necessarily want to emphasis towards
our readership that you know radiate negative energies, we are different from
the others, they don’t do that, they do a good job we do a good job, we want
to make our authors a clear case of what they contribute, so what they
contribute in addition to what is already known, and I think when you are able
to do that, you are also able to do, it’s better tweeting and be able to better
indicate what’s the contribution we make in the original or other journals. That
is of course; ultimately I think what will persuade policy makers and what will
persuade fellow economists, also in if you want to call it that, the mainstream.
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We have also a sort of number of mentoring strategies and we have a bit of a
more international focus in terms of who we want to mentor we want to
broaden the reach of the published articles, and the scholars, young scholars
from developing countries, in transitioning countries, so one is at the journal
submission stage where we give extensive feedback without kind of going
through the peer process, peer review process and then another one is at our
annual conference to pair young scholars with senior scholars so that they get
detailed feedback on their papers, and submit it in better shape, and we are
working on developing a bigger project that involves more in-depth mentoring
at the sort of stage, was our current plan, we haven’t yet implemented it but to
have regional developing countries around the world have regional training
workshops where we can bring people subsequently to our annual conference
and develop networks of people who have themes paired with a mentor, the
idea being fundament to our systemology, which is that knowledge is going to
be accountable to more people, around the world, needs to actually include
the contributions of those people and their insights and ideas, which might
even challenge the conceptions that we currently have and if we really want to
produce economic knowledge that improves the lives of all people we need to
improve every conversation and so we are actively trying to figure out how to
kind of open the gates to that.
That is what good editors do. Anybody have anything else to add? No,
thank you all.
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