 I'm very happy that Robin Harnell, our guest, is having a speaking tour in Helsinki at the moment here, and today we're going to be talking about many interesting things, not just a couple of words about Robin before we start. The idea today is that I'll be interviewing him on these issues, the current state of these disciplines, and we also like to see a lot of interactive discussions on pretty much anything related to that. But Robin is Professor Emeritus in Economics from Portland State University and American University in Washington, DC, and he had a long career. He says he's now retired and very happy not to participate in the departmental meetings and things like that, so productivity increase is massive. As an economist, he has published dozens of articles in many leading journals in economic theory on issues like business cycles and income distribution, welfare economics in COSES theorem I've noticed. More recently, he has written books on green and ecological economics and more generally on heterodox economics. But as a political economist scholar, he has very broad knowledge of the field as, for example, demonstrated by his book The ABCs of Political Economy published by Blue Topress in 2002. Am I correct? There's a new edition coming right right now. Oh, this is the new one, okay. That's part of the reason I was in London. So this is a new edition. He has been an internationally well-known scholar in political economy since the 1970s, especially for his critiques of Marxist political economy and critical approaches to socialist political economy, especially to issues of learning and calculation. But nowadays, he's probably the best known, probably best known for his work with Michael Albert on an economic model based on democratic deliberation, which is often known as participatory economics. And this is one of the reasons he has been here on our speaking tour and invited by Paragon Finland, which is the participatory economics association in Finland. We thank Paragon for bringing Robin here and great thanks for coming. So on behalf of the Finnish Association for Political Economy Research, you're warmly welcome to Helsinki. Have you enjoyed your speaking tour thus far? It's been a very good trip. There was a week in London and then events here in Helsinki on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, actually. But I do get to go home on Friday, the long flight back to Portland, Oregon. Are you still going to London before that, or did you come from London? No, the flight back goes straight to Iceland. Straight to Iceland. Okay, that's good. Okay, Robin has given many presentations about the participatory economic model during these couple of days. We'll return to that later, but first we're going to talk about other issues we could say more, perhaps, things in connection to the academic disciplines of political economy and economics. Of course, we can't talk about these disciplines without talking about the changes in the actual political economy as we are living, but that's another story. So as my short presentation suggested, Robin has had a very interesting academic position as an economics professor who is actually closely engaged in political economy scholarship. So you must have seen the academic life of this kind of more orthodox and more mathematical, modeling-based kind of economics on the one hand, and on the other hand, you've seen the academic life of very broad, multidisciplinary and heterogeneous field of political economy. So have you found this kind of double life challenging in the U.S. academia? Yeah, I can testify as the personal experience that being a political economist and teaching in an economics department at a research-associated institution over the past 40 years is not easy. It's very problematic in a lot of ways. I can also say that I think that it's more difficult now than it was when I started. I think that within the economics profession in the United States that it is more difficult for somebody who is not towing the mainstream line about how one goes about doing economics, real economics. If you have dissident views, if you are inclined toward any of the tendencies that we now call heterodox economics, I think it's increasingly difficult within the United States to build a career as an academic, more difficult than it was when I started back in the 1970s, and that's terribly unfortunate. But why is that? What do you think are the reasons behind that? Well, just that would require tremendous insight. So I can say something that will illustrate the problem very succinctly, and then maybe offer some ideas for why that might be the case. So one of the reasons that I was on this tour was that we just finished a book together. I finished a book with a colleague, Eric Olin Wright, who's, and Eric is a self declared Marxist who now has spent, whose career has been writing about class and class analysis, and who recently, the last 15 years, has been working on what he calls a real utopian project, which is what I call thinking about alternatives to capitalist and state planned economies. So you could roughly say that he and I do similar things. And Eric just finished a term as the president of the American Sociological Association, which is wonderful. And it mostly tells you something about the state of the sociological profession or association in the United States. The thought that somebody such as I would ever be elected president of the American Economic Association just brings out, I mean, the entire room would be laughing at the notion it would be so ridiculous and impossible to even imagine. The American Economic Association is busy doing the equivalent of exiling Nobel laureates like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Prugman, you know, from being taken seriously, you know, by real economists in the mainstream. So that's the sort of nature of the, that's the nature of the beast. I think if we talk a little bit about the state of non-mainstream macroeconomics and macroeconomic theory, somebody commented to me recently saying, you know, if you talk to somebody who is under the age of 40 who's a macroeconomist who was trained in the United States, you know, in the regular PhD programs, you're literally talking to an idiot, Samant, who is so isolated from sort of basic reality about what causes what to happen, who if you ask them, well, you're a macroeconomist. So what do you make of sort of any sorts of, what do you make of Keynes and any Keynesian insights? The answer is literally well, no, I haven't studied Keynes, but that's because of course we know he was wrong. You know, my own reading of all this and studying of all this, and I'm not a specialist in macroeconomics, I'm a microeconomist, is that Keynes certainly deserved, you know, his title of being the greatest, most important economist of the 20th century. And when you have young practicing macroeconomists who have never read anything by him and just been told by their professors that, well, we don't study that anymore because of course Keynes was wrong, and it tells you a lot about the situation, you know, the nature of the situation we're operating in. In my experience, the mainstream of the profession in the United States has gotten increasingly narrow-minded, has increasingly less of any importance or relevance to tell us other than to sort of preach the virtues of free market capitalism and caution against, you know, any sort of government involvement or regulation for participation in economic activity. And as compared to when I was starting out in the late 60s and the 70s, at that point there was a much greater tolerance for free thinking. There was a much greater tolerance for people thinking outside the box. There was a much greater tolerance for people working in what we're at that point thought of as not exactly, you know, the mainstream research agendas. And that the tolerance has disappeared. And in fact, there's a very active policing process that is designed to protect economics departments from any sort of thinking that is outside the mainstream. But that's been the trend, that's been the experience. I think it's reflected in changes in the real world economy as well. It's very consistent with the kind of changes that the real world economy's been going through. I would also argue that it has a lot to do with academic profession as such in a way. I mean, if you think about journals, I'm not an expert on economics journals, you could say. But still, I mean, you have very kind of, of course, you could say that there are few journals, leading journals that would actually publish very heterodox kind of views. I mean, like, it's so that it would include debates of Marxists, Keynesian, Orthodox, even kind of rational expectations, because on everything from one end of the spectrum to the other. So might that also be, I mean, John Campbell wrote in the 90s that the kind of Orthodox scholars sort of congealed the economics journals. But how about political economy? Do you find that political economy scholars are also sort of narrowing their expertise or has the debate narrowed? How would you say, would that be the same case in that discipline as well? Well, yes. But I want to be careful about this. I think the main problem is that the mainstream of the economics profession has closed itself off to any sort of critical thinking. And they have pursued a path that basically is increasingly less and less insightful in terms of what they actually did. And that therefore, on average for the main, that good economics and useful economics resides more and more outside the mainstream in what we call mostly what we loosely refer to as these heterodox schools. Now that's different from, well if we look at all these heterodox schools and we look at sort of what is going on within them, between them, and what sort of progress they are not making over the past, well in my case it's 40 years. That's a different question. And out of my own views about where it is heterodox economics has sort of grown and flourished in terms of understanding wisdom and sort of advancing knowledge. And where it is that various parts of heterodox economics has also stagnated and really not progressed and not been very productive. So my personal sense is that the mainstream of the profession is stagnated terribly. That on average from economists the place you'll find most creative new knowledge coming is probably from outside. But that doesn't mean in every sort of branch of heterodox economics my own personal view is that it's been sort of progressing in the way we would like to intellectually rather than stagnating perhaps itself. So if I start to comment on that then I will be praising certain schools and praising certain sort of evolutions that have gone on amongst heterodox economists and I'll be quite critical of others which I'm happy to do. Yeah go ahead. How about political economy nowadays in the U.S. as an academic discipline? Where is it going? What is the current where what are the theoretical schools traditions and research topics that are popular nowadays? Okay well let's maybe we should name some schools so we can sort of talk about in that way. Good. I mean one of the schools that's certainly heterodox and has been for a long time in the United States is institutional economics. Vevlam for you all Miradol. And that still exists. There's an association of evolutionary economics in the United States. It's one of the heterodox organizations that's increasingly squeezed out of teaching and mainstream programs. It's been with us for a long time. Marxism, you know Marxist economics is certainly one form of political economy. Ever since the 60s there has in the United States been radical political economy that is not Marxist. So you have radical political economy that is different from Marxist economics. You have Marxist economics. You have evolutionary economics. By the 70s we had an association that promoted and did the feminist economic association. In macroeconomics we have the post Keynesian sort of school of economics has evolved. I don't want to leave anybody out. I'm trying to think oh well yes and of course and here let's just be playing about it. The entire economics profession where terrible Johnny come lately to any sort of environmental awareness whatsoever. And no matter whether you were talking about mainstream or you were talking about the heterodox schools that I've just mentioned there really was no creative thinking you know that was inspired by what environmentalists, environmental sciences were discovering about the important interactions between economies and the national environment. And so of course the school of ecological economics is one of those that you know is one of those heterodox schools. So there's an ecological economics association. There's also the US branch or chapter of the ecological economics association. In the United States the name of Herman Daley would be sort of most closely associated with the origins of ecological economics. I think some of those schools have flourished in lecture. None have flourished in the sense that they have. None have flourished in either of these senses. None has flourished in the sense that they have managed to sort of penetrate departments and sort of build a kind of pluralism of economic research, thinking and teaching for students to both enjoy profit from and in some sense choose from when they see what works best for them and what they feel is the most promising. So none of those heterodox tendencies and I'm really speaking from US experience and I understand that this actually might be quite different in some parts of the world, but certainly true in the United States. So none of us exceeded in that sense. As a matter of fact all have sort of increasingly failed in that sense. And I don't think for the most part that's been our fault. I don't think for the most part that's because intellectually we weren't deserving. I don't think it was because we're worse teachers. As a matter of fact that's one of the problems the mainstream has. We're always the best teachers. So they have to develop a culture where their teaching doesn't really matter in order to make sure that they can keep us from having positions. The other area in which we certainly have not succeeded is in having influence over policies in the real world. And that's probably a more serious problem given the state of the world at this point. I think there's some brilliant post-Keynesian economists who have absolutely wonderful ideas about how the Eurozone can get out of its present predicament. And there is just no political party except for some very new and still small political parties that has at least been arrested and what they have to say. Instead all of the traditional political parties center-left as well as center-right continue to essentially rely upon mainstream economists to be their advisers. And I think this is a great part of the problem. So in any case, on the other hand you could still ask the question and I think this is very important for us to keep asking about our heterodox economics activities. Are we stagnating? Or are we actually sort of learning and progressing and pursuing sort of a course forward that is promising intellectually? And since I'm a heterodox microeconomist I would like to say I think the heterodox macroeconomists have essentially made intellectual progress and in my opinion it's been the most spectacular and the most successful. I think that the trends in structuralist macroeconomics thinking of people like Don Harris what's his first name? Steve Martin? Yeah, Steve Martin. Tom Pallie. Amitabha Dutt. These are people who in the 80s and 90s were sort of building, writing, you know a heterodox approach to macroeconomics that was sometimes called structuralist and then became called post-Keynesian. I think that work has been incredibly good and incredibly promising. When I look back and say, okay, what was the macroeconomics that I studied as a PhD student and I went to what is called a heterodox PhD program but you have to be very careful. A heterodox PhD program I went to was heterodox in the following sense. We had mainstream curriculum, exams and things and courses and we also had what at that point was called political economy and that was called heterodox. So it was a department that was pluralist. It wasn't a department that was heterodox. It was a department that, it was usually one-third, one-third, one-third. We basically had about a third of the faculty in the program that was very, very, very, very solid within the mainstream. And then you had a third of the faculty that was very self-consciously sort of heterodox in one sense or another and there was a curriculum that they taught and designed. And then we had a third of the department who were not in either sort of camp and usually are very empirically oriented but it helps if they're just open-minded people. That always helps. So when I study in that program and I look at the macroeconomics that I study as a PhD student and now I compare it to the macroeconomics theory that good post-Kensians write and teach, I see a tremendous advance. I wish I could say that in heterodox micro, we had advanced as much. I quite frankly think that Marxist economics has stagnated and has really no place to go except die a slow death. I admire a lot of the work that feminist economists have done. They've opened up a whole subject area that the mainstream of the profession just insisted on being blind to much as ecological economists opened up a whole subject area that the mainstream of the profession had insisted far too long of being blind to. Yeah, I mean from the European perspective I would argue that of course economics is not only kind of a more heterodox thing. I mean like we have a lot of more sociologically or macro sociologically informed or inspired political economy here like for example like varieties of capitalism, debates, financialization, debates, all this kind of which kind of have the institutional and ideational basis. They're very strong and perhaps more analytical in the sense there are quite few normative schools I would argue in European political economy in that kind of sense where you start from certain normative perspectives and then start to model basically. So I think we are much more qualitative here in many ways. However, it is also interesting what's going on in heterodox economics. I mean like if we think about for example Kingston University which just launched a heterodox program where we have completely changed their curriculum to a lot of heterodox economists and teach lots of different schools. We just had one lecture a couple of weeks ago here in an event from Kingston University. So I think there might be some differences in that sense. Also in Europe there's the new international student movement which we're calling for more kind of heterogeneous curriculums in economics. So I think there are different things going on in this well... My question is that's why I want to be careful to say I'm really speaking from the US situation. And in the US the just the number of departments that are heterodox even in the sense that there is a few faculty members or a group of faculty members that are known to be not practicing the history of economics. The number of those programs has shrunk. And the ability of anybody doing heterodox work to survive in departments where they're the only person that's not very very firmly within the mainstream discipline. It used to be that in the 70's if you came out of your PhD program wherever it was and you wanted to practice heterodox economics of any time you sort of had two choices. One is you could go and be the token heterodox economist in a department filled with mainstream economists. And the other is that you could find one of five or six departments that at least had a group of economists that were trying to develop something like this. And I personally had the experience of trying both. The first two years that I taught I taught at the University of Maryland College Park. Very, very large department. And not really filled with sort of neoclassical ideologues by any stretch of the imagination. Most of them were just doing strictly empirical work. But on what subjects what subjects were considered legitimate subjects to tackle with your empirical agenda and what subjects were simply not the ones that were going to get you published in the journals that would get you tenure, etc. So they were mainstream in that sense. After two years I realized if I get a chance to actually go and have a career in a department where there are at least a few other people who and partly because otherwise you can't develop a curriculum that actually allows students to see something other than oh, you're going to teach your one class on something that's a little bit different. But all of that has shrunk them in terms of its presence within the profession Now, I should also say but let me say one thing about outside my impression has been that the situation is not so bad outside the United States and also that there's actually forward progress in this regard outside the United States and I am not pessimistic that there cannot be a flourishing of heterodox economics at some point not even that maybe even in our near future because my own reading of the political situation and what's happening and my own reading of just how futile mainstream economics is proving to be that my own belief is if people wake up and stop the actual ravages that are going on on the ground that will also lead to awakening up with regard to what kind of economics is useful and what kind of economics is not useful. So I'm not pessimistic about future possibilities in the near future and I'm vaguely aware that I think that even current trends and tendencies outside the United States are more hopeful than they are still inside the United States. So today is this a lot of at this point in time more heterodox economics goes on outside economics departments in academia in the United States than inside economics departments. I'm frequently asked by students I've had over the past well over the past 40 years you're always asked by students who are deciding to go on to graduate school well do you have advice you know where would you recommend I would look into considering the plot and back 30 years ago I would always say well first of all if you want to go outside the United States you need to talk to somebody else because I'm very unfamiliar I know there's plenty of options outside but I'm not familiar with them I can give you the names of some people who are and that's who should ask. Inside the United States I'm very familiar with all the programs that are not alternative, pluralist or provide some sort of opportunities in the heterodox area and I know a lot about their strengths and weaknesses if you want to study you know if you want to study macro if you want to do anything on macroeconomic policies fiscal if you want to do something in money in banking that actually thinks that Minsky is somebody worth studying will anyone go to the University of Missouri Kansas City Department if you want to study so that was always easy if you go back 30 years ago I could always say here are six departments if you're development oriented you want to go to University of Notre Dame you want to go to University of California Riverside if you want to study feminist economics well this is where Nancy Fulbright is this is where this is where you want to go the last 10 years I haven't been able to tell people that and what I've had to tell them is look I can tell you about these programs they're smaller and some of them have disappeared so there aren't options for you anymore but have you thought about a program where you were an economics major you took classes with me and you were interested in some of this it turns out that it's going to be some other discipline graduate studies program where you might actually discover that's where you can study the things that you will find most interesting and useful and I know for a fact that right now if you go out into the NGO world for instance and you look at NGOs that are working on environmental issues and you look at well who are the sort of young economists working for those organizations most often the people doing good environmental economics work working for those organizations their degree is not a PhD in economics their degree is going to be from some sort of graduate or PhD program and environmental studies so they're also I think partly it's because the economics profession has gotten so narrow and insulated that this stuff has happened that some of the best economics teaching and curriculum has had to drift outside of economics departments into other departments in the social sciences maybe that's a good thing in terms of sort of interdisciplinary cross fertilization maybe it actually is not such a bad idea maybe it intellectually has its positive elements but I think partly it's been out of necessity it's the necessity that it couldn't be inside economics departments it was being literally stamped out there and that's what's forced people to go and sort of geography departments are notorious for this in the United States it's sort of like I almost relabeled them I've never been interested in geography all of a sudden I discovered most of the interesting seminars I wanted to attend were being the ones hosted I just want to call them departments of free thinking which as far as I'm concerned is wonderful yeah I have a PhD in free thinking from Oxford so in that case yeah I mean I think the situation is a bit similar in Finland in the sense that we because we established the association for political economy research a couple of years ago and all the last year and we kind of tried to sort of map political economy scholars in Finland it was amazing there are people doing cultural studies a lot of sociologists a lot of political sciences a couple of geographers of all kinds of things and philosophers but perhaps the most interesting thing is that there are a lot of people at business schools doing what we could call heterodox economics kind of even very this kind of European quality kind of political economy so that is an interesting thing have you seen this happening in the US as well that's interesting academics going to business schools well actually there was one semester at Portland State University where I taught in the business school one of the things you discovered the last five years of my career I was teaching as a full-time visitor and full-time visitors are sort of have to become jacks of all trade what happens is that regular faculty members go on sabbatical or they get a grant or they go on leave and so the visitor is sort of asked to teach the classes that oops we need to cover these classes so I ended up teaching the international trade finance class over in a business it was in the Portland State University business school but it was a program that specializes in the Pacific Rim sort of business school program specializing in the Pacific Rim issues and on hand the typical student that goes to a business school is more likely to have sort of an attitude that says I'm certainly more friendly to the business community than necessarily the average student does on the other hand I have more fun teaching that class than I've had teaching many other classes simply giving them an honest sort of evaluation and appreciation of the pros and cons of the great neoliberal globalization process it was such an eye-opener for most of them that it was a pleasure to behold the experience my own work right now I retired from full-time teaching a year and a half ago and I now spend most of my time in the system science department at Portland State University my own research agenda was one that led me to be very very interested in agent-based simulation modeling and it's the system science department that has embraced this new methodology, technology is something that can be quite insightful in the economics department at Portland State University none of the faculty would do this because it would not be publishable in any journal it would be better for publishing it so in any case so I've been working over there with the chairman of the department of system science and two of the PhD graduate students there doing a simulation project for me I'm interested in is a simulation of a participatory planning process but here's the interesting thing we actually now have a prototype of a simulation procedure that would allow testing for something that no economist has ever been able to test before we have these theorems that prove that if you assume a whole bunch of things about technologies and preferences that certain things can be proved necessarily result that the competitive equilibrium of a market economy would be a parade of optimum under a whole bunch of assumptions and everybody's known for a long time that if those assumptions if you don't make one of those assumptions you can't prove what will really happen you can't be sure that you can prove it would be the result nobody is known if you allow those assumptions to break down for 10% of the enterprises in an industry well maybe 20% the fact that you can't prove the result with that a certain thing would happen doesn't mean it won't happen anyway so the whole idea just how sensitive major conclusions are to assumptions we've had to make to prove results formally you can now test that by simply breaking the assumptions a little bit at a time and see when it is that things actually do start to break down if you can break those assumptions 20% of the time and still 99 times out of 100 when you run the simulation you still get the result that you can prove you will always get when all assumptions are made that's a really interesting thing to know we were totally unable to get funding for this research even though it has applications to absolutely main screen issues that have been sort of sitting there waiting to be solved for um so the the chance of getting funding for something like that by any sort of the standard funders of economic research in the United States is zero as a result some people set up not that long ago most of the George Soros money something called the Institute for New Economic Thinking and the whole point of this is there's a whole bunch of research that was going unfunded by any of the traditional funding sources because it was just too outside the sort of narrow main screen mindset that exists in the US at this point in time so we applied for a grant from them and the first we were too far outside their mindset too so they told us well if you've got the prototype then come back to us and we'll see what happens in the meantime fortunately in London I found a funder for it there's more open minded money outside the United States too which is fortunate for some of us that's right it's actually isn't this the how things are nowadays so you have to first do all the research and then say yes we have this kind of research project and then get funding so you have to do the research first and then apply for funding and the PhD graduate students that have worked on the project and will work on it and we get some more now that we've got some funding it was very interesting what their attitude was so the chairman of the system science department and I are thinking about we've got to apply for grants and we'll apply here and we'll apply there and at some point we'll turn down after applying for one grant we'll just crowdsource this we'll do crowdfunding my reaction to that was okay this is new to me this is all fine but I also felt it's a real shame here is something we should not have to use crowdfunding and crowdsource money for it should clearly be fundable in any sense of the formal funding process ought to work for something like this we shouldn't have to resort to that but they weren't they had no hesitation to feel like well I'm not that worried about it we'll get the money for it we'll just go ahead and crowd source I'm still hoping that's not what we have to do good title for a paper crowdsourcing the public good or something like that okay there's one thing about I mean we're talking about different schools of thought and theoretical traditions you have been quite often called a radical political economist which I think it's a very good description if we take radical literally as going to the roots of issues in a way because for me it seems that you have never been afraid of normative approaches and arguments and you have taken part in very many kinds of theoretical debates in different schools of thought and certainly have been afraid to tackle major issues and challenges like democracy and climate change and all that however I have a feeling that this kind of approach to political economy is becoming quite rare in a sense that academics have become very specialized you don't really comment on debates in various schools of thought and normative approaches I have feeling they are often very limited to critiques instead of more kind of positive forms of normative research like in classical political economy do you think this is true or is this happening in the United States well I think this I mean in all academic disciplines we have become more narrow in terms of our practice there's a general tendency toward increasing specialization on the part of the entire intellectual community I think that's clearly a trend I think that's partly necessary because the amount of knowledge that one has to the amount of knowledge that one has to sort of gather in order to actually proceed further in any particular place is greater than it's been in the past and I think it's I think it's also more difficult without a tremendous investment in time to get up to speed in the areas that weren't your specialty so I think it's true in some sense I think that in some sense I think it's inevitable I think it does make it more difficult to have cross fertilization in our intellectual levers and that that's sort of something to be aware of now in my own particular case I never think of myself as it I never thought of myself as a generalist I think it's because I'm this old I've never researched and written as a macroeconomist heterodox macroeconomist well I guess in the abc's political economy yes but not from a research point of view I've actually been told this by students that I'm a much better instructor when I'm teaching the things I don't do when I'm teaching the things that I do that I'm so deeply involved in it that I have a difficult time being an effective instructor but I've been working at this full time for well over 40 years now and so yes during different decades I was sort of concerned with different areas the environmental area is one that came well careers are sometimes strange I used to teach and write in the field of comparative economic systems and I shared that field with Mika Meurs who also worked in that area and we were the two faculty members of American University that taught the comparative economic systems curriculum and in 1989 early 90s one whole economic system disappeared now when I taught that field I never taught about the Soviet style economies and the Chinese economy I never taught about them in an adulatory way but they were different systems and I very much enjoyed teaching about what I thought of as comparative capitalism not all capitalism are created equal you have sort of Anglo-Saxon neoliberal capitalism American UK style you have social democratic capitalism Scandinavian style and the Germans and the Japanese never went about capitalism in the same way the whole idea that you wouldn't have sort of a tremendous amount of government involvement in economies that were never pretending where you had competitive industries where you have Karitsu and Bismarckian type of cap all of that was wonderful I enjoyed teaching it and it also allowed me to say well and there may even be economies besides the traditional ones that have existed or do exist that might even work better was a natural place for me when I'm thinking about alternatives to any of these that might improve but all of a sudden you couldn't teach that curriculum in comparative economic systems anymore in the 90s so I happily abandoned that and said, Nika if you want to continue to do this and she was doing a lot of research on co-ops in Eastern Europe and the transformations so she didn't mind sort of revising the curriculum in teaching comparative economic systems as the economics of transition to usually U.S. neoliberal capitalism I just couldn't stand it at which point I said okay, we had an unsuccessful higher in environmental economics I'm gonna have to switch over so I'm a generally new environmental awareness department because I just ended up stopping teaching something that I couldn't stand I couldn't stand teaching anymore but my whole area has always been heterodox microeconomic theory and the most serious work I've ever done as an intellectual was first the quiet revolution and welfare theory economics book that came out in the 90s and one of the things retirement has helped me do is I just finished a book on swaffing economic price theory or swaffing micro theory and what I happen to think actually is a more promising way for heterodox micro theory to evolve then Marxism or then in some other frameworks that people have tried I'll make my pitch for it while I'm doing it I can do it quickly I think the Swaffian sort of revolution that took place in the 60s and was gaining some sort of ground in the 70s strategic mistake they were hoping to have a major impact on the mainstream of the profession they were hoping to really change the way microeconomic theory was taught and I think with hindsight they had no chance of doing that the way that mainstream microeconomic theory is taught is far too convenient to the powers to be that they are going to abandon it because of a sort of a theoretical critique that undermines its foundations and I think that was their primary goal the people who came after Swaffer who tried to develop that version of heterodox micro theory as a result they lost a tremendous opportunity I think many who I know in the 60s, 70s and 80s who started out very inspired by Marxism that those of us who were serious economists came to realize that there were some fundamental flaws in the sort of labor theory of value that just we weren't going to be able to progress as long as we stuck in that framework and the Swaffian framework provided a very nice analytical alternative but people interested in Marxism and radical political economists are not really interested in a theory that doesn't have a normative dimension that doesn't address the fundamental issues of whether there is exploitation going on with the things that are happening or unfair and the Swaffian tradition tried I think unwisely with hindsight to try and gain a foothold into the mainstream by remaining very silent on all these subjects and yet I believe when you look at the framework and you look at what it says that the ethical implications just jump out at you if you're willing to formulate them and save them the other thing that the Swaffians never did was they never integrated environmental issues into their framework at all and so one of the things that I was working in working on for decades when I was teaching microeconomics and heterodox microeconomics was curriculum areas that were sort of along these lines and so my recent work is sending out to some journals the pieces of this and I'm happy to say that a manuscript on income distribution and prices with a subtitle producers and parasites you know as under consideration at Harvard Press they'll turn it down but where it's relatively published it'll get out there eventually but I think that when I look at heterodox macro and micro theory I think that heterodox micro theory sort of failed to progress after there was an encouraging start with Swaffian with the Swaffian impulse in the 60s and the 70s and I think on the other hand that heterodox macro theory actually did not fail to progress that the post Keynesian sort of the work in the post Keynesian tradition has been incredibly promising the unfortunate thing in their case is they've been completely politically isolated from any sort of influence over actual policies Yes I mean this actually was a good example of the of your kind of recent research I mean the normative aspects of everything I think the economists tend to be very silent about these things and I mean I have a feeling I don't know if I'm correct but I mean that usually the discussions or academic debates in economics start from kind of perspective of modeling you are already at the level of models in your theoretical reason where you actually start debating issues where when you should go like two or three or four steps back in order to sort of understand the normative approaches you are actually taking or normative positions you are taking in your analysis and of course they are different schools and what we in political economy in Finland we'd be trying to do is kind of to take those couple of steps and find the kind of the take a very pluralistic approach to it maybe what kind of approaches there are nowadays and we're trying to talk about these issues but still I mean like it's another thing to show like okay these are your kind of normative assumption or this is your normative position it's a different thing from actually starting to debate about debate on those things and this is not from economics but from organization studies I had one student once friends told me that yeah I had this very good research topic in one contemporary business kind of phenomenon and she said that okay I'm not sure I would like to kind of human resources management kind of thing but then again I get to a critical management studies perspective take that perspective I was like well what do you want to do with that paper it's like you're kind of normative position from which you start to argue because this is social sciences we always take some normative positions and so on so it was for me it's like are you not even thinking about this thing can you really just pick and choose I mean one day you're a capitalist one day you're a communist next day you're a socialist that's for me it sounds very weird in the sense that how can you do that well I mean there's two things that people notice very quickly about mainstream economics and where it's gone one is that it has become much more magnetized and another is that the refusal to address any normative issues is even more more adamant than ever so on that second issue only efficiency is something that an economist has allowed to comment on I think that's one of the things that is that's not the only goal that's not the only criteria by which we should be judging economic performance equity I think has become far more important than efficiency in terms of looking to see how things are going well from 80 to 2000 anybody writing about you know income distribution and the rising of inequality was it was just a subject that was not discussed and it really took the it took the crisis of 2008 and a movement called Occupy and similar movements elsewhere to just finally break the taboo and say we've got to start talking about inequality we've got to talk about something other than efficiency and the Piketty book is a wonderful example of how the public has forced a discussion that quite frankly the mainstream of the economics profession did everything within its power to avoid postpone, table, taboo it's wonderful that a 685 page book filled with numbers and graphs and tables that cost $39.95 became a best seller, this is totally incredible there was such a vacuum that people wanted to hear somebody talking in depth about something that the mainstream simply refused to talk about on that score the mainstream has really shot itself in the foot and I have my own ideas about why they want to avoid the subject but I think it's become literally unavoidable and hopefully become even more unavoidable on the issue of the mathematicalization I probably have a different sense of this than most of my heterodox colleagues and I'm not quite sure why it is certainly true that you can mathematize the first two years of a Ph.D. curriculum to the point where it's so challenging that nobody actually has time to think about what they're modeling and what they're doing and that is I believe a very dysfunctional use of mathematics obfuscating things beyond what is necessary and essentially devising a curriculum where you have people studying so hard about the techniques they're using and they're going to apply that they literally have practically no time to really consider sort of the major issues that is part of what has happened to the mainstream and I am completely opposed to that kind of mathematician. On the other hand I find mathematical tools and deductive reasoning improving things through mathematical theorems to be one very useful way of making intellectual progress and I think that sometimes some of the schools of heterodox economics have gone overboard in their rejection to be useful in the social sciences. This is aside from statistical mathematical ways of sort of empirically testing propositions that I think there's a general intellectual agreement that better statistical methods and using databases more fruitfully to test hypotheses of any kind is sort of a step forward although on the other hand unless it becomes in somebody who's in the hands of a dishonest statistician you can pretty much prove just about anything so that's to be but that's a real problem of intellectual integrity so for instance the post-autistic sort of reaction against the economic mainstream well I completely supported the reaction again so I completely supported the discuss that this has nothing this is in no way useful to us why should we be forced to study this I think the part of it that was a complete rejection of any sort of formalization and formal modeling I personally disagreed with it I thought that would be a step backwards but the newest revolt seems to take a somewhat different form and I'm much more sympathetic with it which is you've eliminated pluralism in economics you've eliminated pluralism and we need to have some of the heterodox thinking and models back into the curriculum so that we when we are graduate students studying economics we have choices about ways that we can make rather than have you make it for us and say only this is the way you're allowed to go about studying economics so I'm very sympathetic with the sort of newest revolt coming from students in the form that it's taken that's actually another topic I mean like where is political economy going at the moment where is heterodox economics going at the moment where is political economy you've seen these turns all the time in the 70's and 80's there was a big institutionalist turn institutions are important again then the ideational and discursive factors come in in the 90's these are really important in the 2000's we had the ecological approaches the kind of economic sociology of kind of calculated devices and all that kind of new assemblies going on where are we going next I think one of the things we need to realize about ourselves is that we are the hundred flowers we're the hundred flowers that bloom and well and some of them are weeds just because it's new and just because it's different doesn't mean it's better doesn't mean that it's actually going to pan out so part of what you do when you embrace pluralism I think it's good to be aware of what one's doing when one makes a choice and so I will put it this way if you believe that the advantages of pluralism in any intellectual discipline are sufficient so that you want to encourage it will then recognize that that you are also sort of logically accepting the fact that new and innovative thinking isn't necessary there's going to be a high degree of failure if you want to stimulate innovation then that means you should be prepared to accept failure most innovations don't turn out to work things true in intellectual areas but certainly in the economics profession we're way in the wrong direction the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of sort of stamping out any sort of pluralism and thinking that we have a lot more to gain from having these various hitters but I think it's very important just because we're heterodox doesn't mean we're right there's a good way of doing things doesn't mean it's going to necessarily turn out to be a better way so we should be prepared to engage on our own self we should not be afraid to be critical ourselves and say that didn't pan out that really didn't work I'll give you one example my own feeling about ecological economics is that it raised some incredibly important issues and then took some terribly long terms and really has not only little left new to tell us that its origins didn't already bring up but in some ways is sort of insisting on doing things in a way that is demonstrably inferior to some ways that issues are handled in the mainstream what I'm thinking of in particular is I was I was teaching a course in environmental economics and considering textbooks and I thought okay there's a new ecological it's literally called an ecological economics textbook Farley, Daly, Costanza, I think those are three of the authors there may be a couple of others so I picked it up and I'm looking through and I was just a textbook I can use in a ten week course, intermediate course in environmental economics at Portland State University and I got to the chapter on international trade and I was aghast it was wrong it was worse than mainstream trade third and basically it was different all right but it was different dead wrong and I thought well I can't even use this in the class that kind of stuff happens and we just have to be prepared to try and sort of self correct when it does perhaps the next stage will be a kind of a new normative pluralism in a way that you can openly discuss about your theoretical frameworks and their normative foundations the kind of political science there are some trends that you are really talking about the foundations it's like what is the philosophical foundation and you very openly discuss these things so let's hope something like that will happen in political economy as well but of course we never know where it's going to lead after that I don't know in the 70's at least in Finland there was interesting struggles between Marxists and basically everyone else in some departments and that is also an interesting interesting thing because it gave pluralism again very easily give rise to some school of thought that will then try to dominate going forward as not in the beginning you have been a strong advocate of this economic model based on participation of us very economics and I personally think this is a very good example of the kind of positive radical approach I mentioned your discussions usually start with theoretical critiques of orthodox economic thinking and also many other approaches including market socialism and all these things and then you start to provide a kind of a positive contribution or application of that forms an entire economic model can you tell us how did you get there what is the kind of intellectual history of your endeavor in advocating participatory economics a lot of intellectuals are sort of psychological contrarians and I think that would be an apt characteristic for both myself and my partner in this project Michael Albert so that's part of it and in 1983 Alec Nove is a very famous well known very good political economist you might have been aware of he was a leading expert on the Soviet economies not uncritical but he actually studied them and do what they did and it was not just the sort of standard pro-capitalist dismissal of them they're obviously just impossible messes so he had spent 20 or 30 years in his career really studying the Soviet economies very thoroughly in 1983 he wrote a book called the economics of feasible socialism in which he was arguing for a kind of market socialist mixed economy he was very very friendly to the Scandinavian model and simply wanted to take it he would have been very comfortable with the Meibner plan in 75 actually gets enacted and Scandinavian social democracy evolved even further in the direction of market socialism where the enterprises are predominantly employee owned and that was what he was arguing for in the book after the book he said look I have many many friends and I've had them all my life and they're very very well-meaning and they believe that there is an alternative to a market system and authoritarian plan and they're wrong there simply is no alternative to a market economy or an economy and I think that you might want to not think of it as a authoritarian planning but it will be those are the two choices and he was saying this because he said I have well-meaning friends who hesitate to endorse my economics of feasible socialism because they're holding out for something else but it's a myth they're naive it's an impossibility and this is where having a contrarian personality perhaps comes in any time somebody tells me it's impossible I'm not going to take it on faith and in particular the thing he was telling me was impossible was what I thought we socialists had always wanted and this was actually prior to reading a lot about sort of libertarian socialist writings and what socialist were writing about in the 1890s and the you know before the Soviet Union before the essentially planned economies in the Soviet Union when you read what socialist were writing back then they were clearly thinking about something that was not a market economy driven by market forces not a system of sort of centralized planning by a bureaucracy they were thinking about something and now I have somebody telling me that this was this was just a myth and that people need to grow up and get over it and it's become an obstacle to progress so in part to have us sat down to say just because Alec knows says so doesn't make it true let's see if we can and the other thing that was going on was when we started to look at the way that socialist wrote any socialist who said no no I don't mean the Soviet Union and no I'm clearly not talking about just another kind of market system we thought there's a lot of rosy rhetoric here and there's a lot of polyannish sort of wouldn't this world be nice but there are not a lot of concrete answers about in any economy there's a whole bunch of different kinds of decisions that have to get made and at some point there has to be a concrete answer to this kind of decision how exactly do you propose that it be made so this vision that we always thought was perfectly possible and thought was what many socialists had long been about suffered from a lack of any sort of concrete rigorous well here let's say this is how it can be done and then we can sit down and see if it really does look good or not and we can sit down and really see if it is as impossible as somebody like Alcnoe's assurance that was the origins and I guess I'm very pleased that over almost 25 year time period now we've managed to write enough about it so that I'm seldom told this is a theoretical impossibility anymore I'm told it's a practical impossibility because there's no way to get there from the mess we're in and I'm completely sympathetic with that but at least I'm no longer being told that it's simply a theoretical impossibility that an economy could be running this way so that's really where it came from yeah many times I've sort of come across this exactly this kind of argument you don't want a planned economy then I would always say well what do you need firms for then in a way like John Kenneth Galbraith he writes it's always like well these are massive planning machines all the time it's like how can you be so blind to us these kind of basic tenets of capitalist economy and so on so it sounds for me it sounds very kind of yeah I've come across those arguments as well and also I like the idea of a challenge someone says no that is not possible and we don't want this but there's nothing in between it's like how come it's never like that it's the sloppiest argument of all the sloppiest argument is so we don't even have to discuss this third choice that you want me to discuss we rule it out as an impossible that was Margaret Thatcher's goal when she came up with her version of Tina once you sort of say there is no alternative then there is no debate then there is no discussion there's no room for argument so it's kind of the oldest play in the playbook and I think that it is that if intellectuals and academics are very useful in society we should be the ones that don't allow that kind of sloppy thinking to just go unchallenged Excellent and that brings us to my last question do you think that research and political economy and economics change the world and do you think that us as academics should try to change the world and if so then how and perhaps with whom I mean if I can have my way now there's a game out there there's a game that the children are playing it's very dangerous when they play dangerous battles played it too there's a game on the internet where you get to eliminate people you're still doing angry birds here okay I mean if I had my way I think the most useful thing that could happen in terms of economics I would fire every macro professor in every mainstream department in the United States I would rip their tenure away from them and I would give those jobs to a whole bunch of very very productive post-Kinsey and macro economists and then hopefully political parties like the Labor Party and Social Democratic Parties would have no bloody choice but to ask for their economic advice what you do in the greatest recession in five generations and then have no choice but to take their advice you do not cut spending in the worst recession in 80 years you increase spending and if you cut spending you will discover that just what has happened in Portugal Ireland, Greece Spain is going to happen when you cut spending demand goes down when demand goes down production goes down when income goes down tax collections go down and before I came on this trip I looked up the debt to GDP ratios for every one of the pigs in 2007 and 2014 so we just look at debt to GDP ratio what austerity is supposed to be about I mean nobody can deny that it's causing incredible amounts of human suffering and pain, 25% of the planet in Spain going on 3-4 years now that's ugly stuff it's literally tearing countries apart for what purpose because we have a debt problem that we just must do something about even if I accept the debt as a goal that was some importance what has been the actual result the debt to GDP ratio for every pig is over double what it was 7 years ago it just doesn't work there's overwhelming evidence that doesn't work and it's the people who are the tenured professors in the macroeconomics departments all around the world that are telling the politicians that that's what they should be doing that's the socially responsible thing to do that's a socially responsible government would do and they are dead wrong and anybody who understands Keynes 101 knows that's wrong and knows why that the logic that the logic that makes sense for an individual family cannot be transferred to the logic that makes sense for a government if an individual family's income goes down well they have two choices I could continue to spend what I am or I could cut back on my spending and it would be irresponsible not to cut back on spending if your income goes down as a family you can't just keep spending what you were before if a government does that and it's a recession all it's going to do is end up producing its own income that is tax revenues but even more that it reduced its spending and the deficit is going to go up and that's exactly what Keynes said would happen it took a depression and somebody who was a lord as well as a brilliant economist to teach us this lesson 80 years ago and the idiot savants who were macroeconomics who were in charge of the departments all across the mainstream programs in the United States they are teaching just the opposite there advising just the opposite and it's absolutely insane it's terrible now if I could then have one other wish besides firing them and putting the post Keynesians in charge and the post Keynesians also understand how money works they understand how monetary policy works they understand how to use it sensibly and again that will be a huge improvement they then understand that we are regulating the financial industry as well as have sensible monetary policy that will be important because the worst thing to the economy if we leave all the climate change out which is an even bigger crisis I ended up with that but if we leave that out the problem with the economy the big problem with the economy is that you're going back on the session seven years into the Great Depression we had the new deal and we were coming out and now 80 years later the human species has managed to be stupid enough so that seven years into the recession we are going back into recession in Europe come on that's not progress and bad economics has a hell of a lot to do with it the other wish if I could possibly have one more wish absolutely my other wish would be that we would open up the hiring process to creative heterodox micro-economists back in academia as well I think we can come in and do better than the labor theory about if we get the chance I'll stop there thank you many things you could comment but just one thing isn't it very convenient for politicians in a way people are afraid of public debt politicians are afraid of public debt say we have to cut now otherwise the debt will rise when they cut then debt does rise and then you can make more cuts or do whatever you like so I would say this is a kind of a virtuous cycle for politicians who rely on the kind of fear of public debt the reason that the new grand of macro-economists who don't know anything about kings are very useful is their advice is to keep cutting and so you ask why would why would we continue with a policy that is so obviously counterproductive even with the perspective of doing something about the debt I think the answer is very simple there are some people out there that never wanted these programs the programs that are being cut are the ones that some very powerful people never wanted in the first place and they are basically shamelessly using this opportunity to get rid of things that they never wanted to never wanted to have these are programs that primarily benefit people who are not wealthy and the taxes and if there is any system of taxes that is collecting taxes from the wealthy to pay for well then this is something they never wanted to have in the first place and this has been the golden opportunity to get rid of them so I think that's and on the labor side the whole idea of labor labor market flexibility yeah I mean one of the things that's made income distribution and work tolerable are things like unions and agreements and benefit programs and vacations and essentially getting rid of all those protections that people fought for decades to have you know in their work lives that's incredibly convenient if you're an employer so employers find this the program works fine for employers the program works fine for the rich and it's terrible for the rest of us but that's not the point apparently yep here in Finland they're just cutting university funding and research funding and we can't stand for that that's our jobs that's right damn right yeah thank you Robin for this interview we'll open for questions and comments