 Welcome to you all on behalf of SOAS. This is a great day, a great celebration for us all. I was also very honoured by the fact that I was asked to say a few words because I thought to myself, well, I'm a literature and a popular culture man, what can I offer? I said to him, he said, well, just a few reminiscences. So I said, ah, OK. So I thought back and thought, ah, yes, I remember undergraduate student, an 18, 19-year-olds, that's me, 1968, being in the bar. And the bar in SOAS used to be front steps and immediately on your left was a little bar. I'd be in the bar and we'd have union meetings. The war in Vietnam was on. And there'd be Fred Halliday, Gordon Gillespie, Andre Mann making wonderful speeches, talking about, you know, the American power and political economy, this and all that and the other. And I listened to all of this and I remember being in the bar after about a couple of months here. And I had this good friend of mine, Peter Delias, he's now a Professor of History at Vitz. And I said, what is this political economy thing? And he paused and he said, there's code. I said, what? He said, it's code. I said, what's it for? He said, it's code for drinking, womanising and singing in the bar. And I said, well, I wouldn't mind a bit of that. Perhaps I'll do a bit of political economy. And as the years went on and I wasn't doing anything to do with the economic department, but in the bar I would occasionally find that there'd be my old friend Peter Eyre, there would be Terry, Terry Byers in the bar occasionally, and we'd have a few drinks together. I even saw, I seem to remember Ruth McVey with a half a glass of lager. I don't think I ever saw Edith Penrose in the bar, but anyway, Michael Haud and others. And as time went on, we used to sing songs in the bar. I used to sing the old Irish Republican song. Terry had a wonderful array of Scottish songs about the clearances as I recollect and working in the shipyards and things like that. I don't remember too much now. I think that Kenneth Walker was practicing his golf swing while we were doing all of this. And I always used to say, of course, that I was doing political economy. And in fact I was reminded the other day my very first publication ever was published in a political economy journal. What happened was I was standing in the bar standing next to Terry and I was telling him about my neighbours. I said, there's a merchant seamen in the flat next door to me and he was on a ship and he was in Trapanie in Sicily and he met this young peasant girl and the two of them come back, they're living in the flat next door to me. And Terry looked at me and he said, have you ever been published? And I said, no. The accent wrong. I said, no. And he told me that he'd got a Sicilian peasant song and he knew of a couple of anthropologists who could write a commentary on it but he needed someone to translate it. So I said, well give it to me. I went back to the flat and I knocked on the door and I went in and with Peen and Neil we sat down and over about a week or two we did a translation. We gave it to Terry and we said, here the best we can do. He sent it off to some anthropologists in somewhere or other and blow me down. They wrote a great commentary on it and it was published and it was in the very first issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies. It's the most tenuous connection to publication I think you can possibly conceive of. But there I was. So I thought to myself I'd claim with pride that moment of intervention. As the years have gone on I've kind of realised that there are all sorts of codes that get used about economics and about political economy and most of them I don't understand at all but one of the ones that keeps coming back to me from time to time is the word heterodox. I've always taken that to mean a broad church view, an embracing of a whole range of different approaches and methodologies and I remember very clearly watching the linguistics department 15 years ago. Implodd as high church theoreticians in linguistics marginalised other colleagues and I saw the damage that that high church activity did to linguistics. It was rather like watching moths around a flame. The bigger the moth the closer you can get to that flame of theory without getting burnt up but at the same time casting other moths into the darkness. Well our particular linguistics moths disappeared off to other flames and left us in a sense with a little bit for a period of time not forever with a bit of a hollow situation. And so I've always heard this word heterodox as used about political economy and the economics department here and hoped and fervently believed that that meant a whole variety of different approaches to economics to political economy. And so I celebrate heterodoxy and look forward to your reflections and the reflections of the panel on where economics at so has been and where it's going and as a distant but fond follower I congratulate you all and I celebrate your achievements and I'll now hand over if I may to Deborah Johnston. Thank you. So I'm Deborah Johnston. I'm based in the economics department here. I'm an ex PhD student from that department and I'm also the associate dean for research and it's with that last hat on that I want to talk and I want to talk about the pedagogic vibrancy of radical economics here at so has. Now before I do that most of you here know me but for those that don't I always start with an apology which is I do have a stammer. Sometimes I will get stuck on words it's late in the evening so bear with me please. Okay so why am I starting this? Talking about teaching, the teaching of radical economics. Well teaching clearly has a vital role in the transmission of ideas and concepts. We know that that transmission doesn't have to happen in this way. Students can buy books and with the online world that we're in at present that's ever easier. That said teaching is important and so has is one of the few places in the UK that offers a coherent grounded programme of teaching in radical economics. In doing that we've asked far more of our students than other economics departments. We asked them to be well versed in different heterodox approaches but we also asked them to fully understand the mainstream economics that they're being critical of. So what is the material evidence of our ability to teach radical economics? I couldn't go back for the last 50 years which is when Terry Byer started at SOAS and he'll probably tell us the data later on in the evening. But I could get data on the figures for students over the last 10 years which is when I started as an academic here at SOAS. If we look in 2001 we had 50 students doing the masters in economics in the economics department in 10 years that figure has doubled. What this means is that we are now one of the largest institutions providing teaching in development economics in the country. We should also highlight the role of political economy teaching in the development studies department and they've done the same thing over a period of 10 years. They've doubled the number of masters students and they currently have just under 300 masters students many of whom take the excellent courses in political economy. So several of these students go on to do PhDs and they're joined by students from other places. So as a consequence our PhD student numbers are very strong. We have a cohort of about 50 PhD students in the economics department and about 60 in the department of development studies. So what do we see? We see that students have voted with their feet. They voted with our feet finding our approaches useful whether they plan a career as a professional economist or as an academic. Now if we consider the number of new practitioners a good indicator of the health of a discipline then there's clear evidence that radical economics is healthy and thriving. So the pedagogic role, this teaching role is important and I want you to think of its importance in a second way and the second way is that it has contributed to the financial viability of both departments of economics and of development studies. Our student income particularly the demand for people wanting to come to do master's courses with us has been vitally important and it helped insulate us from having to look for external funding both from research councils and from other funding donors. Now this has had an important benefit. What it's meant is that so has economists have been able to keep their independence. They've been able to work with people that they choose to and on the terms that they choose. Without this I'd feel that there would likely have been a watering down of the strength of radical economics to keep in line with the demand of various funding bodies. So I'm going to end by talking about the future. Everyone in this room is aware that the future for higher education in the UK isn't clear. We've yet to see how the new government proposals will play out. So we don't know how many students will come to SOAS as undergraduates in the medium term. We aren't clear what the knock-on effects will be on master's level and PhD level teaching. One thing that I am clear about though is that our uniqueness as a place of radical learning can only help us. In a world in which markets have failed and the cost of this failure is a massive shock to the education system, radical economics at SOAS is likely to have greater appeal than ever before. Thank you. Thank you very much, Deborah. That's a fuel for that important contribution. Yes, we do rely hugely on our students and on the teaching that we do here in the department. Can I now introduce one of the leading figures over many, many years of the economics department, one of my predecessors, someone who was there right at the very beginning, Professor Terry Byers. Do you feel good, Nick? Dear, dear, 50 years. I'm put in mind of Jimmy Durante, the American comedian who, at his 80th birthday celebrations, is reported to have said, if I knew when I was going to live this long, I'd have looked after myself. Anyway, here I am. When this event was originally conceived by John Weeks, it was, as I recall, three or four or five months ago, a book launch of books by radical economists in the Department of Economics. Hence the economistic bent of the proceedings. These books are being published at roughly the same time, as I understand. Maybe he'll tell us what they were when he comes to speak. By the way, despite what the publicity for this event says, there is no department of political economy in the school yet. Maybe there will be one day with the Department of Economics to help in studies. John, realising that economics had been introduced in so as 50 years ago, that I had been a part of that, a minor part of that, and had far later been head of the Department of Economics, asked me to come and say something about the history of the department. I agreed. But then the event kind of metamorphosed into something broader. When I got the programme, I saw a celebration of 50 years of political economy. It's so us. That celebration, as the blurb says, is of a nearer of radical economics. It's so us. It's economics that we are celebrating. I'm also building out today something about the political economy of a gradient change. Before doing that, let me make some clarificatory observations or contextualising observations which include a little of the relevant history. From the blurb and from the identity of those sitting on the panel, political economy is obviously seen here as a radical economics. There is, of course, a branch of neoclassical economics that sees itself as a political economy. That's not our concern here, as I'm sure you will understand. Now, the blurb is, I think, accurate when it says that the Department of Economics has contained, quote, an internationally renowned group of radical economists, that's for sure, and that their presence has brought an era that has been productive and intellectually exciting. The names on the programme are testament to that with people sitting on the platform. But I think these names don't exhaust the reality. There are others from the distant past that we need to remember and mention, such as Bill Warren and Bipllab Dasgupta. More recently, Lawrence Harris joined the Department in 1990, when he did that, he was a serious political economist at that time. John Sender, now retired, has done and is still doing important work, he needs to be mentioned. And currently, one must mention other members of the department who are part of the political economy tradition. Moustak Khan, Massoud Karshenas, Graham Dyer, and Hassan Akimian. I see Hassan sitting there. So we need to widen the scope of what we're talking about. Then another point I would like to make is that political economy in its radical and often Marxist manifestations cannot be confined to economics. I want to make it to stress that point. That is true as a general proposition and it's certainly true in the context of SUAS. And I would want to certainly stress that the Department of Development Studies contains a large and distinguished group of political economists. And I was going to mention the names, but let me just mention Jens Lerke, Alfredo Saadfilo, Chris Cremor, Carlos Oya, Peter Mollinga, Subir Sinna, Naila Cwbir, Gilber Ashka. Two of those, Carlos Oya and Alfredo Saadfilo are economists and could as well be in the Department of Economics as in the Department of Development Studies. So political economy has a wide reach that I would like to stress. I would next point out that the notion of, there's one name I forgot to mention in that, Lord West, Henry Bernstein. Now why did I forget that, I wonder? My close friend Henry. Anyway, I've mentioned him now. I would next point out that the notion of 50 years of political economy at SUAS conceals in fact the very precarious nature of radical economics for at least 25 of those 50 years. So it's not an unbroken, wonderful vista of radical economics developing smoothly and so on. It was very precarious for at least half of that time. A little bit of history. The social sciences emerged formally in fact in 1961 when the governing body of the school instituted a Department of Economic and Political Studies. It then was with effect in 1962 when I joined as a young research fellow. And they also renamed the Department of Cultural Anthropology as the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. That was their attempt to bring in the social sciences. Now Department of Economic and Political Studies, that's the department that I joined. Now one might ask why a Department of Economic and Political Studies was contemplated rather than two separate departments, one of economics and one of politics. Indeed the joint department would remain until 1990. One might think that there was some vision of a special synergy between the two subjects, a scope for an interdisciplinarity that would yield a distinctive kind of political economy appropriate to the study of poor countries. Forget it. Absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the founding of the department. The answer is altogether more mundane. It's rooted not in the possible chemistry that exists between social science disciplines but in the structure of power and so on at the time. The structure of that power that determined the department. What it was was that the then director, C.H. Phillips, calculated that he could get away with one department and one new head of department but not with two departments and two new heads of departments because of the majority power in the heads of department's committee at that time. Head of department's committee actually was the most important committee in the school at that time. Believe it or believe it not. Long time ago that stopped. So he then decided, okay, I'll smuggle this in by creating this department which is called the Department of Economic and Political Studies and he managed to do that by persuading three historians at the school to take up political studies and they constituted the beginning of the politics in the school. Now in the event little or no interdisciplinarity emerged the two sections went their sweet separate ways that very little to do with one another. Eventually largely at my urging I had become I don't know quite why it happened but they made me head of the economic section in 1988 and one of the first things I did was to say look this is ridiculous this department has been around for too long it's got to be separated. It was separated and the Department of Economics actually was founded separately in 1990 and it's from then that we can date the expansion of radical economics and more generally of political economy in Suez. So yes the roots go back to 1962 as I said I was appointed in that year to research fellowship but for many years it was a tiny and often endangered plant whose growth came far later. Bill Warren was appointed in 1963 and Biblab Dasgupta in 66. So there were three economists who were political economists in the Department of Economic Political Studies in the 1960s. Biblab was sacked in 1972 and thereby hangs a tale which I will not pursue. The reasons for his sacking was his Marxism and his activities in the Communist Party of India and so on. So as part of being in school I'm very happy about the existence of political economists at the school at that time. Bibl died in the January of 1978. So there it was, I was left at that time. I was the only one left and had you told me in 1988 that the possibility existed of establishing a strong tradition and a large presence of radical economics and so on I would have laughed uproariously. But history has got a very strange way of operating. Here we are sitting here celebrating just that. I'm not going to go into that but it's an interesting question. Then a development studies programme was instituted in 1991 and the Department of Development Studies in 1996. Okay enough of history. Let me now turn quickly to agrarian change. To the extent that economics had a reputation in political economy at the end of the 1980s it was in two areas. First it was via Bill Warren's controversial writing on imperialism. His book Imperialism, pioneer of capitalism, was published posthumously in 1980. And secondly I think one can say in the political economy of agrarian change. As to the former I would simply note that Bill and I taught an MSc course on imperialism from 1970 until his death. We maintained a close friendship throughout but disagreed very strongly about the impact and the implications of imperialism. That made it a very exciting course incidentally. Out of that Bill's preparation for the course, out of that came his book. Turning to agrarian political economy this now becomes personal and I apologise for that. The peasant seminar organised by myself and Charles Cowan operated so us continuously between 72 and 89 out of it emerged the journal of peasant studies which started in 73 which Charles and I edited. And through these the nature and challenges of agrarian political economy were explored and in them it acquired a particular trajectory. A powerful and exciting agenda had been inherited from the 1960s and we pursued that with some passion both in the seminar and in the journal. So the political economy expansion and economics began in 1990, the agrarian and I'm going to concentrate on the agrarian political economy part of it. With the establishment of the separate department so agrarian political economy began to grow. It was prominent therein. Graham Dyer who was sitting there was appointed just before that in 1989 and his excellent book Class State and Agricultural Productivity in Egypt which is a classic study in agrarian political economy was published in 1997. He's still in the department. In 1991 both John Sender and Massoud Kirshena joined the department. John Sender's book written jointly with Sheila Smith, Poverty, Class and Gender in Rural Africa, a Tanzania NK study had been published in 1990 and he went on to do further important work on rural poverty in Africa among other things. John has now returned from the department but continues to be very active in research along with the political economists in the school, Deborah Johnson, who is sitting on the platform and in the department of development studies, Carlos Oya and Chris Cramer. Massoud, still a member of the Department of Economics, is an econometration as well as a serious political economist. His book Industrialization and Agricultural Surplus, a comparative study of economic development in Asia which is published in 1995 is an accomplished study of what he sees as a misplaced emphasis on the role of agricultural surplus in financing industrialization. Deborah, who is sitting on the platform, joined the department of economics later her work on rural poverty and labour markets, land reform and HIV AIDS proceeds very much within an agrarian political economy framework. As the Journal of Parent Studies was in the 70s, 80s and 90s so now and from 2001 when it was founded the Journal of Agrarian Change is an important focus for work in an agrarian political economy. It was first edited by myself and Henry Bernstein and we handed over the editorship in 2008 to four new editors, three of them at SOAS. One Deborah Johnson is a member of the Department of Economics, two others are in the Department of Development Studies, Ynys Lerche and Carlos Oya and the fourth Chris Kay at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. So the presence of SOAS in the field of agrarian political economy is and continues to be a powerful and influential one, I think, and it is one of which SOAS, I think, can be proud. I better stop this as I've gone on for too long. Others on the panel will tell you about different branches of political economy in the department. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much, Terry, and thank you in particular for those truly heartwarming words about powerful heads of department. I'll pass the discussion now over to a much younger generation of political economists. Not that much younger. No, he's not that much. In the form of Kosta Slapavitz, we'll talk about political economy, the work that he has done, some of the work that he's been doing more recently in the department. I've been asked to talk about finance and capital, but I'll do that to a certain extent. But before I do that, I want to do something else. I want to put across a personal appreciation of Terry in this respect, because you see, believe it or not, if you look at this august panel there of economists, with the exception of Terry, I'm the longest standing member of the economics department. I've been here from the beginning, as it were, from 1990, which is when, as Terry said, really the radical tradition properly starts and expands. So I've seen it from the beginning, and I've seen it take place basically under Terry's leadership. And I want to say something about that, not too much because I'm probably embarrassing, but I firmly believe that the reason why we've succeeded and the reason why we continue to do well is because the department has always followed, whether it understood it or not, three principles that I understood him to insist upon from the beginning. So us will do well, the Department of Political Economics will do well if it does three things. If it focuses on development economics, if it focuses on area specialisation, and if it also focuses on political economy, and if it mixes the three. If it succeeds in mixing the three, then it will do well, and it will distinguish itself in Britain and elsewhere. I think we've always done that, when others in other parts of the country, in other universities have not done that. There were moments when people wanted to transform the Department of Economics into a heterodox political economy alone or some such, none of that would have worked. The reason why it has worked, is because we follow this path, we've always mixed these three elements, and we will continue to do so, I hope, and that comes straight from Terry. The reason why we've succeeded is basically Terry and his vision. The only person I've seen in the Department of Economics in the 21 years have been in it that really had a vision for the future, really understood how we could make a success of this. But I also have a personal appreciation too, because you see I owe my job to Terry, so in some ways I would say that, but more than my job, I've got an even bigger debt of gratitude to Terry, because you see I learned to drink malt whiskey with Terry. Now I challenge anyone to sit down to a glass of malt or a bottle of malt with Terry, and not to fall in love with Mother's Milk, as she used to call it. So that is something that has stayed with me too, although I'm ashamed to admit that my tastes have changed from lagavul into lafroic Terry over the years, but I'm sure you'll sympathise with that. Anyway, I want to say a couple of things now about finance and capital at SARS. Terry has spoken about a great political economy, the tradition that came from the past and has been very successful and evolved during the last couple of decades. Now my own field of work has been on finance over all these years, and I'm glad to report that in the last two decades that have been here, finance has become a strong point of source. That's not just down to me, of course. It's because of a number of other people who have taken up positions and have added their own views and their own work broadly in political economy or in heterodox and radical economics as far as finance is concerned. Now my own more specific aim has always been to develop a take on finance that would be explicitly marxist and that would also treat finance as a field in itself. It's a very rare thing in Anglo-Saxon political economy which tends to treat finance as froth sitting on top of the real sector as it were. It's an underdeveloped area in Anglo-Saxon political economy. Here at source, I've always set the task for myself to work to contribute towards developing political economy finance as a field in itself, as a field that merits study in itself. I think to set an extent together with the work of many others we have succeeded in establishing a particular source outlook. This has also benefited from broader political economy at source because we've learned from development economics in doing that and we've learned from avoiding Eurocentrism in examining finance. Now the proof of the pudding is in eating, of course. I can talk great length about what we've done but where is the test? Well the test has come now actually. The test has come during the last few years and I'm proud to say that source has succeeded in putting across views on the current crisis on finance which are distinctive and which carry a certain amount of weight. We've done that because we've understood the crisis from the beginning of 2007-2008 as a crisis of financialisation, financial capitalism, whichever way you're going to call it and so finance as an integral aspect of the crisis. This isn't the crisis in other words of the real sector where finance sits on top of it. This is a crisis that has finance in it from the beginning. We were clear about that. We argued it and I think this is true. I think it's been borne out by events and it's been borne out by how the thing has unfolded during the last three or four years. We've also argued that in Europe this crisis has taken a particular twist because of money, because of the monetary aspect of things which is of course part of the broader money and traditional source, because of monetary union, because of the creation of this poor man's gold standard basically that keeps Europe in its grip, that has basically trapped the peripheral countries in a state of low competitiveness, low growth, high unemployment, a future that looks pretty bleak if it unfolds in this particular way. So we've been able to do that and I think this type of work certainly carries, has analytical weight, certainly seems to be able to explain a number of important events and phenomena that have emerged the last few years. But of course it isn't only the analytics. Again in the tradition of source we've thought of reaction, policy, response to it. What suggestions made about what can be done about this and their proposals have been emanating from source and from various people at source about controlling finance, confronting the growth of finance by controlling it, public finance, policies across the world that might reduce the pernicious influence of finance and bring some hope of avoiding major catastrophe which is not far off if things continue to unfold the way they unfold them. The same with EMU who've been able to put across proposals that argue that if there is to be a solution to this disaster in Europe then we should think seriously about default, we should think seriously about exit, we should think seriously about radical measures, radical way out that would allow peripheral economies to find their feet and to restructure society and economy as a whole. In this too, the source tradition comes out because the policy proposals to respond to the current crisis in Europe have learned, I believe, from the development experience of Asia, from the development experience of other places that have succeeded in the last few years where finance has been controlled to a certain extent, where capital and finance have been relating to each other differently than they have done in Europe. Of course, once again, we've learned by avoiding Eurocentrism and being prepared to use the lessons of developing countries in terms of their own actions, so the suggestions for audit commissions, the suggestions for auditing the public debt of Europe and in this way, possibly controlling it, comes straight from the experience of developing countries in Latin America. It could only arise, I believe, from Sirus because of what Sirus is and what he has been the last two decades and more. In all these ways, I think, finance and political economy are healthy at Sirus. I think things will get even better. We're having a good crisis, in other words. Things will get even better. And as Neoclassical Economics becomes less and less relevant in terms of what it proposes for the world, I believe that the influence of what we have to say is likely to increase. Thank you. Okay, Costas, thank you very much for those very important words about, I think, the major new addition to the repertoire of the department in the form of the research on financial relations, the finance of developing countries, monetary theory and so on. It's my pleasure now to introduce another leading current figure in the economics department who, again, has been around for quite a while, but obviously not as long as Costas, although I'm surprised. But who was his PhD supervisor? Professor Ben Fine. Yeah, I joined Sirus 20 years ago and saw myself as a newcomer, certainly relative to Terry and also Costas and John. For Terry and John, his first heads of economics and development studies, I think it's very easy for latecomers after me, particularly in development studies, in fact, to forget how much they owe to those who came before. But what I want to dwell on to begin with is why we're here. Why is it we can celebrate? How did we do it? How do we manage to survive, even grow and prosper, despite the overwhelming intolerance of the external world to the economics that we do? Here I want to emphasise two factors over and above what Costas suggested. One is to observe that we have always been, and this is not always healthy, a very close-knit group. Terry, Lawrence, Harris and I were all members of the Central University branch of the Communist Party alongside Robert Browning, immortalised in the Browning version, Ralph Russell, leading Urdu Scholar, and a historian known as Eric Hobsbawrn. John, Lawrence and I had been at Birkbeck together. Costas and Alfreda were PhD students at Birkbeck before coming to SOAS and so on. So we've been a very, very, perhaps to some extent, accidentally a very, very close-knit group. The second factor has been unity of purpose and collective endeavour, almost certainly most vital for continuing viability and survival in a hostile environment, and that's something that we must sustain. One reflection of this, and this is what I've sort of addressing a little bit, has been SOAS's critical work on orthodoxy itself, exposing the limitations, dynamics, and continuing inadequacies of orthodox economics, and that's reflected, for example, in the books that we did in 2001, criticising the post-Washington consensus, and now a new one in 2011, looking at recent developments in world bank research and offering alternatives. As has also been mentioned, there's the incredible role played by the Journal of Peasants Studies and the Journal of Agrarian Change subsequently, as well as the formation of IPI, the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy and RMF Research on Money and Finance, none of which I think everyone would accept could possibly have happened without the input that was put in by SOAS itself. But in my remaining remarks, more for amusement than anything else I think, I want to dwell upon what we are up against, what it is we're up against, and it does appear to be ludicrous, but the ludicrous is very, very powerful, and that is the dominance of economics by the United States, and not just by the United States, but the dominance of the United States by Chicago. Let me, I'm sorry for those who've heard this before, I consulted the website at the University of Chicago in 2010, and there they claim that 25 of the laureates in Nobel laureates in economics have been, have some attachment to Chicago. That's out of a total of 64. By comparison, I had a look at literature where there were three. There were 16 in chemistry, but both of these are over a period of 108 years, rather than 40 years. There was, for peace, just one connection. I don't know if anyone knows who that is. It's Barack Obama. We know that Eleanor Ostrom, although not an economist, was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in economics, although it was an economist who got a Nobel Prize for peace, I think in 1946, who was a woman. Otherwise, 60% of the economists have been of US origin, Nobel Prize winners. Only four laureates by birth or naturalization have come outside the United States or Western Europe. Arthur Lewis, Cantorovic, Amartya Sen, and doesn't really count Robert Mundell. There have obviously been no Nobel Prize winners in economics from Africa. The US-Chicago dominance, though, has now become, and to some extent continues to prevail, has now become so strong that it's outraged, even orthodox, economists of a previous era. One of the world's leading econometricians, Angus Deaton, suggests economics has become like evolution, where what people think is well predicted by their political ideology. It is not fanciful to imagine school boards in Texas legislating against the teaching of Keynesian economics. In Chicago, of course, they don't need the legislation. Let me quote now from Bob Solo, and again, an orthodox neoclassical economist in his evidence before the US House Committee in terms of the macroeconomic thinking and policy over the neoliberal period. He says, an interesting question remains as to why the macroeconomics profession led itself down this particular garden path. What he answers and what he thinks should be done about it is as follows. He says, suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion on cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn to the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. So this is an orthodox economist expressing views about what economics has become. And even Milton Friedman lost patience with the developments in economics so much so that he, although he was to some degree responsible for this, bemoaning that discipline had become an arcane branch of mathematics. Can this change? Well, I want to start with one note of pessimism. Again, I took a Google search for the terms similar to or identical to crisis in economics. I guess how many entries I came up at Google's scholar search. For economics I came up with 115. This was not very long ago, a few months ago. Most of these actually referred back to a dispute of 80 years ago around Schumpeter. By contrast, the similar search for sociology just for purposes of comparison came up with 7,230 entries. So you really have to ask ourselves. No one's blaming the sociologists for the crisis. And yet they are permanently in a position of intellectual crisis and debate themselves. And yet the impact of the crisis on economics itself has led to no response whatsoever. A sort of second point I think to make about economics is the extent particularly in the United States to which it's become subject to vulgar self-interest of academic economists themselves. And I think this is quite unique to the United States. This sort of began with Milton Friedman when he was commissioned to write a paper in support of futures markets in the early 1970s. The first paper was commissioned by a Chicago trader. He was paid $5,000 for this. And it was submitted to Charles Schultz, formerly head of the business school at Chicago. You can see what's going on here. But we leap forward 20 years and we find that Larry Summers, between being chief economist with the US government, with Clinton and Obama, is making tens of millions of dollars out of speaking fees and so on. As head of Harvard itself, one of the reasons not so much publicised for his being sacked, he paid $25 million to USAID as a no-fault compensation for insider trading by Harvard economists who were advising on the Russian privatisation programme under Andrew Schleifer. Andrew Schleifer himself is the leading economist, this case from Harvard, arguing that privatisation is the way to eliminate corruption and rent-seeking. He himself paid $2 million out of his fortune for a no-fault claim compensation to USAID. Well, can this change? Can we change this horrendous situation, even though there doesn't seem to have been much response even in the wake of the crisis? I want to end on one note of optimism. Hope should spring eternal, especially if led by so as I suppose. I want to take you back 178 years to 1833. In that year, Britain passed legislation to abolish slavery in the empire. It passed a factory act to protect children workers. Charles Darwin was sailing in the coastal waters of Latin America two years before visiting the Gallupagos Islands. You're wondering where this is going, aren't you? And Chicago was first recorded and founded as a village of 200 people. The end of slavery, the protection of children, the power of evolution and Chicago are all now taken for granted. In that year of 1833, something else emerged for the first time. A newspaper was founded in the UK. It was called The News of the World. And as we all know, until relatively recently, it was also both taken for granted and the most popular newspaper in the country. Again, as we know, it printed its last edition just like that a few months ago. It was deemed unfit for purpose for reasons with which we are well familiar. But by comparison to those of economics as a discipline and as a practice from that discipline, its crimes are surely minor and it isn't exposing these crimes of economics. It's being entirely unfit for purpose that Sires has played such a major role, even unique collective role, and long may it do so until no longer needed. Hopefully, as abruptly as The News of the World's demise. Thank you. I look forward to the ground opening up when the Chicago Business School is thinking into it. OK. Our next speaker is someone, again, who had a long-time association with the Economics Department, but it was also strongly associated with the Development Studies Department and with research, with the Centre for Development Policy and Research. Indeed, one of the instigators is John Weeks. Thank you. Anyone else who would like to leave before I start, please go ahead. I want to thank Graham for his remarks. I want to thank him for something I think I've never done. Thanks so as for its tolerance of heterodox views for the 20 years I've been here. This institution has some very serious problems, but if you're a student and you have not studied economics anyplace else, and if you're a faculty member and you have not taught anywhere else, you have no idea how fortunate you are. You have no idea the repression that goes on in your run-of-the-mill, mainstream economics department. It is not only the Marxists and the radicals that are marginalised. It is the post-Cainsians that are marginalised. So now in Canada there are hardly any post-Cainsians teaching macroeconomics anymore. There are hardly any in the United States. Our economics has been radical, but it's been more than that. We taught and practiced economics. What the mainstream does is not economics. It's something like alchemy or astrology. You might call it alchonomics. The reason is that it bears no relationship not only to reality, it bears no relationship to solid logic. If you don't believe me, Ben made some quotes. Read Krugman. Read Krugman's column from a couple of weeks ago in which entitled Does Economics Progress? And the answer he comes to is no. And the last line of the article is I wonder if I wasted my time voting my life to this profession. Well I would think for a while he did. But now I'm glad to see he has endorsed the Occupy Wall Street movement. What is wrong then with the mainstream? What have we carried on about all this time? I used to say when I was sort of worried about offending people in the profession that they taught myths in mainstream economics. They don't teach myths. It's been indicated from the self-servingness. They teach lies. That is not too strong a word. Perfect competition is an analog for the world of business that we observe. That is a lie. It's not a myth. It's not something that people believe and they try and you know in a deluded way. It's a lie. People's expenditures reflect a question of choice as they allocate the income among various things which some of which they want more than others and which they can order. That is a lie. Most people in the world struggle day to day to keep going. Their choice is not whether to buy maize or to buy corn. Their choice is trying to buy something. Economics is not about choices. It's about different type of choices and they're all derivative and the biggest lie of all. If you took economics anyplace else, what you would be taught, what is economics? Economics is a study of the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends. Rubbish. It has nothing to do with that. Walk outside. There are 10% of the British labour forces unemployed. Are resources scarce? Of course they aren't scarce. They look scarce to the poor. That's the part of the humanity for whom resources are scarce. But economics is not the study of the allocation of resources among competing ends. It should be. It is the study of how to eliminate unemployment, eliminate poverty, generate a decent rate of balanced growth. And what the other people study is not economics. Unfortunately, it is unfortunate that they have appropriated the word from us. It is as if the astrologers had gained control of astronomy. Or the alchemists had gained control of chemistry. Or the people who ride unicorns were running the surgery for horses. But the biggest lie of them all is the one in the old days when 99.9% of economists were men instead of only 90%. We used to say, or the mainstream would say, free markets, free men. Free markets lead to freedom of a wider sense. Without free markets, you cannot have freedom and democracy. No. From the 1930s, we know where the road to free markets leads. They knew it then, they knew it after World War II. Free markets, unregulated markets, deregulation of the financial sector, we know where that leads. That is the road to fascism. And that road is swept by the mainstream economists and kept clean by them. And the reason we struggle, reason we teach radical economics, reason we teach economics is because we're afraid that if we don't, soon there will appear a sign on the road that says, beyond this point, no return. Thank you. Thanks very much, John. It's my pleasure, my privilege to be the person who has more or less the last word on this, which I can do because I'm the head of department after all. But I want to say just a couple of things specifically about the department that are important for our distinctive role and which remain important for keeping it as a place where there is radical economics where radical economics makes waves and makes vital even the basic, I mean even run-of-the-mill statistical research that we do here. First of all, just to remind people here, the appointment of Edith Penrose in 1961 was the appointment of the first woman professor of economics in the University of London. And that's always been very important in the economics department. We have a proud record of appointing and promoting women economists much, much more so than in other departments of economics. So that's one thing to be born with. We really do care about equal opportunities. The second thing is to something else which we can all come together on, apart from the general concern for radical economics. And that is a view of our sister institution down the road also belonging to the University of London, the London School of Economics. I had tea this afternoon with one of our graduates from this school who had done a very good degree here at SOAS, had got first class honours, went to do her MSc in environmental economics at LSE. And there was discussion in the lecture about climate change, the impact of climate change on the economy and so on. And the lecturer said, well, this is how you model this, you try to model it like this, but there are certain very serious difficulties about all of this, about the impact of climate change on the economy. What was that? The difficulties are that it's impossible to put this into a utility function or into a cost function. I mean, you can't specify it in any particular way. So this former student of mine was rather puzzled about this and went to the tutor and said, well, yes, but you can still talk about environmental change and the impact generally on the economy and the impact on different activities and so on. The tutor said, well, yes, you know this, I know this, but you can't say it in this place. And I think this highlights a very, very important distinction between the economics department here and the economics department and other economics departments. You know, you can say these things here. And I will say also that here at SOAS it leads to interminable arguments. This is a department in which the arguments do go on. But we do, you know, at least people argue here, at least people care enough to argue about the issues. I'm supposed to say a few words about the future of radical economics at SOAS or the future of radical economics generally. I'm, you know, perhaps, I'm actually quite optimistic about this. And that's because it seems to me that it really depends on three factors, three factors in particular. First of all, it depends on students and it's SOAS's ability to attract really first-rate students that I think gives me hope for radical economics in the future because these are students who are quite clearly going out, going to other universities. And like the student with whom I had to tea today are finding that the other, the debates in other departments are impoverished, they are impoverished elsewhere. And we can contribute to those debates. The second, my second point may be rather also fairly obvious and comes out from what was previously said by Costas and Ben and John. And that is that the future radical economics depends on our engagement with current political issues. It's now become a common place of economics that, in fact, people on the right, David Laidler was complaining to me about this. David Laidler, a follower of Milton Friedman, was complaining that, in fact, all the surveys that have been done of economics teaching after the financial crisis, it turns out that no one's actually changing their teaching. No one's actually teaching, changing the ideas that are being put across. No one is changing their theories. If anyone read Robert Lucas' response to a critical article in The Economist about the state of macroeconomics, for that matter, anyone who went to, you know, you were similar in some respects in tone to the remarks of John Eatwell at the LSE on Monday, a Robert Lucas said, well, you know, nothing needs to change. We have the right people. We have the bright people. We have Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve. We have me in Chicago. We see Larry Summers in whatever Larry Summers is. Frederick Mishkin. Yes, I was surprised that Ben didn't mention Frederick Mishkin, because for those of you that have seen inside job will be aware that Frederick Mishkin has a star part in this inside job as the economist who resigned from the Federal Reserve. I think he was Deputy Chairman there. Why? Because he wanted to do consultancy work. What consultancy work did he want to do? Well, he wanted to do a report for the Chamber of Commerce for the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce, where he wrote a report, I think published in July 2008, on the stability of the Icelandic banking system, reassuring everyone that it was all okay. He walked off with close to $360,000 for this report, and weeks later the sky fell in on the Icelandic banking system. Actually, another character that appears, there is someone that Ben, John and I remember very, very well, because he was our head of department at Birkbeck College. I should say again, for those that don't know, I did my master's degree at Birkbeck College, where John Weeks, Ben Fine, Lawrence Harris, Sue Himmell White, Sue was there as well. It was actually a very nice pluralist department. We actually were taught all sorts of points of view, and there were arguments there too. But the head of department was a man called Richard Portas. Richard Portas then went on to become Secretary-General of the Royal Economic Society, wasted no opportunity to denounce heterodox economics as technically inadequate. So he, of course, put his techniques to good use. He too was writing a report in the summer of 2008 for a very large sum of money again on the essential stability of the Icelandic banking system. Unfortunately, Ben is right. This is what mainstream economics has been reduced to. It's mercenary. It takes money for doing this kind of thing. It has no sense of what's happening in the economy and takes no responsibility for it at all. So I said earlier on that the future radical economics depends on students of which we have plenty of outstanding students. It depends on our engagement with current issues. My final point is that it depends on a third factor, which is particularly important. And that is, it depends on our engagement with economic debates and discussions outside SOAS as well. I'm actually absolutely delighted that we have graduates who come from this department that go to the LSE, Warwick, UCL, Oxford, Cambridge, all these other mainstream places. They also go into the Government Economic Service. They go to the UN. They go to the IMF. They go to the World Bank. And you can always tell who they are because they're the ones who are arguing. And believe it or not, they actually like them that way. So do continue arguing about these things. That is the future of radical economics. Thank you very much for coming.