Challenging orthodoxy: race, racism and the reconfiguration of the economy

There are many books on what’s wrong with the economy ( Chang 2014 ; Keen 2011 ; Nelson 2018 , Mazzucato 2018 , Raworth 2018 , Stanford 2015 ) and what we would have to do to change it. Given the small change we’ve seen in economics training and effective policy economic thinking since the 2007/08 global financial crisis, and in light of the global environmental, inequality and health crises, it should be seen whether these interventions can have some significant impact. Good thing: half of these impactful books were written by economists. Despite this ‘wind of change’ in an overtly male discipline, it is striking that these books still offer a glaring gap: the issues of race and racism (except for brief mentions in Nelson 2018 and Stanford 2015 ). For many people around the world, these are not mere ‘problems’, but an integral part of their daily struggles and experiences in white majority countries. This is part of a differentiated life – a life differentiated so much that it can be filled with unfulfilled potentials, suffering and trauma, physical harm and violence, and premature death at worst. So while we can move forward, based on these interventions and many others (eg Obeng-Odoom 2020 ; Sarr 2019 or here ), to discuss what would have to change in economic thinking (which includes training in economics), politics and praxis to To help achieve a “safe and fair operating space for humanity” ( Raworth 2018 ), the aim of this blog is more firmly linked to the question of how economic thinking would change if race and racism were taken seriously as structural problems. relational?

Challenging Economics: Embracing Race and Racism as Structural Realities

Much of economic thinking happens through economics. Therefore, my entry will often refer to economics as an institutionalized field. That said, the experience of economics is not just rooted in economics. In fact, economists should not have the intellectual monopoly of explaining how the economy works and should work (although many of them, ironically, seem to enjoy that monopoly). That’s why I, as an economic geographer, dare to write this post. Pluralizing economics, economics and economic thinking are separate but still interlinked projects. Some of the following arguments apply to other disciplines as well. However, economics is unique among the social sciences in terms of its sociodemographic homogeneity (at least in Global North countries), prestige, student enrollment, political influence, and partial self-isolation from other disciplines. Therefore, he deserves private scrutiny.

So what would an economy that takes race and racism seriously as structural-relational problems look like? What kind of epistemic and institutional practices would she have to commit to in an effort to effectively engage with these lived realities? A partial answer is already provided by economists who study race and racism in a field called the economics of stratification, not to be confused with the so-called economics of discrimination. which is largely rooted in a neoclassical economic structure. Based on some of the insights from the first, and adding a few more perspectives, we can ask for at least 10 ways to challenge the broader field of economics (ie variants of neoclassical and behavioral economics, but much more than that, like us saw above!) via race and racism.

Reimagining Economics: Acknowledging History and Challenging Colonial Legacies

First, this reconfigured economy must explain history in much deeper ways, beyond the Eurocentric writings of history ( Blaut 1993 ). Economic thought and colonialism are firmly entangled (Sheppard 2005) Colonialism built on racialization projects through which the expropriation and violent domination over colonized and racialized others in the name of white supremacy and the surrender of ‘modernity’ and ‘ progress’ were justified. Many of these legacies live on. Although (at least mainstream) economics is often accused of being ahistorical, it is particularly the omission of relational histories of domination, accumulation and oppression through the establishment of racial hierarchies and other forms that has placed “modern economics” in a particularly bad position to deal with issues of race and racism in structural-historical terms. If they have entered the mainstream, then it is a matter of individual preferences – innate (‘exogenous’) and irrational “tastes” that are eventually eliminated through the market in the interest of a higher common good.

Hirshleifer 1985 ; Fine and Milonakis 2009

Second, connected to this, the economy needs to recognize its own origin story. Certain powerful strands of the economy not only exhibit colonial tendencies and even take pride in them ( Hirshleifer 1985 ; Fine and Milonakis 2009 ), but they are themselves characterized by a “deep coloniality” by which key thinkers in classical and modern economics had (and still has) relations with imperial and colonial projects ( Kellecioglu 2020) This would include accepting that supposedly innocent and taken for granted economic categories such as ‘rationality’, ‘property’, ‘growth’ and ‘efficiency’ have racial histories and racial lives. As this is a legal blog, I would just like to signal the notion of ‘ownership’ and the need to examine how it is historically entangled with racialized hierarchies of property rights, particularly in colonial settler contexts. One can go even further to argue that there is “property interest in Whiteness” – “the right to forbid the violation of established expectations” and the economic, social and political privileges that come with Whiteness ( Harris 1993) What the Tangle ownership and whiteness needs to be thought of together beyond colonial settler contexts is demonstrated by the current state of the COVID vaccine patent, in which private property rights guaranteeing windfall profits for Western pharmaceutical companies seem to be more important than securing access same as vaccines for everyone around the globe. The result of this was a deeply racialized global hierarchy of access to a post-COVID life. In fact, we live in a “colonial global economy” ( Bhambra 2020 ).

Challenging Neutrality and Methodological Individualism in Economics

Third, a reconfigured economy would have to combat the fallacy of being a “positive science” ( Friedman, 1953 ), offering a “neutral” and “objective” view of the economy that operates beyond vested interests and ideology. All knowledge is situated. All knowledge comes not only from somewhere, but also from someone. Some are more listened to than others, not because they are necessarily smarter or better researchers, but because they speak from a position that makes them more likely to be listened to. The fact that race (and gender) does not matter to most economists is not just because of the prevalence of certain modes of thought, but also because they are often white, male and therefore can afford to DO NOT get involved with race/racism or gender for that matter. There is certainly something ‘non-neutral’ and normative about the practice of excluding ‘the other half of the world’ in your involvement with the economy (gender) or the experiences of millions of people around the world when it comes to racial discrimination, and considering those ‘exotic’ topics that break rather than make careers (there have been repeated reports on the internet that younger economists have been told by their ‘self-made’ colleagues that focusing on ‘soft’ issues like gender and race does not would help advance their careers; see also Obeng-Odoom 2020).

Fourth, it needs to transcend methodological individualism and recognize the power-saturated structures and relationships through which economics is made and lived. Reducing society, or the economy, in this case, to an aggregate of independent individuals gathered in a “free” market impedes how racialization informs how we connect, progress, produce, consume, access education and experience life in general ( Komlos 2019 ), including premature death (Gilmore 2007).

Reimagining Economics: Embracing Intersectionality and Pluralistic Methods

While the individual of methodological individualism can be quickly defended by many economists as a generic abstraction that symbolizes us all and which, as a nice side effect, is easily amenable to economic modeling, it is a very particular individual abstraction. In fact, it not only represents the white economic man, but also helps to maintain his position of power (Nelson 2018). In other words, it helps to reproduce a particular “experts rule” ( Mitchell 2002 ) – a rule with a long history. Chéri Samba, an artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo, powerfully captured the racialized dimension of this epistemic condition in his 2001 painting L es économistes à bicyclette .

Fifth, a reconfigured economy would need to bring intersectionality, that is, other categories with which most economists also have problems and, to make matters worse, relate them to each other in the analysis of economic processes, forms and practices! Most notably, this would include class and gender, but also age and other markers of difference such as (disability). At a time when even the World Economic Forum talks about intersectionality (albeit in a reductionist “business case style”), it seems intriguing that most economics programs bypass it.

Sixth, it needs to be pluralistic in methods: race, gender and other social complexities can only be effectively addressed when various methods are accepted as legitimate tools for knowledge production. Mathematical modeling needs to give in in part and in part to be complemented by the ‘real world economics’ that talks to people and also accepts a ‘lowercase n’ as a basis for making claims about economic matters. Of course, large data sets and numerical calculations are also welcome, but they need to be able to address issues of racialized inequalities and be supplemented with other methods where necessary. Mathematics and statistics can and should be used for social justice, but they should not be the only tools.

Addressing Gender and Racial Discrimination in Economics: Challenging Neoclassical Perspectives

Seventh, he needs to look inward and question his own sociodemographic makeup at various levels (including the editorial boards of journals), as well as his internal structures of racial and gender discrimination, and the toxic professional “bro-culture” reinforcing this. There is something distinctly patriarchal and masculinist about how the economics profession operates and frames its issues. Social media has recently been full of such reports (for example, see the report by Indian economist Devika Dutt ). Studies and experts in the field also confirm the problem ( Nelson 2018 ; Wu 2018 ).

Eighth, a reconfigured economy needs to abandon the so-called Parsons pact (the division between economics and other social sciences, particularly sociology). This pact would separate economics from sociology and lead to the consolidation of neoclassical economics and its variants. A utilitarian rationality as the exclusive mode of economic action is at the heart of such a research program. As a prominent economic sociologist once noted, “the neoclassical market is devoid of social relations, institutions or technology and is devoid of elementary sociological concerns such as power, norms and networks” ( Lie 1997: 342) This “non-social” posture is most boldly captured in a short essay by Milton Friedman, one of the most prominent proponents of neoclassical economics in the twentieth century. In his famous 1970s essay on “Corporate Social Responsibility…” he argues that the

“(…) O princípio político que subjaz ao mecanismo de mercado é a unanimidade. Em um mercado livre ideal baseado na propriedade privada, nenhum indivíduo pode coagir outro, toda cooperação é voluntária, todas as partes dessa cooperação se beneficiam ou não precisam participar. Não existem valores, nem responsabilidades “sociais” em qualquer sentido que não seja os valores compartilhados e responsabilidades dos indivíduos. A sociedade é uma coleção de indivíduos e dos vários grupos que eles formam voluntariamente. ”

Challenging the Economic Disciplinary Divide: Embracing Social Context and Diverse Perspectives

From this quote, it becomes clear that variants of economics based on methodological individualism and utilitarianism operate with a particular understanding of the social order, which is based on “free” individuals acting rationally to maximize their own (actually, there is no “she” as a gender does not matter in this perspective) its own usefulness within the liberating environment of a competitive market. In many accounts, in addition to power / violence / coercion, gender, class and race, other structural ‘variables’ are also absent. All men (sic!) appear to be equal, although in the reality of racialized socioeconomic life, some women are more equal than others. Some argue that sociology was not a passive observer when economics established itself as the only market discipline, but an active contributor. After another prominent economic sociologist, David Stark (2009) , it can be argued that it was not just the neoclassical emancipation of 18th and 19th century classical political economy and variations of the historical/old institutionalist school after the marginalist revolution in the decade of 1870 which led to the analytical separation of ‘value’ from ‘values’, of ‘interests’ from ‘passions’ and therefore the separation of calculative action from its social and normative context and the exclusion of power. This demarcation was later stabilized with the formation of the pact previously called – “Pact of Parsons”. It represented an architectural disciplinary division of labor between US economics and sociology that was consolidated between 1930 and 1950, with the powerful Harvard University sociologist Talcott Parsons playing a crucial role as a disciplinary demarcator. “We make savings, you make society”. Both disciplines were actively engaged in boundary-setting practices, creating distinct domains of the “economic” and the “social”. Thus, economic thinking that incorporates gender, race, racism and other supposedly social issues needs to transcend Parsons’ pact. The economic is social. Related to this is the imperative to abandon the idea that only economists can talk about economics. Interestingly, white economists from the Global North often tell us what is good and bad for the economy, but want to eliminate ‘social noise’ at the same time. The ‘social’ matters, that’s why they speak and are heard.

Rethinking Economics: Addressing Colonial Legacies and Embracing Humility

Ninth, it must be recognized that certain policy recipes based on traditional economic advice have often done little or no good for racialized minorities in many white majority countries ( Komlos 2019 ), but also for many people in the former colonies, why not addressed the underlying problem of colonial political economy structures; nor have they been good for the environment. In fact, the long-lasting “growth mantra” has produced a fallout with highly racialized impacts (from the current COVID crisis that many experts link to runaway growth-induced ecosystem destruction to environmental racism.

Finally, a little humility is needed and it must abandon the vision of God that many economists so readily realize. Among social scientists, economists not only enjoy the greatest power over policy, backed by an award that seems more NOBEL than it really is. They also have the greatest freedom to talk about almost anything without having to prove substantiated fieldwork experiences (like writing books on ‘African development’ without having been in ‘Africa’ for more than two weeks, if at all) or without having to engage with what has already been said by people outside the economy (for example, on the topic of race and racism) or by people (within the broader field) who occupy different intellectual positions. A quick look at the reference list of many economics articles or major World Bank reports – the World Development Report (for an example, see here ) – suggests that many in the discipline seem to ‘know better’ without the involvement that they would be It is necessary to get at least close to that desirable, but perhaps unattainable, state of knowledge. Race and racism can only be effectively fought if much of the field goes beyond its “one-disciplinary arrogance”.

This post was first published on the African Legal Studies blog. Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash.