Bill Mitchell — Why progressive values align more closely with our basic needs

Thomas Fazi and I have been discussing the shape of our next book and I think it will be an interesting and worthwhile followup to Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, 2017). We hope it will be published some time late in 2019. One of the angles that will be delved into is the way in which neoliberal narratives and constructs have permeated individual consciousness. Yes, sounds a bit psychological doesn’t it. But there is a strong literature going back to well before the recent period of neoliberalism that allows us to draw some fairly strong conclusions on how the process has worked. It also allows us to make some coherent statements about the dis-junctures that are going on across the world between the people and their polities, which have spawned the support for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the popularity of far-right movements, the electoral demolition of the traditional social democratic political parties, the election of the new Italian government, and the on-going trouble that the Gilets Jaunes are causing the mainstream political processes in France (and Brussels). The literature also provides a guide as to how the Left might break out of their current malaise based on their tepid yearning for cosmopolitanism, identity and their fear of financial markets to reestablish themselves as the progressive voice of the people. That is what I am writing about at present and here is a snippet....

Bill goes "there," where "there" is philosophy in the best sense as "the study of the wholes in terms of wholes," that is, in terms of systems and subsystems. Economics cannot be approached on than on a simplistic basis without considering its relationship to society. Society is a network of networks, and these networks are dynamic rather than static. That implies that history counts, which includes culture, traditions, and institutional arrangements that are fluid.

Without taking into consideration the considerable knowledge that has been developed in the various disciplines, the social sciences in particular, economics doesn't have much to say about society that is of any worth practically. And the world is looking for practical solutions to pressing challenges.

In other words the mechanistic models based on physics that assumes that human being are like atoms obeying laws of nature and that assume ergodicity are barren with respect to practical application. Reality is not like that idealized world, which is mathematically tractable but non-representational. The social world is non-ergodic; uncertainty and asymmetries are facts of life.

As managers of our lives and environment, we humans need appropriate models to approach human problems efficiently and effectively, and devise workable solutions to pressing issues of the day. The paraphrase management guru Peter F. Drucker, "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." Business people figured out long ago that conventional economic theory is of little usefulness in management. Go figure.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Why progressive values align more closely with our basic needs
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia