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