Except for a few who addressed me as Her Majesty, last week’s column, “If Stephen Harper's an Economist, I’m The Queen of Sheba,” found considerable agreement. I’ve been moved to look deeper into the strange, powerful mystique that surrounds economics and economists.
I have now concluded that’s it’s hard to know what’s more terrifying: that Stephen Harper claims he’s an economist – sorry, a trained economist – or that he might actually be an economist. The first merely leads to a crisis of his credibility. The second leads to a crisis for our economic future. Imagine the future of Canada in the hands of today’s mainstream economists. The mind boggles.
Imagine a so-called scientific discipline based on the proposition that humans invariably act on the basis of rational calculation and complete knowledge. This is not science; it’s blind, irrational faith.
Imagine promoting an economic system that busts as often as it booms and that always leaves an abundance of losers in its wake.
Imagine belonging to that fraternity of maven who are responsible for the economic and financial meltdown of the past two years.
Imagine that your “science” proffers wrong answers as often as right ones. Imagine that you make weather forecasters look prescient.
Imagine insisting that in return for much-needed loans, poor countries must agree to exactly the same kind of reckless de-regulation that enabled Wall Street to trigger the global economic meltdown.
I guess the best definition of an economist is someone with a PhD in economics, but really that’s crudely simplistic. The accumulated wisdom of mainstream economics is now divided into many, many sub-disciplines and branches, so that specializing in one can leave you entirely ignorant of all the others – a very lucky thing, some may well think. You have your micro-economics, macro-economics, mathematical economics, non-mathematical economics, econometrics, and the latest school, me-economics, which specializes in techniques to undermine the economy while making yourself rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Graduates earn an ME.
You might say that an ordinary economist is someone who guesses wrong about the economy while an econometrician uses computers to guess wrong about the economy. A comparable dynamic distinguishes micro- and macro-economists. The first are wrong about specific things, the second about everything.
Lucky for us, our Prime Minister is not an economist like any of the above. Like thousands of other Canadians, he has an MA in economics. But seriously, who doesn’t? What Stephen Harper can say is that a couple of decades ago he studied some economics. But of course a little economics can be worse than none at all.
Here’s the problem: Besides the various branches, there are different schools within the study of economics, some less extreme in their embrace of the magic of the market than others. As it happens, Stephen Harper emerged from the Calgary School, inspired by the Chicago School and its saint, Milton Friedman. In this sect, ideology trumps evidence every time and delusional fantasies about capitalism are treated as axioms.
One of Prof. Friedman’s laws, for example, goes as follows: “Few trends so thoroughly undermine free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of any responsibly other than to make as much money for their stakeholders a possible.” This natural law has been enthusiastically embraced by the world’s corporations, including, for example, the many Canadian mining companies operating in poor countries.
