I landed last week in a somewhat unusual place for someone like me: the annual meeting of the American Economics Association (AEA) in Denver. While en route to the event, I realized it was the first time that I can remember that I was attending a conference as a “listener” rather than a “speaker,” a fact which would seem to make my presence all the more inexplicable. So why the trip? The attraction was the opportunity to deepen my recently germinated passion for ecological economics, which was to be a focus of discussion for the Association for Social Economics, a group that was meeting at the conference along with the Marxist Economists, the Union for Radical Political Economists, the Association of Environmental & Resource Economists, the Labor & Employment Relations Association, the Econometric Society and more economic niche groups than I ever knew existed.
I scheduled this trip several months ago, at a time when the only thing I could think about was “oh my God, what will I do with the rest of my life.” Thankfully, that concern no longer plagues me. In a few short months, I’ve become busier than I’d like to be without even yet knowing what it is that I really want to do.
So it was that I, along with 10,600 often bearded and rumpled but rarely bow tied professorial types descended upon downtown Denver. Did anyone even know there were more 10,600 economists? Has anyone wondered what would happen if they all stayed home and figured out how to fix our economy?
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Marxists and Capitalists in Close Proximity
(But separated by numbers and formulas that I can’t understand!)
I should have expected this! I am a stranger in a strange land. This is the most extreme contact with the academic world that I’ve had since my brief experience with college in the early 70’s.
Projected on endless PowerPoint screens are formula’s that I can’t read or comprehend, along with a whole lot of words that fall way outside my quite limited vocabulary. But I do the best I can.
There is a lot of debate. Social economists lay blame for the savings and loan crisis on the neo-liberal economists. The Union for Radical Political Economists bemoans the decline of labor without a single idea about what to do now. Adam Smith is invoked so frequently that one would think he was still alive. President Obama is rarely mentioned.
There are hundreds upon hundreds of sessions in rooms with no windows. The more progressive the economic politics, the smaller the room assigned. The format of each program has four individuals present a paper, followed by two “discussants” who comment on and critique it. Then the audience weighs in and the presenters have a fast five minutes to respond.
A few samples:
The Union for Radical Political Economists presents a session on the Heterodox Analyses of the Current Crisis that focuses on Demand Factors, the Rate of Profit, and the Current Economic Crisis in the U.S. David Kotz from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst discusses how the crisis highlighted the growing gap between wages & profits. The research is compelling. The lack of wage growth caused increases in household consumption that reduced savings and increased household debt until the housing bubble burst, unemployment skyrocketed and household consumption plummeted causing further unemployment.
The Association for Social Economics presented a session entitled Knowledge and Wealth: Private or Community Property in which Douglas Meador from the University of St. Francis addressed the American Institutionalist and Critical Realist Perspective on Income and Wealth Distribution(!). He observed, interestingly, that in the last 30 to 40 years, the family has slowly been replaced by the individual as the fundamental unit of society. The family now is simply the launching pad for the individual. Individuals do not place the family at the center of their identity or economic concerns. Though this is culturally specific and less true in the developing world and certainly Asia and the Middle East, one can see that society as a whole is more inclined to prepare us to succeed as individuals rather than collectively as members of that society.
Professor Meador also spoke about the impacts created by a society in which a track “race” where everyone starts at the same place is replaced by an endless relay race where the wealthy end up ahead after the first lap and simply pass the baton to the next generation, a situation in which an unfair advantage grows over time.
In the same session, William Dugger of the University Of Tulsa presented a talk entitled Knowledge is a Gift, Not a Property. He pointed out that our society has generated a 13x growth in productivity over the last 100 years. Technology has been the primary driver of this improvement—not capital. Dugger questioned what knowledge and technology the public should own vs. individuals and corporations. Is the private ownership of DNA, genes, seeds, and limited access to education, health services, and the drugs needed to save lives not at the core of the deterioration of our society?
In a discussion called Economics, Democracy, and the Distribution of Ownership, Robert Ashford from Syracuse University discussed the huge amount of unused capacity that he believes is the direct result of the concentration of capital. What is required for a just democratic society is a redistribution of equity (what was originally property/land.) Poverty persists because we have not solved the challenge of matching capacity with future acquisition. The country was founded on the belief that everyone should own property that generates a predictable source of income, which safeguards our democracy. Today, capital grabs income and income streams. Thus as capital becomes increasingly more concentrated, income becomes more and more trapped among a smaller and smaller group of people.
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What I Learned on My Mid-Winter Vacation
So what reflections did I depart with? First, a conference of this size and scale probably only functions efficiently for someone using the event as an opportunity to reconnect with friends and colleagues.
More importantly, it seems a sad waste of intelligence that these captains of the industry of economics seem so unconcerned that no one other than themselves can understand what they are talking about. But I suppose such is true of bankers, doctors, and I would assume astrophysicists and oceanographers, too. This reinforces one of the primary challenges the world faces today: an obsession with specialization and compartmentalization. On a planet that is a system, those who can only see a single tree in the forest or a lone grain of sand upon the beach are bound to come to the wrong conclusions.