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When I arrived at the Pentagon in 2009, the Obama administration was just getting its footing as caretakers of the War on Terror. Our focus then was truly global dominion. That meant, yes, killing and capturing whatever the intelligence process coughed up as bad guys no matter who they were or where they were. But […]

The anime Mashle: Magic and Muscles offers an absurdist metaphor for politically driven discrimination.

"It happens that, 75 years after Seuss wrote it, Thidwick turns out to be a good metaphor Western democracies." ~ Bruce Rottman

Experts tell us that we are experiencing an "epidemic of loneliness." This metaphor is all over the media[1]; the Surgeon General repeatedly warns us of it[2]; Hillary Clinton blames it for MAGA mania; meme entrepreneurs establish loneliness institutes and propose loneliness legislation; and some voices urge a U.K.-style Department of Loneliness. Why has there been […]

In modern economics, “iceberg costs” is an assumption built into certain models of international trade The metaphor is that if you were actually trading an iceberg, it would melt along the way. The extent of the melting would be greater, the farther it was carried across the ocean. Thus, an item which needs to be … Continue reading Historical Lessons from Actual Iceberg Trading Costs
The post Historical Lessons from Actual Iceberg Trading Costs first appeared on Conversable Economist.

I used some "Feeling Thermometer" data in a class recently and was struck by an insane result reflected in the recent data. You'll see that below, where I've linked to the original polling agency, First, definition: A "Feeling Thermometer" is a commonly used research measure. Here's a reasonable definition from a recent piece of scholarship:The feeling thermometer, or thermometer scale, is a rating procedure to measure respondents' feelings about an issue using a scale that corresponds or makes a metaphor to temperatures in the thermometer.Political scientists often derive these numbers via public opinion polling. Sometimes, respondents are specifically asked to provide a number on a scale (0 to 100 is typical) and the results reflect averages, often broken down by specific demographic information.For example, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs asks Americans in a regular poll what they think about foreign countries. As this data reveals, Americans feel quite warmly about Canadians, but have quite cold feelings about North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China. Likely not coincidentally, these are four states specifically identified as threats to American interests in the Director of National Intelligence's annual (public) assessment report. Question for another day: which way does the causal arrow run?With those numbers in the 19 to 32 range in mind (and 85 for Canada), take a look at this next polling result, showing how Americans feel about other Americans -- limited by their political party. Americans like other Americans of the same political party just a little less than they like Canadians.And Americans' feelings about members of the opposing political party are comparable to their feelings about North Korea!Some recent political science research is particularly interesting about the meaning of such data, suggesting that these positive and negative feelings can have real-world consequences, at least in international politics:This research note utilizes novel country feeling thermometer data to explore the [Democratic Peace Theory] debate's micro-foundations: the underlying drivers of international amity and enmity among democratic citizens in the US, UK, France, and Germany.No wonder some scholars are studying the allegedly growing risk of American civil war.
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 A controversy broke out on social media this weekend: Taylor Lorenz interviewed the (or one of the) truly horrible people behind the far right Libs of Tiktok account.  It raised questions of whether one should platform the truly awful.  I have been thinking of platforming such for awhile  now, so I am using this as an opportunity to think through my stance (which is not at all based on a strong standing of the legalities of all of this).Let's start with the basics that people get so very confused about:No one is entitled to a platform, everyone is entitled to free speech.To be clear, when we talk about free speech, we need to be clear that the 1st amendment in the US (and probably the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada) only restricts governments from restricting people's right to engage in free speech.  Clubs and, yes, businesses can restrict the speech of their members/employees in ways that the state cannot. Free speech does have some restrictions--the classic is you can't yell fire as a prank in a crowded theater as that is dangerous.  Inciting violence is also not so free, although your mileage may vary on what counts as incitement.  Is "Free Palestine" incitement? I don't think so.  Now, that whole platform is not the same thing as free speech thing. One is not obligated to give time/space/bandwidth/whatever to anyone (in ye olde days, US tv stations had to give equal time, and when it went away, that gave room for Fox and its ilk).  Universities, for example, don't have to provide stages and fora and audiences to far right speakers or even not so far right speakers.  Or far left ones. In an op-ed, I argued that the Conservative Party of Canada should not provide a prominent speaking position to a far-right retired general as that would politicize the Canadian armed forces.*  Of course, the supposedly cancelled retired general then used his perch at the National Post, a right wing newspaper, to argue that I was trying to deny him free speech.  Nope, I didn't say he couldn't rant in public, I was just arguing it was a bad idea for the CPC to amplify him.  He is entitled to say what he wants, he is not entitled to having his speech amplified.  There is a distinction here, and he is smart enough to get it, even if wants to play coy about how a dual citizen might dare to question him.So, the question is rarely whether to deny someone free expression (although when it comes to jury tampering or inciting violence, gag orders on the Trump family seem to be not only fair but wise), but rather who to platform and under what conditions.  Obviously, the starting point is the intention of the potential actor that might be platforming someone.  The example of the CPC: they wanted to attack the government and found a handy tool that might make it look like they presenting mainstream military views that contradict the government.  Yeah, tis bad faith bullshit, but they had that intent so they didn't care what the downstream effects will be on the military.The example of this weekend is a lot different: it is not just giving space for a hater to speak at length, but providing a critical interview where the interviewer pushes back and gets the hater to be revealed as shallow, incoherent, virulently racist and xenophobic.  To be honest, I haven't watched the entire thing because, well, yuck.  I am online enough (understatement) to know what Libs of Tiktok have been doing--inciting violence against Black Americans first and now LGBTQ+ folks. That the account deliberately names individuals so that its followers can then threaten those people.  Truly, truly awful.  But folks who are not so online may not be aware of this, so a WashPo reporter doing an extended interview with the source of all this hate is a good way to expose what's going on.  People can disagree about whether we need to hear from the source directly, but this is not platforming in the sense of giving someone a megaphone and letting them spread their views.  Recently, the governor of Oklahoma gave this far right white nationalist a position on the state's library advisory council.  That is giving someone a platform.  And then a non-binary kid gets killed, and the governor then acts all shocked.  Anyhow, sometimes these decisions are tricky because we want to expose awful people, but we don't want to provide awful people with greater audiences.  Folks might argue that we need the marketplace of ideas to sort this out, but like most markets and most invocations of the market metaphor, it really doesn't work like the metaphor. Ideas do not win or lose based on the quality of their debaters or the quality of the ideas themselves.  They win or lose based on what people do and who has the power.  That a far right white supremacist owns and controls twitter is a real problem that cannot be sorted out by everyone sharing their competing ideas online.  Musk is platforming far right racist and xenophobic stuff, and he is blocking stuff that is critical.  Suspending Navalny's wife a day or two after his death is a real tell.  Ultimately, journalists and organizations have to be prudent about who they give platforms and who they do not.  Again, no one is entitled to the front page or the editorial page or the university's biggest stage. Every decision to give someone a platform is just that a decision, which should be based on the benefits and the costs.  Academic freedom suggests giving space to a wide range of views, but there is no need to bring back that which has been thoroughly discredited--like flat earthers or those who buy into eugenic stuff or bell curves and IQ tests or antivaxxers.And, yes, we live in a time where Democracy is under threat. Which is a bigger danger: giving anti-democratic forces the megaphone or denying them platforms and then having those forces try to make those institutions feel bad for being hypocritical?  The bad faith actors want to use our values against ourselves.  It can be tricky about how to respond but respond we must.  So, that's my incoherent rambling on this topic.  You are required to read it, to respond, or to share it via social media.* I realize that folks can argue whether Maisonneuve is right wing or far right, but my coding rule these days if one uses "woke" disparagingly and essentially slurs those who are not cis straight folks, they are far right. If right wing folks want to say that is not fair, that those are mainstream views of the right, well, they are telling on themselves about where they are. 

Yes, yes, we know that neoclassical economics is just so out of style these days but the Marginalist Revolution was indeed correct - stuff happens at the margins:It will cost jobs. It will harm the UK's competitiveness. It will make the labour market less flexible. For those with long enough memories, the push back against Labour's plans for a new deal for workers has a familiar ring to it. The same arguments were wheeled out before the national minimum wage was introduced a quarter of a century ago. All proved groundless.Confounding the doomsters and gloomsters of the late 1990s, the minimum wage has raised the pay of millions of Britain's lowest-paid workers by an average of £6,000 a year without lengthening dole queues. It has been described by one thinktank as the most successful economic policy in a generation.It does rather depends upon the definition of success. As Chris Dillow pointed out back in 2005: Tony Blair today announced plans to cut the jobs and hours of low-paid workers.He's going to raise the minimum wage, from £4.85 an hour to £5.05 in October. This as the Low Pay Commission recommends in its report today; it also recommends a rise to £5.35 in 2006.The first rule of economics, of course, says that if you raise the price of something, you'll reduce demand. And this means shorter hours and job losses for some of the low paid.The Low Pay Commission pretends this won't happen. Its chairman Adair Turner says: "Our analysis suggests that previous upratings [to the minimum wage] have largely been absorbed without adverse effects."Can I give Mr Turner some advice? Try reading your own report matey.Now the effect is small at that labour price - the wage set back then might have cost perhaps 13,000 jobs, another estimate maybe 30,000. Now, I'm not denying that some people will benefit from the higher minimum wage. Those who keep their jobs and hours will do so, at least marginally. And tax-payers will have a lower tax credit bill. But these gains come at a cost – of lower hours and jobs for some of the low-paid, and lower profits for many small businesses.There's no such thing as a free lunch. To pretend otherwise is either dishonest or economic illiteracy.Now, perhaps that trade off is worth it to you - possibly less so to the 13,000 to 30,000 - but that's an ethical matter and we can't determine those for you.The thing about those things that happen at the margins, those trade offs. At some point the balance swings to the deal being, on balance, more bad than good. The government went out and hired a respected minimum wage advocate - Arindrajit Dube - to tell them when this would be so with the rate of the minimum wage. That report is here. The answer is that when the minimum wage rises over 55% of median wage - and it's the blended median, of full and part timers together - then on balance that rate is detrimental. No, not just detrimental to those poorest and least trained who are those who don't get a job but detrimental to the society as a whole. The current plan is to push the minimum wage up over 60% of the full time only median wage - very much higher than even advocates of higher minimum wages think optimal.To adapt a commonly used metaphor - the government's noted that jumping out of a ground floor window doesn't cause that much grief so they've decided to try it from the tenth.

It's often said that recessions clear the deadwood out of an economy.We're not exactly in recession in the UK (as Germany, unfortunately, is, and as around 20 EU economies were last winter). But things are pretty bad, with high interest rates, a severe monetary squeeze and business being (to put it mildly) less than great all round. So what does that bode for the clear-the-deadwood metaphor? Are all those deadwood companies, still upright thanks only to years of ultra-low interest rates, finally going to perish and give their ground to thrusting green-shoot enterprises?Unfortunately, I think the opposite may be true.What really makes unemployment peak in economic downturns is not so much the result of established firms sacking workers. Firms never like laying people off. It looks bad, and in countries like the UK and those of the EU, tightly regulated labour markets make it hard and expensive to sack employees. A much more important factor is that downturns make firms of all sorts more cautious, and more reluctant to take on new workers (especially, again, when employment regulation makes it hard to lay them off again if that proves necessary).The result of that is that people who do lose their jobs spend longer looking for new ones, and those entering the labour market for the first find themselves competing for fewer openings, so they too join the ranks of the unemployed.But it is younger, more entrepreneurial firms which are likely to contribute most to the unemployment, because they have not yet built up the confidence, the capital and the other resources needed for them to be sure they can survive a downturn, far less expand while one is in progress. In fact, precisely because they do lack that firm foundation, a greater number of new ventures fail during downturns than do established ones.Unfortunately, therefore, the mature, deep-rooted deadwood companies are more likely to be standing at the end of a downturn than are the new, green-shoot thrusting ones. It's the very opposite of what the 'forest fire' analogy predicts.What are the policy implications of that? First, if we want to speed recovery, we have to encourage newer, smaller entrepreneurial companies and start-ups. That means keeping entry barriers (like regulations) low, but most importantly, keeping taxes on businesses and on capital low. People who are starting or trying to grow businesses always cite taxation as their biggest obstacle: they are taking big risks, probably borrowing money from friends or mortgaging their homes to invest in their new venture, and the government's tax collectors cutting themselves in for a large slice of any possible future product raises that risk even more. There is even a case for having lower taxes and regulations on small firms and start-ups, just to even up the risks when economic times are hard.Second, we need a flexible labour market, free of employment regulation that makes firms reluctant to take on workers in the first place. A large part of that is making it easier and less costly for firms to scale back employment when market conditions dictate.Only such an enterprise-friendly approach, especially a new and growing enterprise-friendly approach, is likely to keep unemployment down, strengthen government and private-sector revenues, capture the innovative capacities of entrepreneurs, and create the new, sometimes revolutionary, businesses that will pull us out of a downturn.

Nicholas Onuf on the Evolution of Social Constructivsm, Turns
in IR, and a Discipline of Our Making






Can we really go on speaking about International Relations
as a 'discipline'? Even if social constructivism is often presented as a robust
theoretical cornerstone of the discipline, one of the thinkers that established
this theoretical position challenges the existence of IR. Surely, Nicholas Onuf
argues, we have a disciplinary machinery—institutions, journals, conferences
and so forth—but these form an apparatus built around a substantive void—in his
words, 'a discipline without an 'about''. In this Talk, Nicholas Onuf—among others—weaves an appraisal of
disciplinary boundaries through a discussion of social constructivism's birth
and growth, tells the material turn to get serious and provides a bleak
assessment of IR's subservient relation to political order.





Print version of this Talk (pdf)





What is (or should be), according to you, the biggest challenge /
principal debate in current International Relations? What is your position or
answer to this challenge / in this debate?



In my view, the
biggest challenge for IR is making good on claims (I'd say pretensions) that IR
is a discipline in its own right.  Such
claims presume that IR has a reasonably well-bounded subject matter and a body
of theory uniquely suited to that subject matter.  For 25 years I have been saying that IR fails
miserably in meeting this challenge. 
Much less do we acknowledge the challenge—there is no debate.  As it is, we have institutionalized a
so-called discipline (journals, conferences, workshops, PhD programs) that
reaches far beyond (lower case) international relations.  In short:  a discipline without an 'about.'  Were we to acknowledge the challenge, we
might be content to say:  Forget disciplines,
it's all about 'the social' and social theory belongs to us—too.  Or we might say, it's all about 'the
political,' and legal, political and
social theory also belong to us.  I'm not
sure there's much difference.  I am sure
that it's not enough to say our 'about' is 'the international.'  And I have said as much publicly, though
intemperate terms that I instantly regretted.



Given such a
negative assessment of IR, you might wonder why I stuck with it all these
years.  Why didn't I just call myself a
social theorist and (try to) publish in the few journals in which theorists
gets a hearing?  Actually, I did try a
few times, to no avail (just as I put 'social theory' in the subtitle of World of Our Making (1989) to no
discernible effect).  I think there's a
status issue lurking here.  Once
identified with IR, it's hard to get acknowledged outside IR.  Nobody reads
or cites us; we 'don't get no respect'; status ordering condemns us to be
consumers rather than producers of big ideas.  If (just perhaps) the era
of big ideas is over, then the next generation in IR may feel a little
braver than I was about jumping ship.  Not that I'm betting on it,
especially since publishing in a host relatively new, expressly interdisciplinary
journals, such as Global
Constitutionalism, International
Political Sociology and International
Political Theory, offer a safer alternative.





How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International
Relations?



I have to say
that events have never inspired me.  In
my callow youth, Hans Morgenthau's Politics
among Nations (1948) inspired me to think about spending a lifetime doing
IR, as did my teachers Robert Tucker and George Liska—both realists with a taste respectively for
international law and international institutions.  Working as Tucker's assistant in revising Hans Kelsen's Principles of International Law (1952) prompted
a longstanding interest in legal theory. 
As a doctoral student, I got hooked on systems theory à la Hoffmann, Kaplan, Rosecrance; the
special issue of World Politics (vol.
14, no. 1) on the international system left an indelible mark, as did Waltz's Man, the State and War (1959).  Working with Richard Falk a few
years later affected me a great deal—he remains one of my very few heroes.  So did Fritz Kratochwil,
briefly a student of mine and friend ever since.



In the 1980s
I got to know a number of mavericks: 
Hayward Alker, Rick Ashley, Dick Mansbach, John Ruggie and Rob Walker
are by no means the only ones on this list. 
More important, I think, were my feminist doctoral students, who changed
my life in a great many ways and were largely responsible for my turn to social
theory.  It was in that context that I
took the so-called linguistic turn to Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin et al. 
World of Our Making is pretty
clear about its many sources of inspiration. 
The big trick was fitting everything together.  Since then (and to keep the story manageable),
working with my brother Peter is responsible for my interest in Aristotle and in the making of the modern world; republican
theory links these two concerns.  I
cannot blame Peter for my ongoing fascination with Foucault.  





What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the
world in a global way?



For me at least, this is a tricky question.  As I said earlier, I am not very much
interested in events—either as theoretical fodder or as a matter of what's
happening in the world at any given moment. 
Most of my friends and colleagues are fascinated by current events—how
often I find them glued to one news source or another.  Students are too, and it seems pretty obvious
they should be.  Most people in the field
engage in the skillful assembly of events, whether in 'cases' or as
statistically manipulated patterns. 
Learning the appropriate skills takes a great deal of time and
training.  At the same time, students
also need an exposure to theory—big picture thinking—and, in my view, the
philosophical issues that lurk behind any big picture.



Theory is a seductive.  I was seduced at the age of 19 and never
gotten over it.  Shifting metaphors, I always
told my doctoral students not to succumb to the theory bug, at least to the
exclusion of what I just called 'the skillful assembly of events.'  In other words, don't do it my way—I was lucky
to get away with it.  Disposition is a different
matter.  Students must love to work hard
for extended intervals with little immediate gratification.  Machiavelli said that warriors must be
disciplined and ardent.  I used to tell
my doctoral students, you have to be 'warrior nerds.'  If you don't fit this profile, find another
vocation.





You were immensely influential in
constructing the theoretical pillar of social constructivism in IR, starting
over 25 years ago. Looking back, has social constructivism delivered on the
promise you etched out in World of Our
Making?



No way, and for all kinds of
reasons.  This was all too clear within a
decade, as I intimated in a review of Peter Katzenstein's
The Culture of National Security (1996,
read introduction here)
and spelled out in Don Puchala's Visions of International Relations (2003).
To simplify unduly and perhaps unjustly, the constructivists who came to
prominence in the 1990s made three mistakes. First, they took for granted that a
norm (as in 'the norm') is normative without asking whether, to what degree, or
how this might be so.  I'm pretty sure this
mistake came from a mindless appropriation of functional sociology and utter
indifference to legal and political theory. Second, they substituted identity
('who am I?' questions) for agency ('who acts for what or whom?' questions) in
guessing at the implications of the end of the Cold War.  In doing so, they compounded the felony by
leaping from personal identity to collective identity and unreflectively
imputing agency to imagined collectivities. Third, they treated culture as an
aggregate residual and then assigned it enormous causal significance. Had any
of them taken the linguistic turn seriously, they might have extricated those
elements of 'culture' that (one might guess) are most consequential for social
construction.



More generally, I
came to see the constructivist surge of the 90s as a liberal-institutionalist
renaissance.  Standing in for legal
rules, formal institutions and corporate personality, norms and identity look
like a conceptual breakthrough to a generation of scholars who had been taught
to dismiss old-time liberal IR.  In the
2000s, a shifting panorama of events (genocide etc.) prompted a straight-on
liberal institutionalist revival with lots of help from lawyers.  Meanwhile, a much more diverse range of
scholarship has come to be styled constructivist for lack a better label.  Finally, there has emerged a gang of 'third
generation' constructivists who now actively repudiate their predecessors from
the 90s.  They speak my language, but
I'll let them speak for themselves.





How, do you think, do 'turns' in IR
relate to the broader context of real-world historical events? If the origins
of social constructivism have been located in the end of the Cold War, is there
some kind of dialectic whereby social constructivism then impacts on the course
of history? For instance, social constructivism is by now so established that a
big part of newer generations of practitioners in IR are probably social
constructivists. How does that influence international politics? In other
words, does social constructivism as an illocutionary theoretical approach hold
perlocutionary effect on its object of study?



I have some reservations
about the metaphor 'turn.'  Do we imagine
IR as a colossal ship that turns, however slowly, all of a piece?  I've already used the ship metaphor, but in
this context it's not appropriate—we're not that put together, and, besides, no
one is steering (not even those legendary gate-keepers).  Or a herd of wildebeests, in which all the members
of the herd turn together by keying off each other once one senses danger and
turns?  I don't think so, even if we do
sometimes see signs of a herd mentality. 




Back in the late 60s, Karl
Deutsch suggested that the field had even then experienced a succession of
waves.  I like this metaphor better
because it captures both the messiness of what's going on and a sense that
perhaps not much is changing in deeper water. 
You yourself switch metaphors on me when you mention a new generation of
constructivists.  As it happens, I like
this metaphor a lot (and have a piece entitled 'Five Generations of International
Relations Theory' forthcoming in a new edition of International Relations Theory Today, which Ken Booth and Toni
Erskine are editing).  It suggests a
dynamic internal to any field of study rather than one prompted by external
events.  Inasmuch as constructivism got
its start before the Cold War ended but afterwards changed its profile
significantly tells us the story is actually rather complicated.



The more interesting question
is whether constructivism will, as you say, impact the course of history.  The quick and dirty answer is, yes, but in
ways too subtle to document.  We already
know how difficult it is to establish any impact from IR as a scholarly pursuit
on world affairs.  That is, any impact
beyond realism and raison d'état.  As we become more specialized in what we do
and so does everyone else, it seems ever less likely that we'll be able to pin down
extended causal chains.  But I suspect
that you have something more like 'mood' in mind.  Once liberal institutionalists adopted a
slick kind of constructivism, they were pretty much in sync with the Zeitgeist, at least for a decade or
so.  So, yes, as a not very helpful
generalization, we can surmise that some degree of co-constitution was then at
work.  Always is.



One last point.  I don't have even the slightest sense that my
own scholarly work has had anything have much to do with large-scale world-making,
or that it will in any near-term.  I
don't have to be told that my work is too austere and forbidding to reach very
many people—though I am told this often enough. 
Years from now, who knows?  Yet my
teaching career convinces me that there's more co-constitution going on in the
classroom than anywhere else we're likely to find ourselves.  Interacting with hundreds of MA and PhD
students in Washington DC over 28 years—during which I noodled through what
would become World of Our Making—affected
me and them in ways beyond measure.  Some
of those students became scholars, but many more have spent their lives in
public service.





What has been, to you, the biggest
surprise or exciting move in IR since social constructivism saw the light?



The biggest and most
surprising 'move' has been the move offshore. 
I speak of course as someone raised, trained and employed in the US when
IR was 'AnAmerican Social Science.'  For the
last twenty years, IR has not so much left the US as gained strength everywhere
else.  Better to say, its center of
gravity has moved.  In the process, IR
has transformed, both as a claimant discipline and as a theory-driven
enterprise.  As a participant-observer, I
see IR as an institutional beneficiary of globalization and, to a lesser
degree, those of us in IR as agents in this hugely complicated process. 



Globalization has meant,
among much else, the extraordinary growth of higher education and its
institutional apparatus.  The
proliferation of universities is an acknowledgment of cosmopolitan imperatives and an accommodation of national needs, exemplified
in programs for the grooming of managerial elites.  For IR, this large process has been colored
by an ostensible rejection of American hegemony.  One expression of this anti-hegemonial
sentiment is the fashion for post-positivist scholarship and the sort of constructivism
that is now conventionally ascribed to Fritz Kratochwil and me.  For me personally, it's just wonderful to be
taken seriously everywhere but my own country.





You recently have turned attention
towards cognitive and evolutionary psychology. This is a pretty
underrepresented field, in terms of its being mined in IR. What challenge has
this literature to pose, in your view, to dominant IR?



Long ago, I ventured into cognitive
studies as a consequence of casting a broad net in social theory.  Since then, several disciplines have
converged in making cognitive studies just about the most exciting game in
town.  I cannot imagine anyone not being
fascinated (but then I am also fascinated by advances in cosmology, however
little I understand the technical stuff).  In recent years, I have developed a more
specific interest in what cognitive and evolutionary psychology might tell
about my mind, any mind, in relation to a world that my mind cannot access
directly, the world of appearances.  As
you can see, I'm a philosophical idealist—with many qualifications, a Kantian
idealist.  Most people in IR are
philosophical realists, for whom such issues are less compelling.  



Let me comment briefly on any
challenge the cognitive revolution might pose for IR in the philosophical
realist mode.  IR's substantive concerns
are so far removed from the stuff of cognitive science (neurons and such) that I doubt scholars in IR will ever feel
obliged take the latter into account. 
Nor should they.  Positivist
science is reductive—it always pushes down levels of analysis to explain what's
going on at higher levels.  But anyone
pushing down risks losing touch with what seems to be substantively distinctive
about one's starting point, and IR and its event-manifold are a long way up
from the synchronized firing of neurons. 
I would qualify this bald statement somewhat to account for the recent interest
of emotions in IR.  At least some of the
psychological literature on emotions taps into a deep pool of research where
the age-old cognition-emotion binary has finally been put to rest.





You have a broad experience in IR.
How do you see the evolution of the field? Is it a tragedy of unfolding
rationalization and increasing division of labor, or is something else going
on?



As I intimated earlier, IR has
failed as a disciplinary project.  I'm
almost inclined to say, there's no hope for IR 'as we know it.'  Better to say, IR has lost its self-told coherence.  A hundred flowers bloom, but just barely, and
there are a lot of weeds.  I don't see
this as a bad thing (your weeds may well be my flowers), although other
disciplines, such as sociology and a resuscitated geography, cast shadows on
our scraggly garden.  I do think larger
societal processes—modern rationalization and modernist functional
differentiation—have conjoined to impose a coherence we don't see.  Crudely, we are servants to other servants,
all of us ultimately minions to run-away capital and victims of its
techno-material seductions.  I guess you
could call this phenomenon a tragedy, though its very impersonality undercuts
the sense of the term.  I have no doubt,
however, that it will eventuate in a catastrophe from we moderns will never
recover.  I have been saying this ever
since the 1970s, when the debate over The Limits to Growth
persuaded me that we would never turn the ship around.





A new 'turn' seems to be developing
in the social sciences, possibly a swing of the ontological pendulum back to
materialism—this time with a more postpositivist undertone. How do you relate
to such a turn?



I am skeptical.  It looks like a fad to me—people casting
about for something new and interesting to say. 
Moreover, the vitalist, Bergsonian tenor of so
much of the new materialism turns me off—I cannot see the case for ascribing
agency (and thus purpose) to things when the language of cause suffices.  (And I am not among those constructivists who
will not speak of cause for fear of positivist contamination.)  But there's another issue that troubles
me:  the continued power of the
materialist-idealist binary.  In IR, we
call realists materialists and liberal institutionalists/soft constructivists
idealists when it should be obvious that whatever separates them (in my view,
not as much as they think) has nothing to do with idealism and materialism as
philosophical stances.  Security dilemmas,
arms races and terrorist plots are not ideationally informed?  Norm diffusion, identity crises and human
rights are not materially expressed?  Get
serious.



 I argued in World of Our Making that the material and the social are bound
inextricably bound together.  Rules do
the job.  They turn the stuff of the
world into resources that we, as social beings, put to use.  I think I got it right then.  Needless to say, I also think students afflicted
with mindlessly linked binaries can only benefit from reading that book.





Nicholas Greenwood Onuf is renowned
as one of the founders of constructivism in International Relations. He is also
known for his important contributions to International Legal Theory,
International History, and Social Theory. Onuf's most famous
work is arguably World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social
Theory and International Relations (published in 1989), which
should be on every IR student's must-read list. His recent publications
include Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American
Civil War (2006, co-authored with his brother Peter Onuf) and International
Legal Theory: Essays and Engagements, 1966-2006 (2008). Onuf is
currently Professor Emeritus of International Relations at Florida
International University and is on the editorial boards of International
Political Sociology, Cooperation and Conflict, and Contexto
Internacional. Professor Onuf received his PhD in International Studies at
John Hopkins University, and has also taught at Georgetown University, American
University, Princeton, Columbia, University of Southern California, Pontifícia
Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and Kyung Hee University in Korea.





Related
links


FacultyProfile at the Florida International University 
Read Onuf's Rule and Rules in International Relations
(2014 conference paper) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Fitting Metaphors: the Case of the European
Union (New Perspectives, 2010) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Institutions, intentions and international
relations (Review of International Studies, 2002) here (pdf) 
Read Onuf's Levels (European Journal of
International Relations 1995) here (pdf) 












Print version of this Talk (pdf)

 Ok, maybe we do.  Seven years ago, I posted my plans for that sabbatical, my second one. Before discussing my plans for this year (July to June), let me check out how I did last time.Make progress on the legislatures and civ-mil book with Phil and Dave.  Well, I did do a heap of research on that book, going to Japan three times!  The other trips happened later due to impeachments in Brazil and then South Korea.  which should have been finished by now.  We did manage to publish a bunch of articles: on Canada, hCommunity Policing as a metaphor for Belgium/NZ, and the entire set of cases.  But the book itself is not yet complete--we hope to finish it off in the next month or two.  Publishers are interested in it, so we just need to revise to make the entire team-written thing sound like one person wrote it.  Smaller projects although not policy relevance piece nor the bureaucratic politics piece (more on that below). Instead, I finally published the testing the hypotheses about professionalization piece.Apply for the partnership grant.  Yep, it took two tries, but we got it.  It has dominated my destiny ever since.  I have no regrets as CDSN-ing has not only helped fulfill the various objectives we had set out (foster a more diverse/inclusive/equitable next generation, become a world-class network that folks outside of Canada will connect with, advance our understanding of defence and security issues, improve the defence/security literacy of Canadians, foster research projects across the various divides, etc), but has been so personally rewarding--I have learned a lot, developed new skills (management?), traveled to cool places, and engaged with so many folks in and out of government.  Read?  Not as much as I would like.So, what am I going to do with this sabbatical?  With the legislature book project winding down, I am hoping to make progress on the Steve, Phil, and Ora project: comparing defence agencies around the world.  What roles do ministries and departments of defense see for themselves?  How are they viewed by the militaries they interact with?  This project will merge with the aforementioned bureaucracies project--what is the nature of each democracy's policy marketplace? Mostly the same cases as before but with new ones.  I don't know exactly where I am going to be during this sabbatical, as a couple of fellowship applications didn't work out, one got deferred, and I applied for two more after the initial results came in.  The joy of comparing 15 plus countries means I can go pretty much anywhere.  This fall, I am probably headed for shorter trips to South Korea and Denmark, but that could change.I do plan to spend much of the winter somewhere, with the contenders right now being Rome, Berlin, and Taipei.  I plan to do a better job of keeping my promise re smaller projects.There is the aforementioned policy relevance piece that will have new data soon.There are a few surveys of the Canadian public I am working on with JC Boucher, and we hope to push out those results this year.Start the work to organize a workshop on the uses and abuses, pro's and con's of using principal-agent theory in Canadian defence/security stuff. A few other things that are on the edges of my attention right now.CDSN-ing!  We have a variety of new and continuing stuff to execute--the Summer Institute, the Year Ahead, the Capstone, the various other opportunities plus a Meeting of the MINDS workshop for the leaders, project directors, and students associated with the nine MINDS networks.  Oh, and I will start prepping the next big grant application to keep us going beyond the first seven years.Read!  This time, I mean it.  I have a stack of great civ-mil books that I want to catch up on.  I am going to try to set aside one day each week just for reading.  Let's see if that is a pie crust promise!Sabbaticals are perhaps the coolest thing in academia--a year to reset, refresh, travel, complete old projects, start new ones.  It is not a year off, as we tend to pile on a lot of work into these years--just not service and teaching (especially grading).  I will still supervise the PhD students I committed to, the MA students who have projects underway, and the CDSN-related service.  But I will not be attending department meetings or retreats, and I will not be serving on any committees.  Woot!It is my penultimate sabbatical unless I want to work an extra five years to get a year of sabbatical.  This is the one for all the marbles, as the next one will probably be a teaching gig someplace that I want to live for a little while.   No pressure!

 The past two days were heaps of CDSN goodness.  We supported the book launch of Phil Lagassé and Thomas Juneau's second Canadian Defence Policy volume, and we held our Year Ahead event.      The book launch had triple the number of people we planned for--150 or so.  We ran out of drink tickets before the speakers event started.  I got a chance to say a few words, mostly to tease Phil and Thomas, partly to promote the Year Ahead event.  It might have been the free booze or it might have been the appearance of the CDS that drew the crowd.  General Wayne Eyre stuck around after his talk for a good 1.5 hours to have pictures taken and to chat with the group.  In my intro, I mentioned that most folks think that no one in Canada cares about Defence, so I guess everyone who does was at the event.  I really enjoyed the event--glad to see Thomas and Phil and their contributors get the spotlight, great to chat with former students, officers and officials who have interacted with me online but not in person, and various other folks.  I spent many of my conversations promoting our big event the next day.The Year Ahead started before the CDSN, with Rob McRae as the director of our research center--CSIDS--building a conference aimed at considering the potential challenges facing us in the near future--the year ahead.  We took this over, and it has gone through various changes over the years due to pandemics and such.  This year, we moved to a different space, the former Shopify offices, which meant we could go down a slide and play with giant versions of Connect 4 and Jenga.  We consulted our various partners in and out of government and came up with four topics.In our first session (no pics since I was the moderator), we had Scott Kastner zoom in and Meia Nouwens and Pascale Massot in person discuss the challenge of addressing an aggressive China whilst avoiding war.  The good news is that China is not ready for a Taiwan invasion, so the much feared war is not as likely to happen very soon. On the other hand, various policies to deal with China are problematic--like "derisking" by trying to avoid China in various supply chains is simply not going to work well.  In the second session, we had very different talks as Nisrin Elamin presented her experience as she was in Sudan when the coup attempt/civil war started, and had a hard time getting herself, her kid, and her parents out of the country.  Stephanie Carvin presented her comparative project (with the aforementioned Thomas Juneau) about how democracies take care of their people in conflict situations, Duty of Care, to help us understand the government side.  It was an excellent conversation to see the personal dynamics interact with the policy challenge.We broke for lunch and made much use of this great space especially the students from Carleton and the NATO Field School:    The third session considered whether and how the 2024 election would generate extremism and violence not just in the US but in Canada. They made it pretty clear that, yes, there will be more extremist violence generated by the next current election campaign, that Americans and increasingly Canadians are living in two different realities, and that things are going to get worse before they might get better.  Ryan Scrivens showed the trends over time, Amy Scooter talked about the rise of militancy in the US (buy her new book!), J.M. Berger talked about the social constructions that are driving these dynamics.  Amar Amarasingam presented more on the Canadian side of things.As a political scientist, I ordinarily would not support this appeal that Amar made:Our last panel was certainly not least as Srdjan Vučetić, Jasmin Mujanović, and Sidita Kushi passionately and insightfully presented the latest dynamics in the Balkans.  I used to study the international relations of some of this so I was surprised to learn how badly the US is screwing this up by supporting directly or indirectly Serb nationalists who are preventing Kosovo from moving forward.  That five European countries don't recognize Kosovo doesn't surprise me as these folks haven't read my earlier work--that secession is not as contagious as thought, that recognition in place does not really matter elsewhere, etc.  It was a great panel to end the day, since the speakers were very dynamic in their criticism of US and European policy in the region.  To put a Hungarian in charge of the NATO forces in the region is just dumb from so many dimensions--Hungary is a spoiler, its military was one of the worst performers in Afghanistan (the nearby New Zealanders would patrol in the Hungarian sector since the Hungarians didn't patrol)., and so on.Oh and it turns out the metaphor I used to describe this panel was a bit ... dated and unoriginal and problematic: We concluded and moved on to a delightful dinner.  So glad I had a chance to meet these folks.  And I am very proud of the CDSN HQ folks--Melissa, Sherry, Racheal, and Mourad--for doing all of the heavy lifting (sometimes quite literally as our swag was in big boxes).  Much thanks to the MINDS and SSHRC folks who fund us and to the NATO Field School and the new Carleton Society on Conflict and Security (I am surely getting their name wrong)--a new student group on campus for those interested in defence and security stuff--for providing much of our audience. Oh, and one last thing:While others did go down the slide, I didn't manage to squeeze it in.   

A stablecoin (SC) is a financial structure that attempts to peg the value of its liabilities (or a tranched subset of its liabilities) to an object outside its control, like the USD. To do this, the SC must effectively convince its liability holders that SC liabilities can be redeemed on demand (or on short notice) for USD at par (or some fixed exchange rate). The purpose of this structure is to render SC liabilities more attractive as a payment instrument. Pegging to the USD is attractive to people living in the U.S. because the USD is the unit of account. Non-U.S. holders may be attracted to the product because the USD is the world's reserve currency. This structure serves to increase the demand for a SC pegged to the USD. To a macroeconomist, an SC looks like a unilateral fixed exchange rate regime or a currency board. The structure also resembles a money market fund that pegs the price of its liabilities with the USD at par (presently, government money funds in the United States). It also looks like a bank without deposit insurance (bank deposit liabilities are pegged at par value against cash). The history of unilateral fixed exchange rate regimes is mixed. Hong Kong has successfully pegged its currency to the USD for decades. But the experience for many countries seems closer to that of Argentina. Unless a USD-based SC is backed fully by USD reserves (it needs an account at the Fed for this) or by USD bills (maximum denomination is $100, so unlikely), it may be prone to a bank run. Any other security (including USTs, as the events of March 2020 demonstrated) is subject to liquidity risk -- i.e., a risk that the market for the security suddenly freezes, or demand for the security vanishes as investors seek safer havens. If a SC cannot dispose of its assets at "fair" or "normal" prices, it will fail to raise the money it needs to meet its par redemption promise. The SC will turn out to be not so stable.  The theory of bank runs suggests that SCs might be rendered run-proof if their liabilities are properly designed. The famous Diamond and Dybvig (JPE 1983) model of bank runs is, in fact, a paper that demonstrates how banks can be rendered run-proof. In the first part of their paper, the explain how a credible promise to suspend redemptions when redemption activity is abnormally high can serve to discourage runs (redemptions based on belief of failure, rather than a need for liquidity) altogether. There is no need for deposit insurance (the second part of their paper is devoted to explaining why deposit insurance may nevertheless be needed, but their argument is not entirely satisfactory).  In reality, we do see attempts to render run-prone structures less prone to runs. The Dodd-Frank Act, for example, prevented institutional money funds from pricing their liabilities at par with the USD (only government funds can now do this). In addition, the Act required that fund managers implement liquidity fees and redemption gates in the event of heavy redemption activity. These provisions have not been entirely successful. Even banks that suspended redemptions in the old days did not manage to prevent mass redemption events. The theory suggests that what is needed is a *credible* policy. Evidently, when push comes to shove, people cannot always be expected to follow through on their promises.  Back in my teaching days, I used a "crowded movie theatre" as a metaphor to explain the phenomenon. Imagine a movie theatre that seats 500 people. If someone was to yell "fire!" (for legitimate or illegitimate reasons), people can be expected to rush for the exits. Invariably, some people are likely to be trampled and even killed. If people would instead react to the alarm by rising calmly from their seats and proceeding sequentially to the exits, then only the very last few people in the queue are destined not to make it. Losing one or two people relative to (say) is terrible, but it's preferable to losing 50 people in a mad rush for the exits. An economist might detect a missing market here. Why not sell tickets with queue positions (in the event of fire)? The tickets with the last few queue positions are likely to sell at a discount (that would depend on the likelihood of the event). This way, if someone yells "fire!", customers will simply show their assigned queue position to the ushers and proceed calmly out of the exits. If the fire does exist, the few people know they are doomed and accept their fate with stoic resignation, knowing that they are dying so that many others may live. (And if it turns out there is no fire, they are saved from the fire and the prospect of death that would have been present had they joined the rush to the exits). Except we know that's not what is likely to happen. People cannot be expected to commit in this manner. And there's no obvious way to enforce such contractual stipulations.  But this is where SCs may have an advantage over conventional institutional structures. In particular, their use of "smart contracts" means that commitment is not an issue. The terms of such contracts are executed under the specified contingencies whether you like it or not. You may not like it ex post, but such commitment can be valuable ex ante. In the context of SCs, the credible threat of suspending redemptions in the event of abnormal redemption activity may actually prevent any runs from occurring in the first place. There are, of course, limits to what smart contracts can achieve. They wouldn't, for example, solve the movie theatre problem I just described. This is because people do not live "on-chain." (See also my blog post Smart Contracts and Asset Tokenization.) To some extent, the same issue exists for USD SCs because USDs and USTs exist "off-chain." Nevertheless, money accounts are different than people, so I think the principle described above can apply to financial products. ****Related work: Preventing Bank Runs (w/ Nosal and Sultanum, TE 2017). 

While new substantive posts go on the substack, I plan to keep (cross-)posting annual review posts here, for ease of archiving.[Past annual reviews: 2021, 2020, 2019 & '18, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.]Posts from before the move (that weren't cross-posted)Longtermism contra SchwitzgebelEmergence and Incremental ProbabilityGuest post: Animal Population EthicsObjections to Rule ConsequentialismRescuing Maligned Views in Philosophy of Mind [HYC]Writing Papers with PandocCross-posted annual review from Good ThoughtsI started the new substack in May 2022, after 18 years of blogging at philosophyetc.net, with the hope that the new platform would boost my reach and prompt more reader engagement (e.g. comments). So far, it seems to be working! I've enjoyed many interesting discussions (thank you, commenters!), and was delighted to surpass 2000 subscribers in early November, after the welcome surprise of being featured on the Substack main page for a couple of days.In this post, I'll flag some of the year's highlights, and bold a handful of posts that I especially recommend (for anyone who missed them the first time around).Off the blogLast spring/summer I was awarded tenure (and promoted to Associate Professor) at the University of Miami. I received a grant from Longview Philanthropy, allowing me to take this academic year off from my faculty position, work full time on a mix of research and outreach projects (including utilitarianism.net and this blog), and visit Oxford's outstanding Global Priorities Institute for this past autumn term. My paper 'Pandemic Ethics and Status Quo Risk' (summarized here) was published in Public Health Ethics. And, a few days before Christmas, I was interviewed live on NPR about the ideas behind effective altruism.New pages I wrote this year for utilitarianism.net include:The chapter on 'Near-Utilitarian Alternatives'A study guide to Singer's 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality'New objections pages on the mere means objection, the separateness of persons, alienation, and special obligationsThere are always more things I want to work on than I'm actually able to get around to. But once you add these 50-odd substack posts into the mix, and new academic papers currently under review and in draft, I'm overall pretty happy with my productivity. I'm also excited about my plans for next year—and will be happy if I manage to complete at least half of what I have in mind.Posts on Effective Altruism & Applied EthicsA major theme of Good Thoughts is that it's good to do good things (and even better to do better)! Some relevant posts include:Effective Altruism FAQ - what I wish everyone knew about EABeneficentrism - how the moral foundations of EA are much broader (and less controversial/disputable) than full-blown utilitarianismThe Nietzschean Challenge to Effective Altruism - here's a foundational challenge one doesn't often hear: maybe well-being is overrated? At least, it may be worth giving weight to things like achievement and not just things like comfort.Ethics as Solutions vs Constraints - contrasting beneficence-first vs purity-first ways of thinking about ethicsPick some low-hanging fruit - while not quite as vivid as Singer's pond, I quite like this alternative metaphor for (moderate) effective altruism in the face of seemingly limitless demands.The Strange Shortage of Moral Optimizers - Why doesn't EA have more competition? It's weird that more people aren't even trying to "promote the general good in a serious, scope-sensitive, goal-directed kind of way."Billionaire Philanthropy - would you prefer they spend it on luxury consumption? Or donate to the US treasury? Seriously?Review of What We Owe the Future - an important book, well-targeted at introducing longtermism to a general audience, but in many respects too uncontroversial for philosophical audiences. Expect academic critics to exaggerate the core thesis (or even conflate it with total utilitarianism) to give them more of a target.Utilitarianism and Abortion - there's no particular reason for longtermist pro-natalists to focus specifically on abortion (rather than other non-procreative choices), and there's no utilitarian excuse to force people to do good things (like procreate) when you could instead incentivize them. (Cf. kidney donations.)On Utilitarianism and Ethical TheoryI think most people—including most academic philosophers—have a pretty terrible understanding of utilitarian ethics, relying on misleading and oversimplified caricatures. Some of the below posts try to correct those misunderstandings. Others more positively explore what we should think about tricky issues in ethical theory.Introducing utilitarianism.net - an overview of the new website and its main features. (N.B. more updates coming soon!)Utilitarianism and Reflective Equilibrium - why utilitarianism is (contrary to common perception) actually the most intuitive moral theory: its conflicts with intuitive verdicts are shallow and easy to accommodate, whereas deontology's conflicts with intuitive principles are deep and utterly irresolvable.Utilitarianism debate with Michael Huemer - expanding on the above point, and on the inferential role of wrongness(Im)permissibility is Overrated - distinguishing right and wrong is less important than settling what's worth caring about.Theses on Mattering - addressing common misconceptions about what it takes to truly value people equallyA New Paradox of Deontology - how only consequentialism combines normative authority, guidance, and adequate concern for rescuable victimsConstraints and Candy - both appeal to our lizard-brains, but neglect less salient interestsDeontic Pluralism - How to reconcile Maximizing, Satisficing, and Scalar ConsequentialismsConsequentialism Beyond Action - and why we need two dimensions of moral evaluation: the fitting the and the fortunate. (Too many consequentialists neglect the former!)Caplan's Conscience Objection to Utilitarianism - why the demandingness objection is confused, and utilitarianism does not in fact imply that we're all bad peopleEmergency ethics - and why I think there's no special duty of easy rescue, just general reasons of beneficenceLevel-Up Impartiality - non-utilitarians sometimes imagine that impartiality means treating everyone as badly as they treat strangers, rather than as well as they treat their friends and loved ones. But I think there's independent reason to think we're more likely right about the latter.Ethically Alien Thought Experiments - don't let alien cases masquerade as real-world ones (transparently alien thought experiments are fine, though!)Consequentialism and Cluelessness - why I'm skeptical of Lenman's Epistemic ObjectionA Multiplicative Model of Value Pluralism - how do distinct kinds of value combine?Double or Nothing Existence Gambles - seem like a bad deal! But what's the best theoretical explanation of this?Killing vs Failing to Create - addressing the replaceability objection by allowing both impersonal and person-directed reasonsPuzzles for Everyone - Some of the deepest puzzles in ethics concern how to coherently extend ordinary beneficence and decision theory to extreme cases. Too often, people mistakenly believe that these are only puzzles for utilitarians, as though other theories needn't care at all about beneficence or decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. I explain why this is a mistake, and especially explain why appealing to "neutrality" about adding happy lives is not an adequate solution to the problems of population ethics.On the link between Theory and PracticeTheory-Driven Applied Ethics - how utilitarianism may inspire mid-level "beneficentric" principles that can command wider assent, and still suffice for all practical purposes.Is Non-Consequentialism Self-effacing? - turning Bernard Williams on his head: even non-consequentialists should probably want others to be more beneficent, which is a goal that may be better served by promoting utilitarian ethics.How Useful is Utilitarianism? - some early thinking about what a 'Beneficence Project' for utilitarian-leaning academics might look like (with an invitation for potential collaborators to get in touch).Naïve vs Prudent Utilitarianism - careless pursuit of the good is bad in expectation (but of course nothing in utilitarianism justifies such carelessness).Ethical Theory and Practice - stipulated thought experiments are not a good guide to how to behave in real life, with its ineliminable uncertainties. As a result, it turns out that utilitarianism and moderate deontology are surprisingly difficult to differentiate in terms of their real-world implications.Other PostsAgency and Epistemic Cheems Mindset - use your best judgment, don't suspend it! (Winner of a Blog Post Prize.)The Fine-Tuning God Problem - without an explanation of why (moderately) life-friendly creator gods are a priori more likely than others, deism doesn't seem to give us an explanation of fine-tuning after all.When Metaethics Matters - and how it might affect our practical commitmentsMetaethics and Unconditional Mattering - we should oppose gratuitous suffering, no matter what's trueParfit in Seven Parts - "In Parfit's Ethics, I critically introduce Parfit's central insights and arguments... But even this very short book is still, you know… a book… and so unlikely to be as widely read as random blog posts on the internet. Solution: turn the book into a series of blog posts!"Against Egoism and SubjectivismPriority and AggregationRational Irrationality and Blameless WrongdoingParfit's Triple TheoryDo you really exist over time?The Birth of Population EthicsMoral Truth without SubstanceMy Top ThreeFor any new readers, I'd especially encourage you to check out my following "top three" most-liked posts:Puzzles for EveryoneBeneficentrismTheses on MatteringHappy New Year!

Robert Wade on Zombie Ideas, Being inside the World
Bank, and the Death of Ethics in Economics after the Marginal Revolution







The global
economy is at the core of some of the main issues in contemporary International
Relations. But how do we understand the global economy and what impact does
that have on how we deal with the power politics around it? A fault line seems
to have emerged between those who take economic theory seriously and those who
denounce it for being part of the problem. Informed by his training as an
anthropologist, Robert H. Wade—professor at the LSE—takes a different tack: he
bases his engagement with the way in which Adam Smith has been appropriated to
advocate for a dominant view of 'free markets' on real-world economics and in-depth
accounts of insiders. In this Talk,
Wade—among others—discusses experimentation in international economic
regimes, why the International Financial Institutions don't fight economic
crises, and the powers and perils of being inside the World Bank.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is,
according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current
International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in
this debate?



If we'd reframe
your question as being more broadly about global studies, I think that one of
the really fundamental questions is how and why it is that the precepts of neoliberalism
have penetrated into every nook and cranny of Western societies, and have
penetrated to a very large extent many non-Western countries.



This has
happened especially, but not only, through the agency of the IMF and the World
bank, which have imbued these neoliberal principles; through the mechanism of
graduate education: children of the elites in developing countries go out to
American, British, other Western universities, and they learn that this is
'true' economics, or 'true' IPE, or 'true' Political Science, and then they
come back and implement these same principles and make them a reality back
home. But across the globe, this even holds for the Nordic countries. In
Iceland and other Nordic countries, from the 1980s, networks of people sharing
a belief in neo-liberal precepts, began to form and sort of place each other in
key positions within the state, and in politics, and built a momentum in this
direction. These precepts have become understood as just natural, as in
Margaret Thatcher's 'there is no alternative'.



I live in the
UK, and the great bulk of the British public really does believe that the
government is just like a household writ large, and the same rules of budgeting
that apply to the household should apply to the state. That when times are
tough the household has to tighten its belt, cut back on spending, and it is
only fair that the government does the same, and if the government does not, if
the government runs a deficit in hard times, then the government is being
irresponsible. And this is a completely mistaken and pre-Keynesian idea, but it
is a 'zombie idea'—that is, however much arguments and evidence may be mounted
against it, it just keeps coming up and up and up, and governments come to
power riding on this zombie idea and a flotilla of related ideas.



The persistence
of this zombie idea is all the more amazing as we just had a global financial
crisis in 2007/8, which would prompt a rethinking of these ideas. But these
neoliberal precepts have been, if anything, more strongly reinforced. In
previous hard times—and obviously the 1930s depression is the exemplary
case—there has been a stronger move towards, what you could call, social
democratic precepts. But not this time! Indeed, even after the crisis, the
whole of the European Union with 500 million people is even more thoroughly structured
on the basis of these ideas. I am thinking of what is popularly known as the Fiscal Compact signed by the EU Member States in 2012, which commits all governments
to balance budgets all the time—that is, first, the structural deficit may not
rise above 0.5 percent of GDP. Second, the public debt may not rise above 60
percent of GDP. Third, automatic financial sanctions are levied on governments
that exceed these two thresholds. Fourth, the whole procedure is supervised by
the European Commission, and this is presented as in the name of sound
budgeting. This package is presented as justified by the proposition that
government is a household writ large. The most elementary principles of
Keynesian macroeconomics show why this is not simply mistaken, but a disaster,
and will keep generating recessionary pressures. It is sold as a kind of excuse
for avoiding to put in place the essential conditions for the monetary union,
namely, a common budget and a sizable transfer mechanism to the regions just as
exists in the United States. But they do not want to do that, but still they
call this agreement 'cooperation', which is all about not cooperation, but
about writing these dictates around this zombie idea written into the very
basic architecture of the EU. Beyond EU politics, it materializes all the way
down to, I don't know, the function of the privatization of the Post Office, it
goes all the way down to the sort of capillaries of how universities are run,
and the incentive systems that have placed upon academics, and there is very
little pushback. The one reason, why I am almost completely delighted about
Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour party, is that this is one
small case of where there seems to be some concerted pushback against these
zombie ideas. The point being that the established Labour party basically
bought into this whole set of neo-liberal ideas. It combined maintaining the
overall structure of inequality in society with more emphasis on providing some
help to the poor, but they had to be hardworking poor.



Yet, one knows
that there can be dramatic changes in the prevailing zeitgeist of norms. One
knows that there can be big changes in the space of a few decades and the
question is can one imagine a scenario in which they might be a big change in
norms back to a more kind of social-democratic direction. So where will this
take place? Because of technological change in the labor market, there is a
real big crisis of employment with many middle-class jobs cut out and
polarization in the labor market. This might then induce a political movement
to have a much bigger change in income distribution than anybody with power is
now talking about. Talk of re-distribution these days is really almost entirely
around redistribution through the state, but the point I would make is that if
there is to be any significant reduction of inequality, especially inequality
at the top, there has to be more attention to changes in market-income
distribution.



Let me explain. The
share of profits in national income has been going up and the share of labor
income has been going down. So we should harness the shareholder structure of
the market to affect a more equal income distribution by enabling a much wider
section of the population to buy into the profit share. At the moment the
profit share goes to senior executives and equity holders, but equity holders
are highly concentrating at the top of the income and wealth distribution. If
equity earners could be spread much more equally, then a much wider section of the
population would get income, while they sleep so to speak. We could institute
something like trusts, whose members could be the employees of a company, the
customers, the neighbors of the company, and the trust would borrow on capital
markets and take out insurance against the repayment of the lending of loan and
then it would buy shares, it would use that borrowed money to buy shares in the
company, and the company would pay out dividends on the shares and then that
dividend income coming out of profits would be distributed to the members of
the trust. That would be a way of getting the rising share of profits in
national income distributed out to the population at large. I particularly like
this metaphor of "earning income while you sleep", since at the moment it is
only the rich people, who are earning income while they sleep. Somehow that facility
of earning income while you sleep has to be made much more widely and available—by
using the market against itself, so to speak.





How did you arrive at where
you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?



I suppose the starting point was really this; my
father was a New Zealand diplomat, so we moved quite often. By that time I was
twelve my parents were posted to Colombo, Ceylon as it was called then. After
having lived just in Western countries, I suddenly encountered at this very
formative age Colombo and Sri Lanka. I was just amazed by that experience; by
the color, the taste, the exoticness, but I was also very struck by how the
many boys at the same age as me, were walking around with no shoes. I particular
remember this boy carrying a baby on his shoulder, the baby looked half-dead
and covered in scabs, and I think it was then I got the idea of just how
unequal the world was. Then at university I studied economics, but I also
visited my parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I got another sense of that
great disparity in wealth and living standards. At this time I had come across
Adam Smith and the wealth of nations question and that helped to encapsulate or
to crystalize my interests. So I wanted to go the Institute of Development
Studies in Sussex and  got enrolled for a
PhD in economics, but en route I spent several weeks in India and during that
time I began to dwell upon just how boring and how useless everything I studied
under the name of microeconomics. I kept thinking of these dreadfully dry
textbooks of marginal cost curves and marginal revenue curves and utility function
and difference curves etc., which I had forced myself to sit exams in. By this
time I had done a little bit of fieldwork, living on Pitcairn Island in the
middle of the Pacific.



When I got back to Sussex after fieldwork I announced
that I wished to not do a PhD in economics, but to do one in anthropology
thinking all the time, that this would actually be more use for understanding
why for example India, where I had been, was so very poor. So that's what I did:
a PhD in anthropology… In some ways I regard that as having been a mistake,
because the sort of mainstream of anthropology is very far away from the Adam
Smith questions. Having done the degree in anthropology, pretty soon I began to
change direction and pay much more attention to the state, to the state
bureaucracy. I went to India and I studied the Irrigation Department and other
related departments. I went to South Korea and I studied state irrigation
agencies and I went to Taiwan and I studied the state more broadly. So I was
kind of moving up from my Italian village, moving kind of up the scale in terms
of state agencies and then the state as a whole.



Then I went to work for the World Bank in the 1980s and
my main reason for doing that was not to do the research the World Bank wanted
me to do, but rather to study the World Bank from the inside as fieldwork. If
in some ways switching to anthropology was a mistake, in other ways it was not,
because I approached those kind of Wealth-of-Nations-questions in a way very
different from how economists approached them. For example when I went to
Taiwan and studied the trade regime, the first thing I did was to go and talk
to people who operated through the trade regime, whereas I noticed that the
published works by economists celebrating Taiwan's free trade regime was based
on what the rules said and what certain government officials told them was the
case. They had never actually talked to
people who traded through the trade regime. If they would have, they would
have learned about all the covert controls that went on such that there was
quite a distinction between the liberal face of the trade regime and the
reality of the trade regime. The reality was that the government was managing
trade in line with industrial policy, but the government absolutely did not
want the world to know that. So all this was kept hidden and I was really
regarded as rather unwelcome visitor—and in fact to this day my book Governing the Market (1990, read the
introduction here) is not well
received in Taiwan. It says the government of Taiwan did a good job of managing
the market, but they want the world to believe that Taiwan is a free trade
country. So that is the kind of intellectual trajectory that I have been on.



So I think that the value of the anthropology PhD was
that it really taught me, in practical terms, the meaning of the
anthropological maxim, which is 'soaking and poking'. To put it another way—I
love this—anthropologists are social scientists, who believe that the plural of
anecdote is evidence. And indeed I place a lot of weight on anecdotes, on
gossip, on the stories people tell, whereas economists would be much happier
reducing, let us say, South Korea's trade regime to one data point in a matrix,
and then compare that data point with, let us say, Malaysia's data point to see
how the trade regimes are correlated with growth, or something like that, and
that is really not my interest.





What would a student need to
become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?



Despite what I've just said, I do think that a graduate
training in economics is very useful, provided one does not believe it. And that is really
difficult, because the socialization pressures are intense: if you do not say
the right things—which are neoliberal type things on the whole—then you will
likely not get a high grade. But I have noticed that economists tend to know
how to think, how to make arguments,
they tend to understand the idea of causality, and that may seem an astonishing
thing to say on my part, because it implies that students coming from other
disciplines are often weak in understanding the very basic ideas of causality,
but that is my experience. I had many students coming from, who knows, IR or
Political Science or Sociology or Anthropology, who clearly do not have much
idea of causality; they can describe things, but they find thinking in terms of
cause and effect, in terms of independent and dependent variables, in terms of
left and right side, they just find it difficult. So I do think that there is a
lot to be said for studying economics, and mastering the maths, provided that
the critical facility is not lost. That is point number one.



Point number two is that I think that there is a huge
premium on doing fieldwork, and the field work maybe in developing countries,
but when I say field work, I don't just mean going out to villages, going out
to see poor people 'over there'. I am talking of fieldwork inside bureaucracies:
to try and understand the culture, the incentive systems that people are
working under—fieldwork at home so to speak, in the countries one comes from. From
the students' point of view, it is clearly much easier to sit in the LSE
library to do the research. So in my marking I give quite a premium to a
student actually doing fieldwork, going out and interviewing, and having the
experience of writing up and interpreting the interviews and somehow fitting it
back into a larger argument—but really few students actually do that, and I
think that that is a real, real big mistake. Mind you, the same risk holds for fieldwork in economics as it does for
studying economics: I encourage students to work for (do fieldwork in,
experience) the World Bank; and several have—but to the best of my knowledge
almost none of them has kept their critical perspective. They really come to
buy into it.





The relations between states are settled
either through diplomacy or warfare. Why would we have to focus on economics to
understand IR?



Because economics—such as
for example balances of payment, surpluses and deficits—set the constraints and
incentives on countries in terms of their relationships with each other. A great
deal of diplomacy is driven by economic pressures: diplomacy to get other
countries to for example open their markets, or to cut deals with countries—'if
you do this, we will do that'—deals that may relate to areas that are rather
different, for instance if you buy more of these of our exports, we will help
you fight such and such country, because the manufactures are in my
constituency.



So, in a way, the way you
framed the question is part of the reason why I react against the discipline of
IR: because it tends to treat diplomacy, war, and so on, as somehow rather
separate from economic pressures, and I see these economic pressures as very
powerful drivers of both of the other two things. As another example, one of
the drivers of the Syrian conflict was that there was an acute drought (like
Weizman observed in Theory Talk #69, red), which meant that many people
were rendered destitute; rural areas flooded into the cities, and the Assad
regime just was—understandably—unable to cope; and large numbers of young men,
concentrated in cities, rootless and with no jobs, just were recruiting fodder for
the Wahhabi sect. I have always thought of economics—not so much as in the
making choices in conditions of scarcity, that is sort of Lionel Robin's definition—in the sense of Alfred Marshal, about how people make a
living, as a very fundamental driver of a lot of what happens in International
Relations.





Pikkety recently published Capital in the
21st Century, causing quite the stir. But why would inequality
between people matter for IR?



Let me comment by invoking
a very contemporary exhibit—the migration crisis in Europe now. Maybe a decade
ago I looked at the figures and if you took the
average income of the EU-15 prior to latest extensions and then expressed the
average income of countries outside of the EU—including sub-Sahara Africa—as a
percentage, then there was a really dramatic falling away of income levels
relative to the EU, in countries all around the EU and whether you took market
exchange rates or purchasing power parity. If you went round to sub-Sahara
Africa and took the average, it was more like two percent in market exchange rates
and seven percent in purchasing power parity; and the 'problem' is that there
is certainly here a rather thin slither of sea between Africa and the promised
land of Europe and to the east there are these great open planes, where armies
can go up and down to the speed of light, so to speak, but people can also move
pretty quickly across these planes.



So all one has to do—and this
might just be only a bit of an exaggeration—if one is on the poor end of this
poverty pyramid is hop across the border and you have a chance at least of
getting a very appreciable increase in living conditions and income, with which
you can then get savings to remit back to home. So the migrations pressures are
just huge. So that is one reason for linking inequality to issues in International
Relations—really fundamental issues, and very very difficult to dissolve.





You've done anthropological fieldwork inside
the World Bank—an institution drawing a lot of criticism from its detractors in
IR. Can you shed some kind of light about what kind of 'animal' the World Bank
is?



First of all, let me say
that at the micro-level—the level of the people you know and the people I know
inside the World Bank—I agree that there are people doing a lot of good work.
But if you look at the organization more generally—the World Bank and also the
IMF—they are clearly instruments mainly of US foreign policy—and any number of
US senators, members of the House, have basically said that. When they are
defending the International Financial Institutions (they often criticize them),
they do so by saying they are important for US foreign policy. And you have to
look at the governance structures to see how it is that the US in particular—but
Western states more generally—have from the beginning, through the very Articles
of Agreement, created a structure which locks in their power, and has made it
very difficult for other countries (including Japan) to significantly increase their
shareholdings. The US has kept the presidency of the Bank and the much less
recognized Number Two position of the IMF, and has used these positions to have
a very strong influence.



Just to illustrate what the
Bank and the Fund do: at the time of the East-Asian crisis—specifically the
Korean crisis in 1997-1998—the IMF mission was in Seoul. The negotiations were
in a hotel there. David Lipton from the US Treasury (and a former student of
Larry Summers who was by then Deputy Secretary) was just down the corridor of
where the negotiations took place, and every so often the IMF people would walk
out of the negotiations and consult with David Lipton, then come back in and—as
Paul Blustein reports in his book called The Chastening—often said
something rather different from what they had been saying before they consulted
with David Lipton.



Just to take another
example, the US being able to appoint the president of the Bank—to appoint a
person known personally to the Treasury Secretary or to the Secretary of the
State, or both—is really of great value: when there is a 'trustful relationship'—or
a relationship of dependency, the president being dependent on those who
appointed him in the Administration—it is possible for those people in the Administration,
or people close to them, to just ring up the president of the Bank, and talk in
a very informal, confidential, trustful way about what is happening in Latin
America, or what is happening in the Middle East, and what the US thinks the
Bank should or should not be doing in those places. Larry Summers appointed a
protégé of his to one of the regional development banks, and this person—who is
very senior in the bank—told me that Larry would frequently ring him, while he
is being driven home in the evening from the Treasury, just to have a chat
about how things were going in her region, and to pass on suggestions about
what the Bank should be doing there, and to get intelligence from her about
what was happening in the region, and so on. The point is that, making these
personal connections is of immense value, but at the same time, the US
Congress, in particular, is very much against having a big Bank against allowing
a capital increase for the World Bank—so that the bank could, as it should be
doing, increase its lending for infrastructure investment ten times. It is just
a complete scandal how little the Bank has been lending for the past 20 years
or more for infrastructure, for roads and power stations and so on. The US does
not want the Bank providing socialistic competition with the private sector: it
says these things are for the private sector to do, and the Bank has to take
care of poverty, because the private sector is not interested in poverty.



So the US wants to keep the
presidency of the Bank, it wants to keep, secondly, its unique veto right on
the big decisions, such as decisions on whether to increase the capital base—but
provided those two things are met it does not care that much about the Bank. In
the case of the Fund, the US is also very powerful, but of course the Europeans
have a bit more relative power. Right now I think the world is in an even more dangerous
sort if financial condition than might appear, because the IMF is acutely short
of secure or guaranteed lending resources, so if there is to be another round
of crisis—as I think is entirely likely within the next five years—the Fund
depends upon borrowing short-term from member countries, like on six months
terms, but member countries can say 'no', and that means that the Fund's
ability to fight crises is quite constrained. The Fund should implement what
was agreed in 2010 by all the member countries represented on the board of the
IMF: to roughly double the quote of the guaranteed lending resources, that is,
resources the countries actually hand over to the Fund, over which they
actually give up country control. All the relevant capitals ratified it with
one exception—the US—because Congress refused because the individual barons,
who are not under that much party discipline, each said to the Treasury: 'look,
the question of the IMF is of zero significance to my electorate, so if you
want my vote on the IMF, you have to give me things that I want like projects
in my constituency and so on'. The Treasury added up the demands of the people,
whose vote had to be won, and it considered those demands were just way, way,
way over the top. As long as a Democrat is in the presidency, while the House
is controlled by Republicans the world is sort of held hostage to this. Beyond
this example, this actually entails a structural problem: the US blocking or
producing a gridlock in international organizations, because the Congress is
hostile to international organizations, because Congress sees it to imply a
loss of US sovereignty. The only way to end this gridlock is to end the US veto
in the Fund and the Bank, but the problem is that the US can veto any measures.



One response of the big
developing countries is to create bypass organizations—such as the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Banks, such as the new Development Bank, such as the
Contingent Reserve arrangement the BRICs have established, and then a growing
number of sort of regional development banks. And I think that that is a good
thing, but it does raise questions about coordination, about who is looking
after, if you will, the global interests, global issues such as climate change.
In short, we need a genuine World Bank, rather than the American-Bank-in-the-World
we have today.



You engage thoroughly with economics and
economic theory. Now there seem to be two kinds of critical approaches to
economics in IPE: one criticizes its rationality as flawed, and another buys
into its rationality but attempts to point out where actual policy gets it
wrong. Where do you stand in this?



If you take the example of
how the EU attempted to impose fiscal rules on Greece, you see a notion of
rationality which draws upon these very primitive notions that I referred to
right at the beginning, where the government is just a household writ large,
and the same set of rules that apply to the budgeting of the household must
apply to the government as well. Here, the assumption is that any macroeconomic
proposition must have microeconomic foundations, that it must be derivable from
propositions about microeconomic agents acting in this sort of self-maximizing
way, and if you cannot derive macroeconomic propositions from those micro
foundations, then there is something unreliable, un-rigorous about your macroeconomics.
So what are then the sources of these micro-economic assumptions?



This leads us to one
fundamental and almost completely unaddressed weaknesses of economics can be
traced back to the Marginal Revolution in the late 19th
century. From that moment onwards, there has been an attempt to model economics
on physics, and that was very explicit on the part of people like Pareto and
Walras, and Jevons, early Marginalist thinkers. They even drew up tables with
terms of physics, like velocity, on one side, and then corresponding terms in
economics on the other. That had a huge benefit in terms of the 'science' of
economics, because it cut economics loose from Adam Smith's and other classical
economists' preoccupations with issues of morality and ethics. Adam Smith
thought his most important book was not the Wealth of Nations but his Theory of Moral Sentiments, on which he was working,
revising yet again, when he died. For Smith, economics and morals were never
separate worlds, but intimately related. So for him, the Theory of Moral
Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations were just twins. The point
about the marginalist revolution, and the embrace of physics as the model, was
that it cut economics free of all that sort of subjective stuff about values. So
economics after the marginalist revolution set off with the assumption that not
production, but the movement of individuals in markets engaged in trading with
each other became the center of gravity of economics. Making the study of exchange
rather than the study of production central was analogous to, say, Boyle's Law
in physics. Boyle's Law in physics explained the
movement of molecules in gasses, as a function of the pressure applied to the
gas. So why did they make that analogy?



The point of likening of
individuals in microeconomic actions with molecules in gasses was the
following. Everybody knows that we do not apply any consideration of
ethics or moral sentiments to the movement of the molecules in gas, so neither should
we apply any notions of ethics or moral sentiments to the movements of
individuals in market exchanges. And that was the way that all considerations
of ethics, of morality were just removed from economics. I for instance asked the
question to well-known American growth theorist, as we were walking down the
street in Providence at Brown University: 'is it moral for people to freeride?'
And he said, 'yes of course, provided they do not break the law'. So ethics and
questions of morality have been almost completely expunged from economics in a
way that would horrify classical economists including Smith; and a particular idea
of rationality has been an important part of cleansing economics from those
moral considerations. George DeMartino, editor of the Oxford Handbook of
Professional Economics Ethics which just appeared has a wonderful phrase to
capture this—'econogenic harm': the harm built into the way that economics,
professional economists work.





Haven't specific fields, like development
economics—a field you engage with yourself—advanced to overcome these
weaknesses in economic theory?



Let me root my answer again
in observations about the linkages between theory and practice, for it is in
practice that economic theory really does its work and its politics becomes
visible. It always amazes me we have had a development industry in place for
roughly the past 70 years with vast numbers of people, organizations, money all
orchestrated underneath this umbrella of development; yet if you go back and
read what the early writers about development and economic growth said—I am
thinking of people like Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Myrdal, Hirschman, Prebisch, but also Moses Abramovitz. If you go back and look
at what they were saying, it seems to me that we have not advanced all that
much. Sure, we have advanced a lot in terms of econometric techniques, but in
terms of substance we have not. One conclusion I draw from that is that it is
really important that international regimes—for example, World Bank and IMF
loan conditions, but also WTO regimes—give room for experimentation, because it
is really not the case that 'there is no alternative'. This Washington
Consensus agenda has clearly not been effective in accelerating production,
upgrading it, and production diversification, or export upgrading, or export
diversification. So, there should be written into the regimes a lot of room for
experimentation. But this isn't there because of the political origin of these
regimes; because of what western countries want for the rest world, namely, to
open the rest of the world to their markets.



In the 80s there were a lot
of experts in industrial development in the World Bank and they did good work,
promoting industrial growth and investment in productive infrastructure. But
then Anne Krueger came in as chief economist, and brought in a whole lot of
people with her—who, like here, were arch-neoliberals. The industrial growth
people were invited to find employment elsewhere, or to rebrand themselves as
experts in who knows what, environmental assessment, primary education, or good
governance. There was no room for them. This also fitted well with some bad
experiences the Bank had had with investing in infrastructure. It had gotten
into a lot of trouble with large-scale infrastructural interventions such as
roads and dams and the like from, especially, US NGOs mobilizing Congress—which
then put pressure on the Treasury and so on. My lament throughout this whole
conversation has been that we seem to have become just locked into this
direction that was set in the 1980s, and it is very difficult to see what kind
of economic catastrophe would be necessary to give a sufficient shock to
reroute the global system of economic governance.



So after the 1980s, the
Bank sort of backed off and began saying that development, economic
development, was about poverty reduction—the slogan of the Bank became, 'our
dream is a world free of poverty'. You can understand that shift partly in
terms of pulling out of the concern with production to get into safe territory,
but also because poverty reduction seemed to sort of take care of inequality,
because you reduced inequality to poverty—to the poor 'over there', and we can
feel good about helping them; but we do not want talk about inequality, which
involves us, because then there is the question of justice of our income.



But then the most recent
turn is that we're seeing a renewed push for infrastructure in the World Bank
and western development agencies. I think that you can link this recent
infrastructure push to uncertainty about the sources of economic growth. In the
West there is a real question about sustaining economic growth without housing
bubbles and stock market bubbles—in other words, without endogenously building
financial instability. There may well be a similar sort of issue in terms of
the growth of developing countries.





Last question. Adam Smith seems to be
constantly present in your work as a critical interlocutor. How come?



I kind of engage in a
critical debate with Adam Smith, but especially with people today, who believe
his ideas. I often start to frame arguments in terms of his famous 40 word
summary of the causes of the relative wealth of nations, which he actually
wrote in 1755, which is to say long before the first edition of the Wealth
of Nations. I will just tell you what these 40 words say, and then I will
tell you the significance of them. He said:



'Little else is
requisite to carry a state to the highest degree
of opulence from the lowest
barbarism than peace, easy taxes, and tolerable
administration of justice; all the rest being
brought about by the natural course of things.'



So I am struck by how today
many economists say or imply that this is essentially right; you need some
qualifications of course, but essentially that is the nub of it. You might have
to translate peace, easy taxes, tolerable administration of justice into more
modern terms, but that is the essence of it. For example, Gregory
Mankiw—Professor of economics at Harvard, former chair of the National Council
of Economic Advisers during the Bush administration, and author of a very
popular textbook in economics—said in the Wall Street Journal in 2006: Adam Smith was right to
say that – and then he gave the 40 word quote. The renowned economists Timothy
Besley and Torsten Persson wrote Pillars of Prosperity, which also
begins with Smith's 40 words, and they even see the book as a kind of
elaboration, but in that same kind of spirit, of Smith's basic idea. So my
point is that these ideas are still current; they are still the sort of front
of a lot of neoliberal thinking. I am just astonished these ideas all these
centuries later remain so powerful. I have had at the back of my mind the idea
of organizing an international competition to provide a contemporary 40 word
statement, which is sort of equivalent to Smith's, which would obviously have
to be of a more global character, encompassing the globalized world economy.







Robert Hunter Wade worked at the Institute of
Development Studies, Sussex, 1972-95, World Bank, 1984-88, Princeton Woodrow
Wilson School 1989/90, MIT Sloan School 1992, Brown University 1996-2000.
Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 1992/93, Russell Sage
Foundation 1997/98, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin 2000/01. Fieldwork in
Pitcairn Is., Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan. Research on World Bank
1995-continuing. Author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village
Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988,
1994), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government
in East Asia's Industrialization (1990, 2003). Latter won American
Political Science Association's award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992.



Related links





Faculty profile at LSE
Read Wade's The Piketty
phenomenon and the future of inequality (2014, real-world economics review)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Capitalism
and Democracy at Cross-Purposes (2013, Challenge) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Rethinking
Industrial Policy for Low Income Countries (2007 ADB Conference paper) here
(pdf) 
Read Wade's Bringing the
State Back In (2005, IPG) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Is
Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? (2004, World Development)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Creating
Capitalisms (Introduction to 2003 book 'Governing the Market') here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)