Post-truth: an alumni economist’s perspective

Abstract

Thanks for the opportunity to give this lecture and, at the same time, mark my retirement from SOAS after twenty-seven years, following twenty years at Birkbeck, and fifty years since first studying economics as a graduate student, having completed a first degree in mathematics. Back in 1969, Jim Mirrlees, then Professor of Economics at Oxford, visited the Maths Institute to recruit third-year undergraduates to be funded to take a two-year postgraduate course in economics. I was one of the lucky ones to benefit from his view that a degree in mathematics was more important than one in economics for his purposes. Within a week, I was participating in a weekly research seminar with the leading mathematical economists organised by Mirrlees, reflecting the ease of transition from maths to such economics. Of course, sorry for the name dropping and more to come as this is an occasion to indulge myself, Mirrlees was later to win a Nobel Prize for devising optimal taxation systems (in which all conscientiously pay their taxes).That's how my economics began, and sorry that I have taught so few of you as alumni in our audience today, as I have scarcely taught other than at postgraduate level, and especially focused upon research students, with fifty-one of my own having completed, and hundreds of others have passed through my hands as I have spent most of my career as a research student tutor. Indeed, I can identify as past supervisees, ten professors, twenty-one lecturers, fourteen researchers, four I am now unable to trace, and two whom I am unsure how to categorise! 1 Now, from my title, I suspect you expect me to entertain you with Fake News and Trumponomics. Not at all. I want to talk about my own career and had to find a way to frame it, a peg or theme on which to hang it, a sort of literature survey of myself (a private joke with my Phd students). 2 I thought it might be interesting to see how my works, thirty books and three hundred articles or so, have stood up to the test of time, against my major theme that mainstream economics is a major and longstanding purveyor of post-truth. Here, it is important to note that the current vogue of pointing to fake news, post-truth, etc, is itself a 1 Note that research students, and colleagues, have been a rich source of joint research and collaboration. But, with one exception, apart from referencing publications, I have refrained from mentioning individuals in what follows despite a huge debt of contribution and gratitude (hopefully deservedly felt in both directions). 2 I have had the chance on two previous occasions to write about my life as an economist, see Fine (2001a and2012a). In the former, I was tickled to realise I was the youngest living contributor!

Preliminary Material

“…So, I split out for a separate volume those pieces dealing in economic history. Interestingly, something similar had happened when drafting what turned out to be one, then, two books on economics imperialism Fine and) with our projected volume, then two volumes, on economics and economic history remaining stillborn. Even then, the first volume for this series turned out too large and it, in turn, was split into two, with reorganisation across the first three volumes to suit.…”

“…I remain to be convinced that such speculation goes beyond self-indulgence, of being more interested in self than others, and this thought has continued to plague my endeavours without impeding them. However, the positive reception to such genuflection in a lecture delivered shortly after my retirement, and the suggestion from those in the audience and beyond that I should do more of the same, set me thinking how and what (Fine 2019).…”

Citizen curation and the online communication of folk economics: the China collapse theory in Hong Kong social media

“…Furthermore, following the definition of post-truth by McIntyre (2018) – ‘a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not’ (p. 12), folk economics is not post-truth in that it also relies on reasoning to persuade others even though this reasoning is not based on scientific reasoning but narratives (Van Bavel and Gaskell, 2004). Contrarily, academic economics, in its worst form, blindly forcing market fundamentalism, while trenched under the excuse of Economics 101 when others criticize their predictability, is the post-truth plaguing our world before post-truth becomes a trendy term (Fine, 2019).…”

Economics and Political economy textbooks: 28 years of interaction

“…Consider international publications on the Main stream methodology or Economics. Main stream is criticized for a purely mechanical approach to understanding social and economic phenomena [1]; for formalism, expressed in the predominance of the use of "obedient" models [2]; for similarity to physics [3]; ignoring the question of distribution, which avoids the ethical question of social justice [4]; ignoring the endogeneity of distortions in transition economies [5]; for adherence to economic imperialism, zeal to export narrow concepts of rationality [6]; contradictions in methodologies -especially those related to postmodernism, positivism and philosophical realism, in the traditions of thinking that have emerged since the Enlightenment [7], the inability to interact with criticism and alternatives [8].…”