Ronny and Jon,

Thank you for your responses and interesting insights! Both posts make me think of the nature of the discipline of economics, and also of (social) science in general. I think we should be careful not to reify economics nor to be dismissive of it as an academic discipline somehow cocooned from reality. Economists are largely trying to understand the world as we (geographers and other social scientists) are. Also, we should recognize that economics is but an assemblage of the larger 'body' of science; indeed, it is argued that different disciplines exists solely as useful divisions of labor. That said, the separate disciplines can and do get hung up on different paradigms at different times.

I think it might also be useful to separate the discipline of Economics (capital 'e') from the wider discourses of economics (little 'e') found in the political (and ideological) realm and mass media (what we might refer to as conventional economic wisdom). I think the distance between these two 'economics' is quite large. While the two are not totally divorced from each other, I think the distance between them highlights Jon's point regarding economics (little 'e') as a simulacrum (of political ideology, if I understand it right [and I probably don't]). 

We should also be mindful that economists are trying to understand economic functions and relations, whether capitalist or otherwise. We really shouldn't equate one (the discipline of economics) with the other (capitalism). 

To Prof. Scott's question of whether we should re-engage with structuralism while also being cognizant of various post-structuralist turns, I think it is an excellent question and one that we shouldn't be quick to reject. The current economic crisis is structural in nature (hence its wide geographical, and spatially uneven, manifestation) and cannot be explained, in my opinion, by overly agency-centered or behaviorist models. To my point regarding Krugman's (and others) engagement with location modeling and economic geography (including work by Prof. Scott on agglomeration economies), I was alluding to the potentially promising possibilities of re-engaging with structuralism(s) with new lenses...

Mark

--
Dr. Mark de Socio
Department of Geography and Geosciences
Salisbury University
1101 Camden Avenue
Salisbury, MD 21804

+1 410 543 6461 (Tel)
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________________________________________
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dr Jon Cloke [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2010 2:01 PM
To: Mark deSocio; [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Beyond post structuralism???

The problem that academic, orthodox economics faces in the
aftermath of the global economic crisis is how to overcome
being brought face to face with a realization, a moment of
essentialist cognitive dissonance. This moment was the
revelation that (following Baudrillard) orthodox economics
is: “A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary,
and from any distinction between the real and the
imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of
models and the simulated generation of difference.”

Contemporary orthodox economics, based on the classical
economics of the 19th century, has always been desperate
to fulfil its ‘science envy’ whilst continually being
denied that hallowed status by the messiness, complexity
and uncontrollability of the situations for which it seeks
to find logic and structure. Classical economic
theorization was based on the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc
premise that because there was capitalism, therefore it
must be functional and neo-classical economics re-assumed
that mantle in the post-war period. In other words, just
as classical economics developed (in the same way as
geography) as an explanans for imperial and colonial
reality, so neo-classical economics developed increasingly
as an explanans for the massive growth and overwhelming
dominance of northern market-based economies, post-WWII.

In this way classical/neo-classical economic orthodoxies
follow the order of simulacrum image phases outlined by
Baudrillard. Firstly, economic theory began to develop
around nascent capitalisms in the 18th century as a
heavily subjective ‘reflection of a basic reality’ - the
ideas of Colbert, Ricardo, Hume, Colbert, Malthus, Smith
(and critics of capitalism such as Marx and Engels) etc.
were ineluctably set within the theistic, occido-centric
and socially Darwinian intellectual precepts of the
socio-economic processes and problems of their time. In
this socio-cultural location, the origins of economic
theorization inevitably ‘masks and perverts a basic
reality’ and combines with a Judaeo-Christian supremacist
world-view under the guise of a nomothetic, objective
rationality.

But 20th and 21st century capitalisms, ‘lived-reality
capitalisms’, have shown themselves increasingly to be
chaotic dynamic systems with a growing propensity for
instability and volatility and an inevitable tendency
towards monopolization and crisis. Furthermore (in perhaps
one of the greatest ironies) capitalisms have been shown
to be increasingly unsustainable without central
stabilizers-of-last resort, initially nation-states and
central banks, then trading bloc authorities and more
recently supranational institutions and
globally-coordinated bail-outs, as the crises have
increased in intensity and frequency. In this reading, a
la Foucault, ‘free markets’ cannot be ‘free’ without the
structures of the state/regulator to limit and control
them…

Orthodox economics, even with the brief interlude
constituted by Keynesianism (which is a different view of
system processes and mechanics, without challenging the
functional integrity of the system itself) can be viewed
as a dialectical take on human society designed to
reinforce a Foucauldesque, capitalistic regime-of-truth.
Looked at this way orthodox economics developed in the
post-war period to initiate phase 3 of the simulacrum
development, that of masking the chaotic dynamics of
capitalisms, ‘the absence of a basic reality’. This phase
produced, for example, so-called development economics, in
which the simplistic dualist models of Lewis, Todaro etc
were produced out of a hat, not so much with the aim of
producing a realistic pathway by which the poor south
might become the rich north but (as Rostow at least
admitted with his Take-off model) as a theoretical gloss
over basic global social and economic inequality which at
once held out promise for the future and tried to prevent
the spread of communism.

Phase 4 of this particular simulacrum began with the
development of complex derivative instruments from the
early 1970s and the rapid development of power within
financial services actants thereafter, which received a
massive boost with the collapse of the socialist bloc in
1989. If the development of complex derivatives provided
an important weapon, the collapse of the socialist bloc
gave what I refer to elsewhere as ultracapital a degree of
political freedom which rapidly eroded regulatory
boundaries and enabled the rapid incorporation of
state/authority actants within ultracapital. What is
occasionally referred to with disapproval as
‘revolving-door government’ is now the norm and
ultracapital achieved a strategic victory by internalizing
and making a virtue out of conflict-of-interest. Thus
having become simultaneously the state and
that-which-is-regulated-by-the-state, ultracapital now
‘bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own
pure simulacrum.’

The list of putative scapegoats for the current economic
crisis is unending and selective according to ideology;
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, NINJA loans, Alan Greenspan,
Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, the Fed, profligate
lenders, profligate borrowers, AIG, Bank of America,
Lehman brothers, CDOs, John Paulson, Goldman Sachs and,
last but not least, the discipline of economics. Economics
is a fair inclusion in some respects because, as Steve
Keen said in The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences:
“Virtually every aspect of conventional economic theory is
intellectually unsound; virtually every economic policy
recommendation is just as likely to do harm as it is to
lead to the general good. Far from holding the
intellectual high ground, economics rests on foundations
of quicksand. If economics were truly a science, then the
dominant school of thought in economics would long ago
have disappeared from view (Keen, 2001, p. 4).”

Looked at from another point-of-view, however, this is a
bit unfair. Including economics in that list is to blame
it for something that it was not designed to do – be a
functional, descriptive and predictive discipline capable
of producing practical and socially progressive policy.
Economics should be seen for what it is, which is the high
priest of a regime of truth, a Janus simulacrum, a
two-faced gatekeeper seeking both to describe its own
unreal simulacrum and, having described it, seeking to
construct a logical framework from which such a hyperreal
could have arisen.



--
Dr Jon Cloke
Lecturer
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Loughborough LE11 3TU

E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel: 00 44 07984 813681