Really happy to have had the opportunity to write a paper on what the effects of and responses to #COVID__19 say about the cracks in the dominant Economics narrative with the brilliant @cacrisalves for @reviewagrarian.
Time for a lil thread. Full paper: ras.org.in/changing_the_n… +
Time for a lil thread. Full paper: ras.org.in/changing_the_n… +
We look at how Econ moved from political economy analysis to an allegedly "exact science" & how this has led to a weakening of the discipline. We connect this to economists' tendency to see #COVID__19 as an "external" shock rather than as connected to our systems of production.+
We then look at the increasingly central role "markets" have come to play in the discipline and how this has narrowed that's considered the “economic sphere.” This market fundamentalism has, in turn, led to a defunding and weakening of public institutions. +
... with this turn there's been a shift towards "market efficiency" rather than resilience, which has ultimately led to a weakening in capacities for social provisioning across the world - leaving us fundamentally unprepared to meet #COVID__19 effectively. +
We also make connections to how this way of seeing the economy has become influential in policy-making through the rise of what's misleadingly been called "evidence-based policy". This has led to a very narrow understanding of what constitutes evidence & expertise. +
We argue that heterodox economic as a research programme can provide the foundations for a better understanding of how economies work, as well as richer and more informed policy debates, and point to the strengths of various strands of hetecon. +
E.g. feminist econ can provide a better understanding of social reproduction & social relations between actors - which is key to understand the spread and responses to the pandemic - Marxist Econ can shed light on class inequalities and stratification econ on race inequalities.+
Hetecon approaches also help us see the economy as embedded in society (e.g. Fred Lee’s emphasis on the historical process of social provisioning), which in turn helps us better understand how responses to the pandemic are mediated by institutional, social & economic factors. +
...Ecological economics helps us better explore of the intricacies between the economy and nature. Indeed, to scholars with a broader understanding of how production affects food and ecological systems, the rise and spread of Covid-19 was less of a surprise.+
We argue that the inherent instability of capitalism & the need to put distributional conflicts at the centre of any economic analysis an important characteristic of heterodox approaches that is key for any analysis of causes & consequences of #COVID__19.+
E.g. looking at distribution as determined exogenously by social and institutional conditions helps us understand the structural weaknesses in our economies as political choices. E.g. the low wages among essential workers are determined by policy and are in no way "natural". +
These weaknesses that were bluntly exposed by the pandemic such as high degrees of homelessness, precarious workforces & poverty, impact the governments’ ability to respond effectively. Policymakers are now, finally, forced to consider public health as a broader societal issue. +
Hetecon can also help to understand the structural forces that lie behind the polarising tendencies within the global economy, demonstrating that deepening global economic integration over the past decades has led to new vulnerabilities alongside improved 'efficiency'... +
For example, global value chains are now very complex systems, and rather than being decentralised, but they are hierarchical and imbalanced with core hubs that exert disproportionate influence. +
With this in mind, when trying to understand developing economies’ constraints in the wake of the pandemic, it becomes important to look beyond their health systems to also consider constraints related to their subordinate or dependent position in the global economy. +
We conclude, as @cacrisalves says in the first tweet, that we need to give space for explanations of the crisis that are capable of seeing the economy as more than just markets but, rather, as embedded in society... +
Causes & consequences of #COVID__19 need to also be linked to our systems of production, reproduction and distribution. A Heterodox Economics framework is well placed to provide such explanations. /end.
P.S. We wrote this back in April, but publication got delayed because of issues related to #COVID__19, so apologies in advance to anyone who's made similar points since then that we haven't cited!!
