People have strong opinions on all sorts of things – gay marriage, Iraq, abortion, global warming – without having any qualifications to make informed judgments. I don’t have a degree in international relations but I have a view on Afghanistan. How come everyone thinks that economics is too difficult, too technical? People make strong judgments on the basis of having some basic knowledge about international politics or some climate science, they are not making this judgment based on sophisticated expert knowledge, and that’s all I’m asking when it comes to economic matters as well.
Unfortunately we economists have been very successful in convincing people that what we do is very difficult and that people won’t understand it even if we explained it to them. There has also been a lot of political interest in keeping economics away from democratic debate, keeping it away from the general public by making people believe that it is very difficult. There is therefore a lack of a real debate except yes, monetary policy should be run by the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve Board, or utility regulation can be done by some special committee. After a while you realise that there’s no substance to democracy because all of the important decisions have been farmed out to these expert groups. That’s what needs to change.
Five minutes with Ha-Joon Chang: “Members of the general public have a duty to educate themselves in economics”
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/five-minutes-with-ha-joon-chang/
In an interview with Joel Suss, editor of the British Politics and Policy blog, Ha-Joon Chang discusses his new book, Economics: The User’s Guide, and the need for a pluralist approach to economics. He recently gave a public lecture at the LSE, the video of which can be seen here.
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I sometimes liken the economics profession to the Catholic clergy in the Middle Ages. Unless you knew Latin you couldn’t even read the Bible because the Pope refused to let the Bible be translated into the local languages. You had to either learn Latin or take their word for it. Economics has become completely inaccessible to many people so we need to change this in the way that some of the religious reforms back then tried to do. In those days, religious reformers promoted the translation of the Bible into local languages and the reading of Bible by common people. They emphasised the authority of the Bible rather than what the Vatican says is in the Bible. They, if you like, democratised the religion. Something similar to that is necessary now once again.
Ha-Joon Chang
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「生きていく上で、経済の仕組みくらい知っていなければダメだ」と、「Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies, and the Threat to the Developing World」の著者である Ha-Joon Chang が言う。
それはその通りなのだけれど、生きていく上で携帯端末の使い方も知らなければならないし、運転の仕方も知らなければならないし、学校に行かなければならないし、仕事だって見つけなければならないし、医学の知識だって持たなければならないし、それに結婚相手も見つけなければならないし、などなど、今の人たちには、経済のことを知る以前に、しなければならないことが多すぎる。
経済に対して意見を持つようになれるのは、やはりごく少数なのだろう。
日本に限っていえば、政治家に、経済を知ってほしいと思う。一部の経済学者の言うことを鵜呑みにして政策を決めるのは、あまりにも危険ではないだろうか。