Aidan Jolly
PhD student, Edge Hill University
Once upon a time, I studied Economics. I entered another world, where my everyday experience of living on limited means had no relevance to what I was being asked to study. My ‘Microeconomics’ tutor tried to convince me that consumers make ‘rational’ decisions. It didn’t help that when he got frustrated, he strode around the room waving a golf club. My conclusion was not that I was wrong, but that he didn’t do the shopping. In Macroeconomics lectures I learnt that consumption and production flowed in a virtuous self-maintaining circle. I remember wondering what happened when arms manufacturing siphoned off some of this production into warfare, breaking the circle through mass destruction. I got short shrift as an answer. Many years later, reading Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’, I realised I was not alone in asking these questions.
The fairy tales are still being told, but we feel their wrongness. We tightened our belts in 2008 as absurd sums of money were poured into the property market, allegedly to restart the circular flow of money around ‘the economy’. Our experience was completely at odds with the language used by Bankers and Chancellors. My current PhD research has used drama to unpick this, playing with our assumptions about finance. Working with a group of local participants, we looked at the ‘strangeness’ of money, and discovered that many of our intuitions about economics are right; and also that some key ideas are completely wrong.
To begin with what’s wrong, government messaging on economics is that nations run like households, and must balance income and expenditure. Not surprisingly, participants agreed with this – at the everyday level, we do have to manage this way. As Dickens put it in David Copperfield “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”. But this intuition is being mobilised to legitimate the disproportionate impact of ‘austerity’ on poorer people. It turns out that governments can create money (if they have a Central Bank). Post World War 2, this was called ‘Keynsianism’; but now the idea is so contrary to neo-liberal dogma that it had to be relabelled ‘Quantitative Easing’ after the 2008 crash. Had QE been invested in local infrastructure or health projects rather than property speculation, our world might now be very different.
What do we know that’s right? Our observation that we are being stolen from and that the gap between the top 1% and the rest of us is huge and widening is true. So is our feeling that government ministers are misleading us. They dismiss our lived experience and present ‘The Economy’ as though it is a single ‘thing’ that can be scientifically controlled and understood, except when it can’t, like the weather. This is a fairy story with roots in the 18th Century ‘Enlightenment’, told so successfully that it is facilitating an accumulation of wealth on a scale not seen for 100 years. Rather than wait for this to ‘trickle down’, our response is to create new stories about plural ‘economies’ of socially useful production, care, co-operation and mutual support. We don’t have to wait for changes in Government policy, which will probably never come; we can build these ourselves. And we can start now.