Inaugural Donal Nevin Lecture
Nevin Economic Research Institute, 23 May 2013
Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil le Tom Healy as ucht an cuireadh a chur chugam chun an léacht tionscnaimh a thabhairt in ómós do Dhomhnall Mac Cnáimhín (do Dhonal Nevin). Soláthraíonn an léacht seo dhá dheis luachmhara dom, ar mór an pléisiúr a fhaighim astu araon: deis chun ómós a thabhairt do Dhomhnall Mac Cnáimhín (do Dhonal Nevin) as a ndearna sé mar shaoránach tiomanta de chuid na hÉireann, agus ina theannta sin, deis chun fáilte a chur roimh Institiúid Thaighde Eacnamaíochta Mhic Chnáimhín lena ráiteas misin fíor-thábhachtach.
[I would like to thank Tom Healy for inviting me to deliver this inaugural lecture in honour of Donal Nevin. The lecture provides two valuable opportunities: both of which give me much pleasure – an opportunity to pay tribute to Donal Nevin for his contribution as a public and committed citizen of Ireland and also an opportunity to welcome the Nevin Economic Research Institute with its very important mission statement.]
The critical and independent analysis of an Institute such as the Nevin Economic Research Institute is an invaluable contribution to our democratic discourse. It will be of great assistance to those attempting to strengthen and deepen democracy if we are collectively to transform and renew our society, our European Union and if we are in an idealistic, yet practical way, to engage seriously in our work to achieve a truly social Europe and one which could by defining the European Union in this way make an ethical contribution at global level. Such a social European Union based on rights, sustainability, respect for cultural diversity, and inter-generational justice could make a contribution of ground-breaking significance, to a new sense of inter-dependence in what is in so many ways – a shared fragile planet.
Donal Nevin’s work for the protection and development of the rights of workers, his commitment to the creation of a fair and equitable society in which all citizens have the opportunity to flourish, and his lifelong commitment to public service are the hallmarks of his contribution to Ireland.
His forty years with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and his work in public service in diverse bodies such as the Combat Poverty Agency, the Irish Hospice Foundation, the anti-Apartheid Movement, the National Theatre, various Tax Commissions and the Economic and Social Research Institute are the legacy of his commitment to the public world and give evidence of his deep commitment and contribution to all aspects of Irish life, his intensive commitment to citizenship and his practical patriotism.
His scholarly works on James Larkin and James Connolly are regarded as among the most definitive. These works, undertaken with the assistance of others but driven by his meticulous concern for detail, indicate a deep regard by a great administrative intelligence, for two very different forms of genius, whose moral courage and selfless lives were crucial in articulating the demand for respect for workers, their organisations and their labour.
Donal and I were both born in Limerick; he in 1924, me some time later. In the 1940s he left Limerick to join the Civil Service in Dublin while I left Limerick 20 years later to make the shorter journey up to Clare. Our paths did not cross until much later on but we found that our individual journeys had brought us to very similar conclusions about the nature of the society we saw around us and the type of society we would prefer to see; of the importance of education and of its fruits being delivered back to the people. I recall speaking with him about the importance of education in the Trade Union Movement when I founded the teaching section of what was then the Worker’s Union of Ireland at the end of the Sixties.
From the moment of his arrival in Dublin, Donal began a lifelong involvement with social issues and trade unionism, an involvement that culminated in his term as General Secretary of Congress from 1982 to 1989.
Donal’s interest in social and economic research was an early interest. His first post in Dublin consisted of eight years in the statistical branch of the Department of Industry and Commerce. He became, and remained, an active member of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland.
Subsequently, in 1960 he was one of the founder members of the Economic and Social Research Institute and served with distinction on the ESRI Council for more than four decades. Such a background as his led him to be adamant that scholarship, in particular from those who questioned the status quo, has to be impeccably based on fact, empirically sourced, and capable of peer review if offered as a theoretically based policy suggestion. The advocacy had to be much more than rhetorically based. Spinning had not emerged as a virus in his time and solid scholarship was an effective antidote.
The debate in the second half of the Sixties which followed the Friis Report as to the appropriate location of an independent research institute, its relationship with Government and the universities was one that was very brief, such questions were given scant attention, and such reflection has never really resumed to this day. Donal Nevin had a familiarity with national research but also with the international foundation and the I.L.O.
In 2002 Donal Nevin would go on to be elected President of the Institute.
He had been appointed research officer of Congress in 1949 and, in 1982, succeeded Ruairi Roberts as ICTU General Secretary. Some of you will remember the 1980s.
As General Secretary, Donal played a key role confronting the economic difficulties of that time. He was an early advocate of the need for social cohesion as a prerequisite to recovery and sustainable growth. This analysis found concrete form in the Programme for National Recovery in 1987. As we now know, this Programme helped provide pay stability which, in time, helped us regain competitiveness and create the jobs that not only gave stability but most important of all helped stem halted involuntary emigration.
Donal Nevin’s world was recognized. In due course, Limerick called him back; quite properly, the University of Limerick awarded Donal an Honorary Doctorate of Law in recognition of his life-long commitment to social justice. He was also honoured with Doctorates in Law from the National University but I suspect the Limerick recognition resonated the loudest in his heart. Then again, given his own work, I know too that he was distinctly moved to have the Nevin Economic Research Institute named in his honour, and he would be proud too of its locating its political and institutional economics within a cultural frame of ethics and social policy.
In its first publication, the Nevin Economic Research Institute indicated that its work would follow the path laid down by Donal and people like him in undertaking research that will be of relevance to the Trade Union Movement but also to the general public across the island of Ireland. The mission statement of the Institute is an impressive one. The Nevin Institute commits itself to:
· advancing knowledge and understanding of economics and the social sciences;
· undertaking, to the benefit of the public, research and analysis on the impact of economic policy development and its effects towards the attainment of a more equitable and just society;
· publishing and promoting research findings in order to advance awareness and comprehension of economic theory;
· undertake activities to ensure a broad dissemination of the research and analysis; and
· providing education, training and capacity building programmes to increase understanding of economic and social science policy among the general public.
The Nevin Institute aims to produce world class research and analysis to contribute to creation of an economy that works for society and serves human well-being in general.
As well as these, Quarterly Economic Bulletins have been published that observe economic trends and provide commentary and advance ideas on a range of economic and social policies.
While the subject matters are diverse – and many of the ideas may vary or indeed run contrary to the generally advanced narrative of the day particularly at a time of flux, uncertainty, recession, and even paradigm failure – a golden thread runs through all of the aims of the Nevin Economic Research Institute – the aim to move forward our knowledge and understanding of what is happening in terms of economics and its impact on society, recognising that standing behind all economic policy options are economic theories and their assumptions, and these in turn are developed in Universities, Colleges, Institutes, some committed in their charters to independent scholarship, others straight-forwardly representing interest groups.
The public need a pluralism of perspectives honestly stated. The global system at present is constituted of ever more anxious peoples who perceive themselves to be an increasingly declining, countervailing force that they perceive to be unaccountable to market forces that are suggested to be beyond their understanding. They have seen fiscal and financial decision-making move away to a significant degree from parliaments that were the democratic achievement of a previous age, the outcome of a struggle for the vote, particularly for women.
They are rightly concerned, in both an ethical and a practical sense, at the growth in influence of agencies that are unaccountable and that are wielding a power that is capable of deciding the fates of states and peoples, and yet that are not transparent or accountable. They feel excluded from a discourse on matters fiscal and financial that are presented in such a manner as to be technical ‘beyond their ken’.
The onslaught of capital flows on to societies is immense, at a speed and a volume that seems to outstrip attempts at regulation. This is happening in new technological conditions which have seen a complete change in the speeds and the ratios of capital and labour to each other, changes deepened by the increased role of financialization in economies relative to the traditional forces of real economic production. Credit policies crucial to economic activity have been distorted and a price paid by the emergence at international and regional level of derivatives without substance, of shadow banking that evaded regulation and we are experiencing, at international level, the consequences of such speculative financial flows as occurred both before, and during, the recent crisis.
There are the circumstances in which the Nevin Economic Research Institute works. It is challenging.
Séard atá romhainn ná rogha lena ngabhann conclúid, is conclúid mhórálta go bunúsach : ar chóir beartas eacnamaíochta a bheith ina chuid den dioscúrsa poiblí ós rud é a bhaineann le gach gné dár saol comhroinnte; nó, ina mhalairt de chás, ar cheart é a fhorchoimeád le haghaidh ghrinnscrúdú na speisialtóirí.
[What is called for is in intellectual work now a choice of problem that is inescapably moral in its conclusions. Should economic policy be a matter for public discourse, involving as it does every aspect of our shared existence; or should it alternatively be, because of its arcane complexity, reserved for a specialist scrutiny.]
That debate is well under way.
All contributions to debate should be welcome and in the professional literature ideally they should have peer reviewed theoretical foundation and, in my view, are best when they are capable of leading towards a pluralist discourse on policy. Healthy debate and argument is necessary. The best ideas after all are shaped and honed on the anvil of discussion. Discussion, difference, and the dialectic at its base, are around as long as Plato and are, in some appropriate circumstances, often the best way of getting at the most sustainable options, and achieving some sense of mutual agreement on what a tentative truth might look like. In our present circumstances neither the certainties of individualism nor the huge modernism of technocratic elitism can serve our purposes.
I believe that an inclusive debate on the range and adequacy of economic theory and modelling is, in today’s circumstances as important as the debate on literacy was in its day. In the UK, the Centre for Social Justice which was set up almost ten years ago, in its own words “to advance the education of the public in the subject of social justice and to promote the role of the voluntary sector”; had a similar view.
Fundamentally, what the Institute and the Nevin Institute is doing is seeking to instigate a public discourse on the interconnectedness between moral philosophy and political economy. They are inviting us all to reflect on our fragmented world, to reflect in an inter-generationally just way on our ill-serving models which have broken the connection between economy, society, environment, culture and life itself.
The concept of a moral economy was invoked by E.P. Thompson in the late 1960s when he looked back at the food riots that took place in England in the 18th century. He saw in them a sense of the people saying that the working of the market – in this case the movement of corn and the manipulation of prices – was fundamentally wrong and was causing people to starve. He could have gone further back to Roman times and found similar examples. What he was saying is that there are times when it appears that the working of the economy may not be working for society as a whole.
The large scale unemployment problem in Europe today, with its large youth component, reveals a dysfunction and should surely engage us all in a discourse that seeks such an understanding, and a strategy in public economics as will meet this waste of human creativity and life, and by doing so can best engage our moral instincts.
It is at such times that one must analyse policies, and the theoretical assumptions on which they are based, and at least apply to them the test of pluralism. That is the space which the Nevin Economic Research Institute is seeking to provide.
The recent speeches I gave at the Sorbonne and to the European Parliament in Strasbourg have been primarily addressing the need to be aware of, and avoid, the risks associated with relying on limited instruments of analyses, policy formation and the possible adoption as a consequence of even inappropriate, instruments of policy analysis. I suggested that the inadequacy of such instruments may be based in turn on a limited frame of economic theory. I spoke of the need for a pluralism of policy options as one envisaged and prepared for a future of cohesion, competitiveness and sustainability for the European Union. There are some fundamental questions that arise and they are of a discourse kind.
What is the appropriate role of economic theory in the public decision-making as to social policy? To what problematic are economic models directed? What assumptions have been made in such modelling? Are they abstracted and part of attempts to predict cyclical outcomes or are they engaging with critical public issues as unemployment or collapsing real incomes? How grounded are such theories? What tools of analyses are to be used? How are they to be acquired and where? – How is economics to be taught? This is a debate which happened in France more than a decade ago.
I know that young students and scholars are interested in all of these questions, but they are finding it difficult to access the wide range of intellectual thought that they, and young scholars, find attractive. It is very clear that at even international level there has been a narrowing of the range of theory, a disinclination for interdisciplinary work and a concentration around certain instruments whose application in an abstract sense has become the defined end of scholarship. The broader social question has, on occasion, lost out to the application of the instrument or the neatness of the model, whose assumptions may have been trimmed for the neatness in question.
It is interesting to reflect on the intense debate that took place more than a decade and a half ago in Paris in the Summer of 2000, instigated by post-graduate students in the Sorbonne, and supported internationally, particularly by post-graduate students at Cambridge.
The students’ petition asked for:
· “engagement with empirical and concrete economic realities;
· prioritising science over scientism;
· a pluralism of approaches adapted to the complexity of economic objects and to the uncertainty surrounding most of the big economic questions; and
· their professors initiating reforms to rescue economics from its …. socially irresponsible state.”
-The students were neither mathematically innumerate nor were they simplistically anti-neoclassical, or nihilistic about any aspect of contemporary economics. They simply wanted pluralism, breadth of perspective, inter-disciplinary co-operation, freedom of thought. Edward Fullbrook describes the events as follows:
“The students’ petition carried great weight because its authors and initial signatories were associated with France’s “Grandes Écoles,” whose enormous academic prestige and selectivity surpasses that of other higher education institutions in France. No one dared say that these students, the crème de la crème, opposed the formalist approach to economics because the mathematics was too difficult for them. Thus from the outset defenders of the status quo were deprived of their favourite argumentative gambit.”
Edward Fullbrook also describes the response. I have been quoting from his contribution to the recent book The Crisis in Economics published by Routledge.
“Meanwhile some economics teachers in France responded with a petition of their own, supporting the students’ demands, adding to their analysis, and lamenting the cult of scientism into which economics in the main had descended. The professors’ petition also called for the opening of a public debate on the state of economics and economics teaching.
That debate began on 21 June when the French newspaper,
Le Monde, reported on the students’ movement … and interviewed several prominent economists who voiced sympathy for the students’ cause. Other newspapers and magazines followed suit.As the French media, including radio and television, expanded the public debate, student and teacher fears of persecution if they took a public stand diminished and the number of signatories to the petitions increased. This fuelled further media interest. Jack Lang, the French Minister for Education, announced that he regarded the complaints with great seriousness and was setting up a commission to investigate. He put the venerable Jean-Paul Fitoussi, President of l’Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques (OFCE), in charge and instructed him to report within a year.
The movement in France now entered a new stage, as it sought to capitalize on its official recognition and expand the public debate. Meanwhile, news of the recent events was beginning to reach the rest of the world.”
These debates have continued in such groups, for example, as Real World Economics.
However, in my speeches in London, Paris, Strasbourg and in my interview it is the discourse among citizens that I have been concentrating on as one that is of fundamental, democratic importance and surely as it is appropriate that we address it in this Year of the Citizen in the European Union. We must take the opportunity and feel free to debate our possibilities as active citizens in our shared Europe rather than retreating in any quietude, or despair, from the intellectual challenges that face us.
Organisations like the Nevin Institute and others such as the Centre for Social Justice mentioned earlier are critical in creating ideas and weaving arguments about what needs to happen in terms of economic choices that make society fairer. They exist too as spaces for debate on theoretical choices and policy pluralism. They have no lesser under-labourer role of being confined to analysis of the consequences of models that they must not question here, in Europe or elsewhere.
In my wider discourse of course there is no doubt but that there will be differences of definition and emphasis, different opinions, for example, on what is meant by such concepts as fairness. The advantage of an institute such as the Nevin Institute is that it can enable us to have the opportunity to have the debate on Justice, just as organisations like TASC and some other bodies have done when they invited us a short while ago to debate and engage in the project of creating a flourishing society.
Addressing that example I have given of defining justice, and achieving fairness. In his recent book Justice for Earthlings Professor David Miller emphasises how we must be open to applying our idea of justice to changing contexts and contingencies. He writes:
“They represent justice as a human invention that accordingly is shaped by the circumstances of human life. Were these circumstances to change radically, what we would see would not be the arrival of perfect justice, but its disappearance in any form we could recognise. ”
Even the most influential theory of the past half century, put forward by John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice, has turned out to be a partial theory, insofar as it is only plausible as an account of what justice demands of the public institutions of a self-contained nation-state.
As Rawls himself admitted, if we want to understand what justice requires on a smaller scale – in social institutions such as families, schools and colleges, and churches – we would have to extend and modify his theory.
The same is true if our aim is to understand justice at international or global level. If we want to say what justice must mean for Earthlings, therefore, we have to begin by thinking about the many different relationships in which these creatures stand towards one another, from the most intimate to the most distant. We will find that different principles fit different cases. Any overarching theory that tries, Plato-like, to discover a single form of justice present in all these diverse instances will either be hopelessly inaccurate, leaving many aspects of justice unaccounted for, or else so vague as to be useless as a guide to practice.
Our circumstances now are where policy must begin – with the 26 million without work, the 125 million threatened with poverty, with a planet threatened by hunger, nutritional needs and climate change.
Independent thought within a critically engaged scholarship is what will serve us much better than any apologetic for something we know to have failed but cannot let go. As to how these issues are located in the debate about the future of the European Union will decide the future of the Union and its relationship to the global issues into the future.
Jurgen Habermas talks of the market and the state being subjugate to what he calls instrumental rationality – where the most effective technical solutions to problems become the determinant – and full and proper discourse, on the solution and the end delivered, may sometimes be lacking. He has been more direct and gone further when he spoke recently in Leuven of a bureaucratic high modernism unamenable to critical discourse and capable of risking a disconnect with a ‘democratic legitimation’.
When I spoke last month at the European Parliament I argued that the future should not descend into a contest between the strong and the weak, between creditors and debtors. I spoke of “threatening clouds” hanging over Europe and the urgency of the inclusive, democratic, and positive discourse we needed in the Union. I suggested that such a discourse was one that should draw on all the riches of a multidisciplinary scholarship.
Neither is it a matter of choosing between what is idealistic and novelty driven on the one hand and what is achievable or pragmatic on the other. What is best is what addresses both, and the history of economic thought tells us the greatest contributions have come from those who have been both. Normative and technically competent, even brilliant.
Tá ról criticiuil ag saothar na hInstitiúide seo, agus institiúidí eile dá sórt, chun argóintí réasúnaithe mórálta a chur ar aghaidh maidir le conas dul i ngleic le sainscheisteanna na hoibre, na fostaíochta, na dífhostaíochta agus na slándála sóisialaí.
[The work of this Institute, and others like it, is critical in advancing reasoned moral arguments about how the issues of work, employment, unemployment and social security are to be approached.]
The discourse we need now, may well require, as has already been noted in the United States by such scholars as Professor Howard Stein, a change in the way we intellectually engage with economics. Economic discourse must be public discourse located in the intellectual debate and assumptions about life. The current discourse among many people has a taken-for-granted reality suggesting an inevitability to be uncritically accepted. This runs the risk of becoming ritualistic, allowing what is banal, and what has limited capacity or originality, lesser connection to the reality and the agony of the world. More seriously it can even sink to being an instrument of ideological propaganda.
All of this makes it necessary to be able to change the way we teach economics and practice economics in our institutes and academies and in turn initiate discussion on policy with policy shapers, policy makers and policy takers. I am concerned that intellectually innovative work comes in the new circumstances from the academies and institutes of countries such as Ireland.
I am far from being as pessimistic as Hyman Minsky was when he put in his Paper 82 at the mid-point of the 90’s:
“The task before today’s economists and public officials is to meet the challenges of the present without forgetting the valuable lessons of the past… Unfortunately, economists are generally ill-equipped to provide much practical guidance. One peculiarity of the preparation of economists at the end of the Twentieth Century is that modern graduate curriculum does not give sufficient opportunity to students to study either the history of economics or economic history.
In fact the curriculum is extra-ordinarily anti-intellectual: graduate programs in economics aim to train rather than educate.” Minsky, Hyman, P. “Forward: Political Economy for the Next Century” (1995) Hyman P Minsky Archive. Paper 82. http://digitalcommons.bard.edu/hm_archive/82This need not be so in any academy in any country now as we work our way into a better future for all. Irish thinkers have background, talent and capacity to give us the multi-disciplinary inputs to policy we need. That is why the independence of scholarship is so important. It is my belief that economics can, at local and global level, be located in a diversity of cultural settings, all of them with the capacity to be ethical.
Agus ar ócáid de leithéid na hócaide seo, más ceadmhach dom críochnú le roinnt guíonna ar mhaithe lena bhfuil i ndán don institiúid: guíonna a ghabhann níos leithne ná an tionchar a bheidh aici agus an maitheas a dhéanfaidh sí: is é mo ghuí ná go mbeidh sí fréamhaithe sa teoiric bhunata, go mbeidh sí il-disiplíneach agus go suífidh sí a cuid teoiricí i gcultúr agus in instinní mórálta díobh siúd ag gabháil don scoláireacht le hintinn na fuascailte.
[And on an occasion such as this if I may be permitted to conclude with some wishes for the future of the Institute; wishes that go beyond the influence I know it will have and the good it will do; my wish is that it be rooted in grounded theory, be multi-disciplinary and that it locate its theory in the culture and moral instincts of those with emancipatory intent in scholarship.]It is our condition after all, that while we strive with the intellectual tools that some of us have been privileged to access, that we are also driven by our intuitive knowledge and inherited wisdom, to bring into being a version of our lives together that is better, that is nearer to an ethical sufficiency, but requires our moral courage to be brought into existence nationally and internationally. When that happens, what was a toolbox of instruments, will have been transformed into a policy option, and at its best will become a poetic for political economy.
In conclusion, I wish the Institute every success in pursuing its aims of contributing to the achievement of a better, fairer society. Donal Nevin devoted all of his life to this end and, while the tide ebbs and flows it has washed most surely in that direction. Having broken rocks, carved its way through canyons, and sustained life for the people on the plains, “even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea” – Donal found that haven last year.
It is has been my great honour to speak with you this evening on the importance of the work you do and to have been afforded an opportunity to publicly remember Donal.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir.