The Only Way Is Ethics: The Skeptical Economist reviewed

I do not object to value judgements and political beliefs creeping into economic argument: I think they are inevitable. But then I do not claim economics as a science.

Much of the furore that greeted the publication of Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist back in 2001 focused on Lomborg’s credentials (or lack of them) to write it. Here was a statistician (and furthermore, one with effectively no academic track record) blithely using questionable statistics to claim that legions of environmental scientists had been getting it badly wrong for years.

I have no such concerns over Jonathan Aldred, author of The Skeptical Economist (Earthscan, 2009)¹. Aldred is a Lecturer in the Department of Land Economy and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and has trained in (and taught) the subject he dissects so well in this book.

No, I worry instead about my qualifications as a reader: Am I perhaps too credible? I know that I am favourably inclined towards critiques of mainstream economics, particularly as implemented in public policy; I’m broadly sceptical of the ‘growth above all else’ agenda; and I lack the basic training in economics to separate balanced argument from polemic. But Aldred’s focus on evidence and data (concepts I do understand pretty well), and his careful analysis of numerous case studies, give me some confidence that his central thesis – essentially, that you cannot separate economics from ethics – is worthy of very careful consideration².

The economy dominates contemporary political discourse. Different political tribes might argue either for austerity and deficit reduction or for tax and spend, but all of them have one end in mind: economic growth³. This is such a central tenet of economic orthodoxy that it is never questioned in the practice or reporting of mainstream politics. John Humphries has never, to my knowledge, growled ‘why is growth good?’ to a cowering junior minister. Likewise, ‘economic growth’ has been allowed to become enshrined as a primary goal of all UK research councils⁴ with not a whimper of dissent. Contrast this with the outcry when the Arts and Humanities Research Council referenced the ‘big society’ in its strategic plan last year – dozens of senior academics threatened to resign over what they thought was an overt political agenda being forced upon them. But as Aldred makes abundantly clear throughout his superb book, the pursuit of economic growth is just as political as the ‘big society’ – it’s just not party political. Yet this orthodoxy “…leaves something crucial out. Economic growth is not an end in itself. We should focus instead on our quality of life, our well-being, or to rehabilitate an embarassing word, our happiness”.

Much of the rest of the book is a dissection of economic orthodoxy as applied in different contexts. Although Aldred is careful to differentiate between the academic study of economics and its application in public life by what he terms ‘policy entrepreneurs’ – well, suffice to say that my opinion of mainstream academic economics was not significantly enhanced (with the old ’that’s all very well in practice, but how does it work in theory?’ caricature still to the fore). If you’re into this kind of stuff, some of the content may be familiar (e.g. the breakdown of the relationship between income and self-reported happiness above a – surprisingly low – threshold is in Clive Hamilton’s Growth Fetish; the negative consequences of introducing markets where they don’t belong is the subject of Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy) but it is covered here in more depth than I’ve read before, including why this might be the case (for instance, we adapt very quickly to increasing income, and then want still more). There is also a fascinating chapter dedicated to happiness actually means, whether self-reported or ‘objectively’ measured (and if, indeed, any such measurement is even conceptually possible).

Other ideas were completely new to me. If you haven’t heard of Baumol’s cost disease (I hadn’t), it appears to be very important. Simply put, services like healthcare and education will inevitably become more expensive relative to other sectors of the economy, because one of the things we value most in them is their inefficiencies (in economic terms): lots of personal contact with a doctor, small class sizes, and so on. The important thing is that this is the case regardless of whether the service is provided by the state or by a private company. Privatising the NHS won’t make it more ‘efficient’, in other words (or at least, not relative to gains in efficiency elsewhere in the economy).

Aldred also suggests some alternative goals for public policy. For example, instead of a constantly growing economy, why not keep it stable but allow all of us to work progressively less? (Sound crazy? Perhaps, but it’s a popular idea in France, and among the first significant acts of the new Socialist President Hollande was to reduce the retirement age for some workers to 60.) But the chapter most relevant to my professional interests is that on ‘Pricing Life and Nature’.

Of course, this is a hot topic in ecology and conservation right now. Not just in Rio+20: think also of the Milennium Ecosystem Assessment, or big new UK initiatives on Valuing Nature, Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services, Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation… Everyone wants to know, what can nature can do for us? Nobody disputes that the answer is ‘lots’ (from climate regulation to pollination to food provision) but going a step further, and putting a value on these services, is much more controversial – not least for many because it suggests that there is a cost-benefit equation somewhere which could, potentially, be balanced a different way. Suppose we could replace pollinating insects with cheap, effective and safe nanobots. Could we then do away with bees with a clean conscience?

The counter to this unease, which I’ve heard expressed at VNN meetings, is to argue that the alternative to putting a value on nature is that its value will be assumed to be £0 in any planning and development decisions. But in that case, what we should be doing as scientists? Should we buy into this system, and spend our time trying to make our dubious numbers somewhat less dubious, supplying more and more refined nutriment to the cost-benefit beast? Maybe, but as Alred notes, unfortunately “dubious numbers are infectious: adding a dubious number to a reliable one yields an equally dubious number”. So we have a lot of work to do if we take that approach, and the numbers we produce may always be too dubious to be useful. Alternatively (and this seems to be Aldred’s preference), we could build better ways of incorporating qualitative pros and cons more transparently into the (overtly political) decision-making process.

One of the real strengths of this book is Aldred’s ability to lay out options and consequences without preaching – this is certainly not a zero-growth, Occupy movement manifesto. Rather, it’s a sober analysis of the evidence (or lack of it) behind various policy decisions, and above all a call for us to recognise the politics that are integral to all decisions made (even those dressed up as ‘objective’ following cost-benefit anlayses). This is important stuff, and Aldred has done us all a service by producing an approachable primer on a topic which affects all of us, and the environment we depend upon.

¹One assumes that the retention by Aldred, a British author, of the American ‘k’ is a subtle dig at Lomborg’s faith in mainstream economics.
²Of course, the ongoing collapse of the world’s financial systems provide a pretty strong supporting case…
³Or more specifically, growth in GDP, which seems even more ridiculous in the light of the double figure drop in GDP the UK would suffer if we all paid off our credit cards tomorrow – GDP depends on us spending money we don’t have! (I heard this discussed as if it was perfectly natural and sensible on a serious Radio 4 economics programme, but was listening in the car and don’t recall specific details.)
⁴e.g. From the RCUK homepage: “We support excellent research, as judged by peer review, that has an impact on the growth, prosperity and wellbeing of the UK”

A Natural Historical Interlude

I’m just emerging from that special juggling act that UK academics perform at this time of year, when a stack of marking is chucked into the air alongside everything else. And given that last time out I provoked a few people (and reinforced a few preconceptions) I thought I’d ease back into things with some nice, non-controversial musings on natural history. Now first-up, I’m not much of a natural historian. Periodically I resolve to learn a relatively manageable group – British trees, say, or dragonflies – but to be honest, I simply don’t have the patience required to work meticulously through a key. Neither do I have that instinctive eye for the salient feature that characterises the great observers. Many’s the time I’ve thought I’ve committed to memory a particular unknown little bird, only to open the fieldguide and find I have no idea of the prominence of its supercilium, or the relative brownness of its legs.

Nonetheless, I muddle on. I am quite good at noticing things, and it’s really important for me to see lots of nature, even if I can’t put a name to absolutely everything. In fact I have a theory that there are two routes into ecology. There are those who as kids collected beetles, who cleaned up and displayed roadkill, or who have subsequently crossed continents to extend their life list of birds. And there are those of us who just sort of liked messing around outside – for whom the important thing remains the experience of nature as a whole, rather than the infinite dissection of its parts.

Over the last four years or so, my major outlet for this interest has been our back garden. One of the advantages of moving back to Sheffield was that a terraced house with a good sized garden fell within budget. And one of the pleasures of staying in the same place for a few years is that early work starts to bear fruit (sometimes literally).

For instance, the other day I trimmed the mixed native hedge that we planted and which is now in its fifth growing season. Originally just a line of sticks, it’s now around 5’ tall, thick and lush. Already populated by sparrows it also shelters blackbirds and starlings, ladybirds and hoverflies. Watching this new habitat flourish gives me as much satisfaction as any paper I might write.

Our pond, in progress (2009) and with water soldiers breaking its surface a year later.

Likewise, the pond I dug in 2009 is an endlessly fascinating mini-experiment. Perhaps I should have kept meticulous records of colonisation dates, but for me it’s enough to remember that the first pond skaters were skating before I’d turned off the tap from filling it; that the frogs appeared to be waiting for me to dig it (I have no idea where they bred before); that great crested newts found it within a year, as did water boatmen, dragonflies and damselflies. The weather’s been rather peculiar this year – the warmth in March got the algae blooming, but then it was too cold for the grazers to do much, so it’s a bit green at the moment. But fishing out some blanket weed at the weekend, I was excited to net three large dragonfly nymphs which I suspect will be climbing up some of the emergent vegetation any day now, as well as the first water beetle I’ve seen there. The birds use it to bathe in and drink from, as do the grey squirrels (which have far less right to be in a Yorkshire garden than the rats that I can’t keep away from the compost heaps, but which have much better PR).

Some of the smaller garden residents: a pioneering pondskater, and its near-mirror image water boatman; frogs in various stages of development; a hoverfly suns itself; and a bee visits a foxglove.

Two more things which have got me into the natural history of my garden. First, buying a good macro lens for my camera – if you look closely, there is always something interesting to see. And of course, sharing it with a 1½ year old for whom all of this is fresh and exciting (and who’s new favourite word is ‘bee’).

Years ago, I studied Candide for my French A level. I’ve never been sure that I grasped in full the philosophical implications of its final line, “‘Cela est bien dit,’ répondit Candide, ‘mais il faut cultiver notre jardin’”. But I like to take it literally, and whenever the stresses and strains of the life scientific start to bite, I take the role of Candide, heading outside with my own version: That’s all well and good, but this garden won’t look after itself.

Confessions of an Open Access Agnostic

The office that I worked in a few years ago had a window that opened onto the main University of Sheffield concourse. Every so often, lunchtimes would be enlivened by a student protest (typically over fees), during which someone with a megaphone would shout a lot. I remember clearly being struck with the thought, “I wonder if anyone has ever changed their mind about anything as a result of something they heard through a megaphone?” It certainly doesn’t work on me. Even if I broadly agree with the shouty person, the louder they shout the more inclined I am to pick holes in their argument. It is a character trait of mine, I’m not sure if you would call it a flaw or a virtue, that I hate being told what to do and, especially, what to think.

All of this explains, perhaps, my ambivalence towards Open Access (OA) publishing. I don’t like being told where I can and can’t publish. I distrust zealots, including well-resourced single-issue campaign groups which will hear no alternative views, which present shades of grey as simple black/white dichotomies, and which (a pet hate) bandy around variants on that tabloid favourite ‘tax-payers’ money’ (when they mean ‘public money’). I worry about people being pressurised into publishing in inappropriate journals, or – if they decide to stick with a non-AO journal, for whatever reason – not receiving the quality of review they deserve because of misguided boycotts. I don’t appreciate non-scientists in the media wading in with their ’aren’t you silly, you’ve been doing this all wrong for decades’ line. And I’m wary of the creeping sense – by no means restricted to science – that content should always be free, regardless of the costs involved in producing it. I’m not comfortable with the big publishers making huge profits from the outputs of science, but I also recognise that good publishers (and their employees) have done, and continue to do a terrific job to ensure the effective communication of science.

Of course, there is a more nuanced debate going on underneath the bluster. From what I see on Twitter, today’s debate at Imperial seems to be a good example (#OAdebate). Some very clever and thoughtful people have weighed things up and come down on the side of OA. And I’m not even sure that I don’t agree with them. Certainly, I am all in favour of the broader Open Science agenda – opening up the data we produce, and the tools we use to access and analyse it. But I remain to be convinced that access to primary research papers is such a big issue that it should be pushed above all else (partly because, with a bit of effort or an email or two, it’s usually possible to access most recent papers), and that all of this energy should be focused on it (whilst overlooking the interesting and potentially profound financial and sociological implications for scientists and their institutions).

My beef is not at all with OA, but rather in the way that the debate has been framed in terms of good and evil, right and wrong (not a million miles from the ongoing GM debate). Subscription-based (reader pays) publication of publicly-funded research costs public money, and has pros and cons. OA (author pays) publication of publicly funded-research costs public money, and has pros and cons. A shift to OA will not (I’m pretty certain) be accompanied by an injection of new cash, but will rather see a shift from funding infrastructure (especially libraries) to funding individuals (e.g. through research grants). And the debate should be on how best we spend limited public money to communicate the outputs of research in the most effective way. It could be that making all primary research available to everyone is the way to do this (although I don’t think accessing papers is quite so difficult as some would have us believe; and in any case, the readership for the vast majority of papers is tiny). It could be that we’d be better advised to concentrate on more effective communication of key results in other formats, or in making other products of our research (especially data) more widely available. Even if we hold OA as something to aspire to, I feel that blindly pushing it as a top priority risks sidelining more important debates about opening up science.

So thanks, but I won’t be signing any petitions just now.