Is socialism feasible? What is the future of heterodox economics after the financial crisis? In this episode of the Governance Podcast, Mark Pennington (King's College London) sits down with Geoffrey Hodgson (Loughborough University London) for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of social democracy, neoliberalism, and new paradigms in economics.
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The Guest
Geoffrey Hodgson is a Professor in Management for the Institute for International Management at Loughborough University London. He is a specialist in institutional and evolutionary economics, with a background in economics, philosophy and mathematics. His research has applications to the understanding of organisations, organisational change, innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. Hodgson is also the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics (ABS rank 3). He has published 18 academic books and over 150 academic articles. He is the winner of the Schumpeter Prize 2014 for his book on "Conceptualizing Capitalism".
Skip Ahead
0:55: You've actually got two books out in the last year -- Is Socialism Feasible? and Is there a future for heterodox economics? I wonder if we could start by you talking us through-- first of all, how do you write two books in a year, but also the rationale for these two particular books?
8:44: I'd like to follow up on that last part and link it to the motivation for writing these books-- you're very clear to make a distinction between socialism and social democracy, so you do see yourself as a kind of social democrat who has been influenced by arguments in the liberal tradition. I wonder if you could say something about why you think, following the crash, there's been a movement toward going back to what you describe as 'big state socialism' as opposed to embracing a radical Keynesian view or some kind of interventionist or redistributive politics, which isn't about nationalising or controlling everything from the centre.
14:45: I really enjoyed this section of the book where you're talking about the use of terminology-- how the use of this term 'neoliberal' has meant that you almost can't have a conversation in certain areas because anything turns out to be neoliberal if it isn't full blooded socialism and I think there's a wonderful line in the book where you say that if you follow this kind of reasoning, when Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy to save the Soviet people from starvation, this would have been described as a neoliberal policy by some of the contemporary left.
16:34: Why do you think that label [neoliberalism] has become so ubiquitous?
18:17: You mention some heterodox thinkers using the term, dismissing certain things as being right wing just because of that. Perhaps we can connect to the second book-- could you talk about the rationale for writing it?
26:32: Can we pursue that more, this issue about how effectively methodological questions seem to get confused with policy positions or ideological views in heterodoxy? This is something that's always frustrated me-- I consider myself to be quite heterodox in the sense that I'm very influenced by the Austrian school ideas. There are lots of debates I'd like to engage with people who are post-Keynesians or post-institutionalists or evolutionary thinkers, and I feel that we should have a club identity around those themes. But because we might divide on policy issues that seems to come apart.
29:59: There is so much within neoclassical economics which promotes, if not radical socialism, although you could interpret some general equilibrium theory in that way, but it certainly promotes interventionism -- it assumes away all the problems of tacit knowledge.
30:33
