The danger of devaluing sociology by Terry Wassall
13 December 2010 5 Comments
Commenting on the economics profession’s mystification at its failure to foresee the current financial crisis, former chief economic advisor to the US government, Thomas Palley, attributed it to “the economics profession’s complete inability to come to grips with its sociological failure which produced massive intellectual failure with huge costs for society” (http://www.thomaspalley.com/?p=148). The economic theory presumed to explain and predict the workings of financial markets is based on complicated mathematical theorems and equations that empirically bear no relationship to the reality of economic life embedded as it is in the combinatorial multilayered complexities of society. The advanced mathematical basis of this sociologically inadequate theory has led to the employment, by the casino bankers and traders, of bright mathematics and physics graduates and computerised algorithmic systems for buying and selling shares, financial derivatives and commoditised risk. (For a readable account see John Cassidy’s How Markets Fail: the logic of economic calamities Penguin 2009). Physics and mathematics will continue to have their teaching funded. Economics, like sociology, is having teaching funding withdrawn but economics has largely been reduced to mathematical fantasies and political doctrine. The consequences of withdrawing funding from other social science subjects, including sociology, may be disastrous however.
Economics is not the only discipline that is impoverished by a lack of sociological perspective, for instance climate change science and policy. Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the UEA, advisor to the UK Government, the European Commission and the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), in his recent book Why We Disagree About Climate Change CUP 2009, identifies three areas of uncertainty in climate science and what the implications are for policy. The first two relate to the uncertainties of climate science itself: uncertainties due to our incomplete understanding of the interlocking physical systems involved and to the inherent unpredictability of large, complex and chaotic systems. The third source of uncertainty and unpredictability “originates as a consequence of humans being part of the future being predicted. Individual and collective human choices five, twenty and fifty years into the future are not predictable in any scientific sense”. He goes on to bemoan the “elite judgements” that lead to social scientists being “poorly represented among the nominated experts”. A strong implication of Hulme’s account of mainstream climate policy discourse is that, rather than prioritising ever more climate science to refine the calculation of ‘climate sensitivity’ – the global temperature increase in the event of the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide – we desperately need a considerably more sophisticated understanding of the sociological aspects of anthropospheric impacts on the climate.
We need a continued investment in teaching and research in sociology. It is a sad irony that the neoliberal economic doctrine that informs (or rather deforms) the government’s policy for higher education (and much else), its assumptions about the efficiency of markets, the one dimensional calculative and self interested economic rationality of student ‘consumers’, and the devaluing of the social sciences, demonstrates its own, destructive, sociological inadequacy.
Terry Wassall, University of Leeds
Brilliant! Best regards from Mexico City,
Janet
I absolutely agree. The problem however is that making the case for the value of sociology to policymakers, as a corrective to the social blindness of both mainstream/neo-liberal economic theory and climate policy, assumes that the ultimate aim of policymaking in these areas is actually to be effective. Arguably this is naive, and in fact effectiveness is secondary to the overriding need to serve the interests of a plutocratic class, in which case the knowledge-based case for the value of sociology, however powerful and well evidenced it may be, is never going to cut it, because it is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of government.
From this point of view, those implementing neo-liberal economic policy don’t much care about its detrimental social impact, or indeed its wider economic incoherence, because all that really matters is that it benefits those whose interests they serve. Similarly, those propagating the dominant approach to climate change are more concerned with its relatively short-term impact on the interests of the wealthy than with its actual effectiveness in mitigating the effects of climate change. To refer to Thomas Palley’s remark as quoted in Terry Wassall’s first line, the costs of the failure of what we might call the Greenspan paradigm were indeed overwhelmingly to society, rather than to the wealthy, many of whom have done rather well out of the financial crisis. One result for example has been that finance capital now has a generous state-backed welfare system paid for by the public, whilst social welfare itself is being systematically retrenched in order to pay for this – the profits remain privatised, whilst the risks have been socialised. Welfare for the rich and laissez faire for the rest: what outcome could be better than this?
As sociologists we are well equipped and accustomed to see through the illusions of liberalism, so we should not fall back into a liberal model when it comes to our strategy for defending sociology – that would be to take our opponents at their word.
Hi Richie. Of course I agree. My hope (no doubt in the current conditions somewhat naive) would be that a sociological understanding would lead to different policies rather than be bent to the service of neoliberal policies and the particular interests these serve. It is because sociology does not necessarily give them the messages and policy implications they want that it is devalued and excluded to the extent it is. I am in the camp, perhaps epitomised by Zygmunt Bauman, that sociolgogists are interpreters rather than legislators and should be contributing to public discourse rather than perhaps dominant policy discourse directly. It would be great if a sociological imagination became as embedded in common sense and public understanding as are the classical and neoliberal assumptions of a particular type of selfish calculative individualism. As I said, no doubt somewhat naive!
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