Tag: diversity

Open economics and hard decisions

Ada Smith would know what to do

Two related stories from the engine room of economics struck me this week. One was the underlining by members of the European Parliament of the lack of female representation on the ECB Governing Council and the other was the news that the Federal Reserve is broadening its hiring process to recruit more women and people with more ethnically diverse backgrounds, though disappointingly this initiative seems only to be focused only on research assistant roles.

Both stories tell us much about gender, diversity and decision making and the direction of the economics profession.

On gender, all of the research I have been involved in this area underlines a couple of themes, that good data on gender representation is still hard to get (my friend Richard Kersley’s ‘Gender 3000’ database is one of the leading datasets), and that better (gender) balanced teams and boards make better decisions (or is it that men only ones make more bad decisions?).

In that way it makes great sense for organizations and institutions to recruit women to professional roles, but these institutions also need to facilitate the upward progress of women. I have known many female colleagues who have suffered the tyranny of ‘flexi-time’ – working a four day week, suffering career ‘stigma’ for doing so, and ultimately having to work 20% harder.

As it concerns central banking specifically, there is a much broader question of diversity of thought. By the time a man or women, from any given nationality has made it through an economics PhD programme of a major US university (Handelsblatt carried a news item last week which showed that only 4 of the top 30 German speaking economists are employed in German universities), published in leading economics journals, gained a faculty place or worked in the Fed/IMF/World Bank system, they have become creatures of the system, increasingly losing the incentive and ability to question the status quo.

Very few have the courage to challenge orthodoxy. A good example was the address that Rajan Raghuram gave to the Jackson Hole Symposium in 2005 (‘Has financial development made the world riskier?’) where (as later outlined in his book ‘Faultlines’) he warned of the dangers posed by the mountain of derivatives that had been built upon the US housing market. The response to his speech was frosty to say the least, and for a time many leading economists castigated him (Larry Summers called him a Luddite).  

The tendency of major academic economics departments to ‘form’ economists is dangerous because the creation of group think in central banking has produced a habitual, backward looking approach to monetary policy that usually ends up producing asset price bubbles and economic imbalances (e.g. negative yields, broken banks).

One response to this is to call for ‘new economics’. A recent example is entrepreneur Nick Hanauer’s impassioned TED Talk on the need to change capitalism. While I have sympathy for this view, I do not think that we need new economic theories but rather a better mix of formal economic theory with other sciences, and generally a much greater focus on the science of decision making (the US military and many sports teams such as the leading teams in the Rugby World Cup are innovators here).

One avenue is to pursue much more of a ‘Santa Fe’ approach to economics (I am thinking of the Santa Fe Institute which fosters a cross disciplinary approach to policy and science problems). Within economics, economists and analysts may in the future be better served by taking more the approach of a sleuth than of an econometric modeler.

Specifically, they should employ a wider variety of skills, ferret out facts and use firsthand experience to better understand them, and be more wide-ranging in their choice of the factors they choose to study. For instance, anthropology and sociology can sometimes better help understand the behavior of bankers and markets than can finance theory. If the pendulum of the economics profession is swinging away from a modeling-based approach, better that it swings toward development economics, for instance, which very often requires a more granular appreciation of how policy formulation works in practice.

Development economics is also the field where can be studied the impact on economic growth of a relative change in the quality of institutions or in rule of law, simply by virtue of the fact that the potential incremental change in both variables is much larger in developing than developed countries. I

In more detail, the policies, actions, and actors that affect development in emerging nations are complex, both individually and in the ways they interact with each other. In the Trump/Brexit/ Macron age, politics and institutional quality are exerting a very significant role on markets and economies, and a multipronged, more bottom up approach may be required to open the black box of how policy decision making is undertaken, how it might be improved, and, as I discuss in The Levelling how politicians can make good use of it.

In that respect the ECB and Fed should focus on hiring more senior female experts, in areas like law, banking, psychology as well as those with experience working in large organisations. Christine Lagarde is both the exception and the role model here.

The last issue is decision making. Surely, with debt levels growing, human development levels receding and the climate warming, we need to better understand why policymakers are so prone to avoiding big decisions?

Have a great week ahead,

Mike

How to reconnect Europeans with the EU

The EU elections, like the Eurovision song contest is, for some, a chance to poke fun at the EU and at the more colourful characters contesting seats. Turnout will be relatively low, reflecting the fact that for many Europeans, power lies in national assemblies, and also the fact that they do not entirely understand the role and purpose of the EU Parliament.

In this respect the EU Parliamentary elections will do little to bridge the political and emotional gulf between the EU and its citizens. My own experience is that whether I am in the north of Greece, west of France or south of Ireland, Europe’s citizens are losing their sense of what the EU means to them in a tangible way.

The core elements of the project need to be remade, and done so in a way that brings them closer and more meaningful to Europeans. One example is the constitution. One frequently noted rejoinder during debates on the politics of the EU is to ask whether anyone has in fact read the EU constitution. Few have.

The EU constitution is some four hundred pages long (at seventy thousand words, it is seven times as long as the French and Dutch constitutions), and it is unlikely that many Europeans have read it or that they keep a copy close to hand.

Lawyers and academics will tell us that constitutions are legal documents and as such are long and complicated. Still, weighty texts like the European Constitution put distance between people and those who govern over them.

This is one of the ways in which politics today has created a sense of disconnect between insiders and outsiders. From a socio-political point of view, it is a disturbing divide because Europeans are losing confidence in the European Union, and as multiple economic and humanitarian crises take their political toll, Europeans are losing their sense of what Europe stands for.

One proposal, which may go just a small way to repairing the gap between the EU and its citizens, is for Europeans to have a short, tangible and agreed account of what it means to be European.

One thoroughly modern response might be to use artificial intelligence to optimize the constitutions of the various European states and to condense them into one, meaningful page. The algorithm would extract core beliefs and principles from the constitutions of a range of countries and boil them down into a single, short document.

A more straightforward tack would be produce a short document that highlights the meaning and relevance of the European Union for its many citizens. It could be done as follows, and maybe the next Commission might take this up.

The exercise would involve European citizens running pilot projects to discover what they feel they have in common, where they feel they are different, and what policies might, to their advantage, draw them together. To think aloud, an initial pilot project could be based on the participation of a retired Portuguese teacher, a Polish bank clerk, a German policewoman, a Latvian student, an Italian pensioner, and a Swedish nurse.

Their goal is to produce, on a single sheet of paper, the answers to the following questions: What do they, as Europeans, have in common? What can they stress as common values and aspirations, what policies might bring them closer together as Europeans (i.e. the Erasmus pan-European student-exchange program).

The answers might start off with the fact that most Europeans have a common history, one that has been marked by wars, scarred by the rise and fall of empires, shrouded in Christianity, and shaped by the passage of monarchy to democracy and autarchy, the rise of learning and culture, and, from the thirteenth century onward, the evolution of great cities.

This is an altogether broad and historical view of European identity, and it might well permit the inclusion of countries, such as Russia, that are not considered part of Europe today. The sum total of this historic experience might well inspire citizens to say that they have the following common values: peace (not to have another European war), the influence of the Christian church(es), democracy, recognition of the benefits of social democracy, and free movement of EU citizens.

This may just be a starting point, and it might even gain clarity through the participation of the growing number of pan-European couples and their children. Such an exercise may not also produce the unity of views that pro-Europeans may desire, but it will make Europeans think about what defines their region at a time when the US and China are reinforcing their own identities.

The next trick will be to get Europe’s leaders to react to such a template.