Why Listen to Me

Economics is poppycock. So said my father in 1971 when I came down from Cambridge, wanting to do a Master’s in the subject, and continue my personal Truth Quest.

With his disapproval, denial of any financial support, and even intolerance for my continuing to live in the parental home, I embarked on what has turned out to be fifty years of purposeful but always restless engagement with economics, applied in a variety of roles and institutional settings, but perhaps fortunately excluding a formal academic position.

Looking back, considering the current value to humanity of mainstream economics, I now think my father had a point.

I began my economics quest by attending evening classes in economic development at the North London Poly, while continuing my day job as an articled clerk at a venerable (established 1805, in Liverpool) city firm of Chartered Accountants, thus able to pay my rent. It had been my father’s idea that I start my articles in the nine months between leaving school and starting university.

Having qualified I left the accountancy profession and got a masters at SOAS¹ in “The Economics of Poor Countries and their Development”, after a year’s conversion course for those without a first degree in economics, and funded by a Social Science Research Council grant. I requested a summer job with the Government Economic Service and got one at HM Treasury, working on the investment intentions survey.

During my Masters’ course I read E.F.Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”, subtitled “A Study of Economics As If People Mattered” and reviewed it glowingly for a student journal. I requested a job with Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action) set up to apply Schumacher’s ideas. Not for the last time, being qualified both as an accountant and an economist proved valuable. I was able to save the group from bankruptcy by demonstrating that the R&D subsidiary was draining precious funds. Schumacher, who was chairman, to my sadness, did not agree with my argument, saying memorably that “money was fungible” and it was “all water in the bath”. But the board supported me and ITDG got substantial and long-term core funding from ODA (the DfID equivalent at the time).

I wanted more economics and less accounting, so I joined Economists Advisory Group which was a small consultancy vehicle for five professors of economics and one professor of accounting. The MD was Graham Bannock, who had been the research director of the government enquiry into the small firm sector², commissioned by Anthony Crosland³. At EAG, and its successor organisation Graham Bannock and Partners, I had a marvellous time, working on a big variety of projects, including many international assignments, and publications, for private and public sector clients. Graham⁴ used to say that we were a think tank for hire. He also said our challenge was to work to academic standards on journalistic deadlines.

Later I was briefly manager of the European Seed Capital Network having become heavily involved in work on innovation systems and in the measurement of activity and performance of venture capital. I had written my book in 1983 with the snappy title “Craft Enterprises in Britain and Germany: A Sectoral Study”. Despite that, it received favourable reviews in heavyweight papers. Over the course of thirty years, I became something of a global expert on credit guarantee schemes for small businesses, which were, I told my mystified friends, like bicycle gearboxes.

More recently I spent 12 years with Oxfam, leading on a research paper “The Missing Middle” about the role of the SME⁵ sector in low-income economies and later working on their Enterprise Development Program and Impact Investing for poor regions. My final role was collaborating with US organisations on a program called Enhancing Development through Cooperatives.

I had long been interested in challenges to mainstream economics by courageous independent thinkers, also pursuing their truth quests, rather than staying within the boundaries of conservative academic discourse. I read E.J. Mishan’s The Cost of Economic Growth in the 1970s, and then later Beyond Growth by Herman Daly. I understood that ecological economics was a more radical departure from orthodoxy than environmental economics. Keynes, the inventor of macroeconomics, became my new hero. While at Oxfam I met Kate Raworth, discovered Ha Joon Chang, Steve Keen, Mariana Mazzucato and Stephanie Kelton, among other heterodox economists.

Take a look at some of my favourite heterodox economists and their books on the Heroes page.

I created an innovative course called “Change in International Development; From the Third World to our Global Village”, which I taught in 2018 at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education.

By the happy coincidence of there being a gap between two permanent Directors of Studies in economics, both experts in migration, I was able to obtain approval to teach another novel course the following year called “What’s Wrong with Economics”.

A wise bird warned me, but too late, that I would need to teach economics before saying what was wrong with it. That, and my inexperience, made the course somewhat indigestible.

Since then, I have become more convinced than ever that mainstream economics is dangerously complacent, and insufficiently challenged, in an accessible way, for intelligent non-specialists, in the face of huge problems for humanity and its planet.