Gallery: Economics debated at the Cambridge Union
Skytte Prize-winning political economist Margaret Levi and the Greek minister of finance under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Yanis Varoufakis, were at the Cambridge Union last week.
On Thursday, November 7, the Cambridge Union were joined by Margaret Levi and Yanis Varoufakis, who engaged themselves in a heated discussion as to whether or not economics can be a force for good, in front of a packed audience of 250. Levi began by introducing the purpose of the evening: to talk about where economics is today.
She showed concern that economics has developed over a “series of assumptions on human behaviour which we know are no longer true. People are not rational, and nor are they totally individualistic”. But for Varoufakis, contemporary political problems do not need to be the focus.
“The economy is far too important to be left to the economists,” he said. On a much more inherent, ideological level, the “capitalists took it upon themselves to elevate themselves to the level of civil engineering, and to believe that we can find truth by a system of equations”, which, for Varoufakis, is the root of the current crisis in economics.
Levi criticised the framework that neo-liberals have been operating on “for making people believe that they can't change things, and that anything that goes wrong is their personal responsibility and not the responsibility of the system of the economy which has helped to create that situation”.
She resented how economic practices have given “undue influence” to big corporations, which undermine her fundamental belief that “more important than economic equality is political equality. Without political equality, you can't have democracy”.
Varoufakis firmly denied this with: “I don't believe that economists rule the land. The economists provide the service that steady the hands of those who were doing whatever they were doing anyway”. He went further to claim that: “We live in the best of all kinds of capitalisms. There is nothing you can do in order to improve the performance of the economy. Whatever you try is going to damage the capacity of the economy”.
Both speakers had their own solutions. Levi called for “an ethical moral political economic framework that takes advantage of where we are now", and Varoufakis “a need to get out of consumerism as a concept”. But when asked by a member of the audience, “Can economics genuinely be a force for good?”, they were finally on the same page.
Varoufakis asserted: “Yes, as long as it stops pretending to separate the psychological and the philosophical from the economics”; Levi nodded convincingly before adding “I agree”.
