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Transcript
Rob Johnson:
[Music]. Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. [Music]. I’m here today with Geoff Mann. He’s been an INET senior fellow. He is the chairman of the department of geography at Simon Fraser University. He’s written fantastic books about macroeconomic discipline, In the Long Run We Are All Dead. If you ask me what’s whispering into my ear, on my shoulder, how to run INET, he’s the core individual. Climate Leviathan, his book with Joel Wainwright, is so compelling because it deals with the dilemmas that we’re dealing with here today. And because I’m concerned about the relationship between the necessity, the urgency of much great change in climate, and the failures in political economy of governments to recognize, and realize that urgency. Not that they don’t recognize it, but they don’t actualize it.
And so I needed to come to Geoff to explore, and see where his mind is right now, would benefit all of our audience. Geoff thanks for joining me. Thanks for being part of this.
Geoff Mann:
Thanks Rob. It’s great to see you.
Rob Johnson:
So here we are. Climate Leviathan is one of the most pressive books. You and I have talked about these questions. Our mutual friend Seth Klein has created a metaphor with the book, The Good War, about what was war mobilization like. Bill Janeway, from our board, has created a course, venture capital and the economics of innovation, all of which was devoted to the last chapter of how do we address climate change.
You see the dilemmas.
Geoff Mann:
Well, I guess the place to begin it seems to me, and again I think you and I have talked about this before, and lots of other folks have talked about it too. The question right now is to look hard at what needs to be done, which I think we have a fairly good idea about, at least in some fronts. For example, it seems to me that I think everyone who takes the problem seriously understands the fact that fossil fuels are a huge part of the problem. So we need to wind down the fossil fuel industry. Even saying that sounds laughably utopian at this moment. And I think part of the reason that it does is because we’re in a situation where existing institutions seem either beholden to those same industries, or the parallel in other sectors, or they seem entirely inadequate to the problem.
And so I guess I would say we have two large-scale political fronts that we have to take seriously. The first is the nature and scope of the institutions that we create to deal with these problems, because the existing ones are either inadequate, or need to be tweaked so radically that we have institutions that actually have a purchase on the problem. And we also need I think to think hard about the nature of the authority of those institutions, and the ways in which they’re managed democratically.
And I think, and I think I can speak for Joel too, though I don’t want to speak, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think that there is an assumption that the only way we can solve this problem is an authority that is so great that democracy is effectively in the way. We have to move it out of the way to get the Technocrats, or whatever is in charge, to handle this. And this is of course what Joel and I were calling Climate Leviathan. But I think that in fact the real solution, if there’s a solution, the real solution is actually to take multiple forms in the communities in which people live. And that means that the response needs to be democratic.
So, in other words, what I’m saying is that institutions that can confront this, despite the fact that it’s a global problem, will be grounded in communities where people are actually dealing with the implications of climate change that are already underway. As you’ve noted before, and we were talking just before we started, about Arjun [Jayadev] and his labor to document what’s going on in India. The Indian state, and the Indian people, cannot wait around for Glasgow [the site of COP26] or another COP [Conference of Parties on climate change] to create a regime that will somehow help them endure what’s coming down the pipe from climate in India. And the same is true here in North America, the same is true in New York, the same is true across the world.
And so I feel very strongly that despite the fact that there’s temptations for a centralized response, that response needs to be democratically accountable to institutions grounded in the communities in which people live. We can’t be handing power up to the same institutions that have failed us over and over. And the global regime itself of course has produced nothing thus far. So the faith in the next COP[26] seems to me entirely misplaced. I’d be glad to be proven wrong that at this point I’d rather bring it down to the ground.
Rob Johnson:
And the other dimension of this Geoff, and I’m really interested in your thoughts on this, the disparagement, or the lack of trust, and faith in expertise, which is probably deserved because a lot of people with credentials became marketing agents for power rather than what you might call seers of global public good, and what was needed. But we’re in a place right now where the susceptibility to demagoguery is much greater because expertise has failed. How do we restore trust? There are some great scientists out there. How do we restore trust in them? You watch this craziness in the United States, and everywhere else, about dealing with the pandemic. “Oh my God, we’ve got to open the restaurants. Oh my God this and that. This and that.”
Using the New Zealand example, we could have shut this thing down months ago, and saved trillions of dollars, and we didn’t do it. That’s a failure of a scorecard of expertise and political power that is etched into everyone’s mind. So I’m leading a bit here, but how do we restore not only the faith in, and the trust in, but the power of common good expertise to prevail?
Geoff Mann:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I don’t have a single answer of course. And I’d be suspicious I guess of anyone who did but I think-
Rob Johnson:
I wouldn’t be suspicious of you. I’d just think you were a genius because it’s what we’re all struggling to find.
Geoff Mann:
You would think I was a liar, which would be fair enough. But when I think one of the challenges of working through this problem, because you are right, there is a tendency I think on the part of folks like me, and I don’t want to speak for you, but maybe folks like you too, who are embedded enough in existing intuitions of expertise that we have a tendency to trust those experts. Maybe some people even think of us as experts ourselves whether we merit it or not. And so it’s a suspicion that seems outlandish, or irrational to us. Do you know what I mean? To look a climate scientist and say, “It’s all a hoax driven by China’s effort to stymie American growth.” Those seem like absolute, and complete absurdities. And so how can we possibly even fathom a conversation that begins from that point?
And part of the problem I think is that fact that for most folks, and I speak for myself here as well. It’s just I don’t think about it often enough. The problem of expertise is inseparable from, and embedded in the problem of the institutions themselves. It’s not like we mistrust the expertise, and the institutions themselves are fine, or the other way around. Those two things are the same. It’s the institutions that implement the expertise the way that people experience expert knowledge, and expertise is through institutions. If that makes any sense.
And right now as you’ve said many time before in our conversations those institutions, the principle ways in which expertise gets communicated that those institutions have lost a lot of legitimacy. Both at the global scale, certainly. Particularly, I would argue the American institutions have lost a lot of global trust. The idea that at one point US might lead the planet, if that makes any sense, has very, very little purchase outside the United States anymore. But the institutional mechanisms through which expertise gets played out through policy, and all other stuff have not adjusted to this new reality if that’s what it is.
And so I guess I would say part of the task is that because of the lack of legitimacy of existing institutions, especially in their capacity to deal with something like climate, and especially to deal with something like climate change in anything like a just manner, is that we’ve built. Those institutions now have built into how we understand the future. A series of expectations of breakdown, decay, collapse, crumbling. And in so far as expect that to be the way our institutions manage, or help us cope with the coming changes, in so far as that’s what we expect, we have a much greater chance of that being true. What we need is institutions in which people expect to find support, expect to find some forms of stability, some forms of provisioning. Right now those don’t exist.
So, managing the people’s expectation, not the people, people expectations, and thinking hard about what needs to be done, is all about the relegitimization of those institutions. And if that’s possible then expertise will come along with it I think.
Rob Johnson:
That’s brilliant. I want to take with our audience a little side trip because I know you work on climate, which is where we started, was what inspired me to call you to talk today. But your work on macroeconomic policy is also very important. And what I see right now, and I’m going to pay real tribute to a man who is a dear friend of mine since the 1980s who’s passed away, and that was Paul Volcker. And Paul Volcker, he knew how, he was a fishing buddy of mine originally. And we worked, and then eventually I was the Chief of Commerce in the Senate Banking Committee. So I was doing the Humphrey [inaudible 00:12:13] confirmation hearings, and then he left and Greenspan came in, and the whole nine yards.
But Paul said to me late in his life, that he was very concerned that what was created in the policy mix, the monetary-fiscal policy mix. And you’ve written books on Keynes. So that’s why I’m putting it out. Was that it’s okay to drop interest rates to zero because it amplifies the value of assets concentrated in plutocracy, but it’s not okay to use fiscal policy progressively because what’s on the horizon is taxes potentially for rich people. So the distortion in what was called an independent central leg, or a monetary fiscal process was the political economy of pushing people to fortify the wealthy. And to constrain the risk of taxation of the wealthy at a time when globalization, and automation were exacerbating inequality, and what we needed was a massive transformation of the education system to create more knowledge intensive rungs in the ladder. And we didn’t do it.
And we turned something that used to be called tax evasion into tax avoidance. It became legal to keep your money off shore. And then to come back to the American people and say, “We can’t afford it.” So you have a very, very corrupt dynamic. And Paul was more than terrified as he watched people like Ron Paul and his son Rand Paul going after the fed because he didn’t know how to defend him. He didn’t know how to defend central bank independence. He wouldn’t buy municipal bonds. When states with budget constraints, and Wall Street’s made a mess, and we’re in a downturn, and we’re supposed to be having quality law enforcement, education, and infrastructure, but we can buy the bad stuff off the balance sheets at banks, the mortgages, but we can’t fortify those communities that are the victims of the downturn cost by Wall Street.
Paul used to sit at lunch with me in his last three, or four years just ranting about this stuff. And I’m bearing witness to it today out of homage to him, but you and your book on Keynes, In the Long Run We Are All Dead, maybe not quite so what you might call with the tentacles in grip of all the details of political economy. But you were seeing the nature of the policy mix being off course, and earlier Keynes was seeing that, and you were illuminating that. And Paul was seeing that. This isn’t just about the environment.
Geoff Mann:
No, agreed. And in fact that’s a crucial, if you and I can get one message across from this meeting, the idea that it’s not just about the environment because nothing is ever just about the environment. That is a crucial point absolutely. It’s interesting that you bring up Paul Volcker who is legendary for lots of reasons. Probably, and I think has a complex legacy in terms of his policy because he’s so closely associated with that one moment.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, the anti-inflationary Reagan, late Carter, Reagan movement.
Geoff Mann:
Exactly, right. And I think when he ends up, if I’m correct, advising the Obama administration later in his life, that’s something that less people know about. Most people think about the Volcker shock, the Volcker coup. And I guess I would say that one of the things that is a crucial dimension of Keynesianism as I understand it, but is a dimension that I think we need to think hard about, and maybe be a bit more suspicious about, is the idea that institutions like the fed, or central banks more generally are themselves, they contain the answers and we just need to manage them well enough to express and communicate those policy answers.
I am not so sure that saving central banking as it sounds like Volcker was wary, or worried that he wouldn’t be able to do. I’m not so sure that, that’s where our attention needs to go right now. And I’m not sure if that’s what you’re saying. But I guess what I’m trying to get at is at the heart of Keynesianism as I understand it, and Volcker would be a great example of this, is in some ways it’s a larger management of the social order. And that’s what he’s afraid of, of course, when you hear Rand Paul, and Ron Paul taking apart this crucial institution. And of course I would never myself endorse Ron Paul, or Rand Paul’s complete misunderstanding I think of the fed. I would be sympathetic to their suspicion of the embeddedness of the fed in system that is dis-equalizing itself. Do you know what I mean? So that means-
Rob Johnson:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), there’s a false faith.
Geoff Mann:
Exactly, exactly.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I’m going to give Paul credit in a way that I think addresses the correctness of your concerns. When you were our senior fellow, and you and I were planning a conference in Washington DC, which the pandemic derailed. And I was preparing to walk onto the stage at the opening and dedicate that conference to two strange bedfellows who had died. The first was Paul Volcker, and the second was William Greider, who wrote Secrets of the Temple. And Paul, who was my friend, encouraged me to work with Greider, which I did in great detail.
And at Bill Greider’s funeral I gave one of the eulogies. And you know what I stood up and said? About two months ago as he knew he was dying Paul Volcker said he wanted to get together with Bill Greider. And Bill had broken his hip, and couldn’t do it. Paul was frustrated. And Paul said, “I know I gave you the green light to work with him.” I’ve told Paul my ground rule was I won’t gossip about when I was inside the fed, but I’ll talk structurally, and try to keep this guy to be on course. But Volcker looked at me when he knew we weren’t going to meet and he said, and I quote, “You tell him when you see him that while it was painful for me, that’s the best goddamn book that was ever written about central banking in the history of the world.”
And I said that at the funeral of Bill Greider during my eulogy. And a man named Peter Osnos, who had worked during Watergate at the Washington Post with Bill Greider, whose PublicAffairs press is a fantastic organization, and Paul’s memoirs at the end of his life were published there. And Peter jumped up and he said, “He said the same thing to me too.” So I know I wasn’t dreaming.
Geoff Mann:
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Johnson:
But Paul had seen the contradiction, and he was seeing the misuse of central bank independence. That it wasn’t independent. It was getting captured. That’s why we talk about the municipal bonds not being bought but the bailout of mortgage toxicity being bailed out.
Geoff Mann:
Right.
Rob Johnson:
And he was deeply concerned not that the central bank was right and needed to be put back on track. He was deeply concerned that the central bank was off track, and we were going further off track with all of our institutions.
Geoff Mann:
Right.
Rob Johnson:
And so your concerns are very valid, but my experience with Paul is that he was aligned with you and I in seeing something he had tried to achieve, and seen deteriorate opening the gate to pandemonium.
Geoff Mann:
Right.
Rob Johnson:
And I watched him restrain himself in the years after Alan Greenspan took office because he didn’t think it was honorable to take on the person who succeeded you and become critical.
Geoff Mann:
Right.
Rob Johnson:
But he told me one of his greatest regrets late in his life, when all the bubbles built up and everything to the great financial crisis, he said he’d had too many terms. I should have started earlier in my, not criticisms of Alan, criticisms of the structure of said policy.
Geoff Mann:
Right.
Rob Johnson:
Which by the way Ben Bernanke, who was another friend of mine, was in charge of by that time. But I guess where I’m going with you because of the multi dimensionality of your awareness of these critical government institutions in a relation to a market economy is that we’re off course a lot more than just climate. And the whole notion of globalization is eroding the power of the nation-state to protect people. It’s feeding despair. It’s creating a yearning which authoritarian demagogues play into. The frontier upon which your work is based on lots of different what I call signposts, lots of different issues, is in jeopardy. The quality of humanity and society is in jeopardy across a large spectrum now. And maybe climate’s the most important. We can tolerate asset bubbles, and bail outs a little bit but we lose oxygen, and water we’ve got a problem.
Geoff Mann:
Yeah, yeah.
Rob Johnson:
But I really do, I really, Geoff, people ask me who are the greatest scholars. And I sit there, and sit there, in this waystation called INET, to me the greatest scholars are people who ask the most important questions. And I think you’re right there.
Geoff Mann:
I appreciate that Rob. I do. I think you’re absolutely right. I think that the questions are the centerpiece right now because they lead us to look in different directions if we can right there ask the right questions. I totally agree. And I do think too that there’s for lack of a better way of describing it, it does feel like whether we are or not I don’t know, but it feels like we’re at a hinge point where the lessons of the past upon which we’ve usually built our knowledge and understanding of where we’re headed. Those seem less and less useful to a lot of people.
There seems to be a disjuncture between the past’s capacity to allow us to understand where we’re headed. And that I think is a terrifying feeling. Not just for average people, but I include myself in that group of course. And that changes not just our expectations of what kind of futures our children might have, and those kinds of quite daunting things to think about as you know. But it also changes our understanding of what we can do with the tools that we have at our hands. And right now there’s an extraordinary amount of distrust in those tools. And I actually think as you just said I think right at the intro that distrust is quite legitimate.
And so the question is, do we put our effort into re-legitimizing the tools that we have, or do we construct new ones, or at least try to think differently about what we do with the ones that we have? And it’s actually interesting to think of the connections between our first part of this conversation, and some of the stuff you just raised, around, say, the purchase of municipal bonds. Well if we look at how we’re going to deal with adapting, if that’s the right term, to climate change’s impact, we’re going to do that at local level. The city as an institution of governance is going to be crucial to any effort like that. The only way that it’s going to be able to do so is to fund those efforts. Municipal bonds will be a crucial tool to that, to the democratization in some senses of our capacity to manage what’s coming.
So we could argue that the institutions exist, and we just need to think differently about them, or we could think harder about a more radical rethinking of the way in which we fund, or don’t fund, what’s the right word, infrastructural efforts. I personally think that what we’re going to need to do is we’re going to need to set aside prioritizing market based solutions. And we’re just going to have to start doing shit. It’s the only way that we’ll get this done. And that might require mechanisms that don’t try to optimize the efficiency of our path forward in a Nordhaus model. It’s going to require, I think, much more radical policy commitments that may be like you said earlier, are going to just require a social movements, or mass movements to push them forward.
I don’t know what that will look like, but I do think it will be, it won’t be one movement. It will be a whole series of movements. A whole series of responses to crisis, and other kinds of challenges as they unfold. I am not as hopeless as I think sometimes you might get the impression, if you read a little bit of what I wrote. I am actually, it wouldn’t be I think a little bit Pollyannaish to say I’m hopeful, but I am convinced that we have the social fabrics to face this problem. It’s just that we can’t, we have to reimagine them as we go to adapt to the new conditions that we’re constantly facing.
But I really do, and I look at the younger generation, many of whom are really politicized, and care so much. And that also motivates me a great deal to try and communicate that we can build visions of the future where we trust each other, not where we turn on each other. And we can do that by democratizing the movement effectively, and by democratizing our institutions that exist to manage the problem as it comes. I actually have a fair bit of hope.
Rob Johnson:
I’m going to offer you a phrase that complements with what you’re saying. We’re not only going to democratize, we’re going to de-plutocracize.
Geoff Mann:
Yes, I hope so.
Rob Johnson:
I’m going to tell you a story now that our mutual friends, and some of what you’ve been saying. Naomi Klein is someone I’ve admired for many years. Her husband Avi Lewis and she have been friends, and they were very close to my wife and I, and were very much cherishing our first daughter Sarah. It was before Toma, their son, was born. And Naomi used to talk with me a lot in the presence of Sarah about these daunting challenges before us. Climate change, the book she wrote on Donald Trump, and what have you. And, inspired by Naomi, Sarah insisted, and took her little sister Dylan, and I took the day off and we went to the climate strike in New York, and we went to see Greta Thunberg, who knows Naomi, and she had talked with us about on a number of occasions.
About a month later, after my board meeting at INET, a number of our board members were at the house for dinner. And I’ve told this story on a couple of podcasts because it’s very germane to what we’re talking right now. And Sarah sat and listened to these adults, and one she calls pizza man because he helps her make pizzas on the grill when we’re in California, another one who took her to meet AOC. And all kinds of things, and Sarah’s this young person. She’s nine and half at the time. And she listened to our concern not unlike the conversation you and I are having. And she went silent, and she went to bed. And I drove her to school the next morning, and she didn’t speak which is very uncharacteristic.
She went to her first class. She had a new iPhone because kids at their school moved between different buildings so they asked us to get the children a phone. Her second period was the study hall. And at the end of the study hall on my phone I get a little image which is a poem. What Is Everything, by Sarah. “What is everything? Is it all essence, or is it all answers? Is there more? Why am I all covered up? I never see past, nor present, nor future. Is it all an illusion? Why is it all collapsing and destroyed? All those lives unknown. Will we ever know?”
I took that poem one week after she wrote it and, by the way, it wasn’t happy and proud. That fact that she was at nine years old carrying that kind of weight felt to me the energy like you and I have explored today. But I took that, and Pope Francis was running an event in Assisi, before you joined me in another event [inaudible 00:32:09], but there was an earlier one. And he was talking about you’ve got to listen to the youth, and I read that poem. And he read it, and translated it into Spanish and English, and read it to youth groups all over the world.
But her disorientation is at one level just like you said to me moments ago, an impetus, and an encouragement because they’re recognizing the lack of coherent structure. And they’re mobilizing, but at the other level it is a description of the anxiety we’re all wrangling with now. And I think that you’re seeing what’s being planted in the heart of the younger generation. What’s being what you might call illustrated valiantly by Greta, and we’ve got to push ourselves so that we can’t go back in a whole lot of realms.
And the pandemic, my joke these days is this is the best unmasking we ever had, to wear masks because it’s taken the curtains back on so many things. And your work in all these different facets of political economy, and the way you and Joel saw the anxious tradeoffs between mobilizing to get it right, but then having this authoritarian overlay. There are a whole lot of people anxious about US China relations now because the US is wallowing in taking care of vested interests, and the Chinese are stepping into the point. It’s not clear that they’re not what you might call the thing that made you anxious with Joel-
Geoff Mann:
Right.
Rob Johnson:
As a [inaudible 00:34:14] non-solution. I’m not, how do I say, I’m seeing their structure. This responding to the challenges, African development, and various other things, and disease. It’s becoming perhaps attractive in a way when people aren’t recognizing the downside of the long run of moving governments to that place. On the other hand the urgency of [inaudible 00:34:46] is really strong, and it’s very compelling, and failing like we’re doing vis-a-vis the pharmaceutical industry. We’re failing. We’re watching fires in Turkey this morning, and all over the Pacific Northwest of Canada by where you live. How people look in the mirror who are public leaders and accept that? I don’t know. I don’t know how you can.
Geoff Mann:
Yeah. You must be able to because they all do it. Yeah, I think sometimes without in any way trying to let the folks in charge off the hook. I do think that the constraints are binding in ways that we don’t always understand. And I don’t mean that I understand, and the rest of the world doesn’t. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I do think if the world disastrous, or calamitous momentum right now that can’t be in my view just attributable to the spinelessness of our leadership. It’s something deeper than that.
And identifying exactly, if we can, maybe it’s not even something we can ever be exact about. Identifying where and how the weaknesses are that need to be addressed is one of the most significant challenges that we could possibly face. And I do think that part of the problem is that we don’t even have a language to talk about that in a sense. We turn immediately, maybe, I don’t mean to say you, or I, or anyone in specific, but I do think in general we turn immediately to solutions like a particular set of tax policies, or the convening of a new international meetings. And I think in some senses those are superficial attempts to address what are actually much greater structural problems that are effectively sedimented from compromises if that’s the best word over decades. Do you know what I mean?
So that when for example Volcker takes charge of a fed that could liberate hundreds of thousands of people from poverty, and wants to do so the institution’s momentum is such that it’s still impossible for him to do so. And I guess part of what Joel and I have struggled with, and as you’ve read the book and you know that we’re very imprecise on what the solutions are because we don’t know. But we do think very strongly that, and I guess I’m speaking for him – I apologize, Joel, if you’re listening – but that the solutions are likely going to require a radical rethink of our institutions. The idea that we can just turn the treasury around to a climate fix seems to me kind of utopian to be honest with you. And I mean that in the negative sense.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, like false resolution.
Geoff Mann:
Exactly, exactly. And so yeah, it’s awkward of course because I don’t have the answers any more than anyone else. But I do feel very strongly that the place we need to begin is admitting what we don’t know, and therefore need to think hard about. And right now a lot of the time we’re acting like we have the solutions. We’re just not implementing them. That doesn’t seem to me to be very clear.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, yeah. What I’m saying about you and Joel is, you waded into the right water with the right question without having what you might call a demagogue like quick fix answer.
Geoff Mann:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rob Johnson:
When you talk about climate [inaudible 00:39:19] the treasury, or you talk about all these different quick fixes, you can understand this is not unlike people talk about Donald Trump as a demagogue. Lots of people project all certainty, and until they’re unmasked as having been false are treated like heroes because they’ve alleviated people’s anxiety. And grappling with the real questions, and staying in them. Not letting go of the question, but not pretending to have answers that are false resolution. That takes courage.
Geoff Mann:
Yeah, I’m not sure if I have it, but I agree completely. And those that do are worthy of our trust I guess effectively. Those are the folks that we need to listen to right now.
Rob Johnson:
I worked for six years on the Capitol Hill, and I know a lot people in the Senate, and the House from those years. And I was interested in, as you were talking, about what are the constraints? And I’ll tell you the one that keeps coming back to me because I’ve heard it in about 19 different forms. “Rob you’re right, but I can’t commit professional suicide because if I’m not in office I can’t make a difference.” So first you’ve got to survive before you can try to do good policy. So a lot of these people understand whether the hierarchy, or committees, the role of money and politic the nature of what you might call disparagement by media. That’s sicked upon them by the wealthy and the powerful. They experience all of these refractory influences.
I gave a talk the other day where I said, “We’re all very concerned, just how can young people find the world map towards the truth because the arts have been commodified. Education is increasingly privatized and commodified. The mainstream media depends upon advertising from the powerful. And the legislature depends upon campaign contributions.” So if you watch, say in the large sense, the refractory influence of money on the democracy that’s supposed to be governing money, it’s quite pervasive. And it’s been a leash more on the United States than almost anywhere else. I think your own country has a better sense of balance than we do.
But it’s a very, very hard thing once you know a politician to be aggressively critical of them, because the smarter they are in understanding the context in which they live, the more conflicted they become. And I do know a United States Senator, who I will not name now, who in the prime of his career left. And I had dinner with him and his wife. I worked with him a lot when I was there. And he said, “Rob, a lot of US Senators are alcoholics because you spend 75% of your time raising money, and most of the money you’re raising is asking you to do something to the detriment of the people who elected you. And it’s very hard to live with that.”
That’s an American story, but I think among the dilemmas, who wants to made a knight, or an emperor, or get awards in other countries. It’s not always cash. It’s not even cash as survival. It’s about dignity. It’s about larger platforms. What we associate prestige with is not always the common good. And the people who are the ambassadors for the global common good are few and far between.
And I listened to a wonderful course recently by a man name Obery Hendricks at the Union Theological Seminary called Political Economy and the Kingdom of God. And the center piece, we had lots of discussion over several weeks. My job was to come in and talk about what Adam Smith really said in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, which isn’t the kind of advertisements that are used what you call market fundamentalists. But I enjoyed this group, and enjoyed this conversation tremendously.
But Hendricks shared with us a paper called Macro Ethics, and it was about the way in which Martin Luther King defined meaning in his life. And I wish that Dr. Hendricks could brief every Senator, Congressman, or person in the Executive because what he planned to do with conscience is about what I would call heroism in the present state is really about. And I’ll send you a copy of that article, but there’s a deeper challenge and some people lose their lives. Some people lose their time in office. But as you’ve been saying throughout in your awareness of governments, and your awareness of the challenges, “We need radical change.”
Geoff Mann:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), absolutely. And I think virtually everybody experiences, I can’t speak for everybody that’s a ridiculous statement, but a lot of people experience something similar to the situation you’re describing if in less rarefied institution setting in thinking about how and what kind of changes and sacrifices might be required at the individual level to address these things. When we talk about shutting down the tar sands here in Canada which I would definitely recommend that we do tomorrow. We also have to think clearly hard about the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of folks whose living is dependent upon that whole industrial operation.
And in so far as those folks committing to that work that doesn’t make them bad people, or weak spined people. It makes them people who like the rest of us find their lives for good or ill entangled in the existing political economy. Just like yours and mine. And helping them, and helping ourselves manage the kind of radical transition you’re talking about. We don’t have to be politicians to think hard about that. We have to think hard about the kinds of institutional fabrics that hold those people in those places even though they would prefer to be otherwise.
I think that task is going to be multi fronted if that’s the right word. And it’s going to require the knowledge that those folks have about how to make those changes. We can’t do all that from the top either. So it’s really, I think, a lot about bringing this down to the ground. And that effort is one of the reasons why I’m so excited about the role of young people right now because they are on the ground by definition. They are it. And they are the base of many of our most powerful social movements right now. This is true in the United States as well. So that’s thrilling, absolutely thrilling. And one of the great things about my job is I get to hang around kids doing stuff like that all the time. You know what I mean?
Rob Johnson:
That’s exhilarating, yeah.
Geoff Mann:
If I’m going to get down, I’m not going to get down talking to a 21-year-old these days. They’re going to fire me up. And I’m very, very privileged for that. You know?
Rob Johnson:
Well, let me ask you this. We’re coming down the stretch here. Are you contemplating a new book? Are you working on a new book? I know you’ve had a lot of administrative responsibility as the chairman of your department, the pandemic, and the young family, and so forth but I’m just curious is there something in your craw that you’re working on?
Geoff Mann:
There is. There is, but it’s very inchoate, if that’s the right word. It’s in very early stages, but I am wanting to think about, for lack of a better term, the politics of uncertainty right now. And I mean that mostly in the sort of, not the kinds of expertise that we think we have. I think that the way that we confront uncertainty in our policy knowledge, let’s say either in our economic models, or our ecological model, and the climate models, or just in terms of the implications of our policy making.
One of the fundamental assumptions that has been built into a lot of the way that we do that kind of technocratic or bureaucratic work is to assume, as I mentioned earlier, a reasonable amount of political economic stability and institutional, what’s the right term? Permanence, if that’s make, I guess what I’m trying to say is, how do we think about planning for the future?, and adjusting to the challenges that climate poses when our very conception of what the world will be like can no longer be based on our own experiences? That we need an entirely new way, I would argue, of thinking about how we might address the climate problem.
So, for example, if we look at the kind of modeling right now. The integrated assessment models that most climate economics are based upon those models, there’s lots of tweaks right now. People are trying to build thresholds in, say the Gulf Stream shuts down, or the water is gone from California. Those threshold mechanisms that weren’t originally in the models. But one of the things all those models do is assume that the contemporary institutions of liberal political economy will last no matter what happens, no matter how hot the planet gets, no matter all of that stuff.
But how do we think about a future in which the institutions we depend upon now are not there anymore? Then a lot of the assumptions of the models are actually thrown out. So I want to think hard about the politicizing of uncertainty right now, which I think is happening whether we like it or not. And it’s in the realm of economics that I’m most interested in investigating that, but as I said this is all very inchoate.
Rob Johnson:
Well this is very important because at the times when things are uncertain people yearn for relief.
Geoff Mann:
Yes.
Rob Johnson:
As the great philosopher Stephen Toulmin wrote it in his book Cosmopolis, about the ’60s and Reagan era. Exactly at the time when you see the fault lines, exactly at the time when you see what you can’t go back to is when you become scared. And many people lurch back to a nostalgic familiarity, rather than push forward to a new design [crosstalk 00:51:32].
Geoff Mann:
Right, right.
Rob Johnson:
And so overcoming the fear becomes central to the task.
Geoff Mann:
Absolutely.
Rob Johnson:
And that’s in part why I flaunt the work of you, and Joel, and a few kindred spirits, because I feel like you continue plowing forward. And when I thought about you today, and as I listened to you tonight, I wanted to quote a song from a British band called The Moody Blues. The band is-
Geoff Mann:
I’m old enough to know the Moody Blues.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, well they have a song called The Question. “Why do we never get an answer when we’re knocking at the door with a thousand million questions about hate, death, and war? Because when we stop and look around us there’s nothing that we need in a world of persecution that’s burning in its greed. Why do we never get an answer when we’re knocking at the door because the truth is hard to swallow that’s what the war of love is for. It’s not the way you say it when you do those things to me. It’s more the way you mean it when you tell me what will be. And when you stop and think about it you won’t believe it’s true that all the love you’ve been given has all been meant for you. I’m looking for someone to change my life. I’m looking for a miracle in my life. If you could see what it’s done to me to lose the love I knew then you could safely lead me through it.”
And I think in that despair in the questions, in what was familiar that’s lost and pushing forward I could see a picture of you, your co-authors, and your sense of purpose. So thank you for being with me today. I hope this is the first of the many chapters, but I really want to inspire our viewer and listeners to stay in close touch with your writing, and your thinking because none of us feel safe. But it’s safer to be with someone who has the humility to explore the real context with courage than it is to adhere to some false resolution that’s going to what you might call wake us up to a distress when we realize it wasn’t true. So thank you Geoff. As always it’s a pleasure to talk with you, and to learn from you.
Geoff Mann:
Thanks Rob. It was a great talk. It was great to see your face. It’s been a long time. I appreciate you connecting. It’s really nice.
Rob Johnson:
I agree. Let’s talk again soon.
Geoff Mann:
Okay.
Rob Johnson:
And check out more from the Institute For New Economic Thinking at INETeconomics.org. [Music].
