{"id":605,"date":"2023-11-12T15:19:32","date_gmt":"2023-11-12T15:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chloejuliette.com\/?p=605"},"modified":"2023-11-12T22:10:17","modified_gmt":"2023-11-12T22:10:17","slug":"just-a-citizen-staring-into-the-banality-of-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chloejuliette.com\/just-a-citizen-staring-into-the-banality-of-economics\/","title":{"rendered":"Just a citizen, staring into the banality of economics, asking it to care for the creatures who serve it"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I think my system for blog-writing is to just wait until something keeps showing up in my life over and over again, and creates enough discomfort, that I must write to make sense of it. I\u2019ve recently been invited onto Radio 4 to speak about the culture of governance in relation to social care, and I\u2019m finding that my reflections on that apply to society and governance more widely. In preparation for an MSc in Sustainability and Behaviour Change I recently went to an all-day conference that brought together movers and shakers in the sustainability space to share knowledge and discuss ideas. I won\u2019t say the name of the event because I spent most of the day utterly furious and texting a friend to stay sane. <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Here are some thoughts that have come mostly from reflecting on my experiences of delivering research and engagement exercises to inform policy, and wrapping my head around what\u2019s going on in response to the climate crisis, with a little from a lovely event I went to on a Saturday night featuring a talk about the mental health system followed by a discussion. Self-organised delib. Wild.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve lost sight of why we invented capitalism.<\/b> <\/span><\/p>\n

I assume that at some point before I was born, capitalism was introduced as a way of organising a huge society in a sensible way with ideas such as \u2018a global economy may discourage war\u2019 and \u2018an open marketplace and options on which government to elect will give citizens power to shape their lives\u2019 with the market and government responding to their needs and wants. Somewhere along the way, the marketplace and politics has stopped acting as a means to an end to improve quality of life for the average citizen. Money has become God and politics serves it. Making profits for shareholders is the ultimate goal, and people are just human resources used to reach that goal. I assume at some point the incentive for companies competing in the marketplace to endlessly grab money and power at any cost was mitigated through accountability and regulation. This appears to have died a death, and we\u2019re left with unchecked greenwashing and children in the care of the state living in squalor while the rich get richer. Not to mention companies have much more sophisticated tools of persuasion than they used to, so it’s increasingly hard to think clearly, ignore the adverts and make actual choices. Whether or not you believe in a higher power with more wisdom than our weird little species – surely we\u2019d rather believe in something outside of ourselves, or be atheist, than worship at the alter of profit at all human cost?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a strong desire to \u2018fix\u2019 problems and \u2018fix\u2019 people and for this to fit within defined parameters.<\/b> <\/span><\/p>\n

Those making decisions or leading the way get into echo chambers and groupthink. This leads to gross misunderstandings of the problem they\u2019re trying to solve, which informs how they move forward. For example, a civil servant believing taking drugs to be a bad behaviour that must be stopped, rather than comprehending that it is an effective way of escaping the psychological torture of being bottom of the pile, if not deeper trauma and abuse. Another example might be someone who is wealthy and worried about the climate crisis believing that those living in poverty have been brainwashed and so cannot overcome the need to eat processed food (yep, seriously, she said ‘they’ don’t have ‘free will’ unlike ‘us’ who eat organic food), rather than understanding it\u2019s about lack of headspace and necessary decision-making about how to use their budget. A few quid at McDonalds gets you far more bang for your buck in terms of calories than organic veggies. Quality isn\u2019t relevant when you\u2019re just trying to survive. I found the fact this person was given a platform and applauded by a room full of (white middle class) people both fascinating and appalling. I felt like an anthropologist. A more sensible climate activist might think education is the way to lead the masses to their way of thinking – evidence says it isn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For Government, definitive answers are desirable so that solutions can be rolled out nationally, saving money while improving lives. Totally understandable given we need to know if public money is being used well. There is a strong accountability culture within the civil service, where a case for spending money must be made using evidence of promise, then the impact must be evidenced using \u2018hard\u2019 data i.e. numbers – of resources spent, people reached and outcomes achieved, and subsequent cost savings. Nuance and complexity is thus less desirable, dis-incentivising long-term and flexible interventions like person-centred therapy in favour of short-term CBT courses. To test interventions they must be defined. To define something complex, we break it up into component parts. We simplify. These simplifications can miss crucial nuances of the intervention in favour of having something can be measured and defined for roll-out. Add to this a culture of governance that is driven by elections and we end up heading in a woefully fast-paced and changeable direction, driven by shifting ideologies and interventions that focus on quick fixes of current problems rather than long-term interventions and prevention. Efforts are being made to manage this, like focusing on place-based solutions, but still – the work of engaging with people is messy while the measurement must be clean.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We have created a way of being that everybody must become in order to be heard.<\/b> <\/span><\/p>\n

Those who are not middle class academics must become so in order to represent their community\u2019s interests. I would much rather be in a field somewhere playing a guitar, but instead I have adapted my heart and mind to fit into a world where I articulate my experiences in a way that practitioners and policymakers can hear, and conduct research and engagement exercises with others so that I can write them up in a way deemed rigorous enough to be taken seriously as evidence to inform policy and practice. I have become what felt like my enemy when I was a child. I see leaders of indigenous communities, much further away from the culture of European Academia than I was, adapting to fit into this world and be heard too. Their wisdom and ways of working in harmony with nature must be told as academic exercises or framed as citizen science in order to be taken seriously, because we have decided that our way of creating knowledge is the correct way and insist that everyone must join us in this way of being in order to secure a seat at the table with those who have taken charge of everything. We\u2019ve created some amazing stuff. Modern medicine saved my life, for example. But, so did music. We need different kinds of wisdom, and we need to learn how to hear people who aren\u2019t like us. Not everything can be reduced to a number, and that\u2019s okay. Let\u2019s find other ways to feel comfortable when making tough decisions. <\/span><\/p>\n

I mean, our entire system of economics was built on the idea that humans are rational. Why aren\u2019t we all running around in the street screaming about the insanity of underpinning our entire society with this premise? I think about it every day. It is WILD. Thank you to those who pioneered behavioural science! You\u2019ve got a bad rep thanks to all this nudge stuff and I worry about how some of the knowledge being created is being used, but good things surely have to come from challenging the idea of humans as rational beings making rational decisions based on all (ALL?!)<\/i> of the information available.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Alas, there is no silver bullet… <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

…but here are some top of mind thoughts on how we might improve things without going down the path of anarchy. While I may have found the idea of overthrowing the entire system and starting again appealing in my youth, now I\u2019m grown I don\u2019t fancy all that blood-shed and drama, tbh. That\u2019s easy to say in my zone 4 flat with my well-paid job and decent social status, though.<\/span><\/p>\n