Bristol’s Festival of Economics – what next?

The first Bristol Festival of Economics concluded yesterday with three panel discussions consisting of academic economists, practitioners of economics, and challengers to the subject. Including Friday’s opening session, the 450-capacity hall at At-Bristol was packed to the rafters each time, showing that there is huge disquiet for the current situation. Which was backed up by most of the questions coming from the floor.

While several people noted that the idea of a ‘festival’ of economics sounded like something of an oxymoron, it was refreshing to see language used so effectively to challenge our conceptions about economics. The festival was such a success that Bristol Festival of Ideas, who organised the event, has announced it will become an annual event.

--

Panel One: People, Places and Poverty

Chairperson Julia Unwin is the chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust.

“On Monday, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation will publish its annual state of the nation report. But the top line information is that the number of people working and poor now outstrips the number of people not working and poor.”

Geoff Andrews is a lecturer in politics and an author.

“It’s striking how much poverty is still talked about as a matter of individual choice. The history of housing policy in Britain is a history of betrayal. A lot of people have been left behind.

“Food banks will feed 200,000 people over the next year – which is up from 26,000 people four years ago.  Slow food offers us a way out in this time of austerity. It’s an opportunity to examine the way we live in a much broader sense. Poverty is not here with us to stay, but we should think about what it means for us to be part of a community.”

Paul Gregg is a professor of economic and social policy.

“Pensioner poverty is in decline. Older people are further up the income distribution than they were. They’ve been replaced by families with children. For the last decade we have not been seeing rising real wages. Women’s earnings are now central to keeping families afloat – their wages are rising slowly, and more than men’s wages are.”

Lynsey Hanley is an author.

“Food is one of the strongest indicators of how living in poverty affects people at a psychological and medical level. In 2007, the housing crisis was that we weren’t building fast enough, and were only building one and two bedroom flats. There are 50-75,000 houses a year being built, but that’s a drop in the ocean of what’s needed. We’re now facing the consequences of two decades of political indecision.”

Paul Johnson is the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

“In 2010 we saw the biggest fall in average incomes in this country. It was a fall in real living standards. O% is the probability of this government meeting child poverty targets as incomes are not rising. We have become much more of a welfare state over the last 30 years. We are living in unbelievably extraordinary times. £120bn is the deficit from the cuts. 2010 was the year inequality fell by more than any other year in recent history. Working age people are now more in poverty than pensioners.

“The richest 1% of income tax payers are paying 30% of all income tax.”

--

Panel Two: What Next for Britain’s Economy?

Chairperson Heather Stewart is economics editor at The Observer.

“How do we rebuild an economy reliant on consumer spending? How do we build something sustainable for the long term?”

Andrew Sentance is a senior economic adviser at Pricewaterhouse Cooper.

“There has been slow growth around 1% but it hasn’t always been clear to people that there is growth. Employment has held up throughout the recession following the financial crisis. Unemployment rate has stuck at 8%, which is obviously higher than we’d like. Inflation was meant to stay at 2% but since 2006 it has been considerably higher.

“The problem with the economy is not just a lack of demand, but with adjusting to a significantly changed economic order. We’re in a new normal of disappointing growth and volatility in economic prices.

“In the long-term I’m optimistic that western economies will get back to a growth phase. But trying to predict what will drive the next wave of growth is very difficult.”

Peter Marsh is manufacturing editor at the Financial Times and an author.

“Bristol has a great manufacturing heritage and a lot of interesting things going on. In Britain there is much more manufacturing happening than people think. We’re now number nine in the world for manufacturing, which is a 2.5% world share.”

Vicky Pryce is a senior managing director at FTI Consulting Inc and an author.

“It is impossible for a small island to keep growing at the rate it has been. Next year is forecast at 0.1% growth, which means more recession. My message is to rethink how you spend the money you raise, and perhaps raise more because the government can borrow cheaply. Spend on infrastructure and housing.”

--

Panel Three: Economics in Crisis

Chairperson Richard Marshall is editor of 3am.

“It’s intimidating sitting here with four people with brains the size of planets, three of whom are women.”

Diane Coyle, author and programmer of this festival.

“There are two types of economists, macro and micro. Micro economists are individuals making decisions, making rational decisions about what to do. Macro economists are when you add everything together as a whole. The crisis is worse for macro economists who didn’t see it coming at all.”

Bridget Rosewell is from Volterra Partners.

“Is economics more like history or physics? Does politics affect the kind of history you do? Physics is about explaining, and when you can predict and can have a good explanation. I don’t think we should be too depressed about the state of the economy, even if we’re depressed about economists.”

Carol Propper is a professor in economics.

“I question when is the optimal time to invest in children, because studies into early child investment have shown that this pays off. Healthcare takes about 10% of the GDP. There’s a government economic service, but not a government sociological or psychological service – even though these would be useful.”

Aditya Chakrobortty is economics leader writer at The Guardian.

“If you ask economists why nobody saw it coming, some say they got too carried away with their own models – which were better than reality. I don’t buy that. Their models didn’t recognise the possibility this might happen.

“No academic discipline has shaped British society as much as economics. Economists have cheerleaded the kind of economy you’ve now got. And it will take well into 2020 before the average family in Britain is earning in real terms what they were in 2002. You’re in a crisis and nobody that I can see has the confidence, depth of study or willingness to enter into the fray.”

The Future of Capitalism

The inaugural Bristol Festival of Economics (organised by the Festival of Ideas and programmed by Diane Coyle) kicked off this evening with a panel about the Future of Capitalism at At-Bristol. 

Despite the inevitably bleak subject matter (in short: financially, we’re screwed), our four expert panellists and chairman David Smith (economics editor at The Sunday Times) presented an entertaining and engaging debate.

Here are the top lines…

Rachel Lomax is the former deputy governor of the Bank of England. This is my opportunity to mention that when I lived in London my next door neighbour was Eddie George, governor of the Bank of England until 2003: never let it be said that I miss an opportunity to name drop! 

“The 1970s were a crisis of confidence in the existing economical framework, even more so than now. There was high inflation, high unemployment, and high industrial unrest. The world was not working well. But it was a period of intense political debate that lasted until the 1980s, when a new capitalism was built. But what’s going on now?

“Economists didn’t see the 2007 crisis coming. In 2007/2008, I thought that some serious rethinking would be a great outcome of this crisis. But I don’t see that happening. Although there is a lot of pressure on banks to rethink their business models. But won’t we still be an unequal society prone to financial crisis?

“We’ve gone so far with means testing that we’ve poisoned the people just above the poverty line. Means testing has turned the nearly poor against the very poor.”

In terms of the situation for women, Rachel added: “The position of women is so much stronger than 30 or 40 years ago. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but life chances for women are hugely improved.”

Daniel Stedman Jones is a barrister and author.

“It was clear there were neo liberal policies there in the 1970s, ready to be picked up if you wanted them. Now it is less clear. We need to be much clearer about what the state can do in terms of regulation. But is it possible now to run one-country economic policies? In Britain we’re dominated by a Euro-sceptic agenda.”

John Kay is founding director of the Said Business School at Oxford University and an author.

“Nobody knows how a market will develop [he uses the development of computer as an example]. It’s a process of experiment, where most experiments fail and get shut down. That’s how market economics work, and why they’ve been more successful in generating progress than any other economic programme.”

Larry Elliott is economics editor of The Guardian and an author.

“Capitalism has produced the goods over a very long period. I don’t have any nostalgia for the world as it once was, but this crisis is a big one. It’s too early to say if it’s bigger than the 1970s’ one.

“There are certain key elements that make capitalism work: profitability, stability, legitimacy, sustainability and creativity. If we want capitalism to regenerate itself, then the current policy mix is probably working against that and keeping zombie businesses and banks alive. We’re not getting new blood coming through.”

The Bristol Festival of Economics continues tomorrow (Saturday, November 24) with three more sessions. For more information and to see if tickets are still available, please click here.

On March 8, 2013, Confronting Women’s Poverty: Turning Things Around will be a one-day event at Bristol City Hall. For more information, please click here.

The School of Life comes to Bristol

On Thursday evening, as part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas, four of the authors from the School of Life led an inspiring evening of leading thought at Bristol’s Arnolfini.

The School of Life is dedicated to exploring life’s big questions, and invites contemporary thinkers to help unravel ideas of work, sanity, money, change, technology and sex (among others) to try and make life just a bit more manageable to everyday folk. However, taking on board that the self-help genre is largely left wide open to ridicule, the School of Life takes the concept in a new direction.

Published by Macmillan, the six current School of Life titles hit shelves on May 10 (priced £7.99 each), and the series is edited by philosopher Alain de Botton. Four of the authors came to Arnolfini to speak about their individual subjects: psychotherapist Philippa Perry about sanity; writer Tom Chatfield about digital culture; Bristolian-born broadcaster John-Paul Flintoff about changing the world; and founding School of Life member Roman Krznaric about work.

Each had 30 minutes in which they led a slick presentation structured around five sharp concepts relevant to their topic. And this was a tidy operation. The School of Life has no place for mismatched Powerpoint slides, or untidy fonts… everything about the evening implied pride in their work, and confidence about what they were doing. Which is exactly what you’d want from the authors of a self-help series, but not always what you get with some other series.

It was impossible to leave the evening without taking away a few ideas for my own self-improvement, or making my own life that bit easier. For instance, I shall try to follow Tom Chatfield’s suggestion of turning my iPhone to flight mode for an hour a day, to facilitate a productive, interruption-free hour where my mind can actually concentrate on just one thing. And at least once a week I shall try to follow Philippa Perry’s suggestion of doing a thought audit meditation – this is also described in the ‘exercises’ section of her book if you’re interested in finding out more.

In short, this was a really positive and inspiring evening that definitely turns the self-help genre on its head and shows this isn’t necessarily a market aimed at so-say sad singletons, but at absolutely anyone who finds modern life a bit too much sometimes. Which is surely everyone?!

Looking good? Thoughts on Catherine Hakim and 'Erotic Capital'

BEFORE THE TALK:

Catherine Hakim has enjoyed a lot of column inches lately, not to mention TV coverage, thanks to her book Honey Money, which claims attractive people earn 20% more than their scruffy colleagues. Hakim’s book is divided into six categories: beauty, sexual attractiveness, social skills, liveliness, social presentation, and sexuality itself.

Honey Money claims men and women can both use “erotic capital”, but women need to take more advantage of it because men are more sexually motivated than women, and therefore they will find women more appealing as colleagues if they are nicer to look at around the office. BUT… Hakim spots a problem. Patriarchy has tried to make women feel bad for spending time and money on their looks, as have radical feminists (those pesky radical feminists), who “reinforce patriarchal moral objections to the deployment of erotic capital”. The result, says Hakim, is to “champion femininity rather than abolish it”. She concludes: “Why does no one encourage women to exploit men whenever they can?"

Celia Walden at The Daily Telegraph was in on this last April when Hakim’s original report was published in an academic journal, which makes me wonder why it’s taken the rest of the world so long to catch up, but anyway. Walden seems quite enamored with the concept, enthusing: “The best news? If you’re not born with it, you can learn to have the EC factor.” (Hakim cites Coleen Rooney as an example.) “We have this idea that you can’t be beautiful and clever. But what’s superficial about beauty?” Hakim asks Walden, adding, as if to prove her point: “Cleopatra exploited her erotic capital and nobody thought the worse of her for it.” Case closed.

In The Guardian, Zoe Williams recently interviewed “social scientist” Hakim, but arrived and left unimpressed. The result, by the way, is well worth reading as an exercise in how to interview someone you really don’t like. In trying to get Hakim to explain her six categories of erotic capital (listed above), Williams elicits this: “I'm saying that there are six elements of which only one is purely sexual, and the second one, sex appeal, is only partly to do with sex. Four of them have nothing to do with sexual attraction.” Towards the end of the interview, Williams writes: “[Hakim] disowns her views then restates them with abandon. She gets incredibly cross. I am slightly too old to capitulate just because someone is unpleasant to me. This you might call my unerotic capital.”

Over at Stylist, the question of the week was: “Should your looks dictate your pay packet?”. Hakim wrote: “Women should stop worrying that it is frivolous vanity to spend time on make-up, nice hair and nails, or good clothes that help you stand out from the crowd. The investment yields benefits. Smile at the world and the world smiles back.” Julie Bindel countered: “I believe we should be judged for our abilities not our dress sense.” She added: “This obsession with remodeling our bodies, face and hair, in order to look acceptable for men, further perpetuates the gap in power between the sexes.”

At Time, the question was rephrased as: “What's wrong with emphasising inner beauty and qualities like kindness, altruism and courage instead?” And the New York Times felt that uglier people should be protected by the same legislation that protects already recognised minority groups. 

CATHERINE HAKIM'S TALK:

So, having racked up mileage on both sides of the pond, let’s head over to Bristol’s Watershed where, this evening, Catherine Hakim took to the microphone as part of Bristol Festival of Ideas to tell us where we’ve been going wrong. I had the dubious pleasure of being in the audience…

Poor old Catherine Hakim. That's what I say. The woman seems genuinely baffled by the hostility she received from the audience this evening (the splattering of empty seats around the room revealing this was certainly not a sold-out affair), and seems genuinely convinced that she is right and if only us ignorant, ugly folk would see this, the world would be a much more attractive place for her and her equally superior chums.

Here are some of the best pearls of 'wisdom' uttered by Hakim this evening:

HAKIM SOLVES THE GENDER PAY GAP:

• "Erotic capital is more important now than ever, and this will only increase. We [who?] have found being attractive will earn you more. All research evidence [what research evidence? A Nuts survey? A poll of 10 people on the street?] shows men benefit more than women from their erotic capital by more than 17%. Attractive women only earn 12% more. So women need to do something to catch up. This will eliminate the pay gap." 

• "People will always have different ideologies. But men achieve more from being attractive than women do. So women should get full value from their erotic capital and close the pay gap."

• "The pay gap is partly due to the fact women don't bargain in the workplace."

HAKIM'S PROBLEM WITH FEMINISTS:

• "The argument from feminism is that it was felt people had to use their looks to sell themselves into marriage. The argument from feminists is this is maybe no longer needed in the current day, and it's no longer important to invest time and effort into being an attractive person. The central argument of my book is that this is wrong. My research shows that being attractive is important." 

• "Feminists argue that male and female sexuality is of equal weight, but that's an outdated idea."

• "Patriarchal men treat the beauty of women as superficial. Feminists have made a fundamental mistake in accepting that ideology."

• "I didn't have space in my book to write about feminists and their views. But there is at least one important central idea that is still around, which comes from feminists like Sheila Jeffries. There is this legacy of antagonism to this idea that beauty is invaluable. And I'm hearing it a lot today in this room."

  
HAKIM TRIES TO EXPLAIN HER OWN THEORY:

• "I'm arguing that there are three forms of personal capital that are well recognised, in terms of skills, qualifications and social capital. They're well established in social science. But there's a fourth unrecognised strata — erotic capital. It's not recognised because feminists positively reject it. I say they're wrong." 

• "Being personally and physically attractive is vital in all areas of life."

• "We're happy to reward intelligence achieved through hard work, even though that discriminates against those who are less intelligent. Therefore, we should reward those who are above average in attractiveness through the hard work they put into looking good." 

HAKIM POINTS OUT WHERE BOURDIEU WENT WRONG:

• "Pierre Bourdieu  focused on the social status of people. I'm not, because it's simpler not to. One of the reasons Bourdieu missed erotic capital was because erotic capital isn't completely inherited and can't be controlled by the wealthy. This is why it is problematic."

HAKIM INVENTS SOME APPALLING STATS ABOUT SEX WORKERS:

• "This is an occupation where erotic capital is highly rewarded. Women quite voluntarily earn 2-40 times what they would earn in an ordinary labour market. The maximum value of erotic capital for sex workers is much higher."

• "Prostitution should be neither prohibited nor promoted. Prohibition makes life more difficult for the women involved. I don't think sex work should be promoted, but prostitution sees erotic capital get its highest potential economic return. What people who claim to have studied the sex industry overlook is that it's an industry that shows the potential market value of erotic capital."

• "The public perception of sex workers is wrong. The media focuses on trafficking, street workers, drug addicts, victims and the exploited. But everyone who has studied the sex industry seriously knows these people make up only 5-10% of all sex workers."

 HAKIM ALIENATES HER POTENTIAL HOMOSEXUAL AUDIENCE:

• "Gay men have more relationships than heterosexual people. I wouldn't call them meaningful relationships though, because 'meaningful' implies a moralistic tone, so I don't use that word. All research evidence on the gay community shows that short term relationships are much more salient in the gay community on the whole. A study showed that some gay men in North America had up to 1,000 partners a year. I don't think many heterosexuals would say that."

HAKIM COMPLAINS SHE HAS BEEN MISUNDERSTOOD:

• "The media have reduced my argument into being about sexuality. That's not true. It's also about social skills." 

So, there's a lot to digest there. Or is there? It seems to me that Hakim has one rather weak and tired idea (which is by no means original), which is that people who are more attractive do better than those who are less attractive. That's it. Except she seems to have stretched it out into a very weak-sounding book (I haven't read it - not for £20!) based on a set of nameless studies (or at least unnamed in her talk, although I am very interested to know their academic worth) over the past 10-15 years.

Hakim's arguments against feminists are extraordinary. I would love to know why she hates feminists so much, and keeps referring to them as an 'other' type? What have feminists ever done to her? Other than ensure she has the right to vote, that she is able to have had her university education, that she is able to work in a senior role and earn her own income? I have no idea if she is married or a mother (frankly, I doubt it), but if she is, then feminists have ensured she has plentiful rights there that she would otherwise not have enjoyed. And whether or not feminists achieved this on days when they wore lipstick, Hakim would be advised to realise quite how much of her freedom is down to feminists. She'd also be advised to realise that while Sheila Jeffries is indeed a feminist writer, she is far from the only feminist writer in the world, and there are many a lot closer to home than Australia, where Jeffries is based.

There's a well worn saying that people in glass houses should not throw stones, and the uncharismatic presentation (both verbally and physically) by Hakim this evening brings this phrase to the front of my mind. I would not normally comment on someone's appearance in this way, however in this context it seems wholly relevant. Her extreme defensiveness to criticism, and her persistent reluctance to engage in discussion positing an alternative perspective is staggering, as is her willingness to blame others for misinterpreting her writing — perhaps she should have written more clearly in the first place, since so many people have apparently misunderstood her.

Hakim presents as a woman who doesn't seem to like women much, and who holds them in extremely low regard. I'm always curious about these women-who-hate-women, and in my idle moments (not many) I plot conducting my own cod-sociological study into them. Sadly, I doubt Hakim will participate — as the session concluded, the chairwoman asked Hakim if she had an email address where people could ask her more questions on her theories. Hakim looked horrified and said sniffily, as if this was something far beneath her: "I don't have any kind of online forum."

(By the way, Honey Money is currently floundering with only 2.5 stars from 15 reader reviewers over on Amazon, showing that the proof really is in the pudding. The reviews are headed with titles such as: “Cosmo article with footnotes”, “Theoretically weak scholarship” and “Nothing we don’t already know”.)

8/9/11 — Postscript: I have asked the publishers of Honey Money, Allen Lane, if they'd be able to send me a review copy, so that I can read it and see if Hakim explains herself better in written word than spoken. As yet, they have not got back to me.