article on the authority of economic advisors

I recently had an article accepted by The British Journal of Sociology, entitled 'Economic Advice as a Vocation: Symbioses of Scientific and Political Authority', based on some of my doctoral research poking my nose into anti-trust agencies in Brussels and Washington DC. The copyright situation looks bleak, so if you'd like to see the piece, please email me.

Based on interviews with economists, the article examines how the Chicago School logic that I mapped genealogically in this article is applied in everyday situations, and the types of tensions that arise. The question I pose is relatively simple: how can the political authority of a government agency be wedded to, potentially grounded in, the scientific authority of a particular discipline of knowledge, in this case neo-classical economics? The answer is - with great difficulty and ambiguity. I use a combined reading of Max Weber's classic 1918 lectures, 'Science as a Vocation' and 'Politics as a Vocation', in order to understand how these different forms of authority combine and conflict.

I guess anti-trust isn't exactly the most obvious preoccupation for sociologists, even if it appears to have become a matter of greater policy intrigue in the last couple of years. Julian Glover writes today that senior members of the Coalition government would like greater anti-trust activism. Then the Vickers review of the banking sector has thrust anti-trust (and industrial organisation economics) into the spotlight; Vickers is in some ways the British figurehead for the sort of neo-classical, Chicagoan anti-trust paradigm that I study. And finally, good old Vince Cable has undermined whatever faith we had in the power of regulators to take purely efficiency-based decisions.

My interest in this pre-dates these developments, and really comes down to three things. Firstly, I share the STS sensibility which casts suspicion on those areas of society that seem most obvious, natural and unremarkable. Michel Callon is credited with reorienting STS towards economics, but Foucault's lectures on liberalism and neo-liberalism, plus the Foucauldian work on accounting and economic governmentality by people such as Peter Miller, had already achieved this politicisation of the economically mundane. There is nothing tedious about economic technocracy, especially when there is so much of it around.

Then there is the intriguing fact that anti-trust policy was the iconic example of legitimate state action in the minds of neo-liberal pioneers, such as Hayek, Friedman, Walter Eucken and Henry Simons. Friedman - following his Chicago colleagues Aaron Director and Ronald Coase - rowed back from his initial enthusiasm for anti-trust over the course of the 1950s (for an excellent account of this reversal, see Phillip Mirwoski and Rob Van Horn's chapter in The Road from Mont Pelerin). However, the notion of the state as neutral 'referee' over the 'game' of free market capitalism remained fixed in the neo-liberal imaginary, even if the powers and reach of that referee were significantly delimited, and the design of a truly free market might therefore be considered fictitious. Hence, looking inside regulators and anti-trust authorities might tell us far more about what neo-liberalism is and how we are economically governed than focusing on more obvious sources, such as the rantings and ravings of Margaret Thatcher.

Finally, it comes back to competition - what is it, why do we need it, why do we like it, why would it be so absurd to get rid of it? To ask these questions is not to argue in favour of cartels or five-year plans. But competition is now such a cherished principle of economy and society, that it is necessary to identify the institutions responsible for upholding this quasi-constitutional template. To ignore this is to allow the economists to naturalise their methodological presuppositions. In the history of modern anti-trust, dating back to the 1890 Sherman Act, one can see antecedents of so many other philosophical and political entrancements with competition, be it in the governance of universities, of individual 'talent' or whatever.

Comments

[Dick Pountain]

My own take on your final question has always been this - competition is an evil, but so is monopoly. We therefore face a classic philosophical conundrum of choosing between two causally-related evils. Solving it is what anti-trust ought to consist of.