Episode Ninety Seven

Introduction

0:00welcome to smith and mark's walk into a bar a history of economics podcast i'm jennifer jun one of your co-hosts today i'm very sick which is why i sound terrible but nonetheless i am here i'm also joined by francois alisson who i am very envious is in rome right now exactly jennifer i'm in rome teaching in a in a in a module about pluralism and economic ideas and and

0:37but the weather is so terrible in rome so much water in the street you cannot walk it's like a swimming pool but nevertheless it is rome the eternal city and it's nice oh we win some we lose

Guest Introduction

0:53some and i'm very excited uh for our our guest today i did want to make a note that we are down a host today jenna we miss you jenna will be coming back um on a future episode so don't worry everyone she's still around um and for today i'm very excited to introduce to you uh dr verena house mayor who is university assistant in the department of history at the university of vienna right now you and i met nearly a decade ago at a history of economic summer camp in montreal we were such babies back then

1:27you're right it's it's almost a decade yes that's shocking that's shocking it's good to see you anyways here i'll see you francois good to see you too thank you for joining us on the show thanks so much for having me yeah i'm in diana the weather the weather is nice we had some sunshine after a december with only seven hours of sunshine for the whole month oh goodness it's pretty nice now oh goodness well it's like a we had a whole bunch of ice over here

2:00in durham so the my neighborhood street was like a hockey rink for the last few days yeah yeah school had to close and everything because we're not equipped for this sort of problem but but we're all here so let's get to it right now we've got some questions for you yes i'm going to start off

Solo's Model

2:21with a question about a book that you published last year with cambridge university press titled managing growth in miniature solo's model as an artifact which tracks the development of robert solo's famous growth model which is one of the central models in post-war economics and solo won the nobel prize for in 1987. this book that you that you published received the best book award last year from the european society for the history of economic thought so many congratulations on that thank you

Background on Solo's Model

2:52now before we get to the book itself i'm going to ask you for a little bit of background about the solo model like what what is it what does it model um and you know where when why did solo development you know what were what was going on that time that necessitated uh such an artifact um so uh i don't know probably some many listeners of of this podcast will be familiar

3:24with the model to to a certain extent so i think i just will be very brief um on this like um so the book i i in the title i say it's about solo's uh model um it's also known as the solo model or the solo swan model or the neoclassical growth model um so as is often the case in the history of science there were several simultaneous and earlier constructions for instance a very similar formulation had been published in 1935 by the dutch economist jantin bergen in a german journal

4:00and also in 1956 there were two uh publications that presented more or less uh the same model so one by the new zealand economist trevor swan and the one by robert solo which appeared in the quarterly journal of economics so one of the most prestigious journals of economics even at that time

4:23well robert solo back then was still a relatively young economist at mit which was not yet the powerhouse of the economics profession that it would become in the following decade um and the the model the building of the model and the success of the model went went hand in hand with uh the post-war um the post-war you might call it messianism of growth or the post-war politics of growth um and this golden

Post-War Economics

4:54age um where growth was the main aim and vehicle of of politics as historians of growth called it um so in this model like in a nutshell it presented a simple model as solo called it in his publication uh it was an equilibrium growth rate um expressed as a linear differential equation so this was a state of growth determined only by output and saving in which both capital and labor uh were fully employed

5:29and this also meant that population growth or capital investment were not enough to increase this growth rate capital would flexibly adapt to changes in population so instead it could only be permanently changed changed through additional factors which were not part of the model so technological change so this is basically what uh solo's model is is famous for um and maybe a few words on on what this what kind of world this model presented um of course it's the new classical growth

6:04model so it's a world of perfect competition where fully the fully flexible functioning of markets ensured equilibrium there were no failures of coordination no overproduction or underproduction and in addition there was the assumption of perfect foresight and this established that future developments of prices and interest rates were already known in the present so there was no uncertainty no risk and this mathematical economy only changed in scale not in composition and all

6:39kinds of historical dynamics and contingencies were excluded um moreover and this depends on how familiar people are with economics um so the model depicted the relationship between capital and labor but it was not about questions of power between social formations um there were no non-augmentable things such as energy or land there was no environmental depletion and there was no money um so uh the question that i raised

7:10uh or my question was that um what made this so utterly frictionless world so appealing to economists so it's very basic questions in a way and soon after to other academics policymakers and professionals um um and what struck what struck me uh right at the beginning was that in the eyes of contemporary economists what set the model apart was not so much a novel idea um idea um because the notion that growth was not entirely dependent on capital accumulation

7:45that had already been theorized before in various ways um but what made this model so compelling um was its specific format and this is what i i then deal with in the book yeah thank you very much

Model Success

8:03varana for this answer um so in the end why was solo's model so successful and and what this success tell us about the history of models in economics um yeah so it was indeed a very successful model like in the depends on what you mean right in the sense that um it was widely cited extended reformulated it was used as the basis for various other kinds of modeling projects and yeah it was called an engine of

8:36analysis and the organizing structure of a variety of subfields of economics and eventually became the basic framework for thinking about growth so and this so when it comes to the history of models in in economics this ties in with uh of course i think that this was what you were thinking about developments between the 30s and the 1960s uh that historians of economics have described this the time of of processes of mathematization and formalizations that the discipline the academic discipline of

9:10economics underwent and i would say that solo's model was one of the agents of this development and and ultimately it has also been described as a model of what it means to think like an economist yeah but at the same time of course and this speaks to the success it was also confronted with the most fundamental criticism um i think i put this in in the introduction as well like uh for the utter unrealism of its

9:42assumption for tautological knowledge for providing an ideological feeling of capitalist destruction and so on and so forth um so it also at the same time uh became an exemplar of economist disinterest in the economic world uh so this i don't know that it's not a success but in the sense that it was received very widely also on on on the side of its critics um yeah okay great um your approach in

Knowledge Artifact

10:13the book is not to follow a person solo but rather to tell the story of what you called a knowledge artifact can you explain us what you mean by this term and what does the concept of an artifact bring to your analysis um i think i would like to to um go the other way around like um so i started off with

10:43this um observation then that economists thought it was not so attractive because of a specific idea that the model presented but because of its specific format um so i tried to find out what it meant that economists talked about the model in terms of being uh very a simple beautiful that it has had a beautiful simplicity to it or that it was extremely useful for tackling the problem of growth

11:14um so what i did was in the book uh to construct various trajectories where i um linked and compared solos model with other forms of economic knowledge about growth and the economy that were around at the time um and i tried to figure out uh what new kind of knowledge brought the model about and how it compared to these other forms of knowledge and uh what what i found out or seemed to me that um economists

11:49appreciated the model for fulfilling several instrumental and also pedagogical functions so for one it was a small-scale working object and this ties very much in with the idea of artifacts in the literature and i will say something about that in in a minute um but like a working object to investigate and to experiment with so um this was more about a a tool for theorizing now this is what solo called uh the model himself like it was the art of theorizing to construct something and then

12:24try things out with it and to be playful about it um but also then it was used as an instrument of measurement um which means that it formatted data in a way that economists deemed productive for further inquiry inquiry inquiry um so this is also something that solo himself did a year after the publication of the model in 1957 where he estimated that technically change was responsible for almost 90 percent of growth since the turn of the century so technically change here was just the label for the

12:56residual um we can maybe we can talk about this later uh yet another function of the model was that it was used as a some kind of a prototype so it was seen as laying the foundation for um building larger scale models but also for integrating more factors into the small world which meant that there was a lot of things that had to be brought in the format of the model to be able to be integrated but also as a teaching device it served as an entry point to the practice of modeling and to becoming

13:31an economist and also and i think this is quite important as well that it provided this little mechanism that could serve as a starting point for all kinds of stories about growth um economists at the time like samuel's no sorrow spoke about fables or parables about growth um so and this is a collection of of how models or how this model was used in practice um and then what helped me enormously and i don't know what came first like it all went hand in hand um was a literature from the history

14:04and philosophy of science that focuses on research practices and the role of knowledge artifacts and knowledge infrastructures and this literature provided me with with a lens and and with a vocabulary um to historicize situate and come in a sense concretize um economists abstractions um yeah so i already mentioned it so more specifically with regard to the history of economics that would be the work of mary morgan or marcel baumann's uh tayia knotila as well margaret morrison who all worked on models

14:40as artifacts um as artifacts um so yeah so this was for me a way to focus on the practices of modeling how economists um maybe that's that's what i emphasize maybe in comparison to that literature like that um this is how economists like this is the practices of economists but it involves their way of talking about their practice so it is both about the work they do and the performance uh of economists as modelers so um

15:17it is about the practice of modeling but also about the way of economists talking about their work as building and manipulating a mathematical model yeah and i think that also in comparison to that literature that uh it was not so much for me to to pick various um models from the history of economics as case studies to think about modeling as a practice um like to focus on the philosophy of scientific modeling for instance as a practice but more to think about the historicity of a model

15:54um like if you put it on different trajectories and if you follow it follow forms of knowledge around um so not only to understand modeling as a practice but also as a specific historically situated practices uh practice yeah

Correspondence with Amartya Sen

16:14so in this book it starts off with a correspondence between solo and amartya sun um um and this correspondence is about the 1956 version of this of this solo growth model and i was wondering if you could say a little bit about this interaction which i thought was really endearing to be honest so you know sen writes and he's puzzled about about something related to his model um could you tell us like what what was he so puzzled about and what for you as a

16:46as a philosopher of modeling this was maybe too basic no not an introduction no not at all i always i i found it really really endearing um i don't know if that's a peculiar reaction to have but um could you tell us like what was sen so puzzled about and why what does this correspondence tell us about um why modeling is important in in economics um so so i stumbled across this correspondence a really long time ago and i completely had forgotten about it um and then when i wrote the introduction to the book i

17:22was really unhappy with it and it didn't work at all and then i i was like desperate uh and then i remembered uh that correspondence and and then i thought ah it's quite useful like to have this sort of vignette or anecdote uh to motivate the introduction um yeah and and this anecdote is that uh amartya sen he edited an anthology of selected readings in growth economics that was the title of the anthology uh

17:52which was published in 1970 with penguin books um and when he wrote the introduction he also seemed to struggle a bit uh so he he offered some kind of survey of the field of growth economics of the state of the art and uh he wrote a letter to to solo at the beginning of 1970 when he was about to finish that introduction and he asked about the proper interpretation of solo's model and uh he said and i i will i will quote right uh is it a description of how capitalist economies actually work

18:28or of the consequences of maintaining full employment there is some ambiguity in the way you put it in 1956 so um what i thought is that this inquiry uh touched on the very status of the mathematical model as a a model so um um yeah so sen believed it could be interpreted in two ways as a representation of actual workings of capitalist economies and as a sketch of an imaginary future world that could be achieved through governmental action and in his reply solo denied that the model's properties were features

19:05of an uh economic reality out there and he conceded that um his discussion in 1956 was was somewhat ambiguous and he says then for the simple reason that it wasn't clear to me at the time exactly what i was doing um which which captures a lot of of how um um how uh how how do you say okay maybe we can cut this but how how how um witty or how jokingly solo often talked about the practice of modeling so you don't you always have

19:42to take these things with a grain of salt um now what what i thought is that you can use this exchange in a variety of ways like you can take it as as an endearing uh anecdote um

20:03and the way i thought i could use it was just that there was some ambiguity with models and with modeling and and i thought that this uh inquiry and maybe even frustration on sen's behalf like i i don't know this is the way i interpreted it that it draws our attention to to the very tricky relationships um of a model and the world's beyond their narrow confined narrow confines so um i used it not so much

20:35to think about why modeling is important but rather to say that okay apparently there is something that economists struggled with so it was not very straightforward how to deal with the models even for economists who had worked together who shared a certain way of reasoning to a certain extent and and then and then i linked it to like this was not specific to economics but like this struggle with with models was a quite prominent theme in the 60s um also in in other side in in other fields

21:11uh of sciences engineering and the arts um yeah so this is the way how i use the the exchange between the two of them that's fantastic i just thought it was so hilarious these are these two giant intellects and one is like what the hell and the other one's like i don't know what the hell yeah read to me um but given given uh given the answer and pointing to this kind of ambiguous status that models have

Modeling and Reality

21:41one thing um that your work does is it complicates and interrogates the standard image of the relationship between a model and the world um you argue throughout the book itself that economists typically refrain from committing to their models either as possessing explanatory power or as representing the real so how i mean how are they engaging with their own models if if not in those ways

22:08yeah so so uh the thing is if you focus on one model in particular and then look at all the things that you can find in archives and and in publications uh that you can go that you can find a variety of uh model talk like of how economists talk about the model and and how they talk about this way of of modeling and it makes things quite uh tricky and and messy um so i i i mentioned it before so the

22:42the different functions that a model um that the model took uh fulfilled in a way um

22:50and i think one of my main taking place was that um

22:58you you can see how solo and other models like it's not only the person of solo but but various modelers and economists how they link this model to national income accounts to different kinds of productivity measurements at the time uh also to to input output models um you can see how how this model is really inscribed into an already existing infrastructure of knowledge uh where models and data mutually reinforced and stabilized uh one another so this was one like how that this model you know

23:33builds on a broad infrastructure of knowledge about um the economy and growth um at the same time it brings something new to the table in the sense that due to its small and very efficient form in a way it equipped a vocabulary of growth development and productivity with this image um of a manageable mechanism like one that led towards like that could principally lead towards an ever more prosperous future

24:04so this growth growth was indeed limitless in principle through the power of technological progress um and also it worked entirely without paying attention to the distribution of income and wealth for instance um and so so the one thing is how it built on knowledge does what that was there and at the same time it laid the foundations for future engagements with growth and over the years and we talked a little about this

24:34before it demonstrated quite quite remarkable uh stimulative character yeah um yeah i think this is one thing one thing that really struck me as well was how modelers who used the model like how solo in various publications but also modelers who came after how all of them presented the model as something tentative and as as always preliminary because it was too sketchy it was too simple one should not take it too

25:08seriously um it was in need of further work um so we could we could say that in a way the work of modeling is rarely finished which which also means that you can always say well it's just not yet there uh you can extend it it can be it can be better so this could be one of the openness this points to the openness of models um but of course at the same time uh the model provided rules for how subsequent models that built on it

25:42how they worked so it was adaptable and extendable uh and as i said before like it did allow for for instance for the accommodation of a variety of other factors but only if they were formatted in a way that they fit into the model so so it is preliminary but also quite um binding

26:05in the literature sometimes like in the broader literature on models and modeling in the sciences and the arts models are described as suggestive um or having this active potential to draw model models or modelers or people who engage with them into the kind of reasoning they allow and i think this would be one example of that yeah okay so a kind of past dependency um yeah so and this relation

26:35between the world and the model evokes to me political issues and in the book you discuss several political

Political Issues

26:45issues related to the practice of modeling in economics and you present solos model not solos solos model as emblematic of neoliberal thinking on the grounds of its assumption of the pervasiveness and efficiency of markets and you're right that solos model was not intended to serve as a policy tool but that the neoclassical synthesis with which both solos model and the mit economics department were

27:17associated to did have a distinctly political character can you a bit elaborate on this um so i did try to better understand the different politics a model can have so which is both the ways it is it is it is used to argue for different policies but also the kind of things that a model um includes and the kinds of things that a model excludes so the type of reasoning it allows on a very basic level

27:52um so so what you referred referred to it's it's um not so much me uh who presented the model as emblematic of neoliberal thinking but it is an attribute that the model uh received in the course of the decades like one one or yeah one example that i bring in the book is by melis sanavi the former ethiopian president uh who described the solo model as the basic neoliberal model of growth because of its

28:23assumptions um of the pervasiveness and efficiency of markets so this is a quote that refers to the use of the model in the realm of so-called development um on which i did not work i did not do work on this myself which is something that i would have loved to do and i hope that i will be able at some point um the point here for me is i think to refer back to this openness of models and and also to the

28:54ambiguity that that sen pointed out in this exchange like the model could be interpreted in different ways and in fact not all of those who worked with the model shared the idea that this model described not a work of fully functioning uh flexible uh pervasive efficient markets uh but it was more like the an imaginary world in the future so um i think this points us to how a model uh can develop a life

29:28of its own um independent of the intentions uh of its modeler and so in some quarters of economic theory the growth equilibrium actually turned into something existing in the world which irritated solo who bemoaned that economists took the construct for a model of actual capitalist um dynamics so this was his critique of of how the field of macroeconomics and growth developed in the decades after his

29:58publication um so for him and and this is something that i found out over time so at several um in several publications but also already in 1956 maybe not that clear as sen pointed out but so the model did visualize indeed a future world that could be realized and that could be reached if government took the right steps so in the context of the council of economic advisors it was about you know

30:30rational management uh government was supposed to to shape the right environment for private businesses to increase productivity and to foster the development of technology um and and within this ensemble of tools like because you said it was not directly uh thought of as a policy tool and i think um it still had had this more elusive elusive function within the realm of policy making um it's like it didn't include anything on the short uh on the short run and the way it like to me it seemed

31:11that um in combination with other techniques that analyze the effects of short-run policies and investigated this aggregated data this model depicted this possible economic state that could be achieved through the implementation of short-run policies so so um that the the economists at the council of economic advisors what their head in the back of the mind this is like where they wanted to go from the from the history of model perspective we could then say so this model called for the

31:45realization of a full potential growth even though it did not provide any guidance uh on the policies required to achieve such an equilibrium vision um so you could say that this model actually visualized the bright promises uh of a politics that was centered on growth and affluence um yeah but but i think but i think like you could write or you could take that as as a as a starting point maybe for a history of market

32:18thinking that involves um american keynesianism um in a history of neoliberalism and the history of market thinking um but but i think that solo and and his colleagues like the fact that the model portrayed a world of free markets neither implied that real world markets would work best without government regulations or union action nor that such model could not be integrated for instance in various socialist frameworks

32:52you also sent us a paper which was the introduction to a special issue of science and context that you co-edited with eric hoonshell titled historicizing interventionist social knowledge 1950s to 1990s and i was wondering if you would tell us a bit about this project in the introduction you seem to be reacting a kind of against a you seem to be reacting against a particular kind of academic attitude that's prevalent in the literature about this area era and what is it that you're rejecting here what are

33:25it seems like you're you're worried that there are historical frameworks that are getting imposed on that period but aren't actually appropriate to it does that sound right uh yes yes yes it does that's right um also here like the specialist she has quite a long history um the starting point was was a double session at the hes in 2021 um and eric council who works on the history of the social sciences and i we were interested in the role of social scientific knowledge in interventionist action after the

34:00second world war so in the from the 50s to the 90s basically um so this is also this interest in the tools and devices of social science but in this case not only economists but also psychologists and anthropologists so it was again um like an attempt to get away from being centered on ideas while not casting them aside entirely either um and so and one of the things that the contributors

34:32to the special issues and we discussed at an author's workshop we organized was if we focus on this level of interventionist knowledge and the related practices how does that relate to common storylines for the social sciences in the second half of the 20th century such a decisive neoliberal turn or or narratives about the end of planning and the end of interventionism in the early 70s or around the early 70s um so so so yeah in a way all of us pondered um what to do with narrative devices such as ideological

35:12political or intellectual consistency when we look at these tools and um and devices in practice yeah because often like so we collected a set of of very um close studies of interventionist tools and what most of the contributions stumbled across were many continuities across the decades um but also a lot of ironies they elicited so the ways um in which interventionist knowledge was used in

35:49different ways than intended it led to different outcomes than it expected or also that it was simply ignored so all kinds of different twists and turns in fabricating and using interventionist knowledge so we were interested in these stories and then we asked ourselves how they compared um to to larger narratives um about the 60s 70s 80s

36:20so what were the sorts of stories just to give us an idea what kinds of stories uh do you have catalogued in this edited volume and what if anything unifies them there were if i recall three main themes that you identify in your introduction um what were you trying to express with those themes and how do they serve to complicate the narratives that are usually told about this era okay yeah um so so what unifies them is really the specific interest and the specific lens and then interest in really diving into the

36:55archival material and and dealing with the nuts and bolts of of interventionist um knowledge um so overall i think we brought together quite heterogeneous uh studies um i would just give two examples because i think it's too much if i if i mention all of them like um mary morgan for instance she writes about um um uh wolfgang starper in who was planning the economy in post-colonial nigeria basically to keep

37:27it safe for for the free market um under scare quotes of capitalism um and she focuses on the informal networking and the personal engagements of this international expert um another example is uh nikki rina um a colleague from from the etha zurich now in berlin uh who worked on anthropological field work that informed the french eco-musee as a tool of regional development so you can see it's a very

37:58broad understanding of of interventionist tools but so we all asked um the same questions and had this focus on uh what happens on the ground and in which ways did things not go as um as intended and um what we found out was um so the one thing i think that picks up on before like so we didn't try to find a new

38:30overarching narrative or this is how you should think about the history of interventionism um but it's really more about you know having the set of smaller case studies um and to have stories about the terms set by interventionist tools themselves rather than charting more or less state intervention or sorting interventions into political ideological camps um and and rather to see okay how if you look at this

39:00level of interventionist tools how does it relate to grand political or intellectual ruptures and and i think three themes that we we found in each of the cases was on the one hand the various forms that interventionist knowledge can take in the course of intervention so it's very much i mean for historians of economics and historians of science that might be not too surprising maybe but uh so but it is something that we learn in our fields and that i think is interesting for the if you're interested in

39:33history of policy making that makes it makes sense to to have this in mind at least so that you have rather blurred boundaries between the quantitative and the qualitative between the numerical and the verbal between the scholarly and the political and between the formal and the informal so these these all intersect and get quite blurry in the course of interventionist practice a second theme that we found was the adaptability of different types of interveners so um

40:10this was about specific skills kinds of knowledge and types of authority that experts needs to be effective as interveners so for instance to just to be able to sometimes spontaneously handle everything that departs from assumptions and that does not fit the expectations um so for instance that planners uh use their information networks not only to find out about regionally specific economic preferences but also

40:42to build relationships that promise local buy-in to the plan or um the way uh experts know how like for for instance andres guillot isaac uh he traced the life of the colombian 10-year plan and uh he looked into how this was used as a kind of security for international lenders so also the the many um tricky things that make invent interventionist knowledge very um have different roles than the ones

41:16that we might expect uh from the start and also that experts have very different uh things to do and very different skills to have to um to really intervene in policy making processes yeah um and the third theme that we found was the overall relativity of expertise um so how for instance specific tools of interventionist knowledge they were just uh sidelined or rendered irrelevant or how they might just miss

41:51their moment if a specific political context has shifted um or how uh specific tools that originally belong to an overturned theoretically disciplinary paradigm how they might persist in interventionist practice so one example um zoe evra who worked on belgium uh economic planning uh he she uh she showed how how so-called keynesian modeling um remained in place in policy making practices which is

42:26something that that our colleagues have also studied in in other realms um and how how these models were repurposed with uh within the belgium planning bureau which was only established in 1970 so so rather late um so so in the end the thing is that so these are not simply stories of influence and and success which is mostly when when when we think about economists and policy making i think we're interested in these

42:58cases um but also this is not simply about failure so this space in between like uh if interventionist tools gets applied uh what happens then how does change the dynamics of policy making practices and what happens on the way in in different fields and um with different types of knowledge um thank you verena and now it's time to move to a third piece of work that you sent us

Historicizing Interventionist Knowledge

43:27one that as you know uh is of greater interest for me um it is a paper recently accepted in in the german language journal uh historische anthropologie and among the topics uh there is this one alternative planning what do you mean by alternative planning yeah so um this is the first paper i published of a project about economic knowledge beyond the academic economics profession which i would like to keep on

44:05working um and here alternative planning is actually an actor's term so it is a term used by historical actors in this specific case um so the paper is about the so-called lucas plan which is an uh was an alternative company plan so this is how they call it it's an alternative to the management's plan of the management of lucas aerospace which was a british multinational and this alternative plan was

44:36organized by a combined by the lucas combined that represented 13 000 workers so 4 000 were were um fired the years the year before and this plan suggested a restructuring of production from defense related production to socially useful so this is also what they called it socially useful production embedded in in broader suggestions for economic reorganizations a reorganization um yeah and

45:10the initiative went from 1976 to 1982 and so i was interested in what kind of knowledge goes into such an alternative plan what are the ways of making knowledge what are the instruments of planning here how are they used which role do they have so in this sense uh what is alternative planning uh so it's it's very similar questions that that we asked in this uh in this uh special issue and also that motivated my book

45:42basically um so yeah but but addressing different actors i am especially happy to hear you about the the lucas plan because as our listeners may not know i invited you to to make a speech about the lucas plan in my class last december but due to a strike at the university of lausanne uh we had to cancel uh this lecture and somehow this was a pity it was a pity indeed um and um i would still like to know how

46:18how the whole story of the lucas plan uh is linked to the more general story of economic planning and especially as the title of your papers mentions to the critique of political economy

46:34yeah so this is not a very straightforward connection to make um also like if if people heard of the lucas planet is like it has a very lively afterlife especially in the past 10 years they has there has been somewhat of a historical revival of the lucas plan um in particular when it comes to debates about ecological and democratic planning and mostly it is received for its approaches to participatory design

47:06and participatory planning um and this is because what the plan like at the center it was it was uh three wall volumes i think with with two 200 pages each so it was a huge volume this plan when it was first published because it basic it it the main part presented socially useful products that um the workforce could um produce with the material and the skills that they had

47:36so uh these goods involved for example electric and hybrid drives or wind turbines um solar collectors and heat pumps um but also devices for the field of medical care such as i think portable dialysis machines um so just to give you a few examples of what this was about and um at the time the plan was quite widely received in particular when it came to its critique of science and technology um so it and this is

48:10basically the line of of of reception until today so it was appealing to environmentalists um because they saw it as a model for a green economy without job losses but also to the peace movement um and it was also celebrated which i only discovered uh but uh later uh by uh by a literature in science and technology studies uh in the mid 1980s and all of these and and it very much for this reception focused very much on this idea of participatory knowledge and collective uh knowledge and um so when i started to study that i i thought

48:46that i wanted to focus and what on what kind of economic knowledge uh was did this science from the workers perspective as they called it what kind of economic knowledge uh did it involve um so and then i started to read the the plan and and there was a plan mark two and the plan mark three so over the course of six years um and and i studied other documents around the plan and it was like the academic economic knowledge appeared primarily as the main thing that the plan repudiated so the plan

49:20criticized both uh the technocratic economics of the fabians and also the economic policies of labor

49:30in the 19 um it was a critique of of uh the common structure of the unions and like maybe i should i should have said that before that the combine was organized across i don't know 15 units or something and across different sites uh of production so it was the the combine consisted primarily i think of of grassroots um activists within the company um so but back to the economic knowledge did present uh and it

50:10took me some time to really see that uh figures from from so-called social audits um and these were more or less input output studies that involved the entire chain of social costs that had to be considered in the event of factory closures so one such audit for instance uh was co-authored by the economist and peace activist mary calder uh the daughter of the calder you might be familiar with um and they examined how the

50:41closure of one plan would lead to a reduction of work in other companies so it was about the sectoral interactions about the effects on other industries and and in this way the study calculated the public costs of unemployment unemployment benefits but also the costs of retraining the rising health costs psychological costs and so on and so forth and based on these social audits the plan argued that the alternative plan was the better economic choice as well because ultimately it would require less public

51:17money than the management's approach um so and i think the point here is that this because you asked about uh economic planning and and political economy so the point here is that this economic argument was essential to the plan as much as public investment was essential for lucas aerospace i mean lucas aerospace was already a key industry like most more than 70 percent of its contracts were already coming from the public sector um and this made it quite obvious to argue that rather than allowing a multinational

51:53corporation to use public funds to basically create unemployment uh that this alternative plan was the better national strategy so it was the argument did work on the level of a national economy or had to work on this level as well um so indeed uh also yeah the plan did receive significant support from tony ben a prominent figure on the left wing of the labour party uh and and it also uh fits into the labour

52:25the labour party's 1974 program that included plans to socialize about half of britain's industries and also to establish consumer organizations to produce according to social needs so it was very much that the lucas plan seemed to me it seems um to provide a model case uh of how such type of economic planning could look like um so yeah in this sense this plan was not just about participatory design or alternative

52:55use of top technology um but it was indeed about a transformation of property relations involving the state um and consequently also a question about the relative about the relevant uh economic knowledge um yeah and so i'm i'm still not so as i said i i basically just started with this so um i would like as far as i know the the lucas plan turned into a model case for instance uh for attempts to

53:30to introduce something like it was called popular planning on the level of a city's industry so for instance in the case of the greater london council uh which was the the highest um

53:48the highest level of administration of the city of london um when they tried to introduce popular planning some of the figures that were active in the lucas plan they were also active within uh the the

54:05brought their expertise in in the economic expertise of the greater london council and so i think that here the question of economic planning and of economic knowledge becomes even more important like if you if you look at the greater scale of the city and the city's industry so i just think that this might be a quite interesting and fruitful place to look for um economic knowledge outside um economics departments even though i suspect there was some uh interactions but this

54:38is something that i still have to find out

54:42ah damn it i guess this means i have to go and learn some german so i can read this article great thank you so much for stopping by the show and for entertaining our questions it's so nice to to have you finally here thank you so much for inviting me it is a very odd thing i have to say to talk about research in in such a format but i tried thank you so much join us again next month for another episode of smiths and mark's walk into a bar a history of economics

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