Speculations on Technocracy and Democracy: UK macro-economics in a time of 'crisis'
This talk explores current macro-economic speculations on the relationships between technocracy, democracy and the economy. The financial crisis of 2008 and the Brexit vote in 2016 in the UK have generated attempts to explain popular attitudes and to legitimise macro-economic policy. At the core of these efforts is new attention to the citizen and their expectations and narratives of the economy. These efforts to divine speculation take economists into anthropological territory—both in their views of the social and in their practices. Yet they also create encounters intended to steer citizens towards the ethical orientations of macro-economics. Where does this leave the anthropological and sociological critique of ‘the economic’? What alliances could we build and how could we divert these emerging forms of technocracy?
About the Speaker
Professor Laura Bear specializes in the anthropology of the: economy, state, time and urban ecology. Her recent book, Navigating Austerity (2015), addresses two key questions of our era: why does austerity dominate in state policy and how can we change this? Drawing on the experiences of boatmen, shipyard workers, hydrographers, port bureaucrats and river pilots on the Hooghly it proposes a social calculus. This measures policy according to the qualities of the social relations it generates.
More recently, she has turned these interests towards an analysis of UK macro-economic policy and institutions. She is co-leading a research hub on Are our UK Economic Institutions Fit for Purpose?, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Public engagement is central to Bear’s research. She is the author of a novel based on her first fieldwork, The Jadu House (Doubleday/Black Swan 2000). She has collaborated with Hooghly river workers to produce five films that have been shown at the Persistance/Resistance Film Festival (2011) and the Thames Festival (2015). She is also a board member in the editorial collective of Economy and Society, LSE International Inequalities Institute and Rebuilding Macro-Economics Research Network.