Rational Exasperation

Exasperating Calculators:  The Rage over Economic Rationalism and the Campaign against Australian Economists
William Coleman and Alf Hagger
[Macleay Press]

As a veteran of the debate over economic reform and "economic rationalism" I can testify that the single most exasperating factor is the serial indifference of the critics of reform to facts, logic and evidence.  No statement about what economic rationalists allegedly believe, or what economic reform has meant, appears to be too outrageous, or too fallacious, for some opponent of "economic rationalism" to fail to proclaim it.

Now two Tasmanian economists, William Coleman and Alf Hagger, have put fingers to keyboards and produced Exasperating Calculators, a savage exposure of the indifference to truth, the cavalier use of evidence, the lack of any genuine forensic analysis identifying reformers and what they said and did, and the substitution of propaganda for scholarship by critics of economic rationalism (whom the authors label "Economic Irrationalists") which have so disfigured Australian public debate over the last decade.

Most of the main villains are properly pilloried.  Michael Pusey, whose mendacious, turgid book Economic Rationalism in Canberra:  A Nation-Building State Changes Its Mind kicked off the entire frenzy in 1991, gets an entire chapter to himself.  The authors expose his indifference to factual accuracy, his failure to provide any definition of "economic rationalism", the thing he was allegedly critiquing in the above book (and the nonsensical nature of the definition he did eventually offer) and the propagandistic nature of his purposes.

The authors are equally good on Robert Manne, who, in their words, combines a studied pose of wisdom with an ingenuous candour about his ignorance.

They demolish his myth-making about Imperial Germany, his serial factual errors, often of a most gross kind.  Of Manne the observer can only remark on the slightness of everything Manne has written on Economic Rationalism.  He seems to have done little of anything like research.

They move on to skewer John Carroll (for whom "manufacturing is something of a economic sacred site") for similar myth-making.  Thus [Carroll] describes Imperial Germany as the "most powerful economy in the world" (Carroll 1992, p.13).  This is a gross falsehood by any ordinary meaning of economic power.  What strange history has Carroll been reading?

Hugh Stretton is showed to be similarly guilty of serial factual error:  within the circle of Economic Irrationalists, Stretton is the undisputed master of the utterly mysterious and absolutely unaccountable factual claim.  We cannot resist quoting an earlier appraisal of Stretton's commentary on economic policy:  "Mistaken premises, false conclusions:  it is impossible to list them all".  (Castles, 1986, p.37).

And so they go on, demolishing tin god after tin god, showing again and again that their alleged concern for the good of Australia does not lead them to do elementary things like getting their facts right.  Peter Self, Eva Cox, John Langmore and John Quiggin, Paul Smyth and Bettina Cass, James Richardson, Gregory Clark, J.M. Hobson, B.A. Santamaria, Clive Hamilton, H.C. Coombs, Fred Argy, Russell Matthews, all get sections to themselves, with their failings coldly and brutally exposed.

The authors are severe on the failure of the profession to defend itself against what has often been an attack on economists and economic per se (noting the collapse in enrolments in economics) and make it clear that there is no reason to expect this abusive calumny to stop of its own accord.

The only real beef I have with this excellent book is that Stuart Macintyre is not in it.  The chapter of his 1999 Concise History of Australia on the economic reform period is rife with the sins the authors expose, particularly gross indifference to factual accuracy and a definition of economic rationalism so fallacious that it covers not a single important player in Australian public policy.

But this a niggle to be set against fine achievement.  The authors are to be commended for their labours.  Anyone genuinely interested in the quality of public debate and the future of Australian should buy and read this book.

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