Why is ignorance of science acceptable?

Janan Ganesh in The FT

Stephen Hawking’s final research paper clarifies his idea of a “multiverse”. I think. Published posthumously this week, it explores whether the same laws of physics obtain in all the parallel universes that were the Big Bang’s supposed offspring. Apparently. The paper envisages a plural but finite number of universes rather than a limitless amount. It says here. 

I do not begin to know how to engage with this material. Nor could I say more than a sentence or two about how aeroplanes achieve flight, or distinguish mass from weight, or name a chemical compound outside those two biggies, H2O and CO2. Not only can I not do calculus, I cannot tell you with much confidence what it is. 

For all this ignorance of the sciences, society treats me as a thoughtful person, rewards me with a line of work that is sometimes hard to distinguish from recreation and invites me to politico-media parties, where I catch up with people who, I promise you, make me look like a Copley Medalist. 

In 1959, CP Snow spoke of “two cultures”, the humanities and the sciences, the first blind to the second in a way that is not reciprocated. When his cultured friends laughed at scientists who did not know their way around the Shakespearean canon, he invited them to recite the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This should be no great ask for anyone of moderately rounded learning, he thought, but they were stumped, and peeved to be tested. It was more in despair than in mischief that he rolled out this parlour game of an evening. 

The subsequent trend of events — the space race, the energy crisis, the computer age — should have embarrassed those steeped exclusively in the humanities into meeting science halfway with a hybrid or “third” culture. In the likes of Ian McEwan, who smuggles scientific ideas into his novels, and Steven Pinker, who has tried to establish a scientific basis for literary style, there are some willing brokers of an intellectual concordat out there. 

Yet almost six decades on from Snow’s intervention, near-perfect ignorance of the natural world is still no bar to life as a sophisticate. In Britain, especially, scientific geniuses have always had to coexist with a culture that holds them to be somehow below stairs. This is not the principled anti-science of the Romantics or the hyper-religious. The laws of physics are not being doubted here. It is “just” an aesthetic distaste. 

We can guess at the costs of this distaste in a world already tilting to economies that do not share a bit of it. In this vision of the future, China and India are to the west what Snow said Germany and America were to late-Victorian Britain: profiteers of our own decadent neglect of the hard sciences. But what if the stakes are higher than mere material decline? 

Since the populist shocks of 2016, there has been fighting talk about the preciousness of facts and the urgency of their defence. It just tends to be tactical — a call for the regulation of Facebook, perhaps, or a more vigilant, news-buying citizenry. 

If something as basic as truth is faltering, the cause might be deeper than the habits and technologies of the past decade. The longer-term estrangement of humanities and science seems more like it. A culture that does not punish scientific ignoramuses, and instead hands us the keys to public life, is likely to be vulnerable and credulous — a sucker for any passing nonsense. 

It is not the content of scientific knowledge so much as the scientific method itself that helps to inoculate against ideology and hysteria. Doubt, evidence, falsifiability, the provisional status of all knowledge: these are priceless habits of mind, but you can go far in Britain and other rich democracies without much formal grounding in them. 

The Eloi-and-Morlocks split between the cultured and the scientific, the latter toiling unseen as a necessary evil, is too one-sided for the wider good. It should be a mortifying faux pas to profess ignorance of Hawking’s work in polite company. In his own country, it borders on a boast.

Justice as a king’s command

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


REMEMBER Emperor Akbar in Mughal-i-Azam? Akbar ka insaf uska hukum hai. Akbar’s command is his justice. This was how the great Mughal ruler dismissed a poor woman’s petition to save her daughter from imminent and wilful execution in the movie. In the real world, Akbar may have never spoken Urdu just as he may have never been approached to spare the life of any Anarkali if she ever existed. The dialogue writer, Wajahat Mirza, died in Karachi in 1990 but not before unwittingly describing an essential feature of justice everywhere — that it is universally a subjective thing. It was the whim of ancient kings and it remains a whim packaged in ornate terminology today, be it as a feature of democracy or of the Third Reich.

Four judges decreed the hanging of Z.A. Bhutto under military dictatorship. Three opposed it. Bhutto lost the lottery. You may see the judges on both sides as scrupulous practitioners of law and you may see their choices as a personal predilection or both. Yakub Memon would have perhaps lived had a different judge had his way. One judge unseated Indira Gandhi from power, another endorsed her emergency rule. President Pratibha Patil opposed the death penalty on principle, to quote a different example, so she never rejected a mercy petition even if she did it by leaving the files unattended. Pranab Mukherjee, who succeeded her, clearly thought otherwise. He threw out all the mercy petitions he could, opening the path to the gallows for those on death row. Justice is thus both a lottery and the wilful command of a moody emperor with or without the judge’s wig.

As far as I am aware, there were no lawyers in Aurangzeb’s or Kautilya’s time though Shakespeare could not have conjured Portia without a nascent European tradition of black-robed advocates. The encounter between the petitioner and the magistrate in Chandragupta Maurya’s court would have been direct and swift, with no place for intermediaries, today’s LL.B degree holders.

In a different era, the lawyers can mutate into an ideo­­logically driven mob, for example to shower Mumtaz Qadri with rose petals while cheering him for killing a secular, liberal soul that Salmaan Taseer was. And there were the Indian counterparts who vici­­ously assaulted outspoken student leader Kan­h­a­iya Kumar as he was being escorted to the courtroom.


Judges often change their ideological preferences to comply with the doctrine of the state they serve.


In India, there is a new tradition, which I also noticed in Srinagar, to prevent lawyers from defending a petitioner. Hansal Mehta made Shahid, a powerful film depicting the true story of a Muslim lawyer in Mumbai who was killed by irate pseudo nationalists because he defended the weak and probably innocent Muslim men in law courts against accusations of terrorism.

Judges can be killed too, usually falling to those they have ruled against. Three US federal judges are on record as being murdered by those their judgements did not please. During the troubled period, the IRA killed three judges, including Lord Justice Sir Maurice Gibson in 1987. That’s a good reason that judges everywhere are accorded adequate personal security.

Indian judge B.H. Loya was hearing a fake encounter case when he died suddenly. The Bombay High Court is looking into allegations that he was murdered while the official records say that the 48-year-old judge succumbed to a heart attack. Loya’s family first feared that he might have been killed after turning down a bribe offer. They later said they no longer believed that to be so. There’s public outcry to investigate the death nevertheless, not least because the head of India’s ruling party stands named in the incident. Soon after Loya’s death in December 2014, his successor dropped the fake encounter case against BJP President Amit Shah.

The most telling comment on the cynical state of justice in India came perhaps from a man described as Babu Bajrangi, a self-confessed Hindutva zealot, who was caught in a sting operation carried out by journalist Ashish Khetan, now a member of the Aaam Aadmi Party. Bajrangi said on camera that he was denied bail on murder charges and that his leader would arrange the right judge to set him free. Cases have to be sometimes transferred to different states over fears that justice would not be delivered in a particular state in a particular court, a fear suggesting that judges are a subjective lot.

In the old days justice was delivered on behalf of the ubiquitous moneylender who had the thumb impression of the illiterate peasant on the book of accounts as evidence of money advanced. Indebted peasants are still committing suicide in India in droves, as they fear that the law overtly or covertly favours the creditor. The Portias are there to protect the poor and ignorant from wily Indian Shylocks but they are few and far between.

Judges often change their ideological preferences to comply with the doctrine of the state they serve. The head of the justice department in Nazi Germany was a former Bolshevik. With the rise of right-wing nationalism in India, a gradual ideological shift is perceptible in all institutions. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh’s Dattopant Thengadi set up the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad (All India Advocates Council) in 1992, ironically the year the Babri Masjid was demolished in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling. The lawyers’ body has produced several judges from its ranks. Justice Deepak Misra, the chief justice of India, seems to be an admirer of the RSS-backed advocates’ body as he was the chief guest at their annual function in Bengaluru two years ago.

Four most senior judges of the Supreme Court took an unprecedented step last week to address a news conference where they expressed the fear that Indian democracy was in peril. Emperor Akbar would not be amused.

No alternative to austerity? That lie has now been nailed

Owen Jones in The Guardian

Ever since the banks plunged the western world into economic chaos, we have been told that only cuts offer economic salvation. When the Conservatives and the Lib Dems formed their austerity coalition in 2010, they told the electorate – in apocalyptic tones – that without George Osborne’s scalpel, Britain would go the way of Greece. The economically illiterate metaphor of a household budget was relentlessly deployed – you shouldn’t spend more if you’re personally in debt, so why should the nation? – to popularise an ideologically driven fallacy.

Greek debt crisis: ‘People can’t see any light at the end of any tunnel’



But now, thanks to Portugal, we know how flawed the austerity experiment enforced across Europe was. Portugal was one of the European nations hardest hit by the economic crisis. After a bailout by a troika including the International Monetary Fund, creditors demanded stringent austerity measures that were enthusiastically implemented by Lisbon’s then conservative government. Utilities were privatised, VAT raised, a surtax imposed on incomes, public sector pay and pensions slashed and benefits cut, and the working day was extended.

In a two-year period, education spending suffered a devastating 23% cut. Health services and social security suffered too. The human consequences were dire. Unemployment peaked at 17.5% in 2013; in 2012, there was a 41% jump in company bankruptcies; and poverty increased. All this was necessary to cure the overspending disease, went the logic.

At the end of 2015, this experiment came to an end. A new socialist government – with the support of more radical leftwing parties – assumed office. The prime minister, António Costa, pledged to “turn the page on austerity”: it had sent the country back three decades, he said. The government’s opponents predicted disaster – “voodoo economics”, they called it. Perhaps another bailout would be triggered, leading to recession and even steeper cuts.

There was a precedent, after all: Syriza had been elected in Greece just months earlier, and eurozone authorities were in no mood to allow this experiment to succeed. How could Portugal possibly avoid its own Greek tragedy?


In 2016 – a year after taking power – the government could boast of a 13% jump in corporate investment

The economic rationale of the new Portuguese government was clear. Cuts suppressed demand: for a genuine recovery, demand had to be boosted. The government pledged to increase the minimum wage, reverse regressive tax increases, return public sector wages and pensions to their pre-crisis levels – the salaries of many had plummeted by 30% – and reintroduce four cancelled public holidays. Social security for poorer families was increased, while a luxury charge was imposed on homes worth over €600,000 (£550,000).

The promised disaster did not materialise. By the autumn of 2016 – a year after taking power – the government could boast of sustained economic growth, and a 13% jump in corporate investment. And this year, figures showed the deficit had more than halved, to 2.1% – lower than at any time since the return of democracy four decades ago. Indeed, this is the first time Portugal has ever met eurozone fiscal rules. Meanwhile, the economy has now grown for 13 successive quarters.

During the years of cuts, charities warned of a “social emergency”. Now the Portuguese government can offer itself as a model to the rest of the continent. “Europe chose the line of austerity and had much worse results,” declared the economy minister Manuel Caldeira Cabral. “What we are showing is that with a policy that restitutes income to the people in a moderate way, people get more confidence and investment returns.”

Portugal has increased public investment, reduced the deficit, slashed unemployment and sustained economic growth. We were told this was impossible and, frankly, delusional. And so British workers endured the longest squeeze in wages since the 19th century, while the coalition did not even come close to meeting its commitment to eradicate the deficit by 2015. Why? In part, because low pay means workers paying less tax, receiving more in-work benefits, and spending less money. Portugal is increasing demand; the Tories suppressed it.

Portugal’s success is both inspiring and frustrating. All that human misery in Europe – and for what? What of Greece, where over half of young people languished in unemployment, where health services were decimated, where infant mortality and suicide increased? What of Spain, where hundreds of thousands were evicted from their homes? What of France, where economic insecurity fuelled the rise of the far right?

Portugal and Britain offer lessons for social democracy too. In the aftermath of the bankers’ crash, social democratic parties embraced austerity. The result? Political collapse. In Spain, support for the socialists fell from 44% to the low 20s as the radical left Podemos ate into their vote. In Greece, Pasok almost disappeared as a political force. In France, the Socialists achieved little over 6% in the first round of this year’s presidential elections. And in the Netherlands this year, the Labour party slumped from a quarter of the vote to less than 6%.

By contrast, the two social democratic parties that have broken with austerity – in Portugal and Britain – are now performing better than almost all their sister parties. Indeed, polls show Portugal’s Socialists now 10 points clear of the country’s rightwing party.

Europe’s austerity has been justified with the mantra “there is no alternative”, intended to push the population into submission: we have to be grownups, and live in the real world, after all.

Portugal offers a powerful rebuke. Europe’s left should use the Portuguese experience to reshape the European Union and bring austerity across the eurozone to a halt. In Britain, Labour can feel more emboldened in breaking with the Tories’ economic order.

Throughout Europe’s lost decade, millions of us held that there was indeed an alternative. Now we have the proof.

Economic forecasting is not a science

Prashanth Perumal in The Hindu

India lost its tag as the ‘world’s fastest-growing economy’ last month as its fourth quarter GDP growth fell to 6.1%, the slowest in two years. Very few economists expected the slowdown. In fact, most waited for the economy to rebound as it quickly healed from the impact of the demonetisation of high-value rupee notes in November. Critics of demonetisation felt vindicated, particularly after GDP figures for the third quarter suggested that the shocking, overnight move to demonetise had very little negative impact.

Yet, for all the sermon delivered by the country’s punditry, the fact remains that macroeconomic forecasting is a lousy business — regardless of who makes the predictions. For one, data cannot prove or disprove any hypothesis as they do not establish causation. The mere fact that growth slowed in the first full quarter after demonetisation does not prove decisively that the slowdown was caused by demonetisation. As some have speculated, the current slump in the growth rate may be a continuation of the trend of slowing growth witnessed even before demonetisation.

Nor does the unexpectedly strong GDP growth in the third quarter prove that demonetisation has had no negative impact on the economy. The economy is a complex organism with several variables working in tandem, which makes prediction an almost impossible task. This is in contrast to the physical sciences where controlled experiments allow scientists to tease out the influence of any variable.

Two, there are no constant relationships between variables when it comes to the economy that allow for making exact predictions. So, even if economists were to dig into historical data and find the exact impact that demonetisation has had on GDP growth, there is no guarantee that it would hold in the future. For instance, people’s expectations may change which makes them adapt to a cashless economy better, thus blunting the impact of demonetisation on GDP growth.

Three, macroeconomic forecasting is focussed to a very large extent on measuring things that are fundamentally immeasurable. When it comes to measuring GDP, for instance, the price that is assigned to a good as its value is arbitrarily decided by statisticians. This happens despite the fact that the value of any good lies in the eyes of the consumer. Finally, both innocent and political biases influence the process of official data collection to calculate GDP, a fact that raises questions about its reliability.
None of this is to say that economists can make no useful predictions. But such predictions are more likely to be qualitative rather than quantitative. Any wise economist could foresee that demonetisation would have a substantial impact on the economy; simply from the premise that money greases the wheels of commerce, so outlawing it would affect demand and create chaos across production lines. But trying to quantify its impact in terms of the exact percentage points of growth that would be shaved off GDP is a futile exercise.

Richard D. Wolff Lecture on Worker Coops: Theory and Practice of 21st Century Socialism

Pakistan and Radd-ul-Fasaad

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times


The Pakistan Army has launched Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad across the country to “indiscriminately eliminate residual threat of terrorism, consolidate gains of operations made thus far and further ensure security of our borders”. The ISPR statement claims that the Army, Navy, Air Force, Civil Armed Forces (Rangers) and other LEAs (police, etc) will participate in this “Broad Spectrum Security/Counter Terrorism operation”.

The key words are, first, “indiscriminately”. This suggests that in earlier operations some terrorist groups and elements were spared for one reason or another but they will be targeted this time round. The second key word is “residual”. This suggests that much of the core work in eliminating terrorism has already been done in the past and only some “cleaning” or “mopping up” remains. The third key word is “Broad Spectrum”. This suggests that operations will be conducted across the country and not just in Fata and Karachi as in the past and that both small and big targets will be fair game. In other words, the operation aims to rid us of all internal and external elements which are creating terrorist anarchy in the country.

If this operation succeeds in even half its stated objectives it would be a great boon for Pakistan. Consider.

In earlier operations, the Pakistani Taliban in Fata and the criminal terrorizing cadres of the MQM in Karachi were targeted. Of late attempts were made to eliminate a handful of leading sectarian elements in the Punjab through police encounters but no systematic attempt was made to uproot the sectarian organisations spread across Southern Punjab. In other words, the actions were discriminatory. One reason may have had to do with the political affiliations of such elements with mainstream parties that stayed the hand of the local administrations. Another may be lack of will in local and provincial governments to face any violent or militant backlash. Are we to understand that now concerted action will be taken against these elements as well? And if action is taken, what sort of action will this be? If sweeping arrests are going to be made without adequately provisioning for successful prosecution, then this will be no more than a temporary palliative because the civil courts will set them free sooner or later. But if summary military courts are to sentence them, then a whole new upgraded legal edifice has to be constructed that is accorded approval by a consensus in parliament and which is not challenged by the superior judiciary. How this is to be accomplished remains to be seen because parliament is still debating the pros and cons of extending the legal cover of military courts for a limited period of time and the Supreme Court has stayed the executions of several terrorists convicted by military courts on one ground or another.

But the problem won’t end even if all this is accomplished quickly and another few hundred are executed or jailed for life. The roots of sectarianism go deep in society and are related to the narrative of “Islamic ideology” that underpins state and society in Pakistan and permeates the political parties, state institutions, education system and media. How on earth are we going to depoliticize Pakistan’s version of Islam in a few years when we have taken six decades to enshrine it as the be-all and end-all, and what it means to be a true Pakistani soaked in this ideology? Operation Radd-ul-Fassad may rid us of a score or two of potent sectarian troublemakers but it will not make a dent in the system that gives birth to and nurtures tens of thousands of such people every year in the bowels of its madrassahs.

The second word “residual” is clearly aimed at the tip of the terrorist iceberg. If the sectarian organisations are the “residual”, what about the jihadi organisations that are unable to stop their “members” from splitting and joining sectarian, IS or TTP groups or infiltrating militants across the border into Indian-held Kashmir? Is the military establishment ready to disband these jihadi groups that trigger the proxy terrorist wars between India and Pakistan? Equally, we may ask whether this operation that claims to secure our border with Afghanistan will target the Haqqani network based in Pakistan and drive it into Afghanistan so that the Afghan government will reciprocate and deny refuge to the TTP that is sending its terrorists across the border to wreak havoc in Pakistan? Like the sectarian organisations that feed off the “narrative” of Pakistan, the jihadis feed off the continuing conflict with India over Kashmir that has now become part and parcel of our national security narrative of India as the perpetual and existential enemy of Pakistan.

These are some of the many thorny questions that remain unaddressed by Radd-ul-Fasaad. Central to the theme of eliminating terrorism is the legitimizing “idea” or “narrative” of Pakistan that feeds into it. On that score, we have not seen any serious initiative by the civil-military establishment that fashioned it in the first place.

How three students caused a global crisis in economics - A review of The Econocracy

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

In the autumn of 2011, as the world’s financial system lurched from crash to crisis, the authors of this book began, as undergraduates, to study economics. While their lectures took place at the University of Manchester the eurozone was in flames. The students’ first term would last longer than the Greek government. Banks across the west were still on life support. And David Cameron was imposing on Britons year on year of swingeing spending cuts.

Yet the bushfires those teenagers saw raging each night on the news got barely a mention in the seminars they sat through, they say: the biggest economic catastrophe of our times “wasn’t mentioned in our lectures and what we were learning didn’t seem to have any relevance to understanding it”, they write in The Econocracy. “We were memorising and regurgitating abstract economic models for multiple-choice exams.”

Part of this book describes what happened next: how the economic crisis turned into a crisis of economics. It deserves a good account, since the activities of these Manchester students rank among the most startling protest movements of the decade.

After a year of being force-fed irrelevancies, say the students, they formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, with a sympathetic lecturer giving them evening classes on the events and perspectives they weren’t being taught. They lobbied teachers for new modules, and when that didn’t work, they mobilised hundreds of undergraduates to express their disappointment in the influential National Student Survey. The economics department ended up with the lowest score of any at the university: the professors had been told by their pupils that they could do better.

The protests spread to other economics faculties – in Glasgow, Istanbul, Kolkata. Working at speed, students around the world published a joint letter to their professors calling for nothing less than a reformation of their discipline.

Economics has been challenged by would-be reformers before, but never on this scale. What made the difference was the crash of 2008. Students could now argue that their lecturers hadn’t called the biggest economic event of their lifetimes – so their commandments weren’t worth the stone they were carved on. They could also point to the way in which the economic model in the real world was broken and ask why the models they were using had barely changed.

The protests found an attentive audience among fellow undergraduates – the sort who in previous years would have kept their heads down and waited for the “milk round” to deliver an accountancy traineeship, but were now facing the prospect of hiring freezes, moving back home and paying off their giant student debt with poor wages.

I covered this uprising from the outset, and later served as an unpaid trustee for the network now called Rethinking Economics. To me, it has two key features in common with other social movements that sprang up in the aftermath of the banking crash. Like the Occupy protests, it was ultimately about democracy: who gets to have a say, and who gets silenced. It also shared with the student fees protests of 2010 deep discomfort at the state of modern British universities. What are supposed to be forums for speculative thought more often resemble costly finishing schools for the sons of Chinese communist party cadres and the daughters of wealthy Russians.

Much of the post-crash dissent has disintegrated into trace elements. A line can be drawn from Occupy to Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter; some of those undergraduates who were kettled by the police in 2010 are now signed-up Corbynistas. But the economics movement remains remarkably intact. Rethinking Economics has grown to 43 student campaigns across 15 countries, from America to China. Some of its alumni went into the civil service, where they have established an Exploring Economics network to push for alternative approaches to economics in policy making. There are evening classes, and then there is this book, which formalises and expands the case first made five years ago.

 Joe Earle, centre, with the Post-Crash Economics Society at Manchester University. Photograph: Jon Super

The Econocracy makes three big arguments. First, economics has shoved its way into all aspects of our public life. Flick through any newspaper and you’ll find it is not enough for mental illness to cause suffering, or for people to enjoy paintings: both must have a specific cost or benefit to GDP. It is as if Gradgrind had set up a boutique consultancy, offering mandatory but spurious quantification for any passing cause.

Second, the economics being pushed is narrow and of recent invention. It sees the economy “as a distinct system that follows a particular, often mechanical logic” and believes this “can be managed using a scientific criteria”. It would not be recognised by Keynes or Marx or Adam Smith.

In the 1930s, economists began describing the economy as a unitary entity. For decades, Treasury officials produced forecasts in English. That changed only in 1961, when they moved to formal equations and reams of numbers. By the end of the 1970s, 99 organisations were generating projections for the UK economy. Forecasting had become a numerical alchemy: turning base human assumptions and frailty into the marketable gold of rigorous-seeming science.
By making their discipline all-pervasive, and pretending it is the physics of social science, economists have turned much of our democracy into a no-go zone for the public. This is the authors’ ultimate charge: “We live in a nation divided between a minority who feel they own the language of economics and a majority who don’t.”

This status quo works well for the powerful and wealthy and it will be fiercely defended. As Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn have found, suggest policies that challenge the narrow orthodoxy and you will be branded an economic illiterate – even if they add up. Academics who follow different schools of economic thought are often exiled from the big faculties and journals.
The most devastating evidence in this book concerns what goes into making an economist. The authors analysed 174 economics modules for seven Russell Group universities, making this the most comprehensive curriculum review I know of. Focusing on the exams that undergraduates were asked to prepare for, they found a heavy reliance on multiple choice. The vast bulk of the questions asked students either to describe a model or theory, or to show how economic events could be explained by them. Rarely were they asked to assess the models themselves. In essence, they were being tested on whether they had memorised the catechism and could recite it under invigilation.

Critical thinking is not necessary to win a top economics degree. Of the core economics papers, only 8% of marks awarded asked for any critical evaluation or independent judgment. At one university, the authors write, 97% of all compulsory modules “entailed no form of critical or independent thinking whatsoever”.

The high priests of economics still hold power, but they no longer have legitimacy

Remember that these students shell out £9,000 a year for what is an elevated form of rote learning. Remember, too, that some of these graduates will go on to work in the City, handle multimillion pound budgets at FTSE businesses, head Whitehall departments, and set policy for the rest of us. Yet, as the authors write: “The people who are entrusted to run our economy are in almost no way taught to think about it critically.”

They aren’t the only ones worried. Soon after Earle and co started at university, the Bank of England held a day-long conference titled Are Economics Graduates Fit for Purpose?. Interviewing Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, in 2014, I asked: what was the answer? There was an audible gulp, and a pause that lasted most of a minute. Finally, an answer limped out: “Not yet.”

The Manchester undergraduates were told by an academic that alternative approaches were as much use as a tobacco-smoke enema. Which is to say, he was as likely to take Friedrich Hayek or Joseph Schumpeter seriously as he was to blow smoke up someone’s arse.

The students’ entrepreneurialism is evident in this book. Packed with original research, it comes with pages of endorsements, evidently harvested by the students themselves, from Vince Cable to Noam Chomsky. Yet the text is rarely angry. Its tone is of a strained politeness, as if the authors were talking politics with a putative father-in-law.

More thoughtful academics have accepted the need for change – but strictly on their own terms, within the limits only they decide. That professional defensiveness has done them no favours. When Michael Gove compared economists to the scientists who worked for Nazi Germany and declared the “people of this country have had enough of experts”, he was shamelessly courting a certain type of Brexiter. But that he felt able to say it at all says a lot about how low the standing of economists has sunk.

The high priests of economics still hold power, but they no longer have legitimacy. In proving so resistant to serious reform, they have sent the message to a sceptical public that they are unreformable. Which makes The Econocracy a case study for the question we should all be asking since the crash: how, after all that, have the elites – in Westminster, in the City, in economics – stayed in charge?

The Econocracy is published by Manchester University.

An Open Letter to Moderate Muslims

Ali A Rizvi in The Huffington Post

Let’s start with what I’m not going to do.

I’m not going to accuse you of staying silent in the face of the horrific atrocities being committed around the world by your co-religionists. Most of you have loudly and unequivocally condemned groups like the Islamic State (ISIS), and gone out of your way to dissociate yourselves from them. You have helped successfully isolate ISIS and significantly damage its credibility.

I’m also not going to accuse you of being sympathetic to fundamentalists’ causes like violent jihad or conversion by force. I know you condemn their primitive tactics like the rest of us, maybe even more so, considering the majority of victims of Islamic terrorists are moderate Muslims like yourselves. On this, I am with you.

But I do want to talk to you about your increasingly waning credibility — a concern many of you have articulated as well.

You’re feeling more misunderstood than ever, as Islamic fundamentalists hijack the image of Muslims, ostentatiously presenting themselves as the “voice of Islam.” And worse, everyone seems to be buying it.

The frustration is evident. In response to comedian Bill Maher’s recent segment ripping liberals for their silence on criticizing Islam, religious scholar Reza Aslan slammed him in a CNN interview. Visibly exasperated, he ultimately resorted to using words like “stupid” and “bigot” to make his points. (He apologized for this later.)

We’ll get to Aslan’s other arguments in a bit. But first, let’s talk about something he said to his hosts that I know many of you relate to: that moderate Muslims are too often painted with the same brush as their fundamentalist counterparts. This is often true, and is largely unfair to moderates like yourselves.

But you can’t simply blame this on the “ignorance” or “bigotry” of non-Muslims, or on media bias. Non-Muslims and the media are no more monolithic than the Muslim world you and I come from.

The problem is this: moderate Muslims like you also play a significant role in perpetuating this narrative — even if you don’t intend to.

To understand how, it’s important to see how it looks from the other side.

***

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

(1) A moderate Muslim states that ISIS is wrong, they aren’t “true” Muslims, and Islam is a religion of peace.

(2) A questioner asks: what about verses in the Quran like 4:89, saying to “seize and kill” disbelievers? Or 8:12-13, saying God sent angels to “smite the necks and fingertips” of disbelievers, foreboding a “grievous penalty” for whoever opposes Allah and his Messenger? Or 5:33, which says those who “spread corruption” (a vague phrase widely believed to include blasphemy and apostasy) should be “killed or crucified”? Or 47:4, which also prescribes beheading for disbelievers encountered in jihad?

(3) The Muslim responds by defending these verses as Allah’s word — he insists that they have been quoted “out of context,” have been misinterpreted, are meant as metaphor, or that they may even have been mistranslated.

(4) Despite being shown multiple translations, or told that some of these passages (like similar passages in other holy books) are questionable in any context, the Muslim insists on his/her defense of the Scripture.

Sometimes, this kind of exchange will lead to the questioner being labeled an “Islamophobe,” or being accused of bigotry, as Aslan did with Maher and his CNN hosts. This is a very serious charge that is very effective at ending the conversation.No one wants to be called a bigot.

But put yourself in the shoes of your non-Muslim audience. Is it really them linking Islam to terrorism? We’re surrounded with images and videos of jihadists yelling “Allahu Akbar” and quoting passages from the Quran before beheading someone (usually a non-Muslim), setting off an explosion, or rallying others to battle. Who is really making this connection?

What would you do if this situation was reversed? What are non-Muslims supposed to think when even moderate Muslims like yourselves defend the very same words and book that these fundamentalists effortlessly quote as justification for killing them — as perfect and infallible?

Like other moderates, Reza Aslan frequently bemoans those who read the Quran “literally.” Interestingly enough, we sort of agree on this: the thought of the Quran being read “literally” — or exactly as Allah wrote it — unsettles me as much as it unsettles Reza.

This is telling, and Reza isn’t alone. Many of you insist on alternative interpretations, some kind of metaphorical reading — anything to avoid reading the holy book the way it’s actually written. What message do you think this sends? To those on the outside, it implies there is something lacking in what you claim is God’s perfect word. In a way, you’re telling the listener to value your explanations of these words over the sacred words themselves. Obviously, this doesn’t make a great case for divine authorship. Combined with the claims that the book is widely misunderstood, it makes the writer appear either inarticulate or incompetent. I know that’s not the message you mean to send — I’ve been where you are. But it is important to understand why it comes across that way to many non-Muslims.

If any kind of literature is to be interpreted “metaphorically,” it has to at least represent the original idea. Metaphors are meant to illustrate and clarify ideas, not twist and obscure them. When the literal words speak of blatant violence but are claimed to really mean peace and unity, we’re not in interpretation/metaphor zone anymore; we’re heading into distortion/misrepresentation territory. If this disconnect was limited to one or two verses, I would consider your argument. If your interpretation were accepted by all of the world’s Muslims, I would consider your argument. Unfortunately, neither of these is the case.

You may be shaking your head at this point. I know your explanations are very convincing to fellow believers. That’s expected. When people don’t want to abandon their faith or their conscience, they’ll jump on anything they can find to reconcile the two.

But believe me, outside the echo chamber, all of this is very confusing. I’ve argued with Western liberals who admit they don’t find these arguments convincing, but hold back their opinions for fear of being seen as Islamophobic, or in the interest of supporting moderates within the Muslim community who share their goals of fighting jihad and fundamentalism. Many of your liberal allies are sincere, but you’d be surprised how many won’t tell you what they really think because of fear or political correctness. The only difference between them and Bill Maher is that Maher actually says it.

Unfortunately, this is what’s eating away at your credibility. This is what makes otherwise rational moderate Muslims look remarkably inconsistent. Despite your best intentions, you also embolden anti-Muslim bigots — albeit unknowingly — by effectively narrowing the differences between yourselves and the fundamentalists. You condemn all kinds of terrible things being done in the name of your religion, but when the same things appear as verses in your book, you use all your faculties to defend them. This comes across as either denial or disingenuousness, both of which make an honest conversation impossible.

This presents an obvious dilemma. The belief that the Quran is the unquestionable word of God is fundamental to the Islamic faith, and held by the vast majority of Muslims worldwide, fundamentalist or progressive. Many of you believe that letting it go is as good as calling yourself non-Muslim. I get that. But does it have to be that way?

Having grown up as part of a Muslim family in several Muslim-majority countries, I’ve been hearing discussions about an Islamic reformation for as long as I can remember. Ultimately, I came to believe that the first step to any kind of substantive reformation is to seriously reconsider the concept of scriptural inerrancy.

And I’m not the only one. Maajid Nawaz, a committed Muslim, speaks openly about acknowledging problems in the Quran. Recently, in a brave article here right here on The Huffington Post, Imra Nazeer also asked Muslims to reconsider treating the Quran as infallible.

Is she right? At first glance, this may be a shocking thought. But it’s possible, and it actually has precedent.

***

I grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, before the Internet. We had an after-school tutor who taught us to read and recite the Quran in classical Arabic, the language in which it’s written.

My family is among the majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims — concentrated in countries like Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Turkey and Iran — that doesn’t speak Arabic. Millions of us, however, can read the Quran in Arabic, even if we don’t understand it.

In most Muslim households, the Quran is physically placed at the highest place possible. In our house, it was at the top of a tall bookshelf. It cannot be physically touched unless an act of ablution/purification (wudhu) is first performed. It cannot be recited or touched by menstruating women. It is read in its entirety during the Sunni taraweeh prayers in the holy month of Ramadan. In many Muslim communities, it is held over the heads of grooms and brides as a blessing when they get married. A child completing her first reading of the Quran is a momentous occasion — parties are thrown, gifts are given.

But before the Internet, I rarely met anyone — including the devoutly religious — who had really read the Quran in their own language. We just went by what we heard from our elders. We couldn’t Google or verify things instantaneously like we do now.

There were many things in the Quran we didn’t know were in there. Like Aslan, we also mistakenly thought that harsh punishments in Saudi Arabia like decapitation and hand amputation were cultural and not religious. Later, we learned that the Quran does indeed prescribe beheadings, and says clearly in verse 5:38 that thieves, male or female, should have their hands cut off.

Now, there are also other things widely thought to be in the Quran that aren’t actually in there. A prominent example is the hijab or burka — neither is mentioned in the Quran. Also absent is stoning to death as a punishment — it’s mentioned in the hadith (the Sunnah, or traditions of the Prophet), and even in the Old Testament— but not in the Quran.

Neither male nor female circumcision (M/FGM) are found in the Quran. Again, however, both are mentioned in the hadith. When Aslan discussed FGM, he neglected to mention that of the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence, the Shafi’i school makes FGM mandatory based on these hadith, and the other three schools recommend it. This is why Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, mostly Shafi’i, where Aslan said women were “absolutely 100% equal” to men, has an FGM prevalence of at least 86%, with over 90% of families supporting the practice. And the world’s largest Arab Muslim country, Egypt, has an FGM prevalence of over 90%. So yes, both male and female genital cutting pre-date Islam. But it is inaccurate to say that they have no connection whatever to the religion.

***

That is the kind of information I could never reliably access growing up. But with the Internet came exposure.

Suddenly, every 12-year-old kid could search multiple translations of the Quran by topic, in dozens of languages. Nothing was hidden. It was all right there to see. When Lee Rigby’s murderer cited Surah At-Tawbah to justify his actions, we could go online and see exactly what he was talking about. When ISIS claims divine sanction for its actions by citing verse 33 from Surah Al-Maaidah or verse 4 from Surah Muhammad, we can look it up for ourselves and connect the dots.

Needless to say, this is a pretty serious problem, one that you must address. When people see moderates insisting that Islam is peaceful while also defending these verses and claiming they’re misunderstood, it appears inconsistent. When they read these passages and see fundamentalists carrying out exactly what they say, it appears consistent. That’s scary. You should try to understand it. Loudly shouting “Racist!” over the voices of critics, as Ben Affleck did over Maher and Sam Harris last week, isn’t going to make it go away.

(Also, if you think criticizing Islam is racist, you’re saying that all of Islam is one particular race. There’s a word for that.)

Yes, it’s wrong and unfair for anyone to judge a religion by the actions of its followers, be they progressive Muslims or al Qaeda. But it is appropriate and intellectually honest to judge it by the contents of its canonical texts — texts that are now accessible online to anyone and everyone at the tap of a finger.

Today, you need to do better when you address the legitimate questions people have about your beliefs and your holy book. Brushing off everything that is false or disturbing as “metaphor” or “misinterpretation” just isn’t going to cut it. Neither is dismissing the questioner as a bigot.

How, then, to respond?

***

For starters, it might help to read not only the Quran, but the other Abrahamic texts. When you do, you’ll see that the Old Testament has just as much violence, if not more, than the Quran. Stoning blasphemers, stoning fornicators, killing homosexuals — it’s all in there. When you get about ten verses deep into Deuteronomy 20, you may even swear you’re reading a rulebook for ISIS.

You may find yourself asking, how is this possible? The book of the Jews is not much different from my book. How, then, are the majority of them secular? How is it that most don’t take too seriously the words of the Torah/Old Testament — originally believed to be the actual word of God revealed to Moses much like the Quran to Muhammad — yet still retain strong Jewish identities? Can this happen with Islam and Muslims?

Clearly from the above, the answer is a tried-and-tested yes. And it must start by dissociating Islamic identity from Muslim identity — by coming together on a sense of community, not ideology.

Finding consensus on ideology is impossible. The sectarian violence that continues to plague the Muslim world, and has killed more Muslims than any foreign army, is blatant evidence for this. But coming together on a sense of community is what moves any society forward. Look at other Abrahamic religions that underwent reformations. You know well that Judaism and Christianity had their own violence-ridden dark ages; you mention it every chance you get nowadays, and you’re right. But how did they get past that?

Well, as much as the Pope opposes birth control, abortion and premarital sex, most Catholics today are openly pro-choice, practice birth control, and fornicate to their hearts’ content. Most Jews are secular, and many even identify as atheists or agnostics while retaining the Jewish label. The dissidents and the heretics in these communities may get some flak here and there, but they aren’t getting killed for dissenting.

This is in stark contrast to the Muslim world where, according to a worldwide 2013 Pew Research Study, a majority of people in large Muslim-majority countries like Egypt and Pakistan believe that those who leave the faith must die. They constantly obsess over who is a “real” Muslim and who is not. They are quicker to defend their faith from cartoonists and filmmakers than they are to condemn those committing atrocities in its name. (Note: To their credit, the almost universal, unapologetic opposition against ISIS from Muslims is a welcome development.)

***

The word “moderate” has lost its credibility. Fareed Zakaria has referred to Middle Eastern moderates as a “fantasy.” Even apologists like Nathan Lean are pointing out that the use of this word isn’t helping anyone.

Islam needs reformers, not moderates. And words like “reform” just don’t go very well with words like “infallibility.”

The purpose of reform is to change things, fix the system, and move it in a new direction. And to fix something, you have to acknowledge that it’s broken — not that it looks broken, or is being falsely portrayed as broken by the wrong people — but that it’s broken. That is your first step to reformation.

If this sounds too radical, think back to the Prophet Muhammad himself, who was chased out of Mecca for being a radical dissident fighting the Quraysh. Think of why Jesus Christ was crucified. These men didn’t capitulate or shy away from challenging even the most sacred foundations of the status quo.

These men certainly weren’t “moderates.” They were radicals. Rebels. Reformers. That’s how change happens. All revolutions start out as rebellions. Islam itself started this way. Openly challenging problematic ideas isn’t bigotry, and it isn’t blasphemy. If anything, it’s Sunnah.

Get out there, and take it back.