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Different forms of practical ignorance.
Source publication
We might be tempted to view the recent efforts by political leaders to cultivate certain convenient forms of economic ignorance as characteristic of a novel ‘post-truth’ age. This article suggests instead that we take this troubling trend as an invitation to examine the role of ignorance more generally in political economic thinking and practice. W...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... I have suggested in Figure 1, it is useful to think of policymakers as working in a space in which they mediate between the internal, or ideational forms of ignorance that are built into many of the economic ideas that they draw on, and the externally-generated forms of ignorance produced by shocks and uncertainty. At the same time, as Figure 2 points out below, policymakers' own efforts to manage these challenges also involve mobilizing various forms of practical ignorance at different stages in the policy process. Although I am indebted to McGoey's brilliant analysis of strategic ignorance (McGoey, 2007(McGoey, , 2012(McGoey, , 2019, in using the concept of 'practical ignorance' I am also consciously choosing a broader and less instrumental term. ...
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Elsewhere, I have argued the need for science educators to create a richer tapestry of education, one that weaves together in a well-considered way the threads of knowing (epistemology), being (ontology) and valuing (axiology). These are essential threads that are constitutive of the intersecting and overlapping daily lifeworlds of teachers and stu...
Citations
... Ergodicity -regular interval repetition -might suit corporate failures' higher incidence. Unfortunately, DSA geometrics/risk calculus routinely decouples debt economics from sociopolitics, thwarting sovereign predictive positivism (Best 2021). ...
... Intertwined with (Anglo-American) capitalism's normative programmatic, SSF reconstructs, ratings referential/data infrastructure dissemination helps impose (unsustainable) austerity on national selfdetermination (Best 2021, Graeber 2011. Enterprise agencement PEC expertocracy promotes 'supply-side' economics over 'demand-side' management to minimize deficits, stabilize prices, preserve asset values, plus subdue interest rates (Beckert 2016). ...
... Next, our study problematizes how (CRA/investor) risk/uncertainty managerial modalities classify, organize, plus constitute (neoliberal) expertocratic agencement PEC plasticity (Best 2021). Their dialectical dynamic and constant interplay between stability/risk and variability/uncertainty shape PEC performance potentiality. ...
Although precarious credit risk management and technoscientific expertise precipitate and exacerbate repeated crises, unfortunately, much remain widespread and virtually unaccountable. Especially evident in the ratings space, the article argues how geometric (sovereign) ‘debt sustainability analysis’ (DSA) informs (fixed-income) futurity financialization. This constitutes and reproduces an (artificial) ‘inertia’ buffering against serious contestation and organizational reform. Advancing the study of organizational change through economic sociology, we problematize credit rating agency (CRA) and investor hybrid ‘default risk/uncertainty’ DSA managerial modalities of expertise mutual mitigation effects. Algorithmic/geometrics-based ‘expertocracy’ – knowledge-based expert rule – (re)validates the organizational conditions and broader market affinities embedding a (disinflationary) political economy of creditworthiness (PEC). Unpacking S&P, Moody’s, and Vanguard platforms reveals how sociotechnical DSA methods/modeling synergies promote ‘business-as-usual’. Studying scores passive/active management facilitation in their operational contexts better explains their analytical, organizational, and normative CRA correspondence, perpetuating crisis-prone PEC conditions. Ratings (reflexive) portfolio performance reinforces a (neoliberal) referential/data infrastructure PEC status quo, we document, amplifying national democracy and global (corporate) expertocracy asymmetries. Necessary for rebalanced alternatives, our scrutiny aids disturb seemingly ‘self-systemic’, thereby ‘self-regulating’, (neoliberal) capitalist agencement PEC dominance. Otherwise, increasingly, market instability, authoritarian populist backlash, and climate crises jeopardize ratings programmatic
... These narratives claim to improve the transition with greater efficiency and savings in cost (for example, by introducing market-based mechanisms rather than set feed-in tariffs) but in effect have slowed the transition for several years 64 . This is not surprising given that purely market-based solutions have a history of being less effective than their proponents claim 68 . ...
Despite over 50 years of messaging about the reality of human-caused climate change, substantial portions of the population remain sceptical. Furthermore, many sceptics remain unmoved by standard science communication strategies, such as myth busting and evidence building. To understand this, we examine psychological and structural reasons why climate change misinformation is prevalent. First, we review research on motivated reasoning: how interpretations of climate science are shaped by vested interests and ideologies. Second, we examine climate scepticism as a form of political followership. Third, we examine infrastructures of disinformation: the funding, lobbying and political operatives that lend climate scepticism its power. Guiding this Review are two principles: (1) to understand scepticism, one must account for the interplay between individual psychologies and structural forces; and (2) global data are required to understand this global problem. In the spirit of optimism, we finish by describing six strategies for reducing the destructive influence of climate scepticism. Hornsey and Lewandowsky examine psychological and structural reasons for climate change scepticism and describe strategies for reducing the destructive influence of such scepticism.
... We draw on the notion of 'socio-technical imaginary' (Jasanoff 2015) to document a highly solutionist vision underpinning the materialisation of RegTech. Third, we expand on the growing political economy of failure (Froud et al. 2010, Germain and Schwartz 2014, Best 2021 to highlight two failures of the RegTech imaginary. On the one hand, there is a dynamism failure in the way RegTech materialises static visions of regulation. ...
The notion of ‘RegTech’ has become a buzzword for applications of emergent technologies to regulatory activities. This paper contextualises and interrogates the novelty of the RegTech phenomenon as expounded in recent years by industry practitioners, regulators and a growing chorus of scholars. Harnessing the notion of ‘imaginary’ from Science and Technology Studies, we identify a particular solutionist vision materialising across public documents from national and international financial regulators, industry organisations, as well as RegTech and consulting firms. We identify two failures of an emerging RegTech imaginary. First, is a dynamism failure in the way RegTech materialises static visions of regulation. Second, is a systems failure as the solutionist RegTech imaginary focuses on narrower, individual problems in finance at the expense of wider changes occurring since the 2007–8 global financial crisis. RegTech, we conclude, reflects continuities with a pre-crisis era and fails to tackle key market and regulatory changes occurring since. Our analysis holds implications for the turn to technological solutions in addressing persistent issues of instability in global financial governance. We point to the need for developing wider imaginaries of technological possibilities for regulation in an increasingly digital world.
... While State ignorance may seem exceptional, Best (2021, p. 5) in fact argues, that policy development and implementation involves ignorance as much as expertise. Ignorance is, in other words, endogenous within the policy process, and key to developing policy knowledge (Mallard and McGoey, 2018;Best, 2021). As ignorance scholarship shows, ignorance fosters tendencies, especially in the context of crises or unexpected events, to reproduce existing institutional conditions (Mcgoey, 2012;Mallard and McGoey, 2018). ...
Purpose
With a focus on the position of EU mobile workers in the Dutch meat industry, this article discusses the multi-level State efforts to enhance protection of workers who experienced limited protection of existing State and private enforcement institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic, with virus outbreaks at Dutch meat plants, fuelled public and political will to structurally improve these workers' precarious work and living conditions. Yet, the process of policy change is slow. The authors show it is the gradual transformation in the institutional environment that the State needs to counter to become more protective for EU mobile workers.
Design/methodology/approach
Using the gradual institutional change approach and the concept of State ignorance, the authors examine State responses drawing on interviews with expert stakeholders in the public and private domain, public administration records and newspaper articles.
Findings
Through knowledge creation, boosted social dialogue mechanisms, enhanced enforcement capacity and new housing legislation, the Dutch State focuses on countering gradual institutional change through which existing institutions lost their effectiveness as protectors of EU mobile workers. The organization of work is, nevertheless, not (yet) fundamentally addressed with tighter public legislation.
Originality/value
The findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role of the State as multifaceted actor in institutional change processes towards increased protection for EU mobile workers.
... This scholarship upends the presumption that ignorance always poses a problem for expert organizations, pointing to the strategic value of being ignorant about certain awkward facts. What my work adds to these insights is an attention to the historicity of different institutional strategies for coping with ignorance and an emphasis on those moments where organization actors are more reflexive about their own ignorancehighlighting the constructive potential for what I call 'practical ignorance' (Best, 2021). In this paper, I also examine the political dilemmas that the management of expertise and ignorance can pose for organizations like central banks whose authority is so closely linked to their expert status. ...
... In this paper, I also examine the political dilemmas that the management of expertise and ignorance can pose for organizations like central banks whose authority is so closely linked to their expert status. Yet, whereas in past writings I have emphasized the broader political economic costs of neoliberal forms of monetary expertise and ignorance (Best, 2018(Best, , 2020(Best, , 2021, here I am focusing more closely on the problems that uncomfortable knowledge poses for central banks themselves. ...
... Strategic reflexivity, in contrast, is the only response to uncomfortable knowledge that involves publicly recognizing at least some of its truth and using that recognition to achieve certain institutional goals. As I have written elsewhere (Best, 2021), although reflexivity is one of the less common institutional responses to evidence of ignorance, it is a potentially transformative oneas it points towards the possibility of finding ways of both acknowledging and living with the limits of expert knowledge. ...
How do central bankers cope with the uncomfortable fact that there are significant limits to their expertise without losing authority? Drawing on Steve Rayner’s concept of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’, this paper undertakes a historical examination of the early years of Paul Volcker’s role at the head of the Federal Reserve, and then traces the ways in which the uncomfortable fact of ignorance has been dealt with in the years since then: from the reflexive and experimental approach of the 1980s, through the dismissal and displacement of the Great Moderation, to the exceptionalism and new experimentalism of the post-2008 era. In each of these eras, I argue that central banks face a visibility dilemma: their expertise must be visible enough to demonstrate their mastery but not so conspicuous that the often ad hoc and uncertain nature of their craft generates political push-back about their role and authority.
... Beyond epistemologies of ignorance: toward the cripping of unknowing Just as we have come to appreciate that evidence-based policy making is a complex phenomenon in which different knowledge forms co-mingle, and that some knowledge claims are privileged over others, there has been an increased interest in exploring how knowledge and evidence have been reshaped or retooled in the service of ignorance (see, among others, Best, 2021;McGoey, 2012McGoey, , 2019Mueller, 2018;Ortega & Orsini, 2020;Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008;Rayner, 2012). In some cases, ignorance serves nefarious ends, as it consists in actively shielding, denying, or contesting knowledge and evidence that exist elsewhere in the public sphere. ...
This article advances an (anti)agenda that would center unknowing as a necessary tool to remake autism. While much of the literature on the social study of ignorance describes its corrosive effects for democracy or how ignorance fuels epistemic injustice, I argue that some harms committed against autistic people have come from well-meaning attempts to know. A newly invigorated “critical” autism studies could foreground a project of ignorance to catalogue the varieties of unknowing that can recenter and remake autism. This does not entail simply supplanting “expert” knowledge with “non-expert” knowledge from the purified perspective of situated, autistic knowers; rather it disrupts feel-good narratives in which any efforts to rescue subjugated knowledges are hailed as undeniably progressive, a practice in which autistic knowers can become ensnared. Unknowing autism can propel the generative possibilities of failure, and futures in which efforts to reproduce dominant ways of knowing are resisted.
... The persistence of neoliberalism and the challenge of COVID-Keynesianism Conceptualising institutional continuity and change are key areas of analysis for political economists, who have examined various structural shifts in economic policymaking at the national and international levels (Hay, 2004a(Hay, , 2004b. Neoliberalism replaced Keynesianism as the dominant form of economic policymaking in many advanced economies in the 1980s, after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the inflation and productivity crises of the 1970s (Hay, 2004a;Best, 2021). Although a highly contentious term, we consider neoliberalism an economic policy paradigm, defined as an interpretative framework based around a set of economic ideas about how the economy should be run (Hall, 1993). ...
Economic policymaking shifted away from neoliberal ideals towards 'crisis' Keynesianism during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a comparative process tracing approach to examine how political and economic actors in Britain, Germany and the USA attempt to legitimise a potential return to neoliberalism to voters. We show that pro-neoliberal actors discursively construct a 'crisis' of COVID-Keynesianism by associating it with rising inflation and 'unsustainable' levels of government spending. Whilst emphasising key neoliberal policies of maintaining low inflation and fiscal conservativism to establish a return to 'normal' neoliberal policymaking. Therefore, we explain how the neoliberal policy paradigm reasserts itself when challenged.
... A second core contribution of constructivism is foregrounding the contested nature of economic ideas (Abdelal et al. 2010;Blyth 2002;Best 2010Best , 2019Best , 2020Best , 2021Hay 2016;Clift 2018). This draws our attention to the spectrum of respectable fiscal policy opinion, spreading more widely than is often appreciated, a range which has expanded since the GFC. ...
... One factor fuelling varied interpretations, and contestation over conceptions of the economy and 'sound' policy, is the scale of uncertainty surrounding economic trajectories (Best 2021). Constructivism foregrounds Knightian uncertainty about economic outcomes, and limits to the economy's legibility and knowability. ...
... We simply do not know' (Keynes 1937, pp. 213-214;Best 2021). ...
This exploration of UK fiscal rules and the establishment of an independent UK fiscal watchdog focuses on the practical enactment of rules-based fiscal policy to analyse the politics of technocratic economic governance. Analysing UK macroeconomic policy rules and their operation unearths numerous dimensions of the politics of technocratic fiscal policy-making. Firstly, policy rules are marshalled for partisan purposes. Secondly, a politics of economic ideas surrounds the invention, revision and interpretation of fiscal rules. Thirdly, technocratic economic governance entails a ‘politics of method’, selecting methodological approaches necessarily built on particular political economic assumptions. Finally, a ‘politics of numbers’ sees politicians cooking the books to present their economic record favourably against fiscal yardsticks. Successive governments have altered UK fiscal rules, informed by different political economic principles. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) sees itself as a technocratic and apolitical institution, yet its operational work entails contrasting accounts of the economy and policy. The scale of discretion and judgement inherent in operating fiscal rules is under-appreciated. This article finds technocratic economic governance to be a much more social and political process than many advocates of economic rules-based policy acknowledge. It engenders new forms of distinctive fiscal politics within elite statecraft and expert technocracy.
