I am writing a proposal to be submitted to the University of Utah, not because I think the chances to have this accepted are great, but because I wanted to formulate my best thinking of what my University should do, so-to-say as a parting gift for my retirement. Right now it is just myself (Hans G Ehrbar). I am trying to find several faculty throughout the U of U to sign on and take over, because I myself will retire at the end of this Semester. Please give feedback so that I can make this proposal as compelling as possible (and if you see errors in the draft below, please do tell the list). If you know someone from the U of U who might be willing to sign, or if you are interested to fill some of the positions or know someone whom the hiring team should invite, all this would be helpful, please let me know off list at [email protected]. If you want to use the ideas here for similar proposals at your own University, feel free to use them. Academia must make changes not just at one University. In fact I hope this posting will generate a discussion about the kind of research Universities in general and Econ Departments in particular should pursue to address the ongoing global changes. I assume that other Universities can be more ambitious and go more into the theoretical questions which this cluster hire tries to avoid. Here is the present (draft) version of my proposal:
Cluster Hire for Economics, Politics, and Investment for Change (EPIC) The world economy has grown so much that planetary resource limitations must explicitly be taken into account in order to provide for the needs of a growing population. This requires far-reaching changes in culture, policies, laws, economic institutions, and international relations. It is not the mission of the University to change economic and political relations. But it is the responsibility of the University to research those issues that are relevant for the changes which our world economy needs. The undersigned team proposes a ``cluster hire'' to fill certain interrelated faculty positions in the social sciences which are necessary in order to properly deal with the increasing global population pressure, resource scarcity, and pollution of the planet, which we will refer to below as the ``resource crunch.'' Instead of changing the relations in which the University is embedded, this proposal aims to implement some changes inside the University itself. These changes consist in adding certain subjects to the research and teaching of economics, political sciences, finance, accounting, and law, so that the University remains a relevant resource for and beneficial influence on the changes under way outside academia. The EPIC cluster hire is deliberately targeted on the social sciences, more specifically economics, politics, finance, and law. It is true that the global changes that need to be made require the cooperation between natural scientists, engineers, and social scientists. However one often hears that the main obstacles are not technologial but today's economic, political, and legal relations. And while researchers at the University are investigating the technological issues from every aspect, the University needs more researchers in economics, finance, and political science explicitly addressing the global resource crunch. It is more difficult to hire economists and political scientists than to hire natural scientists, engineers, geographers, or anthropologists---because the economic and political science positions are politically more contested. In order to overcome this difficulty, the team proposing the EPIC cluster hire has made it their operating principle not to promote or favor specific policies by the choice of positions to be filled. The committee has identified fields of expertise which are needed in any case, regardless of the future political and cultural developments nationally or internationally. Certain questions (defined in more detail below) need to be addressed now, which were perhaps dispensable in the past, but which have quickly moved into center stage and which require a re-focusing of the issues taught and researched at the University. Here is a second deliberate restraint by the committee proposing this cluster hire: we target the applied sciences instead of attempting to recruit scientists who are exploring the basic principles of today's and tomorrow's economic or political structure. The world's economic and political relations are in flux. Quick, profound, and unexpected changes cannot be ruled out for the immediate future. Although it is important to discover what the basic principles of the emerging social formation should be and are evolving to be, it is also necessary, for today's urgently needed changes under uncertainty, to generate and deepen the scientific knowledge enabling beneficial and effective responses to the resource crunch within today's political and institutional framework. The proposed cluster hire aims to address this latter necessity. We propose to hire six different positions over two or three years, in the following fields: Life cycle cost accounting. In accordance with our restriction to applied sciences, the desired position is not a participant in the ongoing debate about the anthropocene and how the planetary resources can or should be defined. Regardless of the outcome of this debate, and regardless of the political and legal changes which will occur, it is obvious that consumers and producers need to know much better than in the past the resource implications of their consumption and production decisions. Therefore the team is looking for a position of full cost accounting, perhaps to be housed in the Accounting or Management Department of the Business School, or in the Family and Consumer Studies Department. In order to compute the full cost of, say, an I-pod, from cradle to grave, highly specific calculations involving engineering and thermodynamics must to be made. Therefore it will be the mission of the hire to establish an interdisciplinary research group, perhaps similar to the one at Columbia University at http://www.clca.columbia.edu/mission.html Cost-benefit Analysis (CBA) CBA is a necessary practical requirement in the US, where it is mandated for Federal environmental policies. It is more an art than a science, and since a priori cost benefit analysis of environmental regulation often arrives at higher cost and lower benefits then a posteriori cost benefit analysis, CBA has somewhat gotten in disrepute, because it often seems used in order to block or retard beneficial environmental regulation. The hiring team thinks that solid cost-benefit analysis is necessary in any case, whatever the prevailing political climate, in order to compute the correct level of a carbon taxes and the many other necessary regulations and legislation. We attempt to hire a seasoned expert with the skills to turn CBA into a tool which represents environmental costs and benefits more fairly than the usual practice. This should be a mid-level or Senior position, because it is not sufficient to follow the textbooks, it should be someone who has practical experience in designing cost benefit analyses. This might be a position in economics, the law school, the business school, or family and consumer studies. Macroeconomics without growth orientation We are not trying to hire someone debating the theoretical question whether economic growth in the industrialized nations must be reduced or eliminated, or whether it is compatible with sustaining the environment ("green growth"). Obviously, diminished growth of population and consumption make it easier to handle the global resource crunch. It is also widely known that for many parts of the world, continued growth is no longer necessary for the benefit of the populace. The desired position should therefore research whether and how it is possible to maintain the necessary investment, full employment, and social protections with a low or even negative rates of growth, whether this low growth has been achieved deliberately or by accident. Part of this research agenda might be to identify those mechanisms through which capitalist economies are dependent on growth, with the aim of designing policies to overcome these dependencies. Alternatively, we might look for someone doing the complementary research defining those areas which need growth in order to enhance human welfare, and those areas where growth no longer necessary from the point of view of individual happiness. This position might also study policies counteracting the rebound effect of a more efficient use of energy and natural resources. Since there is a lot of research about all these question, the desired position could be a junior researcher, willing to work himself or herself into a specific subdiscipline of the established field of macroeconomic policies. Economics or consumer studies. Corruption Although the team proposing the hire does not predict which changes in laws, policies, and international relations will be necessary, it is clear that these changes must be far-reaching and deliberate, and that corruption, organized crime, regulatory capture, predatory finance, and other shady structures and activities are formidable obstacles which cannot be ignored. Corruption is the legal or illegal use of public trust for private gain. Corruption involving natural resources is tempting, and it is a major hindrance to the implementation of environmental policies. It not limited to developing countries only but it has different forms in developing countries than in the developed countries. The required position, probably in the law school, will be someone studying to recognize and combat corruption and/or the other shady practices named in this paragraph. Since the study of corruption is not one of the standard fields of study and teaching, this position should be a senior position of someone who has field experience and who can turn the bountiful experience of legal and illegal corruption in all forms and all geographical locations into a teachable discipline. International Environmental Justice The changes necessitated by the resource crunch must come quickly and must go beyond no-regret policies. There will be losers, and therefore there is a burden that must be shared fairly. This distribution of the burdens must not only be fair, it must also be seen to be fair, and this fairness must be measurable and enforceable. This could be a position in the economics department, which is a specialist on income equality, the philosophy department, the law school, and also sociology, which studies the social implications and conditions of development, or a joint appointment. Climate Finance For the necessary investments, private finance must be mobilized in order to extend the climate finance initiatives agreed on by the UNFCC. Instead of asking the big theory question what sustainable development should look like and how it can be implemented, we are looking for someone familiar with the quickly evolving ecosystem of climate finance institutions. It would be someone who is learning from the experiences of Green Development Mechanisms and existing financial and technological climate aid projects in order to take part in the evolving field and to train the many specialists needed to implement a beneficial international flow of finance. Conclusion: There are enough synergies between the different positions that we expect the newly hired faculty to closely work together. Full cost accounting is necessary for the cost side of a solid cost-benefit analysis. Macroeconomics which does not depend on growth, and the question how to achieve maximum human happiness with a minimum of material throughput, are necessary for the benefit side of it. International finance and equitable international burden-sharing both need realistic estimates of costs and benefits. Corruption is a big obstacle for the necessary legal and regulatory changes. It often goes along with development finance and investment, and in highly developed economies it sometimes takes the form of designing biased cost-benefit analyses. The big question of the 21st century, how to make economic development sustainable, is an overarching theme of which the team to be hired addresses individual practical components. EPIC Team members: Hans G Ehrbar, associate professor at the Economics Department Others TBA _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
