Sorry, but this stuff drives me absolutely crazy. I’m sorry economists & journalists are just discovering the field of international political economy. But we’ve been studying & publishing about this stuff for 50 years now. There’s no new age of anything & “geoeconomics” has been around forever. - ThreadSky

mcopelov.bsky.social • 7 days ago

Sorry, but this stuff drives me absolutely crazy. I’m sorry economists & journalists are just discovering the field of international political economy. But we’ve been studying & publishing about this stuff for 50 years now. There’s no new age of anything & “geoeconomics” has been around forever.

Reposted from Michael Pettis

1/2
I think Gillian Tett is right—the word is undergoing a major shift "in the intellectual zeitgeist—of a sort we have seen a few times before." In a way we are revisiting the 1930s when a period of huge trade imbalances, the subordination of...

www.ft.com/content/daf5...

Comments

bobisjim.bsky.social•6 days ago

Journalists just now discovering that history has this weird way of repeating itself.

simonlester.com•6 days ago

As @inumanak.bsky.social and I wrote a few years ago:

"Meet the New Geoeconomics, Same as the Old Geoeconomics"

jastucaz.bsky.social•6 days ago

I’m not surprised. I remember when journalists from major news outlets were surprised to learn that U.S embassies abroad had diplomats with economic experience/degrees for that very reason. And it wasn’t that long ago.

gylesnamopaleen.bsky.social•6 days ago

my favourite is the british, as we edge closer to the "brexit reset" summit next week, getting excited about the notion aligning product standards & regs with other countries is a nifty idea and will save money.

50 years after Lord Cockfield published his white paper on same!!!

joseggarcia.bsky.social•5 days ago

My favourite Philip K Dick quote seems applicable here “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

One footnote is that when and old reality rears its head people often treat it as a new development that they feel compelled to wrap up in a new fantasy.

vfxpapa.bsky.social•5 days ago

"If it’s new to me, it’s new to everyone! And also I invented it!"

drwhoo.bsky.social•7 days ago

And they won't site the IR IPE crowd and then they'll rediscover us next time they flub this stuff. The bigger question for me is: how do we increase IR/IPE visibility so the dummies start listening?

the-pied-piper.bsky.social•6 days ago

Imo, the question is better framed as “how do we end the myth of economics as a legitimate and distinct field of academia, rather than as one aspect of innumerable others including IR/IPE?”

Modern econ is a bubble of isolation because it’s purpose is class apologia for the rich, not earnest science

drwhoo.bsky.social•6 days ago

Well, we broke up with econ for a reason their modeling depends on rational action divorced from morality. Their reductionism and parsimony which makes them myopic and often truly foolish. I always thought Gunnell made the best case for the failings of econ. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3639551.html

lawprofblawg.bsky.social•6 days ago

I was just reading the International Journal of Political Economy just the other day!

Journalists get the dominant view of economics, which typically serves a particular power structure. Some economists (and this is particularly true in antitrust) cling to antiquated views of economics.

emalma.bsky.social•6 days ago

Silos. Economists are the narrowest academics out there.

economicsinten.bsky.social•6 days ago

The irony that Gillian Tett wrote an excellent book called 'Silos' although to be fair to her, I think she's writing it as anthropologist criticising the economics profession.

jonathanhopkin.bsky.social•6 days ago

It never ceases to amaze me how economists can wade into fields and proceed as if the established scholarship simply doesn’t exist

will-davies.bsky.social•6 days ago

Isn’t Gillian Tett famously an anthropologist? Maybe enough time on the finance circuit eventually turns you into an economist

leesavage.bsky.social•6 days ago

This paragraph will come as a surprise to everyone that works in a politics department everywhere in the world

jonathanhopkin.bsky.social•6 days ago

Not exactly the splitting of the atom is it

yaseppochi.bsky.social•6 days ago

“You don’t have to like it, but this is what peak performance in marketing academic works looks like.”
May you profit much in the long run and save the world in the short run.🫡

kajleers.bsky.social•6 days ago

(cc. @marikestellinga.bsky.social @maartenschinkel.bsky.social)

krietzsche.bsky.social•6 days ago

The internet has allowed a whole new world of take-crafting, so much so that it’s completely disengaged some people from any non-internet or pre-internet traditions

momo663.bsky.social•6 days ago

Exactly. There was global trade in 500BC for god’s sake.

mcopelov.bsky.social•6 days ago

I’m sorry that economists don’t read or cite other disciplines & feel like they can “discover” new topics without reading the existing literature - something they would never tolerate in the other direction. But there are huge piles of books & articles about “geoeconomics” in IPE since the 1970s.

arnkeeling.bsky.social•6 days ago

Wait til they discover History!

davidmouritsen.bsky.social•6 days ago

Reminds me of when chemists decided to "discover" quantum physics...

jack-cowie.bsky.social•6 days ago

A bit like the medical researcher who discovered the trapezoidal rule of numerical integration... in 1994

https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/17/2/152/17985/A-Mathematical-Model-for-the-Determination-of

davidmouritsen.bsky.social•6 days ago

I... hadn't heard about this... And it got published... with thanks expressed to a Yale professor of electrical engineering for his "expert review"... and Google Scholar says it's been cited 568 times...

jack-cowie.bsky.social•6 days ago

Probably cited due to its notoriety, I guess you could go through and check for sincere citations.

Also I seem to remember a chemist discovering a method of integration which was to cut out the curve with scissors and weigh the paper

davidmouritsen.bsky.social•6 days ago

I find myself imagining a movie in which Cavalieri, Fermat, Barrow, Torricelli, Leibniz, and Newton band together to take their revenge...

villora.bsky.social•6 days ago

📌

mcopelov.bsky.social•6 days ago

Here’s a syllabus. The idea that this stuff didn’t exist in some glorious age of neoliberalism is silly & ahistorical. Go & read & then engage with the vast literature. It’s what you would expect from us if we pretended entire fields of economics didn’t exist

https://www.markcopelovitch.com/_files/ugd/83b49b_a8beb77143754aae95d909ae7c88d467.pdf

mcopelov.bsky.social•6 days ago

Did you know there was in international finance & it wasn’t all just technocratic neoliberalism? Incredible. Who could possibly have known?

jeroenvanbouwel.bsky.social•6 days ago

It’s typical that economists are a bit caught in their own discipline, it’s nicely characterized here, for instance: https://www.ft.com/content/1e2584d6-65ef-46de-bfb2-28811be65600

jeroenvanbouwel.bsky.social•6 days ago

Sociologists of science have also documented how insular economics is in comparison to other social sciences, see here, for instance: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.29.1.89

mcopelov.bsky.social•6 days ago

Tl;dr:

mcopelov.bsky.social•6 days ago

More international political economy books, across several decades, from the "geofinance" wing of "geoeconomics"

mcopelov.bsky.social•6 days ago

I want to make clear here that I’m glad more folks, especially economists, are discovering the central feature of the global economy (i.e., it’s all politics all the way down). It would be great to have more engagement. But it can’t start with “this is entirely new & no one’s studied it before.”

severson.bsky.social•6 days ago

No place for Super-Imperialism, now in its 3rd edition?

theangelofhistory.bsky.social•6 days ago

What’s your number one book recommendation as a readable popular or survey work ?

mcopelov.bsky.social•6 days ago

Frieden, “Global Capitalism” (and not just because he was my dissertation advisor!)

lowkeythiccboi.bsky.social•6 days ago

It's wild that people got away with calling themselves non ideological, as if that were possible. Even worse is the number of people who legit belive in it for like 40 years.

rdarf.bsky.social•6 days ago

📌

helloyorick.fightins.online•6 days ago

Thank you for sharing this and these books! You've sent me on a curiosity voyage I'm really excited to dive into.

davidleheny.bsky.social•6 days ago

“Political economy”? That’s crazy talk and I refuse to believe that anyone has studied such a thing before the new era of geoeconomics.

ridder.bsky.social•6 days ago

The new age of geography: the earth might actually be round!

the-pied-piper.bsky.social•6 days ago

Econ routinely insists it’s the special child that’s allowed to break the fundamental rule of statistics and project outside of the sample

It simply isn’t a serious discipline in its modern structure, it’s class apologia for the rich, and ought not to be a distinct discipline but subsumed in others

cmhoskins.bsky.social•7 days ago

We know nothing. Sorry you have to educate us all for freedom. Thanks 🙏

nickel76.bsky.social•6 days ago

📌

rdarf.bsky.social•6 days ago

Good point regarding economists in general but not really fair to Pettis who's aware of the political dimension and often mentions it. In fact, he is not really an economist.

suchatravesty.bsky.social•6 days ago

Pretty sure I got a BA from Berkeley in international political economy in 2005.

econcat.bsky.social•6 days ago

Well, every new generation of economists "discovers" that context and politics matter. Wait until this generation of economists discovers that "space matters" and it will be the geographers turn to "be amazed" ... and so on and so on.

onstatepreferences.bsky.social•6 days ago

To be fair, “the Old IPE” had very different priorities vs. “the New IPE”

alejandroriano.bsky.social•6 days ago

🙄 chill. academics across most disciplines don't know anything beyond their niche fields fo study (I sincerely don't think economists are worse in this respect than ppl in other disciplines). Take what journalists write with a big grain of salt... again, nothing new under the sun

mjamurphy.bsky.social•6 days ago

I am all for bashing economists, but in this case neither has a degree in economics.

jjmedina.bsky.social•6 days ago

jayhay.bsky.social•6 days ago

I'm sorry to inform you that Mrs/Ms Tett holds a PhD in social anthropology and Mr Pettis holds two master degrees, MA in int. affairs and MBA. So none of the two holds a degree in economics.

calvjones.bsky.social•6 days ago

I remember lots of my economist colleagues discovering institutions in 2008, then culture in 2015 🙄

judah-grunstein.bsky.social•6 days ago

Thought it might be the headline, but having read the piece, yes, it's a bit starry eyed.

The idea that geoeconomics weren't at work in the push for globalized connectivity is sort of curious as well.

To my mind, connectivity and protectionism are two poles on the geoeconomic spectrum.

clearwing3.bsky.social•6 days ago

This is like when people discover that society and technology are intimately entwined, and society creates tech as much (more?) than tech creates society #STS

publichealthguy1.bsky.social•6 days ago

evergreen

jamesrcpaton.bsky.social•6 days ago

📌

furiousvoter.bsky.social•6 days ago

I also heard science and medicine is being influenced by politics and religion like never before.

abbyinnes.bsky.social•6 days ago

I read it and got an instant vision of Herman Mark Schwartz waving, with infinite patience and not a little irony…👋🌻

pauljnadeau.bsky.social•6 days ago

100%, but 1) "geoeconomics" as a concept seems to have broken containment starting with the COVID era, 2) even so, I still get a shudder when security-minded types discover anything econ-related (see: post-9/11 era)

stanzanarotti.bsky.social•6 days ago

We just happen to live in a world where leaders are conducting global experiments that would never have been approved by the IRB.

poormarlowe.bsky.social•6 days ago

A fundamental thesis of all modern media is that you're supposed to ignore all knowledge workers and anyone trying to improve anything as a dangerous internal enemy.

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