By Nikhilesh SinhaOn
These are “Interesting Times” in the sense of the old Chinese curse, as referenced by Pratchett. The post-war ‘liberal’ order is crumbling, and while this poses a serious challenge in terms of the basis of alliances and understandings between different countries, cultures and peoples, as with any transition period, there are opportunities to break and remake power structures. Liberalism as a political doctrine is founded on the values of liberty and equality, and generally supports ideas of free speech, a free press, freedom of religion, civil rights, secular governments, gender equality and cooperation between countries. Critiques of liberal ideas can broadly be classed into two categories. Those which question the fundamental principles and those which suggest that however laudable the ideas, the objectives are impractical, and potentially undesirable. It is the second group of critiques that this post attempts to speak to.Positions that question the values of liberty and equality are harder to address through a dialectal method. There are several places where one could start, and each is equally compelling and valid. However the debate around gender equality is both central and current, and the discourse around it presents a useful starting point. 
The emergence of the #MeToo movement has prompted much needed debate around the idea of gender equality, the politics of sex, and traditional roles of (heterosexual) men and women. The backlash against what is being characterised by some (men and women) as an extreme form of feminism has been in evidence since before the movement gathered momentum, but several self-identifying liberals have begun to express discomfort with the shifting of boundaries. The case of Aziz Ansari is being held up as evidence that the movement has gone “too far.” The idea that “good men” are now being thrown to the wolves suggests a mischaracterisation of the issues. The question is structural, and the definition of what is a “good man” is now open for debate, and while this is undoubtedly uncomfortable it presents the only way to move forward. It is easy when the “bad people” are monsters, like Weinstein, but much more difficult when like Kelly’s Pogo “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The way forward requires introspection not just for heterosexual men but for us collectively as a society and not just on the social mores that relate to the interactions between the sexes but more broadly on the agreed upon goals for progress and the means by which we hope to achieve them.    
The fact that Joan Robinson, Jane Jacobs and Ursula K Leguin, are women is no accident, and neither is the choice to reference their work. However it is their substantive and substantial contribution to their respective fields that marks them out as worthy intellectual interlocutors in our search for a more habitable future. There is much to be learnt from studying their ideas, and while it is not possible to do them justice in this brief discussion, I will try and highlight what I find to be most salient.  

Joan Robinson famously stated that “The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” The statement is representative both of her wit and her acuity. Economics as a discipline has sought to mimic and be compared to the natural sciences. To be seen as presenting incontrovertible facts as opposed to subjective judgements, and can be judged to have succeeded in winning pride of place amongst the social sciences if it is to be evaluated on the basis of its overt influence on public policy and to an extent public discourse. Her sharp reminder that economic logic may be used for good or ill remains as pertinent today as ever. Her immense contribution to the field is indisputable and the failure of the Nobel Committee to recognise this remains inexplicable, at least on the basis of scholarly merit. One of the factors may have been her critique of the neoclassical orthodoxy which had taken root, and her unconventional ideas. John Eatwell remarks that she was widely acknowledged to be brilliant but that most economists approached her work with “apprehension” and “bewilderment” because her ideas were at odds with “the framework used by most economists to define their subject.” This statement however should not be taken to suggest that she could not engage with mathematical methods, and her work on imperfect competition is a testament to her ability to challenge the orthodoxy on its own terms. The concept of imperfect competition is now a standard part of undergraduate microeconomics syllabi though much of the subtlety of her analysis is lost. She also introduced the concept of a ‘monopsony’ or the inverse of a monopoly, where buyers can exert market power, which remains the strongest economic argument for minimum wages and fair trade. It would not be inaccurate to say that many economists have been influenced by her ideas without being aware of it. She is the first female economist to rise to prominence barring Rosa Luxemburg, from whom she drew the title of her 1956 book that extended Keynes (kicking and screaming?) into the long-run. She had to contend with a segregated environment at Cambridge, where at the time women were not guaranteed admission to lectures, and were excluded from meals, holidays and other social forums where research was discussed and conducted informally. Keynes considered her his most brilliant student, and while her critiques were sharp and unsparing, those male colleagues who took her seriously benefited greatly from her insight. Amongst her most illustrious students are Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. Yet if there is one overarching principle that may be drawn from her work, it is that economics can and should be used as a force for improving the lot of the least fortunate. Her passionate concern with the poor in the developing world and the recognition that standard economic theory was worse than useless in these contexts predates the birth of the modern field of development economics in the Anglo-American tradition. 

Jane Jacobs unlike Joan Robinson did not have a college degree, a circumstance that was often used to marginalise or discredit her work. Nevertheless her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is arguably the most influential book on US city planning, a standard text in the field of Urban Planning, that would greatly benefit students and researchers of Urban Economics who have yet to read it. She was the first to coin the phrase ‘social capital’ in its modern form, though she rarely receives credit. Her vocal critique of the violence of urban renewal, drawn from keen observations of life in Greenwich village and the displacement of 132 families as well as 1000 small businesses caused by Robert Moses’s plan to ‘revitalise’ lower Manhattan, set her on a collision course with Moses, real estate developers, and the majority of architects and urban planners in New York. She labeled urban planning a ‘pseudoscience’ and was in turn dismissed as a ‘militant dame’, a ‘housewife’ and an amateur who had no right to interfere with an established discipline. Her passionate plea to leading architects, urban planners and prominent intellectuals at Harvard University in 1956 to respect the weird wisdom of urban life in places like East Harlem that did not conform to established conceptions of urban order, brought her to prominence. It was surprisingly well received, with the speech being published in the Architectural Forum. It was however her piece in Fortune magazine in 1958 titled ‘Downtown is for People‘ that sparked controversy and elicited anger from the establishment. It was not just that she critiqued the plans and the designs of architects and planners, but that she questioned the very methodology by which these plans and designs were made, abstract and uninformed of reality. More importantly, she suggested ways in which planning could be more sensitive to the needs of people, but it required the experts to leave the comfort of their offices.”It is the premise of this article that the best way to plan for downtown is to see how people use it today; to look for its strengths and to exploit and reinforce them. There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans. This does not mean accepting the present; downtown does need an overhaul, it is dirty, it is congested. But there are things that are right about it too, and by simple old-fashioned observation we can see what they are. We can see what people like.”Jane Jacobs (1958). Frank Lloyd Wright observed that “The outcome of the city will depend upon the race between the automobile and the elevator—and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy.“, a view that promotes universal automobile ownership. In an urban century when more people live in cities than outside them, and when pollution in Asian cities is fast becoming one of the primary health hazards, Jocob’s question of whether we are building cities for people or for cars should haunt us. While she is seen to have had the greatest impact on Urban Planning, her work has important implication for the field of economics. Her idea that cities are the modern engines of growth was before its time, though few would dispute its relevance today. She was also amongst the first to recognise, along with feminist economists like Warrior and Waring, the systematic undervaluing of services traditionally performed by women, which affects both men and women engaged in those professions today. 

Ursula Kroeber Leguin wrote in an essay titled “Introducing Myself” that she was a man. As she explains, the concept of women is a relatively modern invention, and that when she was growing up you had to be a man in order to be counted. She definitely planned on being counted. The essay is wry, brilliantly funny, and full of anger. I can imagine some who read it might think, but why on earth is she so angry? Perhaps the question should be why wasn’t she angrier, and why aren’t we? Leguin wrote fantasy and science fiction because that was the form that best suited what she had to say, and so faced marginalisation not just as a consequence of being a female writer, but also for not being a ‘serious’ writer. She resisted this arbitrary classification with as much spirit as she countered the arbitrariness of established roles of men and women in society. As she told the Paris Review ““Where I can get prickly and combative is if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet… Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.“ To her science fiction was a laboratory for trying out possible futures, a method for thinking about reality, and one she was exceptionally skilful at. The world of science fiction and fantasy is particularly resistant to female authors and works that challenge gender and racial stereotypes, as typified by the 2016 Hugo Awards controversy. This is particularly ironic given that Frankenstein, the first ever piece of science fiction (in English and to my knowledge) was authored by a woman. It’s almost as if women have no place in male fantasies except as objects. Leguin turned down a request to blurb an anthology of science fiction in 1987 which exclusively contained pieces by male authors, remarking that it resembled an all-male club or locker room, where she just didn’t belong. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards and has been ranked as the second greatest sci-fi work after Herbert’s Dune. Like any great literary work it is impossible to distil its significance into a few lines, but it is considered to have done more to upend gender conventions than any other single work. Leguin’s parents were anthropologists, and the complexity of her explorations of culture and interpersonal relationships are testament to the attention she gave to the social fabric of her imagined worlds. The Earthsea Series, her most widely-read work of fantasy, begins with the trials and travails of a young boy wizard, but it is less about the conflict between abstract binaries of good and evil and more about the complexities of morality, identity and power. In The Dispossessed (1974) she creates an anarchic world where there is no conception of private ownership, and while it may be seen as an utopian vision, she does not hide the cracks in her creation. It is more fitting to say that her work takes us beyond the concepts of utopias and dystopias, and instead forces us to unflinchingly confront the reality of our possible futures, while giving us hope that a better one is possible. 

Robinson, Jacobs and Leguin were not just content with ‘leaning in’ or breaking glass ceilings, but challenged the very structure of their respective fields. Their being women is as relevant as it is irrelevant. Did their being women disadvantage them? Undoubtedly. Did it mean that they had access to experiences and ways of seeing the world that their male counterparts might not have had, and did this shape their views? Possibly. Does this make their contribution less valuable? There does not seem to be  sensible argument for why this should be so, and yet that is precisely what each of them faced. The question might be whether their ideas should be de-gendered, depersonalised, but that is in effect both difficult to do, and on reflection, an unsatisfactory solution. The notion that judgement (and justice) should be blind to difference is one that has perhaps has outlived its usefulness. We have to learn to live with difference and complexity, and in this messy reality acknowledge that our conditioned responses need constant re-examination. It is not a comfortable position to be in, but as in the apocryphal story of the frog being slowly boiled alive, comfort may not be our friend.    
  
This is an attempt to resuscitate my old blog at a time when as a journalist friend out it, no one reads blogs anymore. Let’s hope that Says Law operates 🙂 Please do comment below if the ideas presented here resonate with you, or indeed if they do not.