Vanishing Economic Statistics

If there is one criticism I have of Erixon's analysis it is the fallacy that he and all his economic colleagues make, that size is of no significance and a country is a country. Nowhere is this nonsense more apparent than in their fixation with the idea of 'exports' and their measurement and aggregation at the level of the nation state.

This is really a throwback to the days of mercantilism when the purpose of trade was to enrich the king. At least there was some philosophical coherence about mercantilism. But the modern revamping of the theory with its BNPs, free-floating exchange rates and trade imbalances lacks any coherence. No wonder it requires a trained priesthood to rationalise the system's subsequent misbehaviours.

Instead of trying to compare China exports with Sweden's...they were about the same in 1995...Sweden should be matched with Texas...and Iceland with Uppsala. Don't pretend that there is any difference between Boston and Stockholm...or Singapore. The city region is the most sensible level of aggregation for modern-day economic analysis.

Where trade is concerned the Swedish Wallenberg 'export' engineering firms behave no differently overseas to a South Korean 'chaebol' or a Japanese 'zaibatsu'. But whether this can be squeezed out of the statistics is another matter.

Manuel Castells in his 'End of Millennium' , for instance, threw out the remark that '...as much as one third of world trade seems to be intra-firm or intra-network, movement of goods and services thus largely invisible to trade statistics'.

Follow the money by all means...always a good rule of thumb...but do not for a moment believe this is more than one relatively small part of the big picture. This, in a nutshell, is really the critique that has to be aimed at 'market capitalism'. It begins and ends at the limits of a linear row of cash transactions.

Were that all there was involved it would be fine. But the truth is that this cash and money portion might be as small as just a few percent of the whole in a large range of 'affaires economiques'...which is why 'political economy' or the Wellsian terms 'Human Ecology' and 'work, wealth & happiness' should take the many departments of the economic priesthood back under its wings.

Sweden's growing band of 'gender' researchers are just one group of economic historians that have started pushing the profession in this direction...although for the sake of academic politics the expression 'multidisciplinary' is the label put on much of this sort of work.

In my Master's Thesis (see 'The Value of Specialistion' ; Stockholm University, 1972) ...it should have been entitled 'The Value of Generalisation'  because that was what I was argung for...I inadvertently found myself pushing down similar paths.

Although I did not know it at the time, the core of my argument was that the value of one generalist was equal to that of twenty specialists...and society would go to wrack and ruin if the generalists were squeezed out.

Be that as it may training is still needed to develop the fine art of both generalising from small particulars and particularising from general principles.

And here translucence is the key. Size and scale matter. Because if you don't have your facts straight then it's 'garbage in, garbage out.'