Dear friends,
The timing of this ABC story and Angus Deaton’s Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality (2023), could not be better for me: “But will his colleagues listen to him?”
But will my colleagues listen to me? The timing is that I completed a 129-page explanation and description of my work for over 35 years, on Monday night. A good colleague is going to send this document to the UQ Dean and requesting an interview, so that I finally get a research job and do not loss my house. The Nobel-Prize winner Angus Deaton just recently changed his mind. Like Evan Hadkins, all my life the case against the Neo-Liberal economy was clear, and in the sociology and history I was one of the many participants who argued that case. Yet, after nearly a decade of arguing the case in the Office of Vice-Chancellor, The University of Melbourne, getting some nuanced support of Professor Glyn Davis, now Secretary for the Prime Minister, I have been extremely marginalised in Queensland. This is my case of a lifetime from that document:
Sociological historians (Berlin 1958; Bell 1960; Hofstadter 1955, 1963, 1965; Collins 1998, 1999, 2005, 2008, 2019) ensure that ideas are not lost from the stupidity of the empirical-functional outlook. Even economists (Sen 2006) are part of this reversing the damage of positivistic reduction which was given too much control by foolish political players. …[ignoring or silencing the educationalist theories…]
- Paulo Freire (1970a-b, 1973, 1996, 1985, 1994, 199a-b) began a revolution in global education that paralleled the mid-century history-from-below movement; the strength of thought from Freire was lost to the lies of the Neo-Liberal economists from the 1990s onwards;
- Ivan Illich (1971a-b, 1973, 1974, 1977) began a revolution in global education that rethought the concept and place of “schooling”; the strength of thought from Illich was lost to the lies of the Neo-Liberal economists from the 1990s onwards;…
The University has place its economy in an impossible situation, and yet it seems everyone knows and understands the failure of the neo-liberal economy. A few obscure-writing economists continue to defend an economy which everyone else curse. Again, the problem is the thinking paradigm, and the country is being run by too many fools who think we can calculate our way out of structural problems. And so, we simply have silence from the narrow-thinking decision-makers. [Dr Michael] Macklin is one of hidden figures who was the well-founded learner. He began his career as an Academic, Faculty of Education, University of Queensland (1973 –1980). He became Australia’s interpreter of Ivan Illich, and help Australians to understand the significant difference between schooling and education. In the former is the mindset of the Institution, and usually closed to all except its own political agenda, and the latter, education, we ought to have the processes of learning. Learning is the process; Education is what we call the outcome.
References
Bourke, Paul (1976) Politics and ideas: The work of Richard Hofstadter, Historical Studies, 17:67, 210-218, DOI: 10.1080/10314617608595548
Brown, David S. (2006). Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, University of Chicago Press.
Bell, Daniel (1960). The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in The Fifties, New York, The Free Press.
Berlin, Isaiah (with Bernard Williams) ‘Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply’ (to George Crowder, ‘Pluralism and Liberalism’, Political Studies 42 (1994), 293–303.
Berlin, Isaiah (1958). Two Concepts of Liberty, Lecture, at the University of Oxford on 31 October 1958.
Collins, Randall (1998). The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Harvard Unversity Press.
Collins, Randall (1999). Macrohistory : essays in sociology of the long run. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif.
Collins, Randall (2005). Interaction ritual chains. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford.
Collins, Randall (2008). Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, Princeton University Press.
Collins, Randall (2019). The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification, Columbia University Press.
Deaton, Angus (2023). Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, Princeton University Press.
Hofstadter, Richard (1955, re-issued 1988). The Age of Reform: From Bryan to f.d.r., New York: Random House USA Inc.
Hofstadter, Richard (1963). Anti-intellectualism in American Life, New York: Random House USA Inc.
Hofstadter, Richard (1965; rev. edition, 2008) The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays, New York: Random House USA Inc.
Sen, Amartya (2006). Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Allen Lane.
Neville Buch
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