Should rubbers or erasers be banned in schools? A positive reply to Guy Caxton's thoughts

In an article in May 2015, a cognitive scientist argued that rubbers (erasers) should be banned from the class room.

As reported by the Daily Telegraph: "Guy Claxton, visiting professor at Kings College London, has sparked arguments with his comments that the humble eraser is "an instrument of the devil".
Rubbers create "a culture of shame about error. It's a way of lying to the world, which says 'I didn't make a mistake. I got it right first time.'" It is better, Claxton argues, to embrace mistakes, because that's what happens in the real world...“Out in the big wide world nobody is going to be following you around, marking your work, organising your time for you, in the 21st century you are going to be the designer, the architect, the curator of your own learning.”

It's an interesting argument. As a libertarian, I'm not keen on the word "banning"  - persuasion based on rational argument is better for us to prosper and learn from our mistakes; or perhaps removing from sight those things which handicap us (call it banning if you will for media purposes - but it's a harsh term that echoes totalitarian or theocratic regimes).

Erasers (and delete buttons) have a role in helping to keep our work neat, but I do like Dr Claxton's philosophy - if we provide children with certain tools, they will use them. Are the tools appropriate though? Sometimes yes, sometimes no - along the inappropriate ones I'd argue are game consoles and smart phones and tvs in the bedroom: if you provide them, they will be used. And then you'll slowly create a zombie who "struggles with English" as I often hear from parents. Funny that.

Now rubbers...

In my private practice of working with students of all ages and abilities, I tend to keep the rubber at more than the pupil's arms length or hide it altogether for the young pupils (8-10) who tend to reach for the rubber and enthusiastically make a rubbery mess of their work, often spending more time rubbing out than thinking about the problem or spelling they were working on. The time spent rubbing out rather than just putting a line through it is a waste of time. It also makes a mess. Nonetheless, I agree with Claxton that there's something deeper going on with the eraser though: a covering up of our errors is potentially dangerous habit - one that leans into perfectionism, authoritarianism and narcissistic neuroses underpinned by a belief in infallibility.

(Image - Dr Alex Moseley; Southwell, Notts, private tuition for maths with Classical Foundations: the GCSE student is to my right, the eraser is behind the stapler, out of her sight. This was not set up - I instinctively 'hide it' before lessons).


Why not use the rubber to get rid of mistakes?

Well, it's good to know we've made a mistake - whether it's in forming our letters when we're young or solving an algorithm (a series of logical steps - a word, by the way, that the government thinks all children should know for some reason. I'd prefer then to know 'critical reasoning'...). Seeing our mistakes in retrospect shows where we went wrong and highlights the false paths - and the improvements we're making.

That's life - it's a series of challenges and wrong turnings and constant learning!

Indeed, showing the path of trial and improvement is an excellent way of teaching ourselves that sometimes we don't get things right - reaching for the eraser or dumping that file can be a rejection of the struggle as if the history (personal or academic) should be obliterated. Life is a struggle and a daily challenge (amidst our habits of things we do seem to be getting right) and we need to see the results as they unfold rather than reject them.

Hopefully, gone are the days when teachers pick up a piece of work and rip it to shreds in front of the pupil and the class. (Hmm, I have heard of instances though - what does that say to the pupil?)

Failing forward (the title of a book by John Maxwell) emphasises the forward movement of learning with its trips and falls and dead ends. We learn to walk by toddling and falling over lots until we get it. We learn to ride a bike by falling off before gradually learning a sense of balance. These things take time and patience - and plenty of mistakes along the way.

When working alongside a higher GCSE maths student, sometimes I go down the wrong logical path - it's good for the pupil to see that that the path didn't work out. I've had a couple of students remark, "Hey, you're my tutor, shouldn't you get this right...?" implying that if the tutor/teacher can't get it right, how are they supposed to learn.

Interesting implications for totalitarian thinking - that we acculturate our children into accepting the perfect dogma of the teacher. Frightening even, but it does explain why later a lot of pupils "don't know what to do in life." Cast adrift in a world of trial and error, they've been conditioned not to make mistakes. Creative and balanced minds this does not make. 

When I get something wrong, I laugh and say, "Well, that didn't work...now, let's see what direction we could try now...do you see that sometimes in life we don't get the answer first time?" Or some such message to provoke their mind a little.

I've also noted in our 11+ grammar school training that some pupils are indeed keen to remove any evidence of making a mistake. After getting something wrong, they rub it out, correct it and then say, "See, I got that right." This, I think, is the essence of Dr Claxton's point - too concerned with getting things right, they're not keen to accept that they can get things wrong. They are often relatively more stressed pupils to work with. "It's okay to get it wrong," I comment. Sometimes they shake their head.

I wonder what's going on in the home as well as in the school.

Now that leads to a connection I may be spotting in Dr Claxton's comments that the eraser is "the instrument of the devil."

Having recently read M Scott Peck's The People of the Lie, I saw a similarity in Dr Claxton's use of "the devil" with the psychology of not wanting to get things right of wanting everything to be perfect first time. This, Peck argues, is symptomatic of the psychology of evil: of keeping up appearances even though we are killing our own or our children's spirit. Quickly obliterating the mistake keeps up the appearance of invincibility and godlike omniscience, which, whatever theology you follow, we do not possess as mortals. Herein lies much evil, muses Peck.

 Narciciss at the pool falls in love with himself. The eraser would be his tool.

It's not just erasers though.

Many teachers - my pupils inform me - just read out the answers.

They don't show the children the working out or that they themselves can make mistakes. Accordingly, in the children's minds the answer is either right or its wrong - and sometimes in primary tests there's room to argue with the examiner or produce a different answer, but the answer that's given in the books must be right it is assumed.

It's somewhat reminiscent of Asch's peer group pressure study when the group chose the wrong answer to a simple questions about line length with the participant generally caving in to their choice rather than what he could see was right. If the teacher says it's right - it's right. Period. I'm having an on-going 'banter-argument' with a local primary teacher through a pupil; she insists that you can't have a triangle with more than 180 degrees internally. Yes you can if you break away from Euclidean two-dimensional space. Apparently she insists that I'm wrong - yet, she seems never to have looked it up - even googled it. Now that can be considered narcissistic...or dogmatic.

Here's a short video on taking us out of our flatlandish perspective of life and reality. All is not what it seems - and our path to understanding more is and always will be through trial and error / improvement: sometimes by ditching our mistakes, sometimes by reviewing the mistakes we made and finding something interesting in them: if we've rubbed them out - we would never know where it could have taken us. 

Life in the hole - and why we need the light of consciousness.

An intellectual work in progress...

What I'm working on here:
Why do we put ourselves in holes? How do we get out of them? Do holes really exist anyway?


Philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously started off by saying that people follow two principles in life: avoid pain and pursue pleasure.

It's an okay starting place for us to begin thinking, but it's a bit basic and more relevant to plants and simple life forms than humans.

As a starting place though, it will suffice to lift us up from the plant-life-reactive mode that many folk end up in regarding some aspects of their lives: they end up in a hole supposedly without much clue as to how they got there. Indeed, much conditioning - habit - takes people into holes without them thinking about it...and therein lies the proverbial rub. A lack of thought can take us into some deep dark places. And then our thoughts become conditioned to those places and we screw ourselves deeply into the recesses.

***

Most of the time people fall into habits that preclude them from thinking about their lives. Perhaps if they thought about their lives, the pain would be too much - too much to realise about what they were not achieving and that they themselves were responsible for doing (or not doing) in the first place.

I work with young people who have yet to think. Thinking requires an effort and discipline - an awareness of self and results, but many young people's narcissism precludes a serious overview of their achievements. Fortunately, the self awareness of youth fades - it should be replaced with a maturing, strengthening mind. Instead, it is often replaced with thoughtlessness.

I see the same thoughtless habits in older people, who've not really progressed or mentally prospered since the age of x. It may be ten, it may be twenty. Each of us is unique in that regard. But at some point in their lives, they decided to enter a mental hole - a cave if you prefer - and not come out. Life on earth seemed better if it was dark and they were surrounded by darkness.

The thoughtlessness that slowly takes over can start at any age and gradually, imperceptibly, we find ourselves not going anywhere very quickly. We have slowly but surely dug a hole for ourselves  and we don't seem to get out. We like the dark crevices and the sweetness of immediate sensations of warm, womblike comfort. But just as a butterfly cannot return to being a chrysalis, we do not help ourselves by returning to the womb - to the dark.

A lot of young people extend their education to avoid the inevitable. School extends to college, college to university, undergraduate to postgraduate...and then post-doctoral research. Or the sideways move into work may have happened after school/college/university and then falling into a job (usually the first that comes along) and a relationship ... the growth ends. C'est ca. That's it, game over on many accounts.

The hole is dug. Here's a comment from someone on the web: "I'm in a hole, and I keep digging. I'm behind on numerous things, and I just bury my head until problems become unbearable." He then asks for advice and gets a lot of sympathetic comments and good pointers. Here's another: "I feel like I'm in a hole...I feel like I'm spiraling downwards every single day. All I want to do is sleep and sleep and never wake up...I have no energy for anything or anyone and I just don't want to be here..."

What's gone on here?

Sometimes people put us in a hole. These are people we need to get away from but when we're young, it's difficult to know who's good and who's bad. We just fall into line with everyone else - because that's what happens when we go to school or when our parents insidiously undermine our spirit with platitudes and thoughtless comments that slowly numb us to our potential.

Much that we've inherited from feudal society or even before is tacitly designed to keep us down. The hangover phrases that kept children and serfs in their place echo in parents' and teachers' flippant remarks that we can hear in the markets and playgrounds. It's as if people fear letting their children be who they could be, because they did not become what they could have been.

Fear is the basis of pain for many people - the pain itself only becomes real when we avoid who we are or that which we have to do. When we dig that hole, we enter it willingly because it seems so womblike and cosy - hence people's comments on 'not wanting to get up' or 'just want to sleep all day...' But the reality is that we have left the womb - we were destined to enjoy the placental comfort for only a short time. Then we try to get back in to avoid the bright light of reality. Like the prisoners in Plato's Cave, we seek darkness and habitual living - the light (of understanding) that the freed prisoner describes is just too incomprehensible for those stuck in the hole.

Yet to the light we must turn.

Afraid of reality, we dim the lights of our consciousness; we prefer not to see, not to look at our partner carefully, or our parents actions and words, or our friends, our bank accounts, the state of our home or our children's lives...too closely. Confusion in our upbringing may put us in a hole of our parents' or school's or peer group's making but as we get older, our mind subtly but surely tells us that we're in a hole...and that we're digging deeper.

We then do the digging.

And we like finding people in the hole. We enjoy their miserable company because that's what life is about to people in the hole. It's predictability in misery makes it apparently comfortable. The troll within rails at people in the light - calls them weird, geeks, losers, barbarians, heathen, whatever terms trolls decide to use in their pit culture.

Trolls love trolls. They hate the light and love the darkness. Light is goodness and clarity - it helps to energise us and empower us to greater things, but the trolls within fear the pain that comes with light. 

Our first step is to acknowledge that we're in a hole. We need to turn the lights on. Raise our consciousness to accept where we are. And accept how we got there and the actions and choices we made to keep us in there. For many, it's the fear of the pain that holds them back from switching on the light. And for many who are blinded by the dark caverns they inhabit, helping hands from therapists are critical. A torch shone into little crevices at a time can help let the eyes adjust - but ultimately the light is our inheritance and right.

Once we begin to illuminate our life - a little at a time or in one blast of a floodlight, then we need to begin to stop digging further. We need to change and become who were are supposed to be. Indeed - allow ourselves to become who we are supposed to be. We need growth but growth can only come from consciousness - consciousness of what we want and a learning of what we need to do to get it.

Academic labelling and its effects - personal stories

I had an interesting discussion with one of my younger pupils this week: her school have her down at a certain level that is below the level she's working at. Schools sometimes do this to ensure the pupil scores well at the lower grade. But her replies opened up a huge area in my mind.

"Sometimes" is a flexible word - some schools do this more than others when it comes to GCSEs: for instance, they may keep a student who is working at a B/C level on the foundation maths as they are more likely to secure the C grade pass. Is this all about maintaining a high ratio of passes? It does reflect human cum institutional nature when the personnel are given targets by the state or OFSTED to hit. I case you think I'm a cynic, there's plenty of evidence out there both anecdotal and historical - my position on it is to abolish the league tables and take the pressure off the teachers from having to perform against each others' classes and schools in the region. Education is not football.

It is just as wrong to compare two schools whose local cultures differ as it is to compare two individuals. And this was the point I was trying to make with my young pupil this week. Her responses were however saddening. When I pointed out that her ability was higher than the level her teacher had put, she defended her teacher, and then the school, and then the teacher: not with a reasoned explanation such as "Ah, but you see, when I'm in  the classroom, I cannot concentrate as well as I do here, so my teachers think I ought to do the lower level," which is fair enough and which I've heard before. I don't see the classroom side of my pupils, so I have to bow to the facts and then ask if she could take the exam in a quiet place such as the library.  Unfortunately, her response - typical as it may be at that age - was more thoughtless and just accepting the label provided. 

I found her retorts despairing, not just because she countered my perception of her but because her acceptance of what her school teachers had described was accepted as a dogma: a "label" as people now say. A sudden rush of understanding flooded my mind: an acceptance of what "they" say (a word she used several times) will leave her self-confidence fragile and low for many, many years. Her abilities are being defined by an authority figure and she has taken that authority, like most young people do, fully into her confidence. It creates a dependency on others' reactions and readings of us that is saddening and which needs to be countered by a healthy self-esteem and critical mind. 

In talking to parents, I may ask, "Have you got over school yet?" and many laugh nervously. 

Parents who were dyslexic in particular retain a fragility and host of fears about their children: to what extent this has held them back in their own lives may be difficult to quantify. Yet as we mature, we need to learn (and continue to learn) that other people's assessments and reactions are independent of our own.As an author,  I've been particularly sensitive to others' criticisms of what I've thought to be unassailable logic - partly from my schooling, that we become emotionally dependent on the 'report card' and partly from my personality type I gather (check out 16personalities.com for some fun! I'm an INF ) and partly from some horrendous knock-backs in life that have reinforced a fear that "other people are going to damn what I'm doing..." It's quite common but it's not healthy. 

When I hear a pupil rest an assumption on another's opinion, I first ask  whether they think that the description is fair, which it often is. Sometimes it is well off the mark - such as one of my GCSE students whose predicted grades were set by her SATS results: needless to say, there's a lot of intellectual growth between the ages of 10 and 15 and while she was predicted Cs, she's scoring As and A*s. When it is a fair description, "Yes, I do struggle with doing exams under pressure," I then ask if past performance is any indicator of future performance (a phrase we always hear when finance companies are advertising a product).

A common analogy I then use is strength training. 

When I was first introduced to the dipping bar by Guy Baker, my personal trainer in Nottingham (yep, a plug - but I only recommend what I see as the best in the field), it was only after several weeks of strengthening the shoulders. I'd not done dips for many years and from what I learned from Guy was that I had been doing them incorrectly anyway. He used bands for the first few sessions as I learned the technique and gradually they went. And gradually the reps or the 'time under descent' increased. And then he introduced a belt upon which weights could be fixed. I've gone from supported dips to body weight to weighted dips - dipping an extra 20 kilos on top of body weight. Past performance was no indicator of future performance! I use the analogy with pupils who are struggling to read and write as well as pupils who are nervous about exams. Rarely, the damage is too deep - the pupil needs other intervention (we recommend hypnosis or acupuncture, for starters) to get over exam nerves: but when I've met such rabbits in headlights - it's not just school assessment and reports and labels that have left them nervous wrecks: it's their entire family! 

I recall one girl who was struggling mathematically but whose father loudly repeated every session when he dropped her off how great he was at numeracy, how he could do 12% of £3 11s 10d off the top of his head. 

Can you imagine what that did to her confidence? 

Her situation was rather extreme, but most of us are guilty of dropping implicit or explicit comparisons into our assessments which sound so stupid in the cold light: "Your brother loves French...why don't you? [because you're useless]" "Oh, I used to love maths, I did A-level and got an A...[you must get your innumeracy from your dad, because you're not like me at all]" "I hated English, I hated grammar school [shudders]...so we want our daughter to apply for the 11+..."

??!! - which translates as "I'm setting up my daughter to hate the interminable future...just like my parents did, and they didn't listen to me, so why should I listen to my daughter's fears?" 

I said to one 16 year old, "You're no longer dyslexic..." 
His reply: "What will my mum say?" 
"What has she got to do with it? Her fears and concerns are not the same as what you're capable of in your own right. Just keep it quiet then, and nod and smile, but now you know - you're not the label school and parents have imposed on you." 
Phew! That was a deep one - not massively uncommon though along the spectrum of life.

As teachers and parents, we always need to speak with care - we're human, we'll slip of course, and it's good to say to the kids, "Whoops, I made a mistake there."

It's best not to label, especially regarding ability and choices made in the past. Much better is to say: "You need to work on that area..." which implies that the pupil is capable of working on that area: rather than imposing a restriction on their ability: "You're dyslexic... [implying] so you'll always struggle...[which in turn implies] why not give up now?" 

As humans, we carry with us the immense ability to redefine ourselves and to step out on a new path - but that ability is so thwarted when authority figures and parents impose labels with no hope attached: "You're dyslexic, just like me, just like your grandparents..." or assess our future with a grandiose statement and no analysis of why grandfather John found it difficult to read (he was a farmer who 'had no use for schooling' and books were not in the house and his parents had told him that reading is useless...a culture he passed to his daughter...)

"Once a C student, always a C student" - that was reported by teacher of a head teacher's assessment of her daughter! 

What the heck?

We're flexible and adaptable - that, if anything, is what has enabled us to survive and flourish as a species. And when we are caught not fulfilling our potential or of being virtuous and thoughtful, it's usually because we've labelled ourselves or accepted the labelling and become dogmatic about who we are and therefore of our reactions and choices. 

Why people don't like economics

Fascinating and demoralising reading the comments following the announcement of the 'Nobel' winner in Economics, Jean Tirole.  (I put Nobel in speech marks as some point out that it's not really a Nobel prize, except that's what everyone calls it, hey ho.).

Several commentators disparage economics and assume it's akin to astrology or voodoo. Interesting - I wonder what level they studied the subject to?

Can you imagine declaring mathematics or physics  'alchemy' or 'wizardry' and assuming that everything mathematicians do is somehow intellectually spurious? I'm sure we'd all look upon the commentator as some poor ignoramus merging out of the dark ages with mud and nettles in his hair.

The logic of economics is incredibly solid - whether it is based on deductive reasoning or empirical evidence. It begins with simple statements such as 'humans wish to better their lives' and then proceeds through how exchange and the division and specialisation of labour, augmented by monetary media enables more people do improve their lives.

However, the subject has been hijacked by political thinkers who prefer to ditch the great principles in favour of political (or banking) interests. According to these thinkers - people aren't to be trusted, government intervention in the people's lives is great and necessary, banking needs to be run on a fractional reserve basis which then requires a great big central bank to print money when the banks and the indebted governments get into debt. Debt is normal, savings are evil, inflation is fantastic (because it shifts wealth from the working people to the banking and governing elites), wars produce wealth and regulations create a happy people.

In such an Orwellian world of double-speak, it's not surprising that economics gets a bad rap.

But it's not economics as such that is at fault - it is BAD ECONOMICS. Just as you can have faulty reasoning in physics, maths, etc., it's quite possible to have economists infer falsely, ignore data (and history), and who prefer to use a kind of alchemy (read any Fed Reserve announcements) to suggest that they know what they're doing.

Proper economics explains quite reasonably why such authorities or academics (a) do not know what they're talking about (b) have no grip on the economy as they pretend and (c) are committing long rejected fallacies.

Another reason why some people may not like economics is the same psychological reason that they may not like gravity. It holds them back. Instead, we should embrace the principles of gravity to help us move forward and likewise the principles of sound economics (none of that statist and central bank rubbish) can empower and enrich all of us.

For instance: if you want your country to grow richer it requires the rule of law, transparent government, low taxes, sound money, and a free enterprise culture. That in turn usually creates the conditions for enhanced productivity via capital investment. Governments can help the process of wealth accumulation by getting out of the way. We've known this for two centuries - but many so-called economists (i.e., those with a political agenda) prefer to ignore the principles and history.

Multitasking does not work...do schools let us down in conditioning us not to focus?

One of the fashionable elements to productivity (and education) over the past twenty years is the concept of multitasking. Multitasking is the supposed ability to get more than one task done at a time: multitasks bask in a personal glory of how efficient they are.

The problem is that the evidence doesn't stack up.

Sitting in my living room or in the kitchen to do work was one of the most unproductive things I did. I had no focus and am easily distracted by family and phones. It's something I'd been warning my pupils about for years - don't study in the kitchen (or on the kitchen floor next to the Aga, Millie!) or in front of the tv...find somewhere quiet. And there was I struggling to get things done! So I moved offices into a relatively undisturbed environment and, hey, productivity has gone up! Less stress too.

I was guilty of trying to multitask and multitasking simply does not work..

As I wrote in an earlier blog, focus requires effort. Focus implies dealing with one thing at a time - preferably until it is done. Trying to focus on two or more things at once is counterproductive and leaves one stressed and relatively unsuccessful in completing tasks and chores.

Research from Stanford University, USA, backed up sceptics intuition that multitasks were not godlike humans completing several tasks at one. The researchers basically stated that multitaskers are fooling themselves. When working, we concentrate and focus on one thing at at time - when we shift that focus, there is a mental effort required to engage in the new task and its requirements. That can take from a few seconds to a few minutes while the brain literally re-orients itself. Shifting back to the original task, or a third task, has another corresponding hit on the mind's energy patterns.

One quick way I like to show this with pupils is to ask them to draw some mirror images of shapes - curly shapes that require a lot of right brain focus; once they are engaged and zoned in to the spatial reasoning task, I ask them a simple maths question such as 'what is 6x4+5'? Their pencil stops...you can feel the shifting brain patterns as they dig around for the maths files, they give you an answer and then return to what they were doing. The disturbance or 'task switching' saps their energy.

John Gatto in his famous Dumbing Down book on American education made a pertinent comment. If his lesson were disturbed by an outsider once, he could handle it, twice, it become more awkward to get back into the flow, three times and he lost the plot. It's about the same for me.

Multitaskers may reply, ah, but I can have a conversation while making a coffee. Sure - making a coffee has been internalised and has become such an ingrained habit as to warrant very little conscious brain power. Try the same in someone else's kitchen and you'd be stumbling for things and words.

The research also led to the banning of mobile phone use in the car in many areas. Texting takes up way too much brain capacity and although 'you can drive' at the same time, your driving skills are as severely impaired as if you were drunk! Hyman et al in 2009 did research on people walking while taking on their mobile and not noticing a clown on a unicycle whizz past. Academic fun...but with a serious twist - what if you were on the phone and you didn't notice that kid on the bike...? Poignant. One thing at a time, my friends!

Schools sometimes run on the idea of multitasking. When children are put at tables with their colleagues to learn, they inevitably have to run a multitasking programme of doing their work, conversing with another pupil, engaging in God knows what psychological games with the others at the table (shall I appear a know it all? shall I appear dumb? perhaps I'll stare at that girl opposite to make her squirm...) The old fashioned one or two joined desks facing the front policy were more conducive to productivity: the children's focus was on the lesson, not on their friends.

I've asked several pupils about how well they can concentrate in local primary schools - not very well, is the anecdotal evidence. Not surprising.

Then school curricula jump around from maths to science to geography to French to ... A mixed curriculum is inevitable in a school since we want to expose the pupils to a broad education, as we don't know a priori  what will fire their minds but the overall effect is akin to having to multitask through the day. Imagine as an adult just getting into the algebra and just about to 'click' and go 'ah-hah!' when someone pulls you away to listen to French - with much disruption in between so you forget everything you've just learned. 'What did you do at school today?' 'Not much...' Well, the kids did, they just can't remember it!

Such conditioning can snow ball into a lack of attention and inability to focus academically. Then the kid goes home and watches TV and if you've ever counted the number of scene changes on the telly, you'll find another reasoning why many people can't focus on a task for too long. Then there are online or video games...same problem!

Now, I'll raise my hand and plead guilty of attempting multitasking - I'm just so damned interested in everything that's going on around me, so I'm building up new habits to drop some tasks I do daily to focus on 'The One Thing' - great book by the way. I work on my weaknesses daily and tell my pupils how distracted I can get with the world's libraries at my finger tips or six different articles to write while trading the stock market and home tutoring. So, guilty .... but I'm doing something about it!


Wow, I've been able to write undisturbed for twenty minutes, but now the phone's ringing and I'm on call, so I'd shift attentional patterns and see who it is. Bye!

Dr Alex Moseley

Should economists or historians advise governments?

From a review on iO9.com, historians argue that when politicians swapped adviser type from historian to economist, the result was dreadful...

There is a point to be made - and a point to be conceded. Here's a quick summary of the article:

"According to historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi, authors of a new book called The History Manifesto, historians ceded authority to economists by losing their long view. They stopped studying broad stretches of time, refused to analyze long-term trends over centuries or even millennia. Instead, according to Armitage and Guldi, they gave in to "short-termism," focusing on obscure moments in history that weren't relevant to the public sphere....History, they suggest, helps us understand that there are many possible outcomes any any given situation, but that certain courses of action are more likely to succeed. Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations — perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization. After all, economic systems rise and fall just like empires. That's the kind of perspective we need to take, if we hope to prosper for centuries rather than for the next quarter."

There's a lot of good critique herein: it's not just (some) economists who are caught up in short term analysis, but psychologists, sociologists, and historians: many undergraduates from a variety of disciplines note that they do not (and are told not to) study texts from before 1990 - as they are somehow antiquated and have been superseded by recent events (as if innovations in the mobile phone industry has rendered obsolete all human thought prior to that). Could we do philosophy without studying Plato...and what about art history?!

But to claim that economics is to blame for this short-termism is to confuse particular methodologies within economics (and hence the relevant advisers' beliefs and policies) with the logic of economics.

The logic of economics does not change. It was there before people started trading and it was there in the Soviet Union (Lenin's rhetoric notwithstanding), and it will be there forever the future.

The problem is whether economists are applying economic logic at all - or whether they are mere mouth pieces for some political party or government. "Soviet economists" for instance, were not espousing a new kind of economics but ignoring much economic logic in favour of ... wait for it ... a historical theory about humanity's political evolution. Central planning was far removed from the great insights of economics thinkers through the ages. Similarly, regression analysis and econometric modelling (derived, incidentally from the Soviet mentality of central planning through mathematical modelling) is also far removed from economic logic: its aim is to supply political and banking (and if you don't know it, banking is inherently political) interests with answers deemed appropriate for scamming. Ok, a bit critical - back testing on the stock market is useful - but all it does is highlight the waves and troughs of collective action as it occurred in the past: tomorrow is, after all, another day. Economics avoids (or should avoid) quantitative predictions about price movements, never mind gross statistics such as GDP or unemployment. There are too many factors or noise to be precise. Qualitative statements can certainly be made though - in the absence of X, we expect Y to increase. By how much? No one knows or can know.

Many economists today are employed to espouse government policy - or carefully to watch the government advisers for any hints and insights into what political manoeuvres may be in the making. But what both 'teams' are doing is not economics but politics. 

If Ghengis Khan had employed 'economists' to rule his empire, would we have trusted them?

History is critical: it does provide us with the long duree as Braudel says (as reported in the review), and unfortunately, most economists do not read history. Most that I've met don't read at all - that alone encouraged me to read philosophy for my doctorate rather than economics. Most students in the postgraduate department I was in had not read (or even opened, I suspect) Adam Smith's great tome, The Wealth of Nations. And many critics of economics have not read it - they make so many assumptions about poor Smith that's it's not funny: economic illiteracy is rife.

So what about swapping historians for economists? What do historians have to offer? One thing they don't offer is economic logic - but they also come to the table with their own preconceptions of what history is about and accordingly where we may be going (with out any economic logic of course). The UK's Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was a historian from my alma mater, Edinburgh - and his lack of economic (well, basic financial) logic had him selling  gold as the price fell. But not to place blame on a single historian playing economics - after all, many economists play the markets badly - we must be aware that historians come to the table with their own prejudices about how to read and interpret history. There are schools of thought dominated by certain political philisophies such as the Whig view or he Marxist view and these in turn colour how the past is viewed.

Certainly, history is the study of the past, but what to study and how to interpret it is open-ended and subject to change as viewpoints and ideologies change. Historians want to recreate what it was like but that is to necessarily impose a modern mindset on the past, no matter how much we try to rid ourselves of our current conditioning. 

Economic logic is different. Just like mathematical logic it seeks to avoid imposing political, ethical, or aesthetic judgements on economic activity. It starts with the basic assumption that people want to improve their lives and then the logic pursues what that means. They may want more peace, they may want more money, they may want healthier lives...what value they choose is irrelevant to the logic. How they go about it is.

What most people moan about when they complain about economics are issues such as poverty and injustice. But they are not created by economics! Governments, tragically enough, are usually to blame for injustice and poverty , but that's another story. The economist looks at the situation and explains why some people are poor relative to others, and usually we find out it's because the poor live on poor lands, do not engage in trade, don't have much capital to empower their labour, are engaged in internecine warfare, or just don't like material wealth (economics does not say that people should be wealthy, it's more interested in the logic of wealth creation, or lack of). As humans, we are wont and quick to make normative judgements on all sorts of matters, but that's not what economic logic is about. 

Economics will explain why a minimum wage can create unemployment. People may complain about the logic but the logic does not change if we are rich or poor, in power or out of power. It will explain the tools for wealth creation (free trade, rule of law, sound money, a desire for material improvement...) but it does not judge whether wealth creation is a good thing in itself. It's just that most people for some reason want to be better off and economics can explain how to enrich oneself and one's nation. 

Economics gets the rap a lot. Certainly the profession hasn't made it the most loved subject in the world - the more 'scientific' and mathematical it has become, the more our economies seem to be in disarray . If physicists were failing to launch satellites on a regular basis, we would certainly be challenging them to examine their models more closely. Yet when the US has created credits out of thin air and pretends to be the world's reserve currency, not only are we in for a shock at some point, but we should be examining closely the premises of the model and questioning whether the economists behind the policies are really economists or politicians. You'll find it's the latter. Every time. 

But that's another story too. 

China's renminbi as world reserve currency?

Reported in USA Today, Money section...(7th Oct, 2014)

Main point:

China is making moves to become part, technically or fundamentally, of the world's reserve currencies as a member of the IMF's Special Drawing Right department. As the world's second largest economy, the Chinese government does have a point - as more and more international trade is denominated in yuan, the argument is that such a large currency provider should be part of the mainstream. Indeed, the UK government has recently issued renminbi denominated bonds with the Bank of England holding proceeds. Over the next decade, we should expect increasing renminbi flows through the commercial and central banks similar to the flows we get from the Euro and Sterling.

Secondary point:

It also makes sense in many respects from a Sino-political point of view. If China pushes for world reserve currency status, the USA would finally be sidelined economically and politically: the American century will have ended and the Chinese would begin. Much has been discussed about China's economic and political growth over the past two decades. Some worried about a single party, undemocratic state gathering so much wealth and power, others content to see a more even balance of power emanating around the world.

Commentary.

Whatever the political implications - which are always difficult to assess while they are proceeding - the economic implications are at once obvious but at another glimpse less obvious.

A large currency joining the international markets makes sense. It will be touted as providing greater stability and a political economic balance to global financial markets: an Asian counter balance to the mighty dollar-euro axis. Culturally, the Chinese government will have to accept more transparency in its dealings (especially gold flows), and that in its turn will give the renminbi greater kudos and accordingly help China attract more foreign investment and allow its banks to flourish around the world too.

Nice story. But the downside - and not something to concern central bankers or international banks who are more likely to welcome another club member - is less obvious. Or it will be to the mainstream media.

China prints money. Just like the other members of the club. It creates money and hence 'value' out of thin air. The Bank of China is as inflationist as all the other central banks (inflationism = the policy of devaluing a currency). The renminbi is a paper currency. And that mean that the BofC has no brake on what it can print.

Ironically, the Chinese were the first to place with paper currency a thousand years ago. They banned it because of its powerful and detrimental economic effects. Wise move. Now some of that wisdom has been forgotten - probably by high flying Chinese economists indoctrinated in western monetary economics at our top universities!

Another big inflater on the bloc is likely to unleash more global inflation - world price indices would tick up and an up and the poor of the world will wonder quietly why their lives are getting harder and why famine and poverty are never curtailed. Political theorists will create complex theories on why the South is being exploited by a West-East partnership. And wars will break out in areas of high poverty and unemployment and disaffection.

On the other hand, gold bugs are aware that China has imported tonnes of the stuff over the past decade - China could take a golden opportunity to attach the renminbi to gold and profit massively by becoming the ultimate world currency (gold never left that spot - it has only been politicians dreaming that the gold standard ended). Now that would be something!

(Is it so far fetched? James Rickard's in his excellent Currency Wars elaborates on the thesis).