An important failure: knowledge limits and the financial crisis (original) (raw)
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A. Ahmed et al. (Eds.): Knowledge, Normativity, and Power in Academia. Critical Interventions. Frankfurt: Campus, 2018
Many governance challenges, like the Financial Crisis, involve scientific uncertainty. Sometimes both academics, as well as decision-makers, differ in their understanding of such complex political phenomena. This chapter investigates the different perceptions of the International Financial Crisis 2007-9 among British and German politicians. British parliamentarians tended to make regulatory failure responsible for the crisis, whereas German parliamentarians often identified market failure as the main cause of the global financial crisis. I argue that these different perceptions of the crisis were the result of different levels of receptiveness towards neoliberal and Keynesian explanations of the crisis. The receptiveness of German and British parliamentarians again was influenced by their country’s regulatory culture, as well as by the respective strength of the financial sector. A Quantitative Content Analysis of German and British parliamentary debates as well by a series of interviews with parliamentarians in both countries is used to support this claim.
Economy & Society, 2012
The financial crisis of 2007–8 was experienced and reflected upon as a crisis of knowledge, the perennial question being why nobody accurately understood the risks that were being taken within the financial sector. In the wake of the crisis, there have been demands that rational economic knowledge be extended further and more vigorously, to prevent such ignorance being possible in future. At the same time, there have been demands for a new, softer rationalism, which factors in the possibility of errors and systemic complexities. What neither approach recognizes is that ignorance is not simply the absence of rational economic knowledge, but is a productive force in itself, something that is actively nurtured and exploited, both by neo-liberal theorists such as Hayek and by expert actors who have been implicated in the financial crisis. We explore how ignorance has been alternately an albatross, a commodity and an institutional alibi to financial actors and the scholars who study them.
The main aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on today´s financial crisis through the Modern-Meta Modern discourse. It is argued that the debate of the financial crisis cannot be reduced solely to economic causes and that the deeper causes of the crisis are mainly philosophical, ethical, educational, and social. Most of the already proposed antidotes for today´s financial crisis (i.e. enhancement of the domestic financial system, emerging market and innovative products, better control of the financing system) ignore the deeper moral and educational crisis of modernity that places the responsibility for the financial crisis on citizens and their lack of savings. Meta-modernity opposes viewing citizens as consumers, as depersonalised, technically controlled objects of the financial and political system. It seeks more ethical standards in business, education, and politics and it encourages developing new perspectives for evaluating the financial practices. Meta-modern discourse supports the view that the financial crisis is a direct result of prioritising the interests of the power holdersbanks and financial enterprises-at the expense of citizens' well-being and value-based questions.