The Oxford University degree program in Philosophy, Politics & Economics (PPE) is now 100 years old. Having been generated and supported largely by economists from Balliol College, Oxford, the degree has gained prominence over the century of its existence, and it is widely acknowledged today to be one Oxford’s most influential degree programs. (See: Balliol College: PPE ). Sadly, this is part of the problem we now face collectively as a human community.
The reason for this is that one troubling aspect of the PPE program over the years was that it generally failed to prepare its students to consider human economics as a subset of a functioning ecosystem. For this reason it did not enable them to foresee such urgent, pervasive and devastating problems of contemporary importance like climate change or global pandemics. The anthropocentric nature of the PPE focus necessarily constrained its understanding of the world in which we actually live. Students learned about human philosophy, human politics, and human economics — largely ignoring that as a species we are only one participant species in a complex and rapidly evolving ecosystem. This structural myopia has led us to where we are today.
How did we get here? We have arrived at our current circumstance because the premise of PPE was too narrowly conceived to begin with. It should not have been Philosophy, Politics & Economics (the 100-yr old PPE), but rather Physics, Philosophy and Ecosystem-Science (a much needed new orientation of PPE). If we had conceived the premise of our studies as if we lived in an ecosystem, we would not have arrived at our current circumstance with such helpless bewilderment. Indeed, we may have been able to foresee and prevent some of its current worst manifestations.
Balliol scholars, current students and veterans of the PPE program have undertaken to review its past and the prospects for its future direction in a series of online discussions:
- PPE Centenary Discussion 1 ‘How did we get here?’
and - PPE Centenary Discussion 2 ‘How do we build back better?’
Their intention is to conclude their online sessions by addressing the question: “How do we build back better?” Given the wide-spread failure of governments to address such massive collective economic and political problems like climate change and the current global pandemic, the answers that those who formulate the strategies for PPE to “build back better” could have implications for those all over the world.
To begin, then, the question of “How do we build back better?” would seem, at the very least, to require a broader framework, starting, perhaps with economic history itself. Sadly — as in many universities around the world – in Oxford degrees for the study of economics and politics have been largely segregated from those degrees focused on the study of history. Isolated silos of expertise rarely talk to one another. This is a mistake which could be addressed in trying to “build back better.”
Fortunately, those re-thinking the next steps for the PPE degree have before them a marvelous example of how this could begin. The National Trust – which is well known to the Master and Fellows of Balliol – has undertaken a courageous and exemplary re-examination of some of its most esteemed properties with a keen eye to their embedded character in the economic history of Britain. In the process they have revealed some very interesting historical threads which might be useful for the architects of the “new” PPE degree to consider touching upon in their quest “to build back better.”
For decades students reading for the Oxford Degree in “British Empire and Commonwealth History” were largely divorced from those reading PPE. This always mystified those of us who wanted to study the way in which European empires – the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, etc. – had evolved to shape the modern world economy. This was especially troubling in Balliol where both Jack Gallagher and then Ronald Robinson were College Fellows successively and the then reigning Professors of colonial history. Those of us who worked with both of them some fifty years ago were saddened to see that there was not much interchange between them and those studying PPE at the time.
Since then, of course, the History Department has significantly reorganized its offerings, and central to their new curriculum is a focus upon “Empire History at Oxford” where both Balliol Fellows – Gallagher and Robinson – are recognized for their foundational insights in the study of European empires. Further, the Oxford Department of Continuing Education now offers online courses to the world in this important historical field. It would seem that the effort to “build back better” on the part of PPE might well draw upon both the examples of The National Trust and their previous distinguished historians to incorporate new perspectives on the origins and cumulative impact of colonialism upon the generation of the economy of our contemporary world.
Beyond the inclusion of slavery and its aftermath in the forthcoming curriculum of a potentially “built back better” PPE degree, it would also seem appropriate to consider a basic paradigm shift required now across the world to learn how modern economies are fully embedded in the constraints of a functioning ecosystem. If the patterns of global climate change and the current wave of pandemic infection indicate anything, it is that humankind needs to preconceive its collective role in the cycles of exchange and system-wide “health” of Earth’s ecosystem.
As zoologists and ecologists have long observed, as a species humans are a late-arriving, bipedal, mammalian omnivore with a tragically exaggerated sense of self-importance in an ever-evolving and self-regulating ecosystem. If we want our civilizations and economies to flourish, we had better learn the “house rules” of the global ecosystem and start to behave accordingly. The paradigm shift in public consciousness that this will require could well become a key component of how PPE could “build back better.” We need collectively — as a species — to change the context of what we learn and what we teach. A fundamentally refocused initiative for PPE could provide a strong and vital example of a newly conceived education that the world now so desperately needs.
- Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet is Not Possible: VOX – Voices from Oxford
- What Now? What’s Next? Envisioning the Transition to a Sustainable World
- “Rubbish and Racism: Problems of Boundary in an Ecosystem,” The Yale Review (1983).
Given the current global ecological and economic crises, it is important to absorb and reflect at length upon some of the recent insights and public statements by one of Balliol’s most energetic and accomplished economics graduates, Kate Raworth.
On Tuesday 29 September, Raworth and her economics associates launched the “Doughnut Economics Action Lab.” Through this lab and the internet links it provides it will be possible for all students around Oxford — and, in fact, across the world — to participate in an ongoing discussion of a new kind of ecologically-informed economics, building upon Raworth’s recent publication of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. This field has developed rapidly, and as it turns out Raworth’s Doughnut Economics is now officially in the textbook of Oxford’s Economics International Baccalaureate. Almost single-handedly, Kate Raworth and her network of young associates have upended, outflanked and upstaged the 100-year-old PPE degree tradition, providing Oxford’s programs like the Economics International Baccalaureate with fresh new curriculum.
In effect, because of what has proved to be PPE’s historically dated and structurally myopic perspective on today’s most compelling global problems including climate change and the pervasive pandemic, perhaps it is time at this 100-year anniversary point for the current architects of the PPE degree to rethink the focus, direction and value of the program. They need not abandon its august traditions, but they would do well to embrace as well the perspective and analytical framework of Kate Raworth and the new DEAL if the guardians of the PPE tradition wish to be seen as being serious about wanting to “build back better.” It would be ironic indeed if the Rawworth analysis were to be integrated into the textbook of Oxford’s Economics International Baccalaureate, but remain outside the curriculum of Oxford’s PPE degree program.
For a further elaboration of this Balliol graduate’s important and impressive initiative see:
- From Poverty to Power – Taking Doughnut Economics from idea to action – welcome to the Action Lab – Kate Raworth
and - The DEAL Community Platform launches – Kate Raworth
[Follow further links to selected recent contributions by Kate Raworth]
For the historical context of this new form of post-growth economics see related discussions at:
- Overcoming the Multiple Legacies of European Colonialism: Can The West Survive Its Most Cherished Historical Myths?
- Drawing the Wrong Conclusions – An Anthropologist Looks at History: Cultural Mistakes Since 1492 – The “Frontier” Metaphor & the Myth of Endless Growth
- Ignorance, Arrogance, Overshoot & Collapse: The Destructive Power of Enduing Myths In Collapsing Civilizations
- The Coronavrus: A Chapter in an Ongoing Crisis
- We live on a planet with finite resources and infinite throughput energy….
- Launching Moon Walks and Mars Landings From a Burning Planet: The Myth of Perpetual “Frontier” Expansion vs The Science of Human Survival on Earth=
- “A New Paradigm for Environmental Protection for the 21st Century” – [Excerpt from discussion session on climate change from Rhodes
Scholar 110th Anniversary panel, Rhodes House, Oxford] - “…Just take the case of agriculture…”
- Needed: An Honest Cost-Benefit Analysis of Fossil Fuels to Avoid Extinction
- Statements from the United Nations + Critique of Growth Economics – T.C. Weiskel
- “Some Notes from Belshazzar’s Feast” — Balliol College – JCR – 21 January 2015
- Some Troubling and Enduring Thoughts of a Balliol ‘Old Boy’ on the Focus, Direction and Value of PPE at Oxford
- Discovering Our Place in Space: Can We Survive the Absurdity & Distraction of the “New-Frontiers-in-Space” Race? – Parts 1 & 2
- Ignorance, Arrogance, Overshoot & Collapse: The Destructive Power of Enduing Myths In Collapsing Civilizations
- The Fatal Consequences of a Misplaced Metaphor: The “Agricultural Industry” & The Delusion of Infinite Growth in A Finite Ecosystem
- How Could Something So Right Turn Out Wrong? How Could Something So Good Go Bad? The Tragic Story of the Modern World’s Love Affair with The “Green Revolution” – Part I
and - Some Troubling Chapters in The Political Ecology & History of West African Agriculture
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Because of its historically important role in the creation of PPE at Oxford and the construction of the whole ideological edifice to provide credibility for post-World War II “growth economics,” it can be argued that at this juncture Balliol has a particular ethical responsibility to assist humankind in developing realistic, operational strategies to engineer a peaceful transition to a sustainable world economy “beyond growth” — as the eminent economist Herman Daly so persuasively argued for several decades.
The central principle of ethics is that as human beings we are responsible for the predictable consequences of those actions that we undertake or advocate. This puts some individuals on the Balliol faculty in a very awkward position ethically speaking. During recent decades, for example, much of the teaching of economics at Balliol was dominated by an outlook and the specific writings that stated quite baldly: Small Is Stupid.
As Sir David Attenborough has emphasized with such persuasive power in recent years. the predictable consequences of this kind of ideology are both sadly myopic and profoundly tragic in the finite ecosystem we inhabit. In the light of what ecologists now understand about the limits of our common global ecological systems, we need to muster all the insight and analysis at our disposal to assure human continuity in a complex ecosystem that we did not create, cannot control and must not destroy. There is no “planet B.” We only have one Earth. We only get one chance.
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“Just take the case of agriculture….”
Tim Weiskel
Global Balliol
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Transition Studies 