Working on my Ph.D. (1983-1987): part I
By the time I finished my BA, Jacky Nagels offered me a full-time job as his teaching assistant (TA) for his course on introductory economics in social sciences, which allowed me to work on my doctoral dissertation. Other professors had offered me to work under their supervision but they were not interested by my idea to study the logic of Soviet-type economies, which was the real motivation behind my study of economics in the first place. My job as TA was time-consuming, but it left me sufficient time for research. Teaching to students also has its advantages for somebody who would hope to become a university professor.
While working on my Ph.D, I continued to train myself in both mainstream economic but also contemporary Marxism. I chose to do at ULB the Master degree in economics that was seen as preparatory courses for the Ph.D. This allowed me to deepen my training in microeconomics but mostly to improve my knowledge in macroeconomics that had been somewhat deficient in my BA classes. I got accustomed with disequilibrium macroeconomics that was quite fashionable in Europe at the time that was studying the effect of interactions between markets when prices were downward rigid (prices would go up easily but would not go down easily, especially wages), but also with rational expectations macroeconomics that took into account the expectations of agents in their basic choices of consumption and savings.[1]
I also tried to deepen my understanding of modern academic Marxist thinking. Given my existing attachment to Marxism, after having read Morishima, which was mostly putting some of the ideas of Marx into mathematical models, and a related book by Abraham-Frois and Berrebi connecting Marx, Sraffa and von Neumann, I discovered what has been called analytical Marxism. The major book I remember was Making Sense of Marx by Norwegian philosopher Jon Elster. It was a great pleasure reading that book, because Elster, contrary to most dogmatic Marxists, read Marx critically. In particular, he emphasized which parts remained interesting and which parts were to be rejected. This is where I learned among many other things about the functionalist fallacy that is quite pervasive not only in Marxist thinking but also in social sciences in general. The functionalist fallacy attempts to explain the existence of a particular institution or system of institutions by its function. To explain this, let us take an example. Marx famously noted that religion is “people’s opium”. If we state that religion was created because it was a tool to pacify the masses, i.e. explain religion by its function, this would be a fallacy. It would ignore the exact historical reality of how a particular religion was created and developed, which in general had nothing to do with its function. This kind of reasoning is largely present in the writings of Marx but also in social sciences. The idea that particular institutions evolved because they responded to a particular need (say the evolution of anti-trust institutions for example) is a functionalist fallacy because it explains the emergence of an institution by its function and not by the exact historical process that led to this emergence. If all existing institutions could be explained by the need they fulfill, they would by definition be efficient, but we know this is not the case. We know, especially since the work of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (economics Nobel prize of 2024) that inefficient institutions can persist for a long time, either because people are not able to overcome the collective action problem in changing these institutions or because the ruling elite benefits from these inefficient institutions and acts to block efficient changes.
Elster was part of what was called the “September group”, a group of social scientists devoted to develop forms of analytical Marxism. Among them was John Roemer, a former 1960s activist who had been expelled from Berkeley but developed mathematical models related to Marxist and socialist thinking. I got to know John Roemer very well in 1991 when he invited me to spend a semester at UC Davis where he was teaching. My colleague Pranab Bardhan later joined the group also. As early as 1983, I was lucky to develop a strong friendship with Philippe Van Parijs, a philosopher at Université Catholique de Louvain who had not been an activist like me but had undergone a similar intellectual evolution from standard Marxism to open analytical thinking related to many ideas of Marx. I spent half a day every week going to seminars at UCL of the group “Economies et Sociétés” that Van Parijs also attended and chaired by Robert Leroy.
It was a real pleasure interacting intellectually with Philippe Van Parijs. Our discussions were always very stimulating and I learned a lot from him. He introduced me to the idea of universal basic income. The idea fascinated me. I saw in it a concrete institutional method to gear society from what Marx called “the reign of necessity” towards the “reign of liberty” and this helped me complete some of my earlier thinking (for which I was expelled from the Workers Party of Belgium) on socialism in a postindustrial society. The idea was that as society became more and more productive, people could choose gradually to live off a basic income that would give them free time to engage in free and emancipatory activities. In my view, the level of basic income needed to be linked to the level of GDP to make it sustainable and to prevent a collapse of economic activity in the “reign of necessity”. Indeed, if the level of basic income was too high, too many people would choose not to work, leading to a decline in GDP, making the level of basic income unsustainable. This could be avoided by linking the level of basic income to GDP so that if GDP declined, the level of baisc income would also decline and fewer people would choose to live only off the basic income. Also, I saw basic income as part of the socialist project. Thanks to Philippe Van Parijs, I was able to participate in the First Congress of the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) in 1986, now renamed Basic Income Earth Network. I presented there a paper entitled “Why Socialism needs Basic Income, why Basic Income Needs Socialism”. Basic income has since then always been in the back of my mind, but my own research led me in different directions, especially after the collapse of communism in 1989-1991. I have always remained intellectually close to Philippe Van Parijs, albeit geographically distant, as he became one of Belgium’s most deep and brilliant public intellectuals.
BIEN founding conference, Louvain-la-Neuve, September 1986. Facing the lecture room, from left to right: Bill Jordan, Claus Offe, Philippe Van Parijs, Annie Miller. I am in the upper right looking behind me.
In the same group at Louvain was also Michel Devroey who was a real mentor for me early in my career. Michel was at the time a well-known Marxist economist. Contrary to dogmatic Marxists, his thinking was constantly evolving and he was engaging critically with all forms of economic thinking. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of economics and social sciences, which helped him later on in his research on history of economic thought. He helped me both intellectually and academically, teaching me to challenge my own ideas and to engage with those of others and thinking about how to orient my research. Contrary to Jacques Nagels whose academic connections were more limited, Devroey was extremely connected not only to Marxist economists worldwide but also to various groups of heterodox economists. He made me become part of a group of mostly French economists calling themselves “école de la regulation” with Michel Aglietta and Robert Boyer, but also others such as Jean Cartelier, Olivier Favereau and post-Keynesian economists such as Jan Kregel. The main originality of their research was that they had studied the institutional evolution and transformation of capitalism after the Great Depression. I had read their books with interest. I was in the beginning quite excited to be part of that group, but was somewhat negatively surprised when Michel Aglietta told me he was supervising the thesis of Jacques Sapir and thought very highly of him. I had read Sapir’s work on state capitalism and was following his work on the Soviet economy. I thought he combined a crass ignorance of economics with rather superficial thinking and an unbridled ambition, not a good combination. I wondered how Aglietta, a very smart man, could not see this. After several meetings of the group, Michel Devroey encouraged me to leave, because he thought not much progress was being made and he thought I could make better use of my time. I am very grateful to all the advice he gave me early in my career.
(to be continued)
[1] The idea that expectations were rational, i.e. that agents could make mistakes but were on average correct, was quite controversial at the time but became dominant later on, before being criticized again in recent years.