But when JAMB pinched their balloon of lies with just a strike of a needle, they all recoiled in ignominy. Even the lawyer who had been going about boasting and threatening JAMB with a N2 billion character assassination suit couldn’t find his voice after the Board presented its case

 ADEREMI MEDUPIN

An interesting entry point into the economics of death discourse is through addressing the economic costs of illness as attempted by Dorothy P. Rice, Thomas A. Hodgson, and Andrea N. Kopstein,… where they argued that: The economic costs of illness continue to play an important role in decision-making regarding the allocation of resources in the health sector. They represent the monetary burden on society of illness and premature death. Economic costs represent forgone alternatives and are measured in terms of direct and indirect costs.

A caveat by way of calming professional nerves and a confession

Let me quickly enter a caveat concerning the second part of the title of this piece concerning the ‘the death of economics’ in order to prevent being arraigned before the court of professional economists at home and elsewhere on the charge of murder plot. Details of my defense scenario will emerge later but suffice meanwhile to announce that I am not the original issuance of the verdict of professional death. It was Paul Ormerod as the head of the Economic Assessment Unit at The Economist and the Director of Economics at the Henley Centre for Forecasting in England and who had taught economics at the universities of London and Manchester, and was a founder of the consulting firm Volterra that authored the book, The death of Economics in 1994, published by Faber and Faber Limited, London.  An early reviewer of the 230-page book referred to it as “this fabulous little book” while another reviewer described it as “a nice overview of the insanely irrelevant models used to justify free-market policies up to the present day”. Much later, a commentator advanced the position that: “Paul Ormerod achieved notoriety, even opprobrium among orthodox economists, with the publication in 1994 of his best-selling book The Death of Economics”. In the interim, however, permit me to take up the more personal and sobering issue of the death of fellow human beings.

Given my recent loss of two long-standing friends and mutual club members -Dauda Adebimpe Ibrahim-aka Shetty-from Offa in Kwara State, Nigeria, and Abdulkarim Abdulaziz from Ogbomoso, Oyo State, Nigeria- in rapid succession, I should be pardoned for raising the subject of death. However, well ahead of the twin losses, I had been very curious about the phenomenon of death, to the extent that I have a yet to be published manuscript devoted solely to the subject. The opening of the manuscript’s Preface runs as follows:

I have a long list of relations, friends and assorted colleagues of varying connections who could be considered as having died either relatively young or whose death came, somewhat as a surprise when it happened. At a profoundly personal level, how can we not be excited about how one feels, if one knows, at the approach of our death?

In the concluding section of the manuscript, I noted that, While working on the initial draft of this brief text, I ran into a newspaper publication dated July 21, 2022 headlined: “Death is Coming soon-Mike Tyson” under which the famed boxer is quoted as saying that he felt his death inching closer, adding: “We are all gonna die one day, of course. When I look in the mirror, I see those little spots on my face, I say, ‘Wow. That means my expiration date is coming close, really soon. . . . Money doesn’t mean sh*t to me. I always say that to people. They think money will make them happy, they have never had that much money before, because when you do nobody can truly love you . . . “ (accessed at: www.dailytrust.com). From the boxer’s submissions, clear messages on living and dying come across zeroing down to the sobering Biblical refrain about all worldly possessions being nothing but vanity.

As shared by an analyst, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the topic, “Death”, is one of the most avoided conversations. This point is buttressed by the following quote by an anonymous writer, who reported that: “Life asked Death, ‘Why do people love me but hate you?’ Death responded, ‘because you are a beautiful lie, and I am a painful truth'”. This is apt, as many dread to talk about death despite its inevitability, be it in open or private discussions, and if they must, they tend to seek the convenient route, or uttering the ever-evasive dismissal “GOD FORBID!” Death, however, is an inevitable reality with real-life consequences – sometimes in ripples – on many lives, especially the loved ones the demised left behind. The key point in the foregoing is the inevitability yet incomprehensibility of death, while serving as a broad introduction to our theme which addresses two distinct areas in the application of death scenario.

Human loss through death

As already implied, the instigation for this piece in the first place is the loss of two mutual friends. This initial instigation understandably led to how my professional discipline is connected, treated under ‘Economics of Death’, where attention is not the philosophical issues surrounding the subject but its material fallouts, From a philosophical perspective, a challenging question is: what truly happens when a person dies?. There are two possible answers to this question. A simple one and a rather difficult one is that when a person dies, the bereaved lose that life eternally; that is a simple truth. The second not-so-simple answer is that death does not only take away lives, but it also sometimes negatively impacts the demised family. This latter answer links up partially with the economics of death.

The kernel of the economics of death is highlighted in a number of studies. For example, according to research conducted by Paul Gertler titled “The Presence and Presents of Parents: Do Parents Matter for More than their Money?” buttresses this reality when revealed that at least 15% of bereaved children drop out of school compared to 7% of non-bereaved children. Also, according to Forbes, most businesses do not survive after the owner’s death. Averagely, there is a 20% probability of an enterprise failing within four years after its owner’s demise.

Typically, the death of a loved one is a harrowing experience but having to deal with the hardship of survival while grieving is like being caught in a classic case of double jeopardy. At a more aggregated level of analysis, we can see how the way a country’s economic system impacts on the lives of citizens. As illustrated in the article, “The Economics of Life and Death” published in Scientific American of May 1993 by the Economics Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen, as example, “one country can have a much higher gross national product per capita than another; at the same time, it can have much lower life expectancy than its less wealthy counterpart because its citizens have poor access to health care and basic education.”

An interesting entry point into the economics of death discourse is through addressing the economic costs of illness as attempted by Dorothy P. Rice, Thomas A. Hodgson, and Andrea N. Kopstein, in their 1985 article, “The economic costs of illness: A replication and update”, published in the journal, Health Care Financing Review, volume 7, where they argued that:

The economic costs of illness continue to play an important role in decision-making regarding the allocation of resources in the health sector. They represent the monetary burden on society of illness and premature death. Economic costs represent forgone alternatives and are measured in terms of direct and indirect costs. Direct costs are the value of resources that could be allocated to other uses in the absence of disease, and indirect costs are the value of lost output because of cessation or reduction of productivity caused by morbidity and mortality. Morbidity costs are wages lost by people who are unable to work because of illness and disability and an imputed value for those persons too sick to perform their usual housekeeping services. Mortality costs are the present value of future earnings lost by people who die prematurely.

When I asked Google if human life is quantifiable, the provocative result I got ran thus: In Western countries and other liberal democracies, estimates for the value of a statistical life typically range from US$1 million—US$10 million; for example, the United States FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at US$7.5 million in 2020.

In the USA during the Covid-19 debacle, there was a radio programme, Planet Money (accessible at: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/835571843)on which the value of human life was debated, comprising two hosts and a guest- from which, with editorial touch, the following extracts are made:

KENNY MALONE, HOST: OK, then how much exactly is a life worth in dollars? It is a sticky question, and it happens to be very familiar to economists.

BETSEY STEVENSON: When people say, how could you put a value on life, I say, how could you not? How could you pretend people are valueless?

MALONE: The sticky question at the core here is: How do economists put a dollar value on a single human life?

GONZALEZ: We can tell you they've got one. They say a life is worth about $10 million. But to explain how they got that number, that's a whole episode.

GONZALEZ: So the government has to run this math, and to do that, they need to say a lost life is worth some amount of money. And up until the '80s, here's how they did that. They asked, what is the cost of death? Just an average person's death, both the medical costs associated with that death and - and this is the important part - their lost earnings.

MALONE: Yeah. This is a version of how courts sometimes handle wrongful death lawsuits. When somebody dies early, there are all of these years of life when that person would have been working and earning money but isn't. And so the court will sometimes give a family all of that lost future income.

GONZALEZ: This calculation was called the cost of death. And in 1982, the average cost of death came out to around $300,000. So that would be, like, $800,000 today.

MALONE: But $300,000, that was the number back in 1982 that the government would use to evaluate a new regulation, to figure out if the lives saved were worth the regulation cost.

MALONE: Think about what you are implying by using this number - that a person is only worth what they make at work? Like, that is clearly going to be a low number, too low of a number. You know, it makes no sense in that, you know, if you look at people who don't have income coming in, are their lives worth nothing?

GONZALEZ: Economists have been working on this. And it's tricky because, like, what are you going to do, just ask people, how much is your life worth? They're just going to say, my life is priceless. It's worth an infinite amount of money.

MALONE: This is one of the flaws with this method of putting a value on life. It doesn't factor in grief, or how, or when somebody dies.

In the same neoclassical framework, to Insuranceopedia, the economic value of an individual life is the amount calculated from one’s yearly income, the income one gets leading to retirement, and other variables (savings, assets, etc.) to determine the financial loss a family will suffer in the case of a family member’s death. This calculation will help determine the amount of insurance that a person qualifies to receive. On the platform of Open Archive, under an entry titled, “How Much is a Human Life Worth? A Systematic Review”, published on May 25, 2021, we are informed how “monetary valuation of a human life – the value of a statistical life (VSL) – is used in a broad range of policy areas resulting in a wide range of VSL estimates”. For elaboration and obvious rationalization of insurance, Insuranceopedia explains:

The death of an income provider in the family economically affects the entire household. To protect them from economic devastation, a member, specifically the breadwinner, gets an insurance policy that is determined from the amount of money that is lost if he or she dies. This is arrived at by computing the annual income, the projected generated income until retirement, and other factors such as savings and assets. While this is one method of knowing how much insurance a person should get, there is also another method which, perhaps, is more versatile because it also absorbs the financial effects of death. This method is called the needs analysis approach. To put it simply, this method calculates the expenses a family needs in the future. This includes, but is not limited to, education, legal fees, child care, other possible household obligations, and loss of income due to an employed family member’s death.

But, realistically speaking, is it not murderous to put a price tag on human life as neoclassical economists are wont to do in their typical cost-benefit analysis of projects scenario? It is in the spirit of this basic question that mainstream economics is dismissed as dead on the charge of irrelevance to true human essence that is, not being human-centred. For reason of logic, it makes sense to take a brief look at the trade in human parts as a way of peeping into the value of human life as a wholesome unit.

A note on trade in human organs

Organ trade constitutes the sale and purchase of organs for financial or material gain. According to Frederike Ambagtsheer and Roos Bugter in their article, “The organization of the human organ trade: a comparative crime script analysis”, published in Crime, Law and Social Change (2023), the growing scarcity of human organs has led to an illegal organ market that is proliferating globally. Although reliable figures of the trade’s scope are lacking, the World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that approx. 5000 illegal transplants are performed annually. In 2014 the Council of Europe established a new convention against ‘Trafficking in Human Organs’ which calls for a broad prohibition of virtually all commercial dealings in organs. Accordingly, sales that occur with the consent of donors are considered to be ‘trafficking’ regardless of the circumstances involved. This may help to explain how a former Nigerian Senator served jail in Britain. As noted by Peter Andrews in his post on “The Value of a Human Life”, due to the unparalleled value of human organs, in addition to the potential for exploitation of impoverished individuals, institutions like the World Health Organisation (WHO) insist that organ donations should remain altruistic. Incidentally, studies show that all organ trade cases that have been exposed to date, reveal that legal institutions including blood banks, hospitals, clinics and their staff were directly or indirectly involved in facilitating illegal transplants.

All the aforesaid in this section is background to our primary interest: acquiring an objective perspective on the estimated value of life in the inhumane market economy, that is, putting aside the moral questions of why and how come that the market economy is pricing even our body parts and health in the first place. Of course, there may be conceptual arguments around whether the sum of the parts can be equal to the whole. Dr. Bertalan Mesko, PhD-in The Medical Futurist of June 9, 2022, has provided an insight, noting that: “The world is a giant supermarket where you find price tags on literally everything. A rare butterfly can cost up to a grand on eBay, an acre on the surface of the Moon is available from $24.90 – although we strongly discourage you from actually buying it, and your organs are also for sale. If you could harvest every organ and chemical in your body, you could make a $45 million. But in reality, Medical Transcription estimates, the average price of a human dead body is more likely to fetch around $550,000 (with a few key body parts driving up the price)”. Here we are-dear reader; how much is your life worth? Trust me, I don’t mean to be rude. The medic then entered the insightful observation that: “So, it seems that your body parts are already labelled with a price tag. Scary, isn’t it? But in terms of the pricing practice, there’s not much difference when it comes to our overall health and life either. The distinction lies in that organs with price tags are not so visible to us as the price of therapies, drugs, or prosthetic body parts”. So, we are still left with the question: when a person dies, what do we consider his life to be worth in monetary terms? But how about the death of economics?

Back to Paul Ormerod’s The Death of Economics

A befitting way to approach the justification or otherwise of the verdict, The Death of Economics by Paul Ormero is to bring out its essential argument as done by the publisher with the following critical remarks, that:

Ormerod’s aim was to provide a critique of conventional economics which was accessible to general readers. He described orthodox economics with its assumptions of a rational behaviour in a mechanical, linear world of equilibrium as in many ways an empty box. Its understanding of the world is similar to that of the physical sciences in the Middle Ages. A few insights have been obtained which will stand the test of time, but they are very few indeed, and the whole basis of conventional economics is deeply flawed. No wonder the prescriptions offered by conventional economists regarding big questions like inflation and unemployment are, according to Ormerod, at best misleading and at worst dangerously wrong. A secondary objective of the book was to suggest how economics could be developed to give a better understanding of how the world actually operates.

When David Heathfield undertook a review of the book on the pages of The Economic Journal, Vol 105 in July 1995, he concluded on the note that : “This is a book written by an experienced applied economist and addressed to the general public with the intention of ‘blowing the whistle’ on the economics profession.”

The verdict that economics is dead has been carried to finality by Fergal Shortall, titling his review piece boldly as: “Economics: An Obituary”. This reviewer opened his effort with the following humbling remark: “It is difficult to come to this book with an open mind. Its title suggests a breadth of ambition worthy only of someone with a middle initial, a professorship at Harvard and a Nobel prize, and yet Paul Ormerod is not a household name, even in utility-maximizing households. Furthermore it is a slim airport paperback addressed to the general public not a weighty two-volume magnum opus. In short, it seems at first glance to lack the gravitas necessary to tackle such a topic. However, let us reserve judgment for the moment.” He then drew attention to ‘the present state of economics’, and how Ormerod begins by painting a dark picture of the world in general, and of economics in particular. Recessions, mass unemployment, currency instability and volatile economic cycles have all gone forecasted by economists. The failure of practitioners to predict events of major importance leads him to wonder whether the subject can be of any use at all. Ormerod gives a potted history of the major economic theorists of the past, Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Keynes, emphasizing the scope of their talents and noting their determination to root the subject in the real world. Against this, he juxtaposes the position of modern economists, whom he says have lost touch with reality and in fact 'positively extol esoteric irrelevance.' The profession has become more concerned with the elegance of their theories than their practical implications.

In this vein, of all places, we find displayed on the IMF Blog the acceptance of a “growing disenchantment with the economics profession and calls for the discipline to change to better reflect individual and societal values”, under the topic: Beyond Efficiency: A More-human Economics, authored by Gita Bhatt as shared on March 4, 2024. Similarly, Harvard’s Dani Rodrik has contended that existing policy models are inadequate to address such challenges as climate change, inclusion, and economic development. As an analyst puts it, the orthodoxy of economics, trapped in an idealised, mechanistic view of the world, is powerless to assist in the face of the world economy in crisis, characterized by stagflation: the combination of inflation and unemployment. This is without prejudice to the fact that, academically, the discipline seems to have developed enormously, the mathematical sophistication especially having increased in terms both of theoretical work and of the approved methodologies of applied economics. However, in reality, as Ormerod captured it in the Preface to his controversial but illuminating and challenging text in focus, even to the intelligent member of the public, economics is often intimidating. Its practitioners pronounce with great confidence in the media, and have erected around the discipline a barrier of jargon and mathematics which makes the subject difficult to penetrate for the non-initiated. But as John Maynard Keynes himself observed, “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” This is a way to avoid the death of economics, as presently constituted and oriented. I come in peace, please.

ADEREMI MEDUPIN

The Door of Conceptual Consensus as Point of Entry

For the avoidance of doubt and as a means to facilitating consensus, let us display the key concepts relevant to our theme, namely: economics and religion. There are varying definitions of economics-ranging from the sensible to the naïve, but we limit ourselves to just a few.

To the Department of Economics, University of Illinois, “Economics is concerned with the creation, consumption, and transfer of wealth. The study of economics encompasses the major areas of microeconomics, which explores how people and firms produce and consume goods and services, and macroeconomics, which explores mass economic progress and inter-country trade”. The offer from the American Economic Association incidentally appears rather vacuous, inadvertently limiting its scope to the micro level of engagement, as it states on its website, that; “Economics can be defined in a few different ways. It’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives, or the study of decision-making.

It often involves topics like wealth and finance, but it’s not all about money. Economics is a broad discipline that helps us understand historical trends, interpret today’s headlines, and make predictions about the coming years”. Then there is this rendition on Google, that: “Economics is the study of how goods and services are produced, distributed, and consumed, and how economic agents interact with each other. It's a social science that's concerned with the creation, consumption, and transfer of wealth”.

In none of these definitions is there explicit reference to interest groups or social classes or the sharing of the wealth produced in the economy. Even the rendition by the so-called ‘father of economics’, Adam Smith, a Scottish philosopher and economist, defined economics as "an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations", clearly with gaze on the macro level of interest. To him, “Economics is the science of wealth”-no more, no less-meaning that economics aims at generating wealth both individually and for the nation as a whole, that is all. Incidentally and instructively, the most widely shared definition in contemporary times is the one offered by Lionel Robbins that sees economics as “the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses”; emphasis on scarcity, no reference to sharing. Transcending the purely technical perception of economics to the more ennobling standard of moral imperatives, religion institutively rears its head for consideration.

Coming to religion, an online dictionary defines it, as: “the belief in and worship of a superhuman power or powers, especially a God or gods”. The definition provided by Wikipedia is more robust such that it facilitates the smooth linking of the two key concepts of our theme and therefore helpful to the discussion; the medium notes: “Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviours and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophesies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.

Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings”. Relevantly, this definition highlights ‘morals, beliefs, world views’ which provide the conceptual framework for anchoring the linkage between economics and religion. Take the central one- morals, which is of direct affiliation with religion, also connected to economics contextually; but first, the religion connection.

Religion and Morality

From the August 22, 2024 piece, “Do you need religion to be a moral person?” authored by Harvey Whitehouse and shared on the Big Think platform, we are exposed to the logic of the following assertions: i) While some moral institutions, like deference to authority, may align with religious beliefs, the link between religion and morality is not inherent; ii) Scientific research suggests that morality is rooted in universal principles of cooperation, not necessarily tied to religious beliefs-this is without prejudice to the finding in a survey conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Centre, that in answer to the question ‘Do you need to believe in God to be moral?’ the overwhelming majority of people outside Europe said yes; and iii) A study across 60 diverse societies found that seven cooperative principles, such as loyalty, reciprocity, and respect for property, are universally judged as morally good, with rare exceptions rooted in specific cultural contexts.

It was Sandi Toksvig who posed two challenging questions, namely: a) where does morality come from? –and b) why should I consider others? The thoughtful and honest answer offered is that these are ultimate moral questions, and like all ultimate questions, can be extremely difficult to answer. To the first question, the answer provided is that, when discussing what is right and wrong or making decisions, we often don’t worry about where our moral values came from; instead, we are more concerned with what they are and how to apply them in a given situation. This is where the real work of morality is manifested: in living life. However, if we take the trouble to consider where they came from, the tendency is to credit our upbringing or our education.

But where did the moral values of our parents and teachers, and their parents and teachers, come from? One answer to this is that moral values come from religions, transmitted through sacred texts and religious authorities. In this vein, some people worry that a general move away from religious faith will bring about some kind of moral breakdown in society; but, a humanist will argue that moral values are not dependent on religion, which is a highly contentious position especially given our increasingly secular society.

Concerning the second question on why we should consider others, to the author, the only possible answer is the humanist one – because we are naturally social beings; we live in communities; and life in any community, from the family outwards, is much happier, and fuller, and richer if the members are friendly and co-operative than if they are hostile and resentful. Whatever position we take on this interesting debate, it is obvious that once we associate enhanced human productivity with harmonious co-existence, it becomes easy to see how economics is unavoidably linked to morality.

Economics and Morality

On the platform of the Russel Kirk Center, while dealing with the subject, “The Moral Foundations of Economics”, sometime in 2007, the relationship between economics and morality was graphically displayed even as some people would like to separate the two. The truth, however, is the practical impossibility of the separation which can be seen in the fact that most men and women recognize the inevitability of some sort of moral principles as an economy cannot function without them except on a negligible scale.

In essence, moral beliefs, sometimes called moral values, make production, trading, saving, and the whole gamut of economic activities, possible. Put differently, all human productions and institutions have some connection with moral ideas and moral habits. An everyday mundane but very concrete example is the rearing of pigs for sale and or consumption-which is beyond consideration in a typical Muslim community-among whom pork is a forbidden meal. The bottom line of the argument here is that material prosperity depends upon moral convictions and moral dealings. Adam Smith, the acknowledged father of economic science, was a professor of moral philosophy-and he took it for granted that moral beliefs would affect economic behaviour. At the minimum, and as illustration, any economy that functions well relies upon a high degree of honesty. In this vein, we recall that many commercial contracts are oral, rather than written-registering the primacy of trust which primary foundation is presumed honesty.

This brings to mind the conclusion from Russell Kirk’s 1989 textbook, Economics: Work and Prosperity which is worth noting given its practical relevance to contemporary times of dubious-that is, dishonest, economic agents, acting in gross violation of the virtue of honesty; it reads: Those societies in which theft, cheating, and lying are common do not ordinarily develop successful economies. If production and distribution can be carried on only under armed protectors and without any certainty of being paid, then little will be produced and distributed above the level of subsistence. When bargains are not kept and loans are not repaid, prices are high and interest rates are higher—which discourages production and distribution. Another moral quality or habit important for the success of an economy is the custom of doing good work—of producing goods of high quality.

The modern economist of conscience, would be expectedly disturbed by the unfolding moral degeneration of economics discipline, pointedly captured by Hans J. Blommestein in the paper, “Why is Ethics Not Part of Modern Economics and Finance? A Historical Perspective”, published in Dans Finance & Bien Commun 2006/1 (No 24). In that paper, the author is seen lamenting over how, “once upon a time, moral considerations occupied a prominent place in economic studies.

However, later, ethics was considered not any longer a legitimate object of serious study in analytical economics. Instead, in today’s dominant analytical models in economics and finance, economic agents act in a morally neutral fashion. Ethics as such is not part of the core explanation of the efficiency and viability of (financial) markets”. In other words, the role of ethics in modern economics and finance has become insignificant, objectively peripheral. Indeed, it has taken no less a personality than John Maynard Keynes -one of the greatest three economists in history-the other two being Adam Smith and Karl Marx, to force this issue of moral degeneration of contemporary intellectual endeavour in economics discipline on to visibility and consideration, when he argued soberly but forcefully, in a prophetic mood, that: I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.

In this Keynesian vein, Arjo Klamer –of Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam, had titled his 2016 paper, published in Schmollers Jahrbuch 136, unambiguously as “Economics Is a Moral Science”, arguing for the imperative of transforming economics discipline into a moral science., projecting with hope, that, “We economists would cease to be cynical about the intentions of individual agents and focus on doing the right thing.

We would abandon our instrumentalist orientation where means get all our attention and the ends virtually none, and focus on what makes people truly happy. In other words, economics would be the discipline concerned with the good life and the good society, just as it was before the economics of Lionel Robbins, Jan Tinbergen and Paul Samuelson”. In short, pleading for a return to the era before the triumph of neoclassical economic paradigm-with focus on so-called positive economics (what is) and derisive attention to normative economics (what should be). It’s pertinent at this juncture to recall the legendary EF Schumacher-author of the groundbreaking book, Small Is Beautiful published in 1963 who in response to a question, insisted, that: “Economics without ethics is a body without a soul, a well without water, a flower without fragrance”; adding, "In my opinion there is no distinction between spirituality and economics.

In the west we have separated spiritual values from economics, and as a result we lack happiness and contentment.” It is this model of Schumacher’s perspective that informed the crafting of the article by Satish Kumar, titled: “Economics without Ethics is wrong”, published by The Resurgent Trust on April 27, 2023. If, as we should, raise this verdict of economics being a moral discipline to apply to the economist especially in Africa and the Global South in general, the logical question becomes this: what should be the role of the intellectual in society?

The Role of Intellectuals in Society

Understandably, a lot has been written and publicly shared on the role of the intellectual in society. For example, on the Google page we find this interesting and inspiring entry, to the effect that: “Intellectuals are those who have diverse wisdom and foresight, who apply their intellect and forward-looking visions for the purpose of awakening society”. They are generators of ideas and stand a good chance in normal circumstances of exerting influence on public policy across diverse spheres of life. When they live by the expressed mandate, they objectively promote public good and can be seen as public intellectuals. Unfortunately, for personal and ideological reasons, we find intellectuals joining forces with the economic and political oppressors to perpetuate the sufferings of the masses through the rationalizing ideas they advance.

On the platform of Braincrave.com, we read about an elaborate and high-level lamentation that goes far beyond the focus of this piece, but nonetheless conveying subtle relevance, which is that, “Generally, the world is intellectually bankrupt, thinking that violence is always the answer to solve the world's problems. Intellectual dishonesty is everywhere. Although there are some intellectual leaders who promote a morality other than the initiation of force, theft, murder, dishonesty, tyranny, and comparable destruction, by and large, the political and economic leaders have descended into the morass of simply who to sacrifice next”. I seek the reader’s permission to highlight the role of an economist who fits squarely into the status of an anti-people intellectual; his name is Milton Friedman.

Case Study of a Morally Bankrupt Economist

Upfront, I confess my bias as I accuse late Professor Milton Friedman of crime on two distinct charges albeit at interrelated levels: one, at the basic philosophical level of ideological indifference to morality and two, at the level of a specific case of his role in Chile. Friedman wrote his seminal essay, "A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," published in The New York Times in 1970, arguing that the social responsibility of business is (solely) to increase its profits, and contending therefore that businesses bear no moral obligation to society or the public at large. Coming to Chile as our case study, we must remember the role of a group of Chilean economists, known as the “Chicago Boys,”-led by same Milton Friedman- who wanted free markets.

As a backdrop, we recall the 1972 address by Salvador Allende, then President of Chile, a country where Copper was central to the economy as oil and gas is central to that of Nigeria, in which he made the following instructive point: Apart from the importance of the economic sphere… there is also an important political consideration. With the step that we are going to take, we will break with our dependency, our economic dependency. That means political independence. We will be the owners of our own future, the true sovereigns of our own destiny. What is done with our copper will depend on us, on our capacity, on our effort, and on our sacrificial dedication to ensure that copper in Chile is produced for the progress of our country. The people will have to understand – and they do understand – that this is a great national challenge, and that it is not only the mine workers that have to respond to this, but the Chilean people as a whole.

As rightly recalled by the editors of Tricontinental, in their September 5, 2023 edition, in the report titled “The Coup against the Third World: Chile, 1973”: Allende’s statement at the third session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), held in Santiago de Chile in 1972, is of particular interest. At this conference, President Allende outlined the position of his government and the objectives of its international economic relations policy from a revolutionary perspective that retains its relevance today. In Allende’s words, this position sought ‘to replace an obsolete and radically unjust economic and trade order with an equitable one that is based on a new concept of man and human dignity and to reformulate an international division of labour that is intolerable for the less advanced countries and that obstructs their progress while favouring only the affluent nations’.

The publishers also correctly observed that “this means that the programmatic, political, and ideological issues cited by Allende remain valid and necessary in all societies suffering from the consequences of imperialism”. The report went further to recall how:

On 11 September 1973, reactionary sections of the Chilean army, led by General Augusto Pinochet, left the barracks and overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity coalition. In the melee around the attack on the presidential palace known as La Moneda, Allende died. The military and other security forces began an assault on the organised sectors of society, making mass arrests and setting in place a regime of repression, which included permanent centres of torture and assassination.

It is pertinent to remind the reader that The Popular Unity government, led by Salvador Allende as President expected to use the increased revenues from copper exports to fund its programme to transform life in Chile. And so it did, instituting healthcare, educational, and agrarian reforms, constructing homes for the working class and peasantry, and implementing a programme that delivered half a litre of free milk per day to children.

By 1973, 3.6 million children received milk through this scheme, dramatically reducing malnutrition rates among children, which, before Popular Unity took office, hovered around twenty percent. The import of this historical recall is that, following the unpopular CIA-sponsored military coup against Allende in September 1973, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys whom he backed to the hilt, supported the power usurpers around General Augustus Pinochet to unleash a barrage of anti-people economic policies on Chile. Milton Friedman –a Noble laureate in economics-died in 2006, occasioning a barrage of conflicting sentiments, one strand represented by the following from John Kozy in his “Milton Friedman in Memoriam”: Milty was an enigma. Supremely intelligent and completely dishonest intellectually. He advocated economic freedom for the few at the expense of many. He lived in a democracy but really preferred tyranny and an established aristocracy of the wealthy.

What he and his colleagues at the University of Chicago did to the people of Chile and countless other multitudes really cannot and should never be forgiven. He helped create an economic holocaust that consigned whole peoples to economic concentration camps, many of which still exist. He was an exploiter of humanity, a thoroughly evil person.

Yet to uncritical economists, he is somewhat of a saint. Heilbroner was right when he called economics the dismal science. If Milton now rests in peace, cosmic justice has gone awry. Of course, only a glimpse of the Friedman essence can be got from his own statement that serves as justification for this representative anger against the man whose core argument was predicated on his strong neoliberal belief and argument that that governments should limit themselves to three functions, namely: military defense of the nation, enforce contracts between individuals, and protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property.

He was an extremist in defense of an unregulated market, not caring one bit about how its blind forces may turn out, as they often do, undermine human welfare through intolerable in equality and social misery especially in the context of third world economies epitomized by Chile where Milton Friedman-inspired economic policies turned the vast majority of the citizens into victims. Kozy had actually prefaced this obituary with the more definite tone of disapproval with the following words: Well, the world of free-market economists has lost its Uncle Milty.

When I heard the news, I was reminded of one of Mark Twain's quips that went something like this: When a person he was not very fond of died, he sent the following note to the widow: I regret not having been able to attend the funeral, but I want you to know I highly approved of the event. I need not add anything to these lines except perhaps, as evidence of my own endorsement, to say that Prof Milton Friedman should have died much earlier.

I come in peace, please.

... I politely invite the reader to recall and revisit the patriotic intellectual who pronounced the instructive verdict on onlookers in a conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed as being in effect either cowards or traitors.