Economic Geography

Economic geography minus the economics
Thanks to these influences the PCTEG is economic only in a thematic sense (it
uses the word ‘economy’ occasionally). It’s students are unlikely to have any but
a very tentative grasp of how economic theories are constructed and used, or of
geographic–economic history beyond the comic book categories of Fordism,
PostFordism, Knowledge Economy etc. They are unlikely to be familiar with the
nuances of the debates over capitalism’s macroeconomic and growth tendencies
and its cyclical trends. Despite all the deconstructable ambivalences that run
through those debates, like any, this means they are missing something.
Economics, from Adam Smith onwards, was distinguished by its concern with the
emergent properties arising from organising production and consumption through
markets. The common PCTEG claim that this meant treating the economy as a
machine misses the point entirely. Economic inquiry (liberal or Marxist) aimed
to explore how machine-like properties could arise; under what conditions can the
whole turn out to be much greater than, and so different from, its parts? The clas-
sical economic tradition also gave a central place, at least in principle, to the cultural
embeddedness of the economy, as even a superficial glance at Smith, Marx, Bukharin,
Keynes, or Sen would show. For ‘culture’ defined what counts as a commodity and
a market in the first place. You would never know this from the more extreme cele-
brants of the PCTEG, who present a neo-Whiggish graph of intellectual history in
which it appears as the crowning peak, rather than another haze in a dip.
The PCTEG pretends it has turned economics’ thematic questions and analyt-
ical insights to mush in the acid bath of textualism, and invented its cultural ones
anew. But it’s a con trick. When Thrift and Olds announce ‘the full complexity
of modern economies only become apparent when we move outside of what are
often still, considered to be the “normal” territories of economic inquiry’ (Thrift
and Olds 2004: 59) they are not reporting a fact, merely demanding that atten-
tion be redirected from one kind of complexity to another that they prefer (often
those where there is no chance that research might ever arrive at some kind of
practically adequate answer). This doesn’t necessarily bring complexity to view at
all, though it does bring into view the prejudices of the authors. Ten years ago
Stuart Hall warned of the danger of flipping from a naive economism to an even
more naive culturalism.
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PCTEG all too often proves his point.
Extracting from economic geography of any way of grasping arguments 
for this or that market intervention other than by a discursive reduction 
to those for or against, has left it with little grasp of economic development, or
much to say about policy. Assertions by figures such as Castells, Sassen, and
others, for example that a city or regions’ past and future, and its policy priorities,
are explained by its ‘competitiveness’, have been accepted as gospel. But they are
theoretically incoherent (prosperity is a function of productivity, whether this
The new imperial geography
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corresponds to ‘competitiveness’ is entirely contingent on circumstances) and
empirically question-begging (the development of the finance centre of London,
for example, is unlikely to explain more than a tiny part of the London labour
market, though it has affected its planning and its skyline). To take another
example, the current global house price boom is a major factor in the current
frenzied round of urbanisation and ‘regeneration’. But the PCTEG offers neither
the techniques nor the motivation for a macro analysis of circuits of capital
(which might explore how this is connected to neo-liberalism’s redirecting of
government intervention from tax and job-creation to credit-driven consump-
tion management), or a more local inquiry along the lines of the questions in the
introduction (which might show how it is instantiated locally, and how it might
be moderated a little here or there).