Abstract
This chapter adopts a historical and scientific perspective to situate the economy, as well as the monetary and financial sphere, within the Earth system and society. It then discusses some of the challenges that the Anthropocene poses to both economic theories and social provisioning systems. Finally, it introduces pluralism (as opposed to monism) as a useful resource with which to apply social justice and sustainability to a renewed economic analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed, at the time, the peasantry worked on two types of land: the land of the lord, and that of the village community (the common).
- 2.
In his book L’Economie du Diable. Chômage et Inflation (1976), the French demographer Alfred Sauvy tells this joke: When John Maynard Keynes knocked at Heaven’s door, Peter asked him, “What good did you do to make up for your sins?” “I gave capitalism 60 years of reprieve, of survival,” Keynes replied. The heavenly authorities are still debating what to do!
- 3.
Some economists argue that institutions are ever-changing, and, by definition, always obsolete. Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), the father of the institutionalist school, wrote in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): “The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow by a selective and coercive process, by acting upon the habitual view of men, and thus by modifying or fortifying a viewpoint or mental attitude derived from the past.”
- 4.
Other more complex but related definitions have been proposed by various authors, such as “the study of the processes that provide the flows of goods and services required by society to support those who participate in its activities” (Gruchy, 1987), or “the study of the process by which material surplus is created, extracted, distributed, and used” (Harcourt, 1986). Another close definition refers to “the study of how societies organize themselves to reproduce human life and enhance its quality” (Nelson, 2009).
- 5.
In fact, the neoclassical concept of market equilibrium (which stipulates that prices adjust themselves in such a way as to balance supply and demand) somehow echoed Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion, which demonstrate that a body is in inertia (in equilibrium) unless a force acts on it, which generates an equal and opposite motion, the oscillation continuing until a new equilibrium is reached.
- 6.
The ‘pretense of knowledge’ was criticized by Friedrich von Hayek in his 1989 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “It seems to me that the failure of economists to guide policy properly is connected with their propensity to imitate the procedures of physical science - an attempt, which in our field can lead to serious mistakes. This is an approach that can be described as ‘scientistic’ (…) it relies on the mechanical and uncritical transposition of habits of thought to areas very different from those in which these habits of thought were formed.”
References
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Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (trans. Germain Garnier), ed. Otto Zeller, 1966.
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Lagoarde-Segot, T. (2023). Reality, the Economy, and Economics. In: Lagoarde-Segot, T. (eds) Ecological Money and Finance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14232-1_1
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