We Need An Economics That Recognizes The Greater Good

Read more: See here

Whenever anybody writes about the failure of mainstream economics as a discipline, they usually have only a handful of issues with the discipline in mind. The failings, however, are systematic. Training in economics has incorrectly been seen as foundational to ordered, logical, rational thinking. Econ 101, as the basic course is often called, also feeds a career track in law and business administration. So what⁘s being taught matters, especially since only a few students will pursue any further studies in economics and any intricacies.

University students learn that on the supply side, people are atomized as production labor (L), and all other means of production are reduced to capital (K). L and K combine in a mathematical equation to produce Q (output). On the demand side, what is produced is unimportant as long as it meets demand, achieves a mythical equilibrium for profit-taking and provides an amorphous satisfaction, called utility. Because we can⁘t measure utility directly, it⁘s equated with consumption of all that output, weighted by market prices (P). The joy of consumption, as we⁘re told, does not distinguish between needs and wants. Externalities, always unpriced (an indirect cost or benefit) to a third party, are ignored. The benefits of growth and accumulation are taken for granted.

The textbook lubricant of this philosophy, as Jon Erickson writes in ⁘The Progress Illusion,⁘ is the belief that putting a price on everything in a way that presumes people and the planet are disposable, tradable and otherwise serves profit-taking and the invention that we call the economy. In a 2007 survey of North American professors, economics stood out as the only field where a majority (57.3%) disagreed with the statement, ⁘In general, interdisciplinary knowledge is better than knowledge obtained by a single discipline.⁘

Abiding by this understanding, we would never confront the catastrophes of today⁘s fossil-fuel-driven climate catastrophe in the form of physical breakdown and social destruction. That matters.