The Quest for Prosperity: Reframing Political Economy
256
The Quest for Prosperity: Reframing Political Economy
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Overview
Envisioning a different mode of economic relations requires a rethinking of the classical frames of references we commonly take for granted. The implicit assumptions that we carry into critical debates are the stumbling blocks for finding useful solutions to age-old economic problems. And these impediments constrict our political imagination.
This book asks what are these frames of references? How many of them are worthy of retaining, while others might be discarded? And what new framings should be adopted in order to bring about a less crisis-prone and morally acceptable mode of human interaction?
Each chapter interrogates a different frame of reference, including culturally-embedded concepts of human nature, scarcity and abundance, markets, and the human condition. Examining their historical anchoring and the ways in which they have become confining for the realities of the postmodern world in which we currently live, it is shown that they have become so familiar that they are assumed rather than critically examined in most discussions of political economy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783489312 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Abundance/Scarcity
From the Garden of Eden to Utopia
Most historical or historically informed texts that deal with theories of political economy, from John Locke and Adam Smith to more contemporary ones by Milton Friedman and behavioral economists, assume that scarcity is our natural condition. If indeed natural resources are scarce, then certain other factors are bound to frame the discussion of production, distribution, and consumption. For example, questions of efficient resource allocation become paramount, whether the good under examination is energy or food. But if scarcity is only an assumption rather than a reality, and if instead abundance is the natural condition under which to make political and economic decisions, then many theories and the policy decisions based on them should be changed. My interest here is to outline the genealogy of this frame of reference and suggest that particular ideological interests have foregrounded scarcity rather than abundance. Though offered as brief vignettes, what follows is supposed to offer a picture of natural abundance that somehow has disappeared for a long time, until revisited more recently under the guise of technological innovations, industrial and digital.
I: DEFINITIONS
Among the definitions of scarcity found in the Oxford English Dictionary, one can note those associated with positive attributes concerned with saving and preservation, such as frugality and parsimony. But amid these definitions one can also find some associated with negative attributes, such as niggardliness, stinginess, and meanness. Regardless of one's inclination to consider the term either positively or negatively, one can appreciate the ubiquity of the term scarcity and the ambiguous meaning it has in certain social, political, and economic practices. Should society abhor scarcity and try to overcome it whenever and however possible? Or, should society resign itself to the "facts of life or nature" and accept scarcity as unavoidable? Should scarcity be welcomed and manipulated to some advantage? Or, should it be overcome to "create" abundance?
More useful definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED ) emphasize the "insufficiency of supply; smallness of available quantity, number, or amount, in proportion to the need or demand." In support of this particular definition, John S. Mill's Political Economy is quoted: "things which cannot be increased ad libitum in quantity, and which therefore, if the demand goes beyond a certain amount, command a scarcity value" (III, iv, section 6, (1876 edition), 283). A comment about value is added: "an enhanced value due to scarcity." This particular definition may be troubling to most economists, since the adjective enhanced makes no sense. Either there is value due to scarcity — scarcity is defined as lending value to things — or there is no value; what does it mean to have "enhanced value"? In addition, the OED uses the following terms to identify scarcity: "comparative fewness ... rare," "scantiness," "inadequate provision of the necessities of life — hardship." Here the emphasis is on the problem inherent in certain "things": they cannot be "increased" at will. Things, such as water and air, were considered unproblematic for a long time, so that the notion of scarcity could not be applied to them. Singling out water and air has become a historical anachronism: water and air alike are scarce in the sense described above. So, does that mean that water and air "command a scarcity value" in the sense of "an enhanced value"? Since the answer is affirmative, one must wonder if there is any "thing" left today that will fall outside of Mill's classification. If the answer is negative, according to most environmentalists, then this classification is of no help; it is too broad: everything is scarce by definition.
Can Mill's definition be rescued if scarcity is distinguished from shortage, for example, in the sense that there can be shortage of everything but only certain things are considered scarce? According to Janos Kornai (1980, Introduction), the notions of scarcity and abundance are more fundamental than the notion of shortage. He is not interested in describing or criticizing a system of economic activities, capitalist or socialist, which fails to accomplish a set of goals, such as bringing to an equilibrium the production and consumption of the system, the supply and demand portions of the economy. The notion of shortage is exclusively concerned with the failure of the system, and is therefore an internal problem, not one through which a critique of the whole theoretical framework of political economy can be handled. One may argue that an internal critique, what critical theorists call an immanent critique, can provide insights fundamental to the very conception of the system/model/theory that is criticized. Just as in the case of shortages (chronic or temporary) in a socialist society, one would be providing a parallel but not identical examination of the problem of unemployment and underutilization of resources in a capitalist society.
So, the notion of scarcity is different from that of shortage at least in the sense that the former is considered more fundamental than the latter. More fundamental in what sense? According to Kornai, in the sense of being able to correct shortages, either of capitalist or socialist economies, while being unable to overcome scarcity. Scarcity, then, is not an artificial human construct or invention, but is understood as a natural given. However, phrasing the question of scarcity in empirical terms has itself been open to critical evaluations over the years. That is, it remains unclear what the empirical status of scarcity was, is, and will be.
II: THE GARDEN OF EDEN
The Bible is similarly confusing on these questions. While the narrative of creation in Genesis bespeaks of abundance, and the picture in the Garden of Eden is considered an ideal materialized by divine will for the sake of Adam and Eve, there is also the story of the expulsion from that very Garden. Once Adam and Eve leave the state of abundance, where they roam freely and need not work for their subsistence, Adam's curse is that he should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Does this curse turn the human condition around, and change the state of bliss into a state of torture? Must humanity indeed labor continuously and undergo hardship in order to survive in this world? Is this a condemnation or a justification of what actually exists; namely, limited resources for which humanity competes?
Most accounts of the Garden of Eden focus on the serpent's seduction of Eve and her seduction of Adam in turn to eat from the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge and their expulsion, or what the Christian tradition calls the Fall (from grace). The running assumptions about the Garden are first, that there is abundance in the garden where "the Lord God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad. A river issued from Eden to water the garden"; and second, Adam was placed "in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it" (Genesis 2:8, 15). What we may miss from the narrative in our theological haste is the fact that though the garden offers abundance for Adam (and eventually Eve), there is an expectation that he will "till it and tend it." What does this entail? As we learn much later when original sin is committed (the eating from the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge), and Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden, Adam's punishment is "by toil shall you eat of it" and "by the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat" (ibid., 17, 19). It's unclear if abundance has been replaced with scarcity, yet it's quite clear that the custodial responsibilities have been replaced with a cursed existence of hard labor. Leisure has been forever denied in the name of sweat and death, "to dust you shall return" (ibid.).
The image of abundance accepted as the starting point for all the Abrahamic religions is striking not simply because it begins with the opulence of abundance, but because it sets in place a divinely sanctioned starting point for humanity, one that was squandered away. With this in mind, Christopher Jennings argues that the ancient and mystical "Judeo-Christian proposition that history is bookended by golden ages" was coupled with the modern, rational one "that the human race is advancing ineluctably toward a perfection of our own making" (2016, 4). Just as humanity began in the Garden of Eden, so will its worthy candidates end up in Heaven: both are understood as idyllic places where abundance and immortality are guaranteed. It's in the "middle" space and time where humanity confronts scarcity and hardship, pain and suffering. Theologically, the question isn't limited to the relationship between humanity and the divine (where disobedience and lying fractured the intimacy of the two), but is also informed by the human quest for knowledge (realizing nakedness in the garden and eventually more sophisticated attempts to understand the universe).
Between the beginning of life as we know it and its eventual death (return to the dust of the earth), generation after generation must endure work for the sake of survival. There can be no reliance on an omnipotent power for prosperity. If we pay less attention to the theological message and focus on the idea that divine creation brought about a state of abundance, we may also appreciate the Native American view of humanity as custodians of the great Earth gifted to them by the gods. It was clear to Native Americans that "the Creator of life" gave them their lands and that their chiefs and tribal councils have "the responsibility for protecting the lands of our children and the unborn generations to come" (Hill 1992, 171). Unlike the biblical relationship between the divine and humanity, for Native Americans there is a continuity of abundance for which they are responsible as caretakers and which they therefore cannot privately own or tender to newcomers and outsiders. (In this book I use the term Native Americans interchangeably with First People, Indigenous Americans, American Indians, and others.)
III: THE ANCIENTS
For some historians, scarcity in the sense of overpopulations has been an empirical reality as early as the sixth century BC. Barry Cunliffe, for example, quotes from Herodotus the incident that led to the establishment of new colonies, in this case off the coast of Libya, with the advice given by the oracle of Delphi. According to Cunliffe, colonization was a standard response by society "when population level approaches or exceeds the holding capacity of the land" (1988, 12–13). Though the conditions that determine the "holding capacity of the land" may vary from city to city, from one island to another, there seemed to be a common appreciation of the need to migrate, to form new cities and colonies, so that issues of scarcity will not undermine the development and well-being of the population.
The sense of the given environment, an environment in which human beings must learn to live with whatever is available to them, has also been discussed by Plato and Aristotle. For both the question was not what is scarce or found in abundance. Rather, it was a question of social and political economic arrangements and structures through which the questions of scarcity and abundance are answered indirectly. And the important question for both Plato and Aristotle is the legitimation of the construction of a city/polis in terms of self-sufficiency.
Plato argues in The Republic that "a city comes to be ... because not one of us is self-sufficient, but needs many things" (369b). The multitude of needs we and others have are reciprocally fulfilled. From this argument, incidentally, the notion of the division of labor, as it eventually makes its way to Adam Smith, arises already here quite naturally. Aristotle echoes Plato's sense of justification for the establishment of an ordered city when he says in Politics that "now self-sufficiency [which it is the object of the state to bring about] is the end, and so the best; [and on this it follows that the state brings about the best, and is therefore natural, since nature always aims at bringing about the best]" (Politics 1253a).
Among the ancient Greeks whose insights have remained the starting point for most Euro-American thinking, we find Aristotle's Politics as offering some clues to their view of what nature is supposed to provide humanity. Aristotle explains that "it is the business of nature to furnish subsistence for each being brought into the world; and this is shown by the fact that the offspring of animals always gets nourishment from the residuum of the matter that gives it its birth" (ibid., 1258a). The language here is of "subsistence" rather than abundance, but it ensures full "nourishment" for all living beings, as if it were nature's responsibility to do so. Instead of a moral duty, this responsibility is understood in a utilitarian or functional way. In his words: "As nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, all animals must have been made by nature for the sake of men" (ibid., 1256b). This view of natural resources, including all animals, as being made for the "sake of men" comes close to the biblical notion of humans' dominion over the animal kingdom.
Underlying this view of perfectly functioning nature, there is also a sense that human subsistence is not simply promised by the gods, but that more specifically human survival is naturally guaranteed. If we were to worry that mere subsistence is offered and no more, Aristotle continues to claim that natural resources "serve to furnish man not only with food, but also with other comforts, such as the provision of clothing and similar aids to life" (ibid.). Natural provisions are mentioned by Aristotle as part of a broader argument about property and the "art of acquisition," topics we will discuss below. As is the case with the general theme of his discussion of the ideal political arrangements among people, the point for him is the discouragement of excess, the moral probity not to accumulate beyond one's needs or the needs of the "household," which for him is the cornerstone of economic relationships. Abundance and scarcity are not mentioned as such because they are at the two extremes of the spectrum of options of what nature offers humans or what humans find in nature; instead, the concept of subsistence is invoked, perhaps what we would think of today as sustainability, the ways in which humanity can provide for itself in the long run.
So, do Plato and Aristotle avoid the question of scarcity altogether? Though appearing to avoid the question, the fact that they emphasize the prudence of the city-state and the inner working of a social, political, and economic arrangement for the sake of self-sufficiency intimates that the backdrop they assume is that of scarcity of resources. The issue of self-sufficiency, now discussed in social as opposed to individual terms, brings us closer to an understanding of the economic organization of society to overcome scarcity. What society can do for the individual is what every individual can do for every other individual: contribute to the social pool from which everyone can draw and thereby overcome any personal sense of unmet need or scarcity.
Self-sufficiency is treated not only by historians and philosophers but also by anthropologists, and more specifically social or economic anthropologists. In a most engaging book, Marshall Sahlins argues that preagricultural societies of hunters may be considered to have lived the life of affluence (even if not abundance in the traditional sense), and not to have suffered from scarcity. According to Sahlins, one need not adopt the familiar modern conception of economists that "man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable" (1971, 2), an assumption that usually leads to an emphasis on industrial productivity and economic growth as the ways by which to minimize the inherent gap between needs and their means of satisfaction. Instead, Sahlins offers what he terms a Zen strategy, claiming that "human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate" (ibid., 144). Empirically speaking, this would mean that human needs are finite (tranquility assumed) and human wants are infinite.
(Continues…)
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