Week 33: No Better time for an economic researcher to think without the box!

[image credit Joe Wehbe]

The ineptness of dominant economic development frameworks, templates and toolkits to solve present day compounding social problems is unconcealable.

The disconnection of economics from its root of “human good” as espoused by Aristotle and subsequent mathematization of the social needs underlying the economic frameworks (with significant credit attributed American Economist and 1970 Economic sciences Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson) arguably led to skeletonization of social life and a reductionist approach to what economic development is.

Protesting against economic teaching in 2000, French students characterized this present day assumptive, oversimplified and disconnected economics as taught as a “true schizophrenia” in relation to the real world. (see reference 1)

Iranian Born Economist, Kamran Mofid put it this way: we are progressively marching from the promised land [that globalization and neoliberal economics pitched] to a wasteland [that is the already the reality for majority of the impoverished billions in the world today]. (see reference 3)

Strangely enough, this eventuality is not so “out of the box” and was foreseeable well before the nascence of neoliberalism by acclaimed philosophers and economists whose thinking form cornerstones of understanding and critiquing modern economics. Aristotle, arguably the first economist, distinguished “oikonomikos” – household trading that was essential and “chrematisike” – accumulation of profit for its own sake; characterizing the latter as blurry in its desire for human good (as it has explicitly removed the human person from the equation) and therefore parasitic.

British economist John Maynard Keynes in 1932 quipped: 
“ At present the world is being held back by something which would have surprised our fathers-by a failure of economic technique to exploit the possibilities of engineering and distributive technique ; or, rather, engineering technique has reached a degree of perfection which is making obvious defects in economic technique which have always existed, though unnoticed, and have doubtless impoverished mankind since the days of Abraham.” pp5 (see reference 2)

Validly, many scholars have questioned the mathematization of economic development highlighting the contradiction of juxtaposing a discipline governed by rigor and precision on a discipline of vague and often times unpredictable social life of human beings by way of beginning the economic equation with “assume that:…” .

Truth is, social life is messy and contested. It interacts with manipulable ideologies, as well as manipulable legal and market institutions to produce indeterminate economic realities.(see reference 4)

The foregoing reflection is however not all gloom and doom. As the good ol’ saying goes “Necessity is the mother of invention”. The present-day dilemma has opened space for alternative ideation of economic development – the reason why it is a great season for a researcher and economic thinker.

A discourse that is gaining traction in filling the lacuna of “what is [economic] development?”  is social transformation. As a study it rejects the teleological vision of development from agrarian communities through modernization to industrialized societies and finally postindustrial societies. It also rejects the narrow economic-based characterization of the individual in society as that of a rational actor with narrow self-interests and total will power who always acts to optimize his/her self-interests.

Instead, Social transformation takes an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to comprehend societal change in terms of the value systems of the participants in that society. It radically redraws the image of the citizen as that of a social actor with bounded self-interest, bounded willpower, and bounded rationality (by limits of their knowledge, culture, environment) . The individual is defined in the social setting and not just out to optimize their own narrow self-interest.

Essentially,  Social Transformation studies invert the questions asked by economists and development specialist. Instead of beginning  with an (“assume that:…”) theory of social change, it begins with the organic question – "what do individuals in this society deem as important in aggrandizing their relative wellbeing through the sharing of the pains and rewards available in their society?" (see reference 4)

Referenced material:

1. Le Monde: Open letter from economic students to professors and others responsible for the teaching of this discipline; June 2000; https://www.autisme-economie.org/article142.html

2. Keynes, John Maynard. "The dilemma of modern socialism." The Political Quarterly 3, no. 2 (1932): 155-161.

3. The Roots of Economics — And Why it has Gone So Wrong, Dr. Kamran Mofid, available online: https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-roots-of-economics-and-why-it-has-gone-so-wrong/

4. Excerpt of Keynote speech by Justice (Professor) Joel Ngugi at Tangaza University symposium on 22 April 2022. Available on YouTube Part 1 and Part 2.