[P2P-F] Fwd: The Church of Economism and Its Discontents (GTN Discussion)

[Denis Postle]

A Must Read and the Norgaard essay referred to as well.

All very welcome not least because some decades ago I tried to get 
'capitalism as a religion' on the agenda of science and society media 
series but the Marxist scholar we were working with dismissed the 
notion, 'back to the drawing board' I was told. It shut down that line 
of inquiry for a long time.

I'd offer a caveat re the Noorgard article, he writes as though he 
believes we can somehow get outside nature. Might it also be 
sacreligious to try to insist that along with us capitalism and all its 
artefacts are intrinsicly a part of nature? An essential perspective I 
now find personally. But has it perhaps become an orthodoxy I haven't 
noticed?
Denis Postle
On 16/11/2015 06:40, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: *Great Transition Network* <gtnetwork at greattransition.org 
> <mailto:gtnetwork at greattransition.org>>
> Date: Mon, Nov 9, 2015 at 10:22 PM
> Subject: The Church of Economism and Its Discontents (GTN Discussion)
> To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com <mailto:michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
>
>
>
> >From John  Barry <j.barry at qub.ac.uk <mailto:j.barry at qub.ac.uk>>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> “Economists—the prophets and priests of this new religion—preach about 
> and have a major impact on public policy and our institutional 
> arrangements. Economics therefore provides an alternative faith 
> tradition, complete with values, ideas of welfare and of 
> progress—usually defined in terms of quantitative economic indicators, 
> which dominate public discourse and which seek to reshape our 
> institutions and organisations. With their influence on government, 
> economists are the new theocracy, the contemporary manifestation of 
> Plato’s guardians.... In ancient times, seers entered a trance and 
> informed anxious seekers of the mood of the gods and whether the time 
> was auspicious for particular enterprises. Today, the financial media 
> are the diviners and seers of THE MARKET’s moods, the high priests of 
> its mysteries. THE MARKET has become the most formidable rival to 
> traditional religions, not least because it is rarely recognised as a 
> religion.” (Boldeman, 2007: 279).
>
> Norgaard's timely essay follows nicely from some of the previous 
> essays this year - from Kallis, Daly and Bellamy Foster for example - 
> in offering another critical perspective on the ideological dimensions 
> of dominant economic thinking. While I agree 100% with the analysis 
> offered by Norgaard, I feel he pulls his punches. Everything he 
> describes as 'economism' can be easily and equally described as 
> 'capitalist economics' or - to give its more usual nomme de guerre - 
> neoclassical economics. 'Economism' is, after all, simply the ideology 
> of capitalist economics, the capitalist economic imaginary that has 
> now achieved almost full spectrum ideological and imaginative 
> domination in how we define and describe the economy and this how we 
> conceptualise 'economics'.
>
> Thus it is not the ‘Anthropocene’ we now live in (which conveniently 
> elides and deliberately obscured issues of class, power, global and 
> national inequality, and injustices between peoples and places), nor 
> is it the ‘Ecocene’ as Norgaard suggests. No, rather than either of 
> these terms, a more accurate description for the current age is the 
> ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore, 2014). After all, what we witness is not the 
> 'humanisation the world', nor has our planet been ‘economised’, but 
> rather the earth has been 'capitalised'. And it has been capitalised, 
> rendered into commodities, monetised, and valued right from the 
> micro-level of DNA through biotechnology to the macro-level of the 
> entire planet becoming negatively affected through climate change by 
> capitalism and its addiction fossil fueled endless orthodox economic 
> growth.
>
> Similarly, when Norgaard talks of 'economists', I do not think he is 
> talking about feminist economists, ecological economists, Marxist or 
> heterodox economists, or green political economists such as myself. 
> No, he is correctly talking about those who are members of the 
> dominant economic orthodoxy, capitalist, that is, neoclassical 
> economists, so let's call a spade a spade. And, of course, it is 
> economics as doxa that enables it to be interpreted as form of 
> religious thinking.
>
> In everything from the nonsense of a 'value-free', objective 'science' 
> of the human economy to myths of endless economic growth on a finite 
> planet, we can correctly ascertain the ideological and mythic 
> characteristics of modern capitalist/neoclassical economics. So I ask 
> if it looks like a pig, smells and walks like a pig, why not simply 
> state that what we're talking about is capitalism, its ideological 
> power and inherent tendencies to ecological irrationality and social 
> injustice? Why be coy?
>
> On this issue, I've been always struck with the reticent of American 
> scholars from invoking the C word, in a way we in Europe find odd 
> given how criticism of capitalism and suggestions for possible 
> post-capitalist political economies and social orders has long been a 
> perfectly legitimate form of scholarly inquiry. It is almost as if 
> some people can accept the end of the world more readily than the end 
> of capitalism....Here, economism as used by Norgaard is closer to the 
> way it was defined by Lenin (quoted in the essay) as a reformist 
> rather than transformative political project in its unwillingness to 
> explicitly propose the replacing of capitalism...but this is perhaps a 
> minor quibble (but one perhaps worthy of a future Great Transition 
> discussion).
>
> I have myself long been convinced of the ideological character of 
> modern economics. Here, I make two related points. The first is that 
> there is no ideology-free conceptualisation of the economy and 
> economics: all forms of economic thinking are at root forms of 
> 'political economy' a fusion of ethical, political, and normative 
> prescriptions and principles with empirical economic proposals in 
> terms of policies or suggestions for public policy. Political economy 
> is of course what Adam Smith and the great classical economists 
> practiced, fully aware of the political and ethical dimensions of 
> their ideas and proposals. It's a pity most modern economics students 
> have very little idea of the political economy roots of the discipline 
> they study . Instead, modern students of neoclassical/capitalist 
> economics (since there is little to no pluralism in modern economics 
> teaching) are completely ignorant of either the normative or 
> historical foundations of discipline. In this context, what we in
> the universities churn our year after year in our economics programmes 
> are nothing short of 'technically competent barbarians' (Barry, 2012).
>
> The second point relates more to the religious invocation used by 
> Norgaard to describe modern capitalist economics. Here, viewing this 
> religious dimension as essentially ideological in another sense - that 
> is masking and occluding power relations or hidden normative 
> assumptions conveniently smuggled in as 'axioms' for example - is a 
> really important starting point for the dethroning of this false 
> religion of 'economism'. Here we need to ask ourselves, in whose 
> interest is this form of 'knowledge/power' deployed and inscribed in 
> university curricula, and what does it hide and why?
>
> How fragile as the assumptions behind market economics? asks Norgaard 
> rightly. Here are some more suggestions to add to the ones he outlines.
>
> ‘Twelve Theses on Neo-Classical Economics’.
>
> 1. the fact that the ‘economy’ is the material/metabolic 
> foundation/bridge/link between the human and non-human worlds also 
> affects relations of power within human societies;
>
> 2. neo-classical economics’ purported objectivity, ‘scientific’ 
> status, or ‘value neutrality’ is false since it is as value-laden and 
> based on ethical and political judgements, as other ethical or 
> political position and prescriptions;
>
> 3. related to that, this lends economics the illusion of being able to 
> definitively establish the ‘truth’, mostly through its use of 
> quantitative and numeric methods, what Stephen Marglin (2008: 136) 
> calls the algorithmic ‘ideology of knowledge’ of economics;
>
> 4. modern capitalist economics regards itself as defined by its 
> methodology and approach, which has (almost) universal application to 
> all human affairs, rather than a subject matter, ‘the economy’ per se ;
>
> 5. the ‘naturalising’ of the institutions of the modern market economy 
> – such as ‘the market’, ‘private property’, ‘competition’, 
> ‘efficiency’ etc. – in such a way that these are both ‘natural’ 
> (beyond the capacity of humans to alter) and also ‘good’, if we want 
> economic growth and material well-being;
>
> 6. which in turn establishes ‘economics’ and ‘economists’ as the 
> professional ‘experts’ on how the economy works, thus ‘crowding out’ 
> or marginalising ‘non-economic’ and thus ‘non-expert’ commentary on or 
> views about the economy;
>
> 7. allowing its analyses and aims – most crucially the concept and 
> objective of orthodox ‘economic growth’ – to be accepted within a 
> pluralist social context, i.e., it is something almost all 
> value/normative and political positions can accept, endorse, and 
> support as a self-evident ‘common good’ (think of how both left and 
> right promote orthodox undifferentiated economic growth uncritically);
>
> 8. its capacity to deliver (albeit unequally) material benefits to 
> enough people often comes via hiding, externalizing, or sequestering 
> the social and environmental costs of economic growth, but 
> nevertheless it is regarded and promoted as a form of knowledge that 
> ‘works’;
>
> 9. its supposed ‘non-political’ character –related to 2 above, which;
>
> 10. supports powerful interests, groups, forms of thinking, and 
> institutions within society, and allows the by-passing of ethical, 
> political debate, and perhaps more crucially of all;
>
> 11. its position as the ‘master discipline’ or form of knowledge 
> within policy-making and political decision-making by the state such 
> that all discourse and debate must ultimately be translated into a 
> form acceptable to neo-classical economics.
>
> 12. which means that as well as ‘crowding out’ rival accounts of the 
> economy, as well as political and ethical debate, neo-classical 
> economics ‘colonises’ non-economic areas of life, such as health, 
> family, the domestic sphere, community, and politics, i.e. , it moves 
> outside its own subject area.
>
> While all of these ‘theses’ are interlinked, it is the imputed 
> ‘value-free’ (and therefore supposedly non-ethical and non-political) 
> character of modern neo-classical economics that I particularly wish 
> to focus on here. Simply put, the study of the economy is not, and 
> never can be, either a politics- or ethics-free zone.
>
> My own work on critically examining orthodox, undifferentiated 
> GDP-measured economic growth as a permanent feature of the economy has 
> led me to analyse not just growth but neoclassical/capitalist 
> economics as by turns a form of ideology, myth, religion, and cultural 
> meme (Barry, 2015). Revealing the ideological core of 
> capitalist/neoclassical economics is of course central to Norgaard’s 
> essay.
>
> The ideological power of capitalist economics cannot and should not be 
> underestimated. Its comprehensive failure to predict the current 
> global economic crisis has led neither to its displacing as a useful 
> paradigm nor to the reforming and reformulating of the paradigm 
> (Barry, 2012). Rather, we have witnessed what John Quiggin 
> provocatively but correctly denotes as 'Zombie economics' (Quiggin, 
> 2010). That is, dead, analytically useless (but politically and 
> ideologically powerful) ideas and nostrums that still reign over us in 
> terms of informing everything from 'commonsense' and everyday 
> understandings of the economy, to state economic policy, to the 
> political platforms of political parties (Barry, 2012). This entails 
> recognizing the ‘commonsense’ and ‘taken for granted’ nature of 
> capitalist economics and its emphasis on growth, i.e. that almost 
> everyone seems to at least tacitly, if not explicitly, accept it. 
> Thomas Homer-Dixon captures this well in his statement that:
>
> “The tacit arrangement among our elites, our experts, and the rest of 
> us is essentially symbiotic - a mutually gratifying and 
> self-sustaining cycle of denial and delusion. Through our acquiescence 
> in and often active support of modern capitalism, we legitimize our 
> elites' and experts' status and power, while those elites and experts 
> give us an overarching ideology of permanence, order, and purpose that 
> lends our lives a sense of place and meaning. According to this 
> ideology, economic growth is a panacea for all our social and personal 
> problems. Growth equals health. Unfortunately when we’re in denial, we 
> can't think about the various paths that we might take into the 
> future. Nor can we prepare to choose the best path when the 
> opportunity arises. Radically different futures become literally 
> inconceivable - they are ‘beyond imagining’ in the same way the 
> heliocentric cosmos was inconceivable to many people prior to the 
> Copernican revolution.” (Homer-Dixon, 2006: 219)
>
> And we need to always remember that orthodox, capitalist economists 
> are called up to comment on the media not because what they say is 
> correct or true, but because they are asked, because they are presumed 
> to be and present themselves as the authority on ‘the economy’. That 
> is, it is from the fact that orthodox economists have privileged 
> access to some objectively verifiable truth that their power and 
> authority stems. Rather, it is because ideologically we all accept 
> that they so possess this power: the power to discern whether the 
> ‘market fundamentals’ are sound, to detect the prevailing or 
> anticipated moods of the Gods of the market. How different is this 
> from shamanism? Indeed, how different is the dogma of austerity as 
> cure for our current economic woes from other societies that 
> sacrificed their children to assuage the Gods and ensure the harvest?
>
> I see Norgaard's article as an important contribution to the project 
> of dethroning and delegitimising capitalist/neoclassical economics - 
> similar to the view of scholars such as Princen who have advocated the 
> effective delegitimisation of fossil fuels as an indispensable element 
> in decarbonising the economy and combatting climate change (Princen et 
> al, 2015). We need to see neoclassical economics /economism for what 
> it is—a form of groupthink—and we need more like Norgaard to point to 
> the emperor and say he has no clothes. And as for what new clothes we 
> need, what new 'ism' as Norgaard put it, we need, my own suggestion 
> (and in keeping with Norgaard) is that we need an old/new political 
> economy of sustainability based on pluralism. We need context-specific 
> not one-size-fits-all logic, and one in which the myth of endless 
> economic growth is replaced with sufficiency, a sense of ‘enoughness’, 
> and (as the degrowth position has it) a focus on redistribution of 
> resources,
> economic wealth and opportunities. And perhaps above all else, a new 
> model of progress and prosperity beyond orthodox economic growth which 
> has done its job in the overdeveloped world (Wilkinson and Pickett, 
> 2009), and now passed the point where it is causing more costs than 
> benefits.
>
> It is high time we call a spade a spade and move on from not just the 
> dangerous myth of perpetual economic growth, but the entire dominant 
> economic system of thinking (which can be viewed as form of religious, 
> ideological and indeed mythic thinking) and practices behind it - 
> namely, carbon-fueled, consumerist-dependent capitalism. To 
> paraphrase, 'It’s capitalism stupid'. And to invoke religious 
> language, ‘the truth will set us free’. And here we might best begin 
> by recognising that the enemy of truth is not falsehood but myth and 
> fantasy. As JF Kennedy noted:
>
> “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, 
> contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive, and 
> unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. 
> We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We 
> enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. 
> Mythology distracts us everywhere - in government as in business, in 
> politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs.”
>
> And so Norgaard’s essay helps us see past the beguiling and comforting 
> myths of capitalist economics and to recognise both the painful truth 
> of economic mythic thinking (allied to a powerful myth of 
> techno-optimism and the capacity of human beings to control the 
> world). And thus begin to live in sustainability as a consequence of 
> recognising the multiple dangers and risks of such false mythic 
> thinking. But he also rightly points out in his essay that we need 
> alternatives to the latter’s religious mythic doxa. After all, without 
> vision the people perish.
>
> In this way, I think the task before us is to 'live in truth', as 
> Vaclav Havel wisely put it, and equally importantly to co-create and 
> co-imagine new visions for how we want to live in truth, justice, 
> sustainability and solidarity with one another in our particular 
> places and storied residences, as well as our more collective species 
> story of living in peace on and with our planet, our 'common home' as 
> Pope Francis has recently put it. Capitalism or our ‘common home’? 
> (Pope Francis, 2015). That is our choice.
>
> References
>
> Barry, J. (2012), The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: 
> Human Flourishing in a Climate Changed, Carbon Constrained World 
> (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
>
> Barry, J. (2015), What's the Story with Growth?: Economic Growth as 
> Ideology, Myth, Cultural Meme and Religion
> available at: 
> www.researchgate.net/publication/280489369_Whats_the_Story_with_Unsustainable_Economic_Growth_Understanding_Economic_Growth_as_Ideology_Myth_Religion_and_Cultural_Meme 
> <http://www.researchgate.net/publication/280489369_Whats_the_Story_with_Unsustainable_Economic_Growth_Understanding_Economic_Growth_as_Ideology_Myth_Religion_and_Cultural_Meme>
>
> Boldeman, L (2007), The Cult of the Market: Economic Fundamentalism 
> and its Discontents (Canberra: ANU)
>
> Homer-Dixon, T, (2006), The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity 
> and the Renewal of Civilization, (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf).
>
> Marglin, S. (2008), The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an 
> Economists undermines Community, Harvard: Harvard University Press.
>
> Moore, J.W. (2014), ‘The Capitalocene Part I: On the Nature & Origins 
> of Our Ecological Crisis’, available at:
> www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason_Moore3/publication/264457281_The_Capitalocene_Part_II_Abstract_Social_Nature_and_the_Limits_to_Capital/links/53dfe3520cf27a7b830748fb.pdf 
> <http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason_Moore3/publication/264457281_The_Capitalocene_Part_II_Abstract_Social_Nature_and_the_Limits_to_Capital/links/53dfe3520cf27a7b830748fb.pdf>
>
> Pope Francis (2015), Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father 
> Francis on Care for Our Common Home, available at:
> w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html 
> <http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html>
>
> Princen, T. Manno, J. and Martin, P. (eds), (2015), Ending the Fossil 
> Fuel Era (Boston: MIT Press).
>
> Quiggin, J (2010), Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among 
> Us, (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
>
> Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K (2009) The Spirit Level: Why more Equal 
> Societies Almost Always do Better, (London: Allen Lane).
>
> --John Barry--
> Queen's University Belfast
>
> *********************************************************************
>
> Friday, October 30, 2015
>
> >From Paul Raskin <praskin at tellus.org <mailto:praskin at tellus.org>>
>
> -----
> GTN Friends:
>
> I write to launch our NOVEMBER DISCUSSION, which will consider Richard 
> Norgaard’s new GTI essay, “The Church of Economism and Its 
> Discontents.” Please read it at 
> www.greattransition.org/publication/the-church-of-economism-and-its-discontents 
> <http://www.greattransition.org/publication/the-church-of-economism-and-its-discontents>, 
> and consider commenting.
>
> Is orthodox economics akin to a secular religion? Are we living in the 
> “Econocene”? Is there a way out? Norgaard, a founder of ecological 
> economics, argues yes, yes, and maybe. In so doing, he guides us 
> further into the terrain of alternative economics we’ve explored 
> recently in our discussions of GTI pieces by Herman Daly, Giorgos 
> Kallis, Peter Barnes, and John Bellamy Foster.
>
> I wonder, though:
> * Is economism still a monolithic ideology? Or are critical currents 
> within the economics mainstream increasingly questioning its 
> reductionist framework and false predictions?
> * As a framing for our contemporary condition, is “the Econocene” a 
> useful corrective to the geologic emphasis of “the Anthropocene”? How 
> do these compare to GTI’s term, “The Planetary Phase of Civilization,” 
> which aims to convey the multi-dimensionality of the globalizing 
> social-ecological system?
>
> I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts on these and other issues raised 
> by Norgaard’s stimulating essay.
>
> Comments are welcome through NOVEMBER 30.
>
> Looking forward,
>
> Paul Raskin
> GTI Director
>
> NOTE ON GTI’S PUBLICATION CYCLE:
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> EVEN-NUMBERED months. Each discussion takes up a new essay or 
> viewpoint prior to its publication. After the discussion closes, GTI 
> publishes the piece, edited comments from the discussion, and a 
> response from the author (along with other new articles). You can 
> review all GTN discussions at www.greattransition.org/forum/gti-forum 
> <http://www.greattransition.org/forum/gti-forum>.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
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