Ecological Economics Beyond Markets

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* Article: Ecological Economics Beyond Markets. By Sam Bliss and Megan Egler. Ecological Economics. Volume 178, December 2020, 106806

URL = https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919312868


Description

  • Non-market practices and institutions make up much of every economy.

• Historically, markets only emerge when states forcibly create them.

• Markets are inappropriate in most contexts that matter to ecological economists.

• Markets do not serve justice, sustainability, efficiency, or value pluralism.

• Ecological economists should redirect research attention toward non-market economies.

"Non-market practices and institutions make up much of every economy. Even in today's most developed capitalist societies, people produce things that are not for sale and allocate them through sharing, gifts, and redistribution rather than buying and selling. This article is about why and how ecological economists should study these non-market economies. Historically, markets only emerge when states forcibly create them; community members do not tend to spontaneously start selling each other goods and services. Markets work well for coordinating complex industrial webs to satisfy individual tastes, but they are not appropriate for governing the production or distribution of entities that are non-rival, non-excludable, not produced for sale, essential need satisfiers, or culturally important. Moreover, we argue, markets do not serve justice, sustainability, efficiency, or value pluralism, the foundations of ecological economics. We sketch an agenda for research on economic practices and institutions without markets by posing nine broad questions about non-market food systems and exploring the evidence and theory around each. By ignoring and demeaning non-market economies, researchers contribute to creating markets' dominance over social life. Observing, analyzing, theorizing, supporting, promoting, creating, and envisioning non-market economies challenges market hegemony."


Contents

"This article is about why and how ecological economists should study non-market economic practices and institutions, what we are calling non-market economies. Non-market economies encompass production not intended for sale and transfers other than buying and selling. They are economies without money. In Section 2, we demonstrate the ubiquity and importance of non-market economies, and review what markets are and are not good for. In Section 3, we lay out a research agenda for studying non-market economies, structured around a set of questions relating to non-market food systems. These questions correspond to important themes for ecological economics beyond markets. This manuscript includes subsections on five themes: distribution, governance, power, values, and ecology. To fit within this journal's word limit, we have created a separate text, available as “supplementary material” online, with subsections on four more: scale, transformation, utopia, and resilience. (A preprint version of the unabridged article is available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3655676.) We acknowledge that these nine themes do not cover every subject that ecological economists study, but together they offer the roots from which a comprehensive research program on non-market economies can grow.1 In Section 4, we conclude by drawing attention to the social processes through which research contributes to constructing reality. We argue that reallocating research attention toward non-market practices and institutions can help unmake markets' dominance."


Excerpts

Markets Proceeds from State Coercion

Sam Bliss and Megan Egler:

"Formalist economists assume that humans are innately self-regarding rational calculators, such that institutional development toward market society was a mere refining of preexisting propensities to trade in pursuit of gain. This assertion is not substantiated and its premises are faulty (Kahneman, 2011; Levine et al., 2015; Sober and Wilson, 1998; Urbina and Ruiz-Villaverde, 2019). Substantivist economists, on the other hand, hold that social organization and ecological context shape economic systems. For them, people make market (and non-market) institutions to meet their needs within, and in response to, political and biophysical processes (Kapp, 1954). Ecological economics is largely substantive economics (Gerber and Scheidel, 2018).2

Those who, in this substantive tradition, trace markets' origins to the dynamics of history tend to find that elites create conditions that coerce common people to construct and participate in markets. Heinsohn (2009); Heinsohn and Steiger (2013) argues that indebtedness forces property owners, whose titles are on the line as collateral, to start selling things in order to pay back principle plus interest. Where formal property rights are absent, he notes, so are markets. David Graeber (2011) writes that markets materialized as early empires expanded. City-states would requisition grain or produce it on royal estates to feed their militaries, conscripted labor, and palace complexes (Polanyi, 2014b; Scott, 2017), but in far-flung occupied territories this became administratively difficult. So, states started paying their armies in, say, silver and then demanding that conquered subjects pay a tax in silver. This turned whole colonized economies into machines for provisioning soldiers via markets (Graeber, 2011). These accounts emphasize different parts of the same story: ordinary people, left to their own devices, do not seem to spontaneously establish or exchange in markets.

Once markets exist, Karl Polanyi (1944) teaches us that they remain regulated and auxiliary, subordinated to—or “embedded” in—other social institutions that govern economic life, until states forcibly turn land and labor into commodities through enclosure and dispossession. It is only when states take away people's means to produce their own necessities and destroy non-market institutions for distributing them that propertyless people must work for wages with which to purchase their basic needs (Murton et al., 2016). Powerful actors who stand to gain from markets' existence have enacted policy to grow them from non-existent to marginal to dominant economic institutions.

Intellectuals have contributed to creating this market society (Polanyi, 1944). Political and economic theorists omitted the existence of non-market economies from their accounts of human nature and history (Goodfellow, 1939; Hobbes, 1651; Smith, 1776). They urged the establishment of markets for land and labor in order to discipline the poor and organize society in service of industry (Malthus, 1798; Ricardo, 1821). In theorizing and promoting an all-encompassing self-regulating market system, classical economists began the formalist tradition of studying the economy as if were to consist only of production for and exchange in markets. Much neoclassical economics continues this tradition today.

Ecological economists and our predecessors have focused attention on the extra-market processes from which the market economy extracts work and onto which it exudes waste, namely ecosystem functions and the unpaid labor of women, slaves, and colonies (Kapp, 1950; Martínez-Alier, 2002). Yet in the first 30 years of ecological economics, we have not systematically studied the non-market economies that form the fabric of material existence for human societies outside of capitalism. Nor have we often studied non-market economies in capitalist societies as legitimate economic institutions in their own right. If we care about justice and sustainability (Daly and Farley, 2004), it matters that the most egalitarian (Graeber and Wengrow, 2018; Power, 2018) and lowest-throughput (Haberl, 2001) societies we know of do not have markets. One might hypothesize that people in modern societies are more likely to treat each other as equals or distribute goods and bads fairly in non-market relationships, or that we tend to act with ecological frugality in non-market production. We elaborate each of these points with evidence and research questions in 3 How to Study Non-Market Economies: The Case of Food, 4 Concluding Remarks: The Social (De)Construction of Market Society.

Non-market economies could support the goals of ecological economics as an intellectual project. But we have to study to them to know where and how so."

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919312868)


Concluding Remarks: The Social (De)Construction of Market Society

Sam Bliss and Megan Egler:

The arguments we have presented suggest normative propositions for our field. Ecological economists should study non-market economies. This research should focus first on resources that are non-rival, commonly accessible, not produced for market, essential to meeting human needs, or culturally important. It should examine the entire spectrum from centralized (state-based, authoritarian) to decentralized (self-organized, informal) institutions. It should be relevant, useful, comprehensible, and ideally of interest to those who create and benefit from non-market economies. In the case of self-organized non-market economies, participants, not policy makers, should be the most important audience for research products. Researchers can learn from participants, address their needs, respond to their problems, account for their values, and embrace their diverse worldviews. At the same time, researchers should reflect on their own positions. Empirical investigation of non-market economies should involve or support action. It should be transdisciplinary, drawing on multiple ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies, scientific and otherwise. Yet it should also pursue the construction of theory, which should adhere to consistent philosophical frameworks. This body of ecological economics scholarship should acknowledge that it is always inescapably political ecological economics. Research on non-market economies should, paraphrasing Marx, seek to understand the world in service of transforming it. We use “should” here not to imply that no one is doing these things, but to endorse those who are and urge others to join us in this research agenda. Many of these propositions could be, and have been, applied to ecological economics scholarship in general. So why do we emphasize their relevance to non-market economies?

Markets dominate not just the world economy but also the official versions of reality experienced by much of the world's population. Insofar as market institutions privilege buying and selling over other behaviors, self-interest over other attitudes, gain over other values, maximization over other goals, and the forces of supply and demand over other mechanisms for determining outcomes, economies follow market “laws” that appear to originate outside of society. Journalists give “the market” agency and obfuscate the fact that humans create markets. Narratives of self-made men and the lazy poor naturalize the unequal outcomes that markets generate. Most adults in developed societies buy food and other things nearly every day; our identification with market roles further disguises that these institutions are human creations like any other, just one of many possible ways to organize production and distribution. Non-economists tend to live in the common-sense mythology of the market and its invisible hand (Goddard et al., 2019). Economists mathematically theologize about the goodness of these gods. In the social constructivist vocabulary of Berger and Luckmann (1966), ordinary people reify markets pretheoretically while elites fabricate conceptual machineries that maintain the symbolic universe lending legitimacy to market society's institutional order. Ecological economists contribute to this project when we ignore economies without markets.

The existence of non-market economies threatens market society because they present alternate symbolic universes that deviate from the official definitions of reality. Beyond simply disregarding non-market economies, scholars work as custodians of market society's sanctioned stories about the world when they study non-market economies almost exclusively in non-market societies, as if these institutions were to exist only at an earlier point on the linear, one-way journey of development from primitivism to capitalism. Researchers treat non-market food activities in market societies in congruently delegitimizing ways: household food preparation and sharing are non-economic domestic work, further marginalizing reproductive labor; gardening, hunting, foraging, potlucks, and the like are leisure activities or hobbies; and recovering unsellable food for hungry people through gleaning, dumpster diving, community meals, and food pantries are merely fixes to remediable errors in the functioning of markets. Moreover, even scholars who are not formalists often theorize non-market economies as buying and selling disguised in primeval or informal arrangements. Anthropologists have written of gift economies in ways that emphasize rational self-interest and exchange, assuming that giving a gift always incurs a debt that must be reciprocated (most famously Mauss, 1967 [1925]). Positing non-market economies as embryonic institutions on the inevitable path toward establishing competitive markets nihilates the notion of non-market systems as legitimate economic institutions. Together, these lines of research function as “therapy” for deviants who consider straying from market society (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). As ecological economists, we call for examining, describing, discussing, debating, analyzing, theorizing, narrating, encouraging, nurturing, promoting, propagating, experimenting with, and participating in economies beyond markets in order to counter markets' supremacy.

In summary, we tend to consider things “economic” only if there is money involved, but the economy is our material relationships with each other and the rest of the mesh of existence. Non-market economies provide greater possibilities for creating relationships of care, love, solidarity, generosity, and reciprocity, while markets tend to engender relationships of extraction, exploitation, and self-interest. That is our argument for paying more attention to non-market practices and institutions.

We are not, however, arguing for the abolition of markets, nor for abandoning the study of them entirely. Karl Polanyi, on whose work we have drawn heavily in this article, maintained that markets are harmless when they remain peripheral to social life. It is the market economy, the institutional order that makes all other institutions subsidiary to markets, that we advocate extinguishing in service of the public good. Elites coercively created and now vigorously maintain this market system at least in part because they benefit from it. This maintenance happens both by force and through the power-laden social construction of reality we just described. Together, these projects create market hegemony, the subjugation of societies to the universalizing logic of markets. Research that aims to fix the failings of the market economy without questioning its existence or underpinning worldview contributes to the reproduction of the dominant market system. So does research that renders invisible non-market institutions, as we have explained. When a group of actors forcibly maintains an ecological or economic system, the system will tend to become more spatially homogenous and less resilient over time (Farley and Voinov, 2016; Holling, 1995). The maintenance of the market economy reifies market institutions' claim of superiority over non-market institutions. This inhibits institutional diversity, which leads directly to human society's codependence with a single global economic system that is increasingly vulnerable to shocks, whether financial, geopolitical, environmental, or viral. What is needed then is plurality in institutions that serve to meet human needs. In the absence of market hegemony, diverse and context-specific economic practices would have space to re-emerge and strengthen. Societies can create economies comprised of coexisting, impermanent market and non-market institutions that over time draw greater adaptive capacity from the ecosystems within which they are embedded (Becker and Ostrom, 1995).

A patchwork of market and non-market economic institutions can better serve the public good than any universal solution. Return to the case of food systems. Communities can distribute food to those who most need it via non-market institutions, strengthening social ties in the process, while markets make it easier for people to exchange food with different, distant others. Societies with multiple institutions governing food production and allocation can flexibly scale them in response to change and shocks, creating networks of overlapping food systems that are more sustainable and resilient than any single structure. Markets and gifts can both direct food to where extreme weather or violent conflict has wiped out production. With real food sovereignty, those who grow, gather, process, transport, prepare, share, exchange, and eat food will construct institutions with and without markets according to their needs and values. Capitalist societies already have diverse economic institutions (see Gibson-Graham, 2006, Gibson-Graham, 2008) that are waiting for us to stop making market hegemony so they can bloom, bear fruit, and drop seeds."

(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919312868)


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