Social Ecological Economics
Discussion
Max Koch & Hubert Buch-Hansen:
"Ecological economics, specifically what Spash (2020b) refers to as ‘social ecological economics’, is premised on an ontology according to which reality is hierarchically ordered into a number of strata and higher strata presuppose lower and less complex ones. Consistently with critical realist philosophy of science (Bhaskar, 2015), the mechanisms of higher strata (say, the social stratum) are held to possess emergent properties as a result of which they are irreducible to, and qualitatively different from, their lower stratum foundations (say, the physical stratum). While the laws of physics never cause social outcomes, the social is nonetheless subject to biophysical structures (Spash, 2020b). Reversely, social activities can impact biophysical structures. Unlike the anthropocentric ontologies underpinning mainstream economics/political economy, then, this deep ontology – which also in critical respects resonates with Marxist political economy (Buch-Hansen & Nielsen, 2020) – constitutes a worldview that has the potential to fruitfully underpin a postgrowth political economy."
(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807837?)
Economics as the study of social provisioning
Clive L. Spash & Adrien O.T. Guisan:
"A rather obvious approach to defining what constitutes economics as a subject is to determine its primary object of study. Economics as an orthodoxy has for some time been dominated by a neo-Austrian dogma that was introduced significantly via Lionel Robbins (1932) and adopted into the mainstream, not least in microeconomic theory. This placed the concepts of resource scarcity and individual choice at the centre of a liberal political economy that was supposedly value free. The economic problem became meeting unlimited and competing wants and the supposed solution was meant to be resource allocation via “the market”, soon supplemented by (macro-)economic growth. In fact a single institutional process associated with capitalism was being advocated, namely, what Karl Polanyi (1957) termed, the price-making market. Robbins neo-Austrian definition then merged into Chicago school neoliberalism, where choice in a market setting, subject to price incentives, became the essence of economics and this has since permeated its meaning. This approach permitted an imperialistic expansion of economics into all sorts of subject areas, simply based on the idea that humans must make decisions as individuals so that any decision became an economic topic, e.g. equating everything from buying a cup of coffee to suicide (as infamously proposed by Becker, 1976). In stark contrast, an older tradition regards the core of economics as determining the social and institutional arrangements for providing the needs of a community (or nation). Here the aim is to achieve a common good or well-being of all. What constitutes the good/well-being for a group then requires explicit ethical judgment. Modern times reduced the goal of seeking the “common weal” (i.e., the ability to fare well, prosper and have good fortune) into accumulating wealth and making money. Economics then simply became the study of capital accumulation using money and market prices and ultimately leading to economists’ claims of being able to determine optimally efficient public policy. SEE immediately takes issue with reducing the subject down to studying something as singular as the economy, as if there were only one such entity or form. The term “the economy” is merely unthinking code for market capitalism, while denying actualised varieties of capitalism and that this is only one form of economic system (Hodgson, 2016). So rather than reduce economics to the study of one generic form meant to approximate the currently dominant system, a far broader approach is required, and not least so because this system is failing and creating catastrophic social and ecological crises. A more comprehensive approach is to define economics as the study of social provisioning to meet human needs within an ethical framework of care and justice for others, both human and non-human. Social provisioning is a necessary activity for any social group whether a household, village, town, city, region, nation state or global collective. It concerns the ways in which people organise as social groupings to satisfy their needs. Markets as mechanisms for allocation are merely one form of arrangement and themselves diverse in structure. "
(http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue96/SpashGuisan96.pdf)
The Biophysical in Economics
Clive L. Spash & Adrien O.T. Guisan:
"A basic fact, although absent from most economic thinking, is that natural resources and waste sinks are required to ensure social provisioning. The reproduction of societies must address the maintenance of ecosystems structure and their functioning or fail. Production fundamentally requires energy, or, more precisely, available energy termed “exergy”. That is, humans require energy capable of performing useful “work”, which is defined, as in physics, to mean the exertion of a force against some form of resistance (Ayres and Warr, 2009). Such work can be performed by humans, animals or machines, but will always require some input of exergy, whether it is the solar radiation embodied in food that fuels human and animal labour, or fossil fuels to power a heat engine. This dependency of societies on flows of energy and materials is captured in the concept of “social metabolism” (Krausmann, 2017). There is no single social metabolism because it will vary depending upon the structure of an economy and its social provisioning mechanisms, and there-in lies the potential of alternative social-ecological economies. The metabolic nature of human societies emphasises the role of materials and energy in their reproduction. This make the laws of thermodynamics central to any economic process as explored by Georgescu-Roegen (1971)."
(http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue96/SpashGuisan96.pdf)
More information
* Article: A future social-ecological economics. Clive L. Spash & Adrien O.T. Guisan. real-world economics review, issue no. 96, 2021.
URL = http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue96/SpashGuisan96.pdf
"This paper describes the need for and content of an emerging paradigm termed Social Ecological Economics (SEE). In this paper we argue that SEE is the essential future direction for the economics profession, not least because of the social-ecological crises facing humanity and the need for transformation of capital accumulating economic systems. Economics as a discipline is a failure because of a long running inability to address, and tendency to marginalise, such things as power relations, social inequities and injustice (across gender, class and race), ethical social provisioning, the role of care and reproductive processes, the social implications of advancing technology, treatment of others with silent voices (e.g. future generations, children, the non-human world). SEE draws upon a wide range of literature with links to classical political economy and critical institutional economics. It relates environmental problems to economic structure via the work of Kapp (1950) on social costs and cost shifting, and Georgescu-Roegen (1971) on thermodynamics and dialectics, and connects to ecology to identify mechanism arising from ecosystem structure and function (Spash and Smith, 2019). These are common roots with some branches of ecological economics, but the fundamental difference is the emphasis placed on social structure. In this respect SEE shares concerns with feminist economics over care, reproduction and the role of unrecognised labour, and Marxist political theory over power, class and exploitation. The need is recognised for a social theory as well as a philosophy of science, neither of which have been adequately addressed by ecological economics."