Ecological economics focuses on scale issues foremost because it believes the scale of human population has made the world both resource poor and labor abundant, which has altered the role of the market economy relative to the larger ecology within which the market is situated.
That market approach has us looking at the material rather than at the social realm as the key to proper decision-making. It mimics the market economists' approach by devising institutions that work properly by measuring the institution’s material conditions rather than its social conditions.
A different approach would look at gifts that come out of the problematic of abundance as the key to the institutional functioning. From such a perspective, the central focus of decision-making would turn around the general conditions of the economy, on whether some good about which a decision needs to be made falls under market rules or gift rules.
The same good, for example, could operate under market rules for the founder who made the good in the first place, and then operate under gift rules when the next generation inherits the good. A good that is fought for and built up out of the effort of its builder-owner has a different meaning than the same good when it is bequeathed to the builder's legatees. In the one case it is a good, in the other, it is a bad.
The measure is not of the good but of the effect of the good on the persons in question. The key measure is of deservedness and how the good affects the condition of deservedness of the persons in question. Marketed goods call for interested decisions; gifted goods call for moral decisions.
No comments:
Post a Comment