Post-economics: Reconnecting reality and morality to escape the Econocene — Richard B. Norgaard

Economism has been modern capitalism’s myth system, or in computer parlance, capitalism’s operating system. It has stressed utilitarian moral beliefs compatible with economic assumptions that are critical to neoclassical economic theories. These beliefs include the idea that society is simply the sum of its individuals and their desires, that people can be perfectly, or at least sufficiently, informed to act rationally in markets, that markets balance individual greed for the common good, and that nature can be divided up into parts and owned and managed as property without systemic social and environmental consequences (Norgaard, 2019). Especially after World War II when the industrialized nations globally organized around economic beliefs and set out to spread their economic systems among less industrialized nations, these simple beliefs steadily displaced more complex moral discourses of traditional religions (Cobb, Jr, 2001). Economism has facilitated climate change and other anthropogenic drivers of rapid environmental change. Natural scientists are labeling current times the Anthropocene. I advocate using the term Econocene since our economic beliefs, both moral and those with respect to reality, and the econogenic drivers they facilitated have been critical to the rise of rapid environmental change. Furthermore, the term Econocene alludes to the current social and technological structures and human capital that are sustained by economism.5 Escaping the Econocene will require dynamically, polycentrically, reconnecting reality and morality writ large.

I have invoked the terms “reality” and “morality” several times and will do so many times again as if people, whether individually or collectively, were able to comprehend reality and morality directly. I have no doubt that reality will remain elusive. I do not imagine people comprehending the changing details and dynamics of natural systems, as well as the combined complexities of natural and social systems interacting. Nor do I imagine people mastering the long and diverse discourses on morality, as if there were no limits on human understanding. Of course, there are limits. We need to be continually humbly aware of our limits (see for example DeCanio, 2013). And so I am advocating that morality and reality need to be actively discussed, not things long lost in economic fables. Morality and reality have long been ignored in the vague units of analyses precisely presented in the mathematics of economists. It is time to listen to scientists and moral philosophers and to have more people entering into informed, reasoned debate. A key point of this paper is that we need to remove the constructed narrow conceptions of morality and reality associated with the economics and economism that have brought humanity and the planet to the brink of disaster and into centuries of rapid change.