by From Clive Spash and Adrien Guisan Economics has become increasingly detached from its object of study and the orthodoxy is fundamentally flawed as a social science because it advocates a prescriptive methodology while lacking any serious engagement with epistemology and ontology. The resulting epistemic fallacy means it promotes a narrow implicit world view as if a factual truth. Failures here include imposition of limited quantitative methods and mathematically formalist methodology that exclude qualitative aspects of reality and the use of isolated/closed systems thinking for an open system reality. Economies are the socially structured institutional process involving the interaction of humans with the natural world. Social reproduction is achieved only within the bounds of
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from Clive Spash and Adrien Guisan
Economics has become increasingly detached from its object of study and the orthodoxy is fundamentally flawed as a social science because it advocates a prescriptive methodology while lacking any serious engagement with epistemology and ontology. The resulting epistemic fallacy means it promotes a narrow implicit world view as if a factual truth. Failures here include imposition of limited quantitative methods and mathematically formalist methodology that exclude qualitative aspects of reality and the use of isolated/closed systems thinking for an open system reality.
Economies are the socially structured institutional process involving the interaction of humans with the natural world. Social reproduction is achieved only within the bounds of the given structure and mechanisms of biophysical reality. The form and scale of economic processes depends upon a set of spatially and temporally contextual social institutions. That is economics concerns the form and function of social provisioning process which can take various forms and are far from limited to price-making market or capitalist institutions. Starting from processes of social provisioning, economics becomes the study of plural historical, actual and potential economies with their underlying institutional arrangements and biophysical basis rather than a singular abstract idealised “economy”. This broadens analysis not only to what institutions, norms and values shape the economic process and agents’ behaviours, but also to what are socially desirable and ecologically sustainable systems of social provisioning. Economics is neither value free nor ethically neutral but its stance on both should be made explicit. It must also be realist about how economies are reproduced via social and ecological mechanisms. That means linking to both power relations and ethical and just means of provisioning, but also material and energy throughput that respects others (human and non-human). The aspirations of economists to provide for the well-being of humanity, if taken seriously, mean a revolutionary change in economics is long overdue.