Meta-economics (cont.)

(Vintage book cover 2011 edition)

I owe any readers of this blog a definition of meta-economics...

"Prof E.H. Phelps Brown, in his Presidential Address to the Royal Economic Society on ‘The Underdevelopment of Economics’, talked about ‘the smallness of the contribution that the most conspicuous developments in economics in the last quarter of a century have made to the solution of the most pressing problems of the times’, and among these problems he lists ‘checking the adverse effects on the environment and the quality of life of industrialism, population growth and urbanism’.

As a matter of fact, to talk of ‘the smallness of the contribution’ is to employ an euphemism, as there is no contribution at all; on the contrary, it would not be unfair to say that economics, as currently constituted and practices, acts as a most effective barrier against the understanding of these problems, owing to its addiction to purely quantitative analysis and its timorous refusal to look into the real nature of things” (p.32-33). 

Bear in mind that this book was written in the 1970s and yet I find that it still rings true today.

For Schumacher, meta-economics looks beyond that quantitative dimension; looks at in particular living animals, and perhaps even plants - otherwise known as 'capital' and 'labour' or 'factors of production' or simply as 'resources' - not as means to an end but instead as ends in themselves. 

Schumacher's "technology with a human face" (chapter 10) enhances human joy in doing something useful and knows where its limits lie beyond which it is more likely to make people unhappy (one example of inhuman technology he uses is nuclear energy which he opposed vehemently). Schumacher's 'development' provides "gifts of knowledge" (p.164) as opposed to investments and capital that do not respect those receiving aid as human beings with the potential to learn, create and evolve, but treat them more as underdeveloped entities or labour units that have only limited potential, if any, and that are static, uninspired and insufficiently productive.

Schumacher talks about the perplexing dichotomy that economics imposes between "man-as-producer" and "man-as-consumer": "What man as producer can afford is one thing; what man as consumer can afford is quite another thing. But since the two are the same man, the question of what man - or society - can really afford, gives rise to endless confusion" (p.85). Schumacher gives the stark example of farmers and other food producers "who would never think of consuming any of their own products" (p.84) and I know that these farmers still exist today. They instead buy organically produced products for their own consumption while selling on the poisoned so-called 'goods' to others who perhaps know little or nothing about the damage being done to themselves via consuming those products, and to their habitats and fellow creatures via allowing them be produced in that manner in the first place.

To sum up...

"There is no escape from this confusion as long as the land and the creatures upon it are looked upon as nothing but 'factors of production'. They are, of course, factors of production, that is to say, means-to-ends, but this is their secondary, not their primary, nature. Before everything else, they are ends-in-themselves; they are meta-economic, and it is therefore rationally justifiable to say, as a statement of fact, that they are in a certain sense sacred. Man has not made them, and it is irrational for him to treat things that he has not made and cannot make and cannot recreate once he has spoilt them, in the same manner and spirit as he is entitled to treat things of his own making" (p.85). Although Schumacher is not referring specifically to humans, I think this counts for human beings themselves, too. We are all sacred.

Source: Schumacher, E.F. (1973) Small is Beautiful - A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, London: Vintage (2011)

P.S. Incidentally, running a quick internet search for the term "meta-economics" brought me to this website which talks about the moral philosophy roots of economics amongst other aspects: http://www.metaeconomics.co.uk/metaeconomics.html. Makes for interesting reading - must explore more!