After the financial crisis: towards a human economy

Towards Anew Human Approach for Economics, Banking and Finance1, 2016

Our main Objective for this research paper is defined to explore the new required -and neglected human role -to be designed and played by Public Finance, Monetary and Financial System and policies. The new role as dictated by the human subjective wellbeing determinants for building the groundwork upon which to approach human happiness and sustained wellbeing.

2011

This paper will give an overview of economic anthropology both in terms of the history of ideas and the philosophy of science. It will look at how the field has developed from several distinct philosophies in economics to the multifaceted approaches within the field today. The first section will look at the roots of the field and the major philosophies and proponents of those philosophies. The second section will look at the more recent trends in terms of how they draw on the earlier philosophies and the new elements they incorporate. The final section will look at how the multifaceted approaches in the field has allowed for new avenues of study. In particular, this section will look how these multifaceted approaches have made the definition of the “economic man” more crosscultural.

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2014

We review here recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listing its achievements, shortcomings, and prospects, while referring back to the discipline's founders a century ago. We take our departure from the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, both of whom combined openness to ethnographic research with a vision of world history as a whole. Since the 1960s, anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields and marginal debates. The anthropological study of money and ethnographies of finance, in particular, have been the focus of much research since the 1980s. Despite taking on new objects and directions, anthropologists still find it difficult to connect their situated analyses with global processes and world history. We propose some conceptual and empirical directions for research that would seek to overcome these limitations by integrating ethnography more closely with human history, while stressing the importance of money in shaping world society and attempts to reform it.

Market and Society (Cambridge University Press), 2009

We are living in another one-world moment like Magellan’s. I seek to throw light on this moment in history, first by examining Polanyi’s analysis of the part played by money in “the great transformation” of the nineteenth century and in the disaster that followed from it (1914–1945). My own version takes off from Polanyi’s emphasis, even as it differs from his – of “the long twentieth century” going back to the revolutions of the 1860s. From this I develop some general arguments concerning money’s role in a “human economy,” a concept that Polanyi sometimes referred to. I end with some remarks about the political lessons to be gained from revisiting The Great Transformation (1944) today.

economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, 2011

By taking a broader view of money than its current identification with finance, I aim to historicize the present by placing it within a long-term process of social development, in the process offering a new explanation for our economic problems. I take the financial crisis to mean the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the subsequent attempts of leading governments to stave off economic collapse by using taxpayers; money to save the banks. the current break in history goes far deeper than the recent replacement of social democracy by neoliberalism. We are witnessing the end of the social form that has dominated the twentieth century. I call it “national capitalism” and its origins lie in the political and technological revolutions of the 1860s. Its historical trajectory includes two phases of financial imperialism each lasting three decades, from the 1880s and the 1980s. The former ended in the First World War, so we had better watch out! I argue that the financial crisis is only superficially a question of credit boom and bust. At bottom the social organization of national money that the world has come to live by since its inception a century and a half ago is coming to an end.

Goldsmiths, University of London, 2007

I will talk today about people, machines, and money. This, in a reduced form, is the project that I take from Marx. He found that under Victorian capitalism, working people were tied to machines in the new factories and subordinated to the power of big money. He and Engels thought that this order of social organization—giving priority to money which bought the machines and thereby controlling the workers—ought to be reversed. In a broad sense, this is my political project and my writing project too. My lecture has three sections: first on machines, then on money and finally on the emergent world society that humanity is now making.

PERSPECTIVES OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE AND HEALTH – GLOBALLY AND LOCALLY – Thematic Compendium , 2021

Certain economists have finally begun to understand the crucial points of the so-called hypothesis of financial instability and the necessity to focus on financial leverage: the relationship between a long-term company credit and its claims, income or assets. The debt-deflation theory of the Great Depression is used to undermine the substance of contemporary, global world: the more debtors pay, the more indebted they are. In the situation of enormous debts and unstable economy, defaulters are forced to reduce leverage, creating thus the so-called deflationary spiral. The combination of the apparent liquidity and the burden of debts leads to a situation in which saving seems to be absurd. The savings paradox does not imply that the increase of savings means an increase of investments that contribute to an increase of future well-being. However, during depression, those who save do not spend. The result is a new downward trend – a continuous collapse of economy. The economy paradox causes the leverage reduction paradox and the labour market flexibility paradox. The financial sector of the global economy has imposed the idea that the market in itself leads to an efficient and stable outcome. Stressing that monetary policy must focus on inflation, not on job creation, including hard focus on fiscal deficits. And the deficit cannot always be a problem; not if the money is spent on investments and especially if this is done while the economy is weak. In this research we also look at the controversy between monetarists and Keynesians Monetarists, unlike Keynesians, usually consider that expenditures are determined by an excessive supply, or by demand in the real amount of money. The stated differences in attitudes and actualizations of such controversies are relevant to the problem of research in our work encouraged by current economic actuality triggered by global human health crises. Key words: global finance, global economy, economic growth, human crises.

The paper analyses the financial crisis as a broader economic crisis caused by excessive consumer credit-propelled growth. Running on debt has turned into a major "growth" factor gradually turning the markets into Ponzi Schemes. Economic growth got detached from human development. Increase in production becomes an objective of its own; ‘commodity’ gets detached from ‘functionality’ and each consecutive increase of commodities contributes less and less to capabilities in a ‘declining marginal capabilities’ pattern. The consumer is being increasingly flooded by cheap ‘disposable’ goods to keep the economy running. Developed world economies are close to market saturation – the point when an increase in consumption of commodities does not improve levels of human development. The innovative financial instruments have helped detach part of the financial sector from real value generation. The financial sector in developed economies has passed the critical point of optimum beyond which it no longer adds value but is just redistributing value generated elsewhere. It increasingly resembled technologically fancy gambling casino populated by smart mathematicians with limited knowledge of economic history. The magnitude of the ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ damage is still unclear. So is the anticipated time-frame of the recession, its depth and scope of necessary structural adjustment. The world is still to come to terms in assessing its implications – and the consequences of governments’ response to the crisis (massive bail-outs and infusion of cash to rescue the financial system). An entire industry has been discredited. Public support for stronger government involvement in the economy is also likely.

2022

This essay has an Introduction and four parts. In Part 1 I refer briefly the relationship between economics and the human sciences drawing on Foucault in The Order of Things (1970). ******** 1. Max Weber, General Economic History (1930); 2. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904); 3. V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899); 4. Talcott Parsons, The Theory of Social Action (1937); 5. J.M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (1932); 6. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944); 7.Marcel Mauss, Essay on the Gift (1925). ******** Each of these individuals, with others of course, launched a branch of knowledge that dissented from professional economics: socio-economic history; institutional economics; neo-Marxism and development economics; economic sociology; macroeconomics; the economic history of world crisis; and economic anthropology. ******** Part 3 summarises, in a manifesto, two decades of the human economy approach. Part 4 has two sections: on organized knowledge, especially the two great principles of our civilization, democracy and science; and the relationship between the humanities and popular culture.

Money in a human economy, 2017

In the last half-century humanity has begun to form a world society. Its engine (and possibly its means of destruction) is widely believed to be capitalism. But the history of money is much more than capitalism. We must look to that history for ways of repairing the damage that modern money has done before it is too late. So where are we in the history of money? Is capitalism nearing its end ('late capitalism') or just beginning as a multi-sited global phenomenon ('one-world capitalism')? Has the bourgeois revolution been replaced in our time by a reversion to the Old Regime that it once conquered? The origins of our times According to writers as varied as John Locke and Karl Marx, ours is an age of money, a transitional phase in the history of humanity. Capitalism is the organization of society by and

Suomen Antropologi, 2011

The author has always been sceptical about the use of value theory in anthropology. Here he considers its scope in relation to a project linked to the publication of The Human Economy: A Citizen's Guide in 2010. This international project, which aims to develop an alternative to free market economics, is outlined briefly. The main source for the present lecture is Marx's theory of the commodity as value-form. This leads to an examination of the concept of commoditization which is defined as a quasi-historical sequence, the progressive abstraction of social labour. The approaches of Marx and Mauss must be reconciled if we are to bring Marx's value theory up-to-date. Four main points are identified as showing how the human economy project might benefit from the previous discussion of value. The lecture concludes with some remarks on the significance of value theory for anthropologists.

2020

This paper explores the fundamental importance of sociality to monetary sovereignty, investigating the apparent contrast between the state and the market in theories of money. Sociality deserves attention given the recent increase since the 1990s of denationalised, regional and, more recently, crypto currencies, which are different from legal tender. First, we examine the classification of metalism and chartalism, that is, the commodity theory of money on one hand and the chartal theory of money on the other (Section 2). The former has been dominant in the history of economic thought, focussing on catallactics, or the function of money as a medium of exchange, while the latter lays more importance on the function of money as a means of payment and relies on literature in history and anthropology. We then concentrate on the meaning of the institution of payment and debt, with which a person can participate in the society to which he/she belongs (Section 3). People’s belief in the per...

Anthropology Southern Africa, 2013

The Human Economy Project is interdisciplinary in scope, but relies extensively on anthropological research methods. These methods are an appropriate counter to the methods adopted in mainstream economics, which has been criticised for its isolation from ‘the ordinary business of life’. Four essays in this collection illustrate the use of the ethnographic research method in posing questions about the way in which people in different parts of the world perceive the ‘big institutions’ – the market, the state, business corporations – that impinge on their lives. The final two essays discuss the rationale behind the Human Economy Project and the meaning of the ‘human economy’ idea.