Research Projects
Working papers:
Ongoing Reseach
Project
A Normative Foundation for Ecological
Economics and the Tools for its Assessment
Principal investigator: Peter G. Brown
Co-investigators: Richard Janda, Peter Victor (York
University), Mark Goldberg
Funded by SSHRC: 2009-2012
The Problem to be Addressed:
An astonishing fact
is that the world is ruled by an economic order whose fundamental premises
are strongly at odds with our current scientific understandings of how
the world works, and which, as a consequence, is a major driver in the
rapidly growing ecological crisis.
Many indicators suggest
a rapid decline in the prospects of life on our planet, including accelerating
climate change, increasing loss of natural variety, changing and expanding
disease vectors, an economic system that overwhelms the biosphere on
which it depends, and rapid growth of the human population. Life’s
long sojourn on planet Earth is at a turning point, especially if the
dire predictions on climate change come about. Yet, we shrink from asking
the question: is there something fundamentally mistaken, even wrong,
with our stance toward life and the world?
We propose re-examining
the conceptual underpinnings of the economic order present in most societies
to assess its role in the current situation and to identify foundations
for, and elements of, a different and more prosperous prospect for life’s
future. Contribution to the Advancement of Knowledge and to the Common
Good: Our approach is to further and enrich the paradigm shift proposed
by the scientifically grounded branch of ecological economics. That
shift insists that the economy must be seen as a subset of the biosphere,
as opposed to the construct whereby the biosphere is seen as a subsystem
of the economy (i.e., as property), as in the neoclassical, mainstream
model. We propose to extend this development in three directions.
First, we will take
the next logical step of examining what this “new” economics
would be if it were grounded in an ethics informed by the same scientific
perspectives that is the cornerstone of ecological economics. Ironically,
the ethical assumptions underlying ecological economics has tended to
remain anthropocentric in seeking to assess the value of ecosystems
in relation to human needs and uses (e.g., as revealed in the term “ecosystem
services”). Any serious attempt to formulate a new economics along
the lines of ecological economics cannot, without radical and impermissible
schizophrenia, rest on an ethic that assumes only persons have moral
standing.
Second, we propose to
develop credible indicators of an ecological economy that would allow
us to appraise its successes and failures.We will structure our inquiry
concerning how to assess such an economy by pursuing answers to six
key questions: What is an economy? What is an economy for? How does
it work? How big is too big? What is just? How should it be governed?
Third, we will examine
the implications of our proposed ethical foundation and the tools of
assessment for many of the key concepts used currently in economics.
We propose to discover, construct, and unearth the internal vocabulary
for an expanded framework of ecological economics so as to re-cast the
terms of discourse of the neoclassical model. One place to begin is
to reformulate and reconceive many of the ideas from economics through
ideas from thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, and ecology.
We must form a link
between these understandings of how the world (and the universe) works
and our understanding of economics and its fundamental and operational
constructs. For instance, what would be the analogues to or reformulations
of terms used in microeconomics, such as market failure, marginality,
and consumer welfare, and to concepts in macroeconomics, including aggregate
demand, liquidity trap, money supply, comparative advantage, interest,
public finance, and wealth? We envision that these three issues of ethics,
assessment and key concepts will, as the research develops, all be “in
play” at once and that reflecting on them simultaneously will
enrich the development of this alternative model considerably.