Reconceptualizing Political Economy as a Quality of Life Issue
Introduction
Political economy was a domain of natural philosophy. In the subsequent sharp break between philosophy and specialized social science disciplines, the vital interconnections and understandings connecting the values of politics with the rationalities of economics were sundered.
As a specialized “science” and subsequently as a public philosophy, the academic field of “economics” overgeneralized and glorified the magic of the “market” for large scale coordination. Economics became over reductionist in their conception of human beings and too narrow in their conception of “value”.
In the Empire of Value MIT Press Andre Orlean argues for a different view of “value” than classical economics. He concludes, “The neoclassical economist is incapable of giving a complete account of market regimes…this requires adopting a point of view that looks beyond instrumental rationality to what really creates sustainable value. Economists must begin by trying to understanding the shared values that are the foundation of social life. This, as I say, means breaking with substance value. Value does not reside in objects. It is produced by human beings acting in concert with one another.” p.372. He goes on to say elsewhere that without a consensus of the multitude, not solely the individual utility maximizer in competition with one another, one cannot derive a unified conception of value which provides the social trust and confidence for economic monetary exchange. Summing aggregates of isolated individual preferences do not make an integrated value.
In other words, an atomized model of man is very insufficient for determining the quality of life. Acting upon their self-interest based on passions and separative preferences is full of folly and error, far away from having omniscience; thus knowledge of one’s interest must entail dialogue and development of mutual interests which point to the public good with a sustainable quality of life with durable value.
Only recently has our “public philosophy” struggled to restore the broader field of political economy—reconnecting values and economizing rationalities to conceptions of quality of life in order to provide a broader understanding of human purposes in an increasingly interdependent globe. We need a conception of political economy which enables a “public philosophy” which emphasizes the inner and outer ethical ordering of the quality of life for each and all with varying standpoints supported by interdisciplinary rationalities of mobilization and distribution of societal and global resources to sustain and strengthen it.
This paper attempts to restore and understand governance and public policy as an integrative political economy in a turbulent field of interdependence. For those wanting a more technical and reasoned standpoint, please see the works of Noble Prize winning welfare economist Amartya Sen.
A. Governance: From Loyalty and Coercion to Humanitarian Reason and Integrity
Until the eighteenth century, monarchs and kings ruled most of the globe. They extracted taxes from their subjects to pay their armies for protection and to provide luxury for their blood lines and cronies. Through the coercion of public policy, they supported their cabals through estates and fiefdoms with slave or serf labor or established caste lines to insure benefits in exchange for stability.
The American Revolution and those that followed substituted peaceful Constitutional arrangements for the arbritrary nature of kingdoms. These Revolutions transformed subjects into citizens. They provided for the ability of citizens to “own” their governance through indirect representative democracy and boundaries for dialogue and reasoning together on a large scale. The impartial rule of law (not men) allowed for the incremental struggle for universal human rights and the somewhat related benefits of autonomous commerce which improved the standard of living sooner or later for everyone. It allowed and encouraged the use of science and technology to improve and extend what people individually and collectively could do.
B. Visions of Just Political Economy
Philosophers saw political economy as a natural aspect of what “constitutes” us in a republic. One can make a historical case that political economy was always part of the many of the U.S. Founding Fathers’ political thinking. Professor Emeritus John E. Schwarz in Common Credo: The Path Back to American Success writes on page 35 and 36 “The economic conditions the Founders envisaged had a moral power they believed was compelling enough to be regarded as self-evident truth. Its moral force resided, first, in the basic natural right of every free individual to the fruit of his or her own labor and improvement. Second, it lay in the ready access that nature gave all individuals to the economic security needed for independence through the common access that every individual had to the Earth at the beginning, a right affirmed in natural law. Thomas Jefferson argued that the right to the means of providing a tolerable living came prior to and took precedence over the right of property ownership of any others who own in excess. It was up to society to ensure that the required opportunity—if need be, through accessibility to public lands or to additional employment—so that a condition would in turn be broadly available.” Jefferson also argued for an income floor and ceiling. A century later Henry George, in his Progress and Poverty, appealed to natural law for a basis of taxing property so it would not create a “rentier class”.
Thus democratic governments were seen as being able to create laws to regulate the social and political order through stable property rights as well as the extension of access to land and subsistence to citizens. Proposals for social security for the young and old, guaranteed, universal direct cash grants, progressive income tax systems, and universal access to land or a just redistribution of rents from land are primary examples.
Regulation also included the power to license and restrain private power, unprincipled factions, while allowing freedom of association and other human rights. Paine and Jefferson insisted on explicit Constitution-making every generation to enable citizens and their representatives to continue to promote a just, transparent ethical ordering of “what constitutes us” based on universal and impartial principles rather than shadowy personal favoritism, corruption, and factions.
C. Changing Technologies with Lagging Ethical Principles
But how far could the intentional American and other democratic experiments go? Radical groups of Enlightenment Thinkers suggested that citizens are capable of becoming more self-governing in an egalitarian democracy. The U.S. Founding Fathers noted that there is no system of government which can sustain trust-inducing cooperation and autonomous self-organization if citizens do not exercise essential virtues that will sustain democratic life and express those values to create a strong, stable government. In civic life, these virtues include tolerance and civility in deliberations for the common good. In a personal character, it meant the courage to speak one’s conscience, yet be able to reason in the company of others in a dispassionate, disinterested manner. These character virtues translated into the economic realm of fair-dealings and upholding contractual agreements with obligation to law.
In the modern age, the self-exciting market fused with technologies of the Industrial Revolution and subsequent ones. These transformed a decentralized economy into a highly autonomous, capital-driven economy based on the concentrated power of large organizations. This condition was captured in John Kenneth Galbraith’s New Industrial State. The political economy of capital accumulation reinforced a political culture of a production-consumption socialized life space which appeal to the glamorization of citizen acquisition of material goods.
Thus, as Peter Friesen writes, it is not unusual for organized economic interests to appropriate democratic governments. Neo-liberalism, for example, shifts the purpose of the political economy in order to render the world safe for a 24-7, frictionless, trading economy. The Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decisions equates money with free speech; thus invading and constraining the critical distance needed for creatively expressing conscience while widening inequality in the expression of free speech. Thus, a tipping point is soon approaching between a republic of conscience and one of a moneyed, elite democracy supported, as U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned, with a military-industrial-media-academic complex both in America and in other liberal and illiberal states.
While neo-liberal economic globalization has lifted millions out of extreme poverty, a proliferation of consumer brands, stimulated by media, stroked desires for material goods and social positioning. The ethos of bourgeois middle class consumerism and materialism is unsupportable by the globe. The multiple effects of extracting the earth’s physical and human resources for continued economic growth and for potentially deadly competition between nation states and non-state actors for fertile soil or fresh water imperils life on the planet.
D. A Different Starting Point: Gandhian Political Economy
While the market is one coordinative rationality, society must be delimited to achieve proper balance and promote social harmony for each and all. Thus, human beings and their associated public policies must attempt to approximate these ideals through shifting their values through cooperating around limits. This involves new thinking. A global political economy should reflect a distribution which provides all citizens with the potential to participate in the political realm of “voice” while having at least an economic subsistence to be able to have minimal human dignity and participate in the collective. This proposition reflects what 18th century Enlightenment thinkers proposed as just political economy.
Globalization implies devolvement and democratization of ethical citizenship and political economy. M.K. Gandhi stated that the earth has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed. Thus, in an age of globalization (or any age), individual self-regulation of desire and recognition of moral interdependence are critical enabling values to policy regulation of a political economy.
Geoffrey Vickers wrote, “The growth of human systems is limited by the demands of the other…Mutual demands mount not only between men and their milieu but also between each and all the others; and these social demands become harder to meet as they grow less structured by custom, less governed by authority, and more widely extended beyond social groups which are used both to contain them and sustain them.” The polity will not be able to cope with these forms of increasing atomized “self-excited” complexity.
M.K. Gandhi then called upon each person to be a good “trustee” and preserver of the temporary resources in our care (including ourselves). Gandhi said each individual should continually subtract their desires from their needs so that we can prevent a multiplication of wants. Luxury seeking rationalizes excess greed and appropriation, and creates an obscuration in the mind. This partiality separate us from others and blocks clear and steady thinking on what is good for each and all. One can refer to Gandhian Trusteeship. Thus, it is the citizen through the family that promotes “civic spirit” globally and locally.
E. Working With Limits
Thus, a change in consciousness on the part of citizens is needed. Richard Falk writes that we are entering a world where we have live with limits. This ethos corresponds to an ecological ethic of “de-growth”. (For a review of different conceptions, see “In Defence of Degrowth” by Giorgos Kallis, Ecological Economics 70 (2011) 873-880.
Individually, these limits can be seen as presenting viable alternatives and choices for living and learning. Self-governance involves regulating and letting go of excessive appropriative tendencies. This can be done by forgetting one’s self and serving others. Enhancing one’s ability to serve others may be seen as acquiring true wealth whatever the circumstances. A thoughtful but generous attitude can be the basis for altruism. The Dalai Lama says that altruism is the first step of true happiness as does the Golden Rule found in all universal religions.
Policy-wise, the economist John McArthur has demonstrated that a very small global tax, about .15 percent of high-income countries annual income , would reduce the extreme poverty income gap for the entire world for about $80 billion, dropping to around $30 billion by 2030. The Good p.16 “Can Basic Income Work?”
In addition, using Gandhi’s principle of raising up the least first, new solar and intermediate technologies can improve the basic access to information of all of the world’s population.
From the standpoint of the nation-state, the old theory of economic democracy–subjecting economic activity to political command–may not be feasible. But the use of political power to redistribute economic power from those who have too much to some of those who have too little is possible. Stein Ringen writes in What Is Democracy For “is that poverty is simply not unfair, but unacceptable.” p.222 Thus poverty is not “normal” nor should be “contained”, but through strengthening families, villages, and communities, especially with direct grants, social care, and education, the eradication of poverty can be done. This is a fundamental function of a government “of, by, and for all the people.” and whose democratic order needs a universal legitimacy and ideals within its boundaries.
However, in addition to markets, hierarchies, and technologies, we can think about community as a category of public policy. Under the basic premise that political arrangements should be decentralized for appropriate citizen access and economies deconcentrated for more accessible, fair markets, we can imagine what Gandhi termed “a community of communities.”
A crucial dimension of these communities is the range of how much voluntary intimacy and service to others can individuals fit themselves for a common good.
F. Self-Governing Villages
Gandhi viewed the rural village as the anchor of self-reliance. One of its roles was to provide full employment to those who had the internal virtues and self-discipline to live and work together, with the hands, hearts, and minds, in a mutual culture. This more intimate setting enabled persons who have mutual knowledge of each other to cooperate. These contexts provide more granular opportunities for integrating persons, roles, and families into a common good both inside and outside village life.
Collectively, villages as intentional communities can provide a workshop for learning self-governance and collective participation. The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in California for more than thirty years has concentric circles of varying membership and obligation, yet also engages political and ecological concerns in its broader milieu including advocating political legislation. Thus, the village is the bulwark of local democracy, and without vibrant villages, local democracy will die.
Public policy should remove disincentives to village scale habitat. The bourgeoning mega-cities of the world over 10 million are magnets for the dispossessed and this trend needs to be reversed in order to create a sustainable, humane society.
In addition, there are larger scales of governance such as the local government district and larger regional areas. People could find work in more extended cooperative and networked enterprises. There are also jobs in public services at district and regional levels. For those persons not suited in character for village life, these jobs, especially in dynamic cities or even peri-urban areas, can provide the diversity of goods and services and potential business opportunities. These may require a frugality and endurance of life style given the precariousness of employment work in more atomized environments.
In summary, the Noble Prize winning welfare economist Amartya Sen writes that each citizen must have the basic means to participate in both the economy for sustenance and as a participative citizen with human dignity in the political arena. With a minimal guaranteed annual income or regular cash dividend, indexed to the economy, at whatever amount is suitable to each nation, citizens can choose which concentric circles of working and living they want to belong to in different life phases. Each of these circles provide choices as to how one defines quality of life. Thus, we may be able to slowly catch up the ideals of the Enlightenment thinkers, their thoughts of political economy, and their ideals of a universal society.
This paper has argued that how we choose to become more self-governing as individuals and as members of collectives define our quality of life supported public policy and our political economy. In an era of limits, less is more which many young people understand. Individual self-governance of desires and sustainable communities allows less appropriation and extraction so that others may live on Earth.
