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November 25, 2008
A review by Scott London of an old book that meant a lot to me----Herman Daly and John Cobb Jr's For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). London says that according to Daly and Cobb:
contemporary economic theory holds to a crude, mechanistic worldview of homo economicus as an autonomous individual driven solely by self-interest and of society as an aggregate of such individuals. This view tends to equate gains in society as a whole with the increases in goods and services acquired by its individual members, but it says nothing about the changes in the quality of the relationships that constitute that society. They therefore propose a "paradigm shift" from economics conceived as "crematistics" (maximization of short-term monetary gain) to the sort of economics Aristotle called "oikonomia" (management of a household aimed at increasing its use value over the long run for the community). In "economics for community," their term for the latter alternative, there is no aim for unlimited accumulation or "growthmania." Instead, "true wealth is limited by the satisfaction of the concrete need." Such a conversion entails a departure from radical individualism to the notion of a "person-in-community," as well as a fundamental shift away "from cosmopolitanism to communities of communities."
This kind of paradigm shift has not happened in Australia. The mode of economic governance is still a neo-liberal one despite the recent resurgence of sustainability talk around the Murray-Darling Basin.
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