{"id":12835,"date":"2023-01-22T19:31:11","date_gmt":"2023-01-22T08:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=12835"},"modified":"2023-01-22T19:31:11","modified_gmt":"2023-01-22T08:31:11","slug":"how-the-philosophy-of-the-past-can-help-us-imagine-the-economy-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/22\/how-the-philosophy-of-the-past-can-help-us-imagine-the-economy-of-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"How the philosophy of the past can help us imagine the economy of the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

The economy keeps making headlines for all the wrong reasons \u2014 stories about\u00a0rising prices<\/a>,\u00a0supply shortages<\/a>\u00a0and a looming\u00a0recession<\/a>\u00a0have been frequently making the front page these days.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0current economic crisis is deepening the long-standing issue of social inequality,<\/a>\u00a0widening the gap between the rich and poor \u2014 a problem that was already accelerated by the\u00a0Great Recession of 2008<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0economic shock brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The richest country in the world,\u00a0the United States<\/a>, is among the most drastic examples of this trend.\u00a0Today, American CEOs earn 940 per cent more than their counterparts did in 1978<\/a>. A typical worker, on the other hand, only goes home with 12 per cent more money than workers from 1978 did.<\/p>\n

As a\u00a0report by the Economic Policy Institute<\/a>\u00a0demonstrates, rising CEO pay does not reflect a change in the value of skills \u2014 it represents a shift in power. Over decades, American politics has undermined the bargaining power of workers by\u00a0discouraging<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0obstructing<\/a> self-organising efforts, such as unionisation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The growing wealth of a minority at the expense of the majority means power is concentrated in the hands of a few people,\u00a0mostly men<\/a>. It\u2019s not surprising that figures such as\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a>,\u00a0Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Elon Musk<\/a>\u00a0have a disproportional impact on our communities \u2014 sometimes with devastating consequences that threaten our democratic institutions.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more necessary than ever before to re-examine the fundamentals of our economic order. The search for alternative economic models, however, is made difficult by conventional thinking patterns.<\/p>\n

Many believe\u00a0we are facing a stark choice<\/a>\u00a0between a capitalist market economy on the one hand and a socialist-planned economy on the other.<\/p>\n

Although we live in a world that defines economic models in absolutist terms, it doesn\u2019t have to be this way. We argue that the psychological and social perspectives on economy that were developed by 19th-century philosophers such as\u00a0Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel<\/a>,\u00a0John Stuart Mill<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Georg Simmel<\/a>\u00a0can help us re-imagine economics with a human face.<\/p>\n

These thinkers were convinced that a good economic order had to incorporate elements of classic capitalism (such as a\u00a0free market<\/a>\u00a0in goods and services) with elements of classic socialism (such as\u00a0collective ownership<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0means of production<\/a>). This is what we call\u00a0economic pluralism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hegel is a good example of an economic pluralist thinker. In his\u00a01820 Philosophy of Right<\/em><\/a>, he presented an\u00a0extensive reflection on the modern economy<\/a>. He discussed the market and its operating principles, social inequality and even the formation of desires through advertisements and consumer culture.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more necessary than ever before to re-examine the fundamentals of our economic order.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Among the many topics he examined was the problem of affluence<\/a>. Hegel was not just worried about the poverty created by the modern market economy, but also about the concentration of extreme wealth in few hands.<\/p>\n

Writing hundreds of years before modern multi-billionaires arrived on the scene,\u00a0Hegel already argued that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cboth of these sides, poverty and affluence, represent the scourge (Verderben) of Civil Society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hegel\u2019s analysis is even more prescient: He believed affluence created the counter-intuitive tendency among the affluent to feel victimised and disenfranchised by society. As a result, the affluent perceived all social demands, like taxes, as unjustified incursions into their personal freedom.<\/p>\n

Hegel thought this sense of victimisation could lead to an unexpected bond between those at the very top of the economic pyramid and those at the bottom \u2014 a bond that overcame differences in lifestyle and mutual antipathy to form an alliance that attacks civil society from both sides. The phenomenon of Trump\u2019s MAGA alliance<\/a>\u00a0is an interesting modern example of this.<\/p>\n

Unlike some later socialists, Hegel did not think problems of affluence were best rectified by introducing a planned economy that enforces wealth equality. Instead, his approach was pluralistic.<\/p>\n

He made a case for a free market exchange paired with co-operative modes of production, which are \u2014 in some respects \u2014 similar to\u00a0modern-day worker co-operatives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If most economic production in society was organised co-operatively, Hegel believed, wealthier subjects would be embedded in economic decision-making with others, replacing the detrimental \u201cbond of victimisation\u201d between the rich and poor with a collective identity based on shared economic agency.<\/p>\n

When reimagining our current economic order, we can take a page out of Hegel\u2019s handbook by focusing on\u00a0worker co-operatives<\/a>: economic ventures that are\u00a0co-owned by workers<\/a>\u00a0that make productive decisions together, often \u2014 albeit not always \u2014 in a democratic manner.<\/p>\n

Under what conditions are such co-operative modes of production successful? How can the state incentivise these forms of production within the existing market economy? And are these worker co-operatives really a way to achieve economic justice? These are the questions that, inspired by the past, might help us imagine a new, pluralist, more equal and human-centric economic future.<\/p>\n

This article was co-authored by Johannes Steizinger, Associate Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University, and Thimo Heisenberg, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, at Bryn Mawr College.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published in <\/strong><\/em>The Conversation<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Photo by David Suarez<\/a> on Unsplash<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The economy keeps making headlines for all the wrong reasons \u2014 stories about\u00a0rising prices,\u00a0supply shortages\u00a0and a looming\u00a0recession\u00a0have been frequently making<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":617,"featured_media":12837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[430,422,539],"coauthors":[540],"class_list":["post-12835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-economics","tag-economic-theory","tag-philosophers","tag-wealth-inequality"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/617"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12835"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12839,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12835\/revisions\/12839"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12835"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}