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Defining "Economics" Inclusively © Copyright 2002 Tony Aspromourgos
Its inclusiveness –
or, if one prefers, its expansiveness – should be evident. The
classical-Marxian orientation towards material reproduction and distribution,
with the price system as a conduit for the associated allocation of
commodities, fits naturally into this definition. Keynesianism (and hence
also the effective demand dimension of Kalecki) can
be articulated within its domain – as a theory of how, in certain kinds of
political societies, there may be no spontaneous mechanism to ensure an
optimal level of resource utilization, and hence sub-optimal activity levels
and consumption outcomes occur. The evolution of social organization and
institutions also finds a natural place, as the study of how the
politico-social mechanisms for effecting consumption have varied. Hence those
associated with the Historical School, evolutionary economics and
Institutionalism find a legitimate place. My definition also
avoids the asocial orientation of marginalism by taking its point of departure from
social organization, rather than from independent individuals.
Furthermore, it embraces the study of current, past, or even future
(including ‘ideal’), societies. Hence it does not discriminate against
economic history – economic history is included in a natural way in the
definition, as well as economic anthropology and economic sociology. (The
discipline definitely would be better off if some of the resources currently
devoted to theorizing were redeployed to historical studies. There is too
much of the former and far too little of the latter.) The study of ‘ideal’
societies points to normative analysis – in orthodox language, welfare
economics – though of course, non-orthodox welfare economics need not only
proceed on such a grand scale. If it is felt that
nature and the natural environment should be more explicit in the definition,
then ‘extraction,’ could be inserted before ‘production’ in the definition.
In fact, the focus on ‘sustenance’ is suggestive of sustainability – and
indeed, the classical focus on reproduction of social economies is, at core,
a notion of sustainability (including scarcity of an objective kind, rather
than the subjective marginalist form). The definition
offered here might also have the effect of orienting the various, current subdisciplines of economics more towards the final,
human, material purpose of economic systems. This need not in all respects
involve radical departure from conventional thinking. Hence, for example, the
theory of finance has as its purpose the study of instruments and systems for
enabling the intertemporal shifting of consumption.
This is not a heterodox proposition, even if participants in financial
analysis often lose sight of this ultimate (legitimate) social purpose of
financial systems. Consumption is not the ultimate human purpose of course;
but beyond survival, the purposes consumption serves seem not to be something
economics can say anything very significant about. Certainly orthodox
economics has offered little beyond empirically empty nonsense-tautologies
like ‘utility’ and ‘preference’. (Why not just say ‘people are what they are’
and be done with it!) The referring of consumption demand back to deeper
underlying characteristics of commodities may
be a fruitful way towards saying more. From the standpoint
of my suggested definition of economics, the marginalist
approach then appears as the study of the distribution or allocation of a
given set of resources to the achievement of (some of) a given set of
possible (ranked) uses. Hence my definition does not, and does not seek to,
exclude orthodox economics – it rather locates it as one approach, to one
particular kind of question, in a larger and more general context. Or perhaps it does
exclude one dimension of the marginalist intellectual
project in its widest form: the idea that its method (constrained individual
optimization, with or without strategic interaction) can be a general theory
of human psychology and choice as such
– hence the idea that it can explain getting married, having children, going
to war, committing suicide, and so on. By orienting the subject matter
towards ‘economics’ in the common sense
of that term, my definition marginalizes (pun intended) these
pretensions. Get back to the study of ‘guns and butter’ (or, in a classical
vein, machine tools and corn) boys and girls! ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ –
indeed.
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