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Adopting an orthodox mainstream paradigmatic perspective, in part or whole, has serious implications for the conduct and relevance of economic science. This chapter aims to clarify the divisions in economics between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and to show how this has impacted understanding of the environmental crisis. The concept of orthodox - as opposed to radical - dissent is introduced, and the meaning of paradigmatic conformity is outlined. The chapter argues that the fight for a paradigm shift in economics is undercut by such conformity and pragmatism. What constitutes heterodox thought on the environment is critically reviewed in terms four economic schools: Marxist/socialist, institutionalist, feminist and Post Keynesian. The chapter reveals the paradigmatic and ideological struggle in which heterodoxy in general is engaged and how this plays out with respect to ecological economics in particular.
Social ecological economists have been present since the creation of the ISEE and have provided the main approach in the ESEE. This chapter frames the discussion about creating an alternative economics that gives insight into operationally effective alternative forms of economies. It looks at the rise of modern industrial economies. They are contrasted with a generalised category of 'traditional economies' based on differences in structure, although a richer analysis might employ a dialectical conceptualisation. The chapter outlines the roles of State and corporate actors in promoting technology, how work has become central to modern lives but without meaning, the related failures of development and its colonialism, and the disconnect between Nature and society. This is followed by outlining the related key problem areas facing social ecological economic research in the search for viable alternative systems of social provisioning and means of transformation away from current destructive and exploitative economic structures.
If growth in scale is success, then ecological economics appears to have been successful. Three main positions on research are described as constituting ecological economics: new environmental pragmatism, new resource economics and social ecological economics. Four crossover positions, between the three main ones, capture a fuller picture of argumentation about direction and meaning and are explored. The chapter then considers the implications of these seven categories for unity and division within ecological economics. Social ecological economics takes a research position that is distinct from the existing economic orthodoxy, but is also critical of the pragmatic willingness to adopt whatever is assumed to achieve a given end. Several authors have advocated the idea of a potential union between ecological economics and neoclassical resource and environmental economics.
Chapter 7 concludes with a sketch of possible future trajectories. It returns to the introductory argument that digital capitalism represents a post-neoliberal economic practice, in the sense that its leading companies have jettisoned the idea of neutral markets (which is essential to every liberal theory of capitalism). The conclusion argues that the obvious attempts by the state to gain a more active role in the economy – especially in Europe – represent the flip side of this post-neoliberal constellation. It sketches out three possible scenarios for the future of digital capitalism: the existing Western path, where life chances are increasingly distributed as (digital) capitalist services; a political-authoritarian version of the type currently appearing in China, where life chances are distributed according to a logic of privilege for political conformity; and a third version which is characterised as a digital society based on rights.
Chapter 3 takes up the links between digital technology and broader capitalist developments by exploring the systemic ties between financial capitalism and the digital economy. It starts with the direct interactions: the IT industry as the main supplier of technology used for ‘innovation’ in the financial sector (high-frequency trading, data-based asset management, etc.) and Wall Street as the main supplier of investment capital for the digital economy. The argument then turns to more indirect similarities and filiations. Both the banking sector and the internet industry deal, on an ontological level, with goods that are not scarce (to them). They make money by selling access to virtual goods that can be produced at very low cost. Banks create money by issuing credit essentially with a keystroke; internet companies distribute non-rival digital goods that they can multiply without relevant costs. This leads to similar business practices appearing in both fields. The chapter explores these in depth and frames them analytically, concluding that the most successful digital corporations owe their accumulation practices to role models in the financial sector. The chapter identifies venture capital as a specific type of financial capital that has been essential to the growth of digital capitalism. It explores its rise throughout the dotcom boom of the 1990s, analyses it as a strong driver of economic crisis and shows how the period after the financial and debt crisis of 2008/09 (roughly the past ten years) resembles the 1990s.
This book explores radical dissent from orthodox mainstream economics, and sets out a theoretically grounded vision for the emerging paradigm of social ecological economics. In short, orthodox dissent has entailed arguments for maintaining hi-tech growth economies and redistributing the surplus regardless of core counterarguments from Marxists, feminists, institutionalists, Post Keynesians and ecological economists. Building on the radical and philosophical foundations, the book articulates a preanalytic vision of social ecological economics, dismantling entrenched notions of growth and efficiency in favour of a framework centered on social provisioning and needs embedded in ethics. In a thought-provoking conclusion, the book applies its analytical lens to the multiple crises of modernity within industrialised capital-accumulating economies. An agenda for social ecological transformation toward diverse alternative economies emerges, providing a compelling call to action in the face of contemporary challenges. Schumpeter's proposal is put into a broader perspective by comparison with the theories of Neurath and Kuhn and issues in the sociology of science that they all raise. The book then turns to clarifying the meaning and role of ideology and the differences that have occurred over time and between different authors - Marx, Engels, Schumpeter and Gramsci. The concept of ideology in Schumpeter persists with the negative Marxist treatment and regarding it as something to be removed, but developments in political science have changed this understanding.
In this chapter, ecological economics is identified as arising from late-twentieth-century environmentalism and the failure of environmental economics to create an academic community prepared to challenge mainstream economic thinking, and more specifically economic growth and price-making markets. Ecological economics engages with a range of topics which recur across time and space and have been debated in Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks. Environmental economics arose, along with the growth in public awareness, as a direct response to pollution problems. Neoclassical theorists gave resource and environmental economics a technocentric optimism and ideological faith in self-regulating, price-making markets that circumvented recognising any need for fundamental change in human behaviour or major government intervention to directly regulate corporations or control market players. Economists voicing strong environmental critiques proved too revolutionary for the orthodox mainstream of the profession.
Instead of ecological economics offering an integrative approach, it was founded on vague and unstructured appeals to transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, holism, pluralism and eclecticism. In this chapter, the approaches to integration critically reviewed by Kapp are discussed and brought into a current social ecological economic perspective with specific focus on dialectics (from Hegel to Engels and Marx to Georgescu-Roegen), analogy and metaphor (which are distinguished), unity of science and finally multi-/trans-/inter-disciplinarity. The argument is made that interdisciplinarity is key but requires insight into a process as to how it might proceed. The role of conceptualisation is highlighted and Kapp's proposal for 'common-denominator' concepts is explained and explored. The potential for and barriers to integration are reflected upon throughout and summarised in the conclusions.
This chapter describes the rise of leading digital corporations as an attempt to cope with long-term economic stagnation and the surfeit of surplus capital emerging in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008/09. After a brief introduction to the topic of the book and its main arguments, Schumpeter’s classic theory of capitalist monopolies (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy) is established as a central point of reference. This contextualises digital capitalism in the historical perspective of concentration of economic power and the emergence of monopolies. The chapter also briefly introduces one of the concluding arguments: in digital capitalism, we are dealing with a post-neoliberal practice in the sense of the market itself being privatised – which is unthinkable in neoliberal economic theory. The chapter concludes with a brief introduction to the following six chapters.
In order to provide firm foundations for social ecological economics a basic understanding of issues relevant to developing scientific knowledge is required. This chapter provides an overview of the history and philosophy of modern science as it developed in Europe and then spread. Following the historical overview, it proceeds to a more detailed explanation of logical empiricism, as developed by the Vienna Circle, not least because empirical claims have been core to environmentalism, but also because of the general tendency to refer to 'positivism' as if this were some unified singular school of thought. Officially, economists follow a rigorous and scientific epistemological approach connected to logical empiricism. This sets a procedure for gaining knowledge on the basis of logical deductive theory development, leading to hypotheses which are meant to be empirically tested by observation, resulting in validation (whether verification, falsification or confirmation) - the hypothetico-deductive methodology.