Excerpt

This talk is derived from my forthcoming book, Market Humanism, co-authored with Nick Hanauer. The thesis of the book is that in order to change the economic system—to create a system that is more inclusive, prosperous, and sustainable than the one we have today—we have to change the ideas that built that system. An understanding of human beings as the social, cultural, cooperative creatures that we are, and economies as the complex, evolving systems that they are, is central to the new thinking that is required. Much of this work was pioneered and continues to be developed at SFI. In this talk I sketch out where the economic ideas that inform our current economic ideology and system came from, why those ideas have been so damaging, and how new economic thinking could lead to a new ideology that helps us meet our challenges.

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This is going to be a bit more of a philosophical talk rather than a scientific talk. What I hope to do is raise some issues that will then set up the more scientific discussion that the next speakers and the rest of the afternoon will bring to us. In that spirit, I’m going to start off with a philosophical question, which is, “What is the economy? What kind of a system is it?”

Well, there’s a wonderful phrase that the historian Noah Yuval Harari uses to describe human social structures—he calls them imagined orders. I would argue that the economy doesn’t exist in reality. It’s a product of our imagination. It’s made up by human beings. It exists in our heads. The economy is made out of ideas. And if you look at all of the economic ideas and concepts that we use very commonly, whether it’s economic value, money, markets, growth, GDP, wages, or even the idea of a job—all of these things are concepts that were made up at some point in our history. They’re not part of the physical world or governed by immutable physical laws. They are human conceptions. So, the economy is a product of our imagination. It’s an imagined order. Now, this imagined order has evolved quite dramatically over time. Our economic arrangements have changed a lot from hunter-gatherer days to the advent of agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, and to modern capitalism today. And that imagined order then does have an effect, an impact, on the real physical world. It changes our physical world.

When something happens in the imagined order of the economy, buildings get built, food gets grown and delivered, products get made, and so on. And we’ve seen the impact of the imagined order of the economy on our physical world at a planetary level, causing a transition from the Holocene to what now is being called the Anthropocene. As this has unfolded, we’re now beginning to realize that the imagined order that we have is not succeeding. 

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