Author: Lee M.

As I mentioned previously, Daly and Cobb’s central concern is that the abstractions of economics leave out aspects of reality that are crucial to understanding the world and shaping the economy in a way that nourishes community and is sustainable in the long run. Following A.N. Whitehead, they refer to the phenomenon of treating an abstraction as exhaustive of the reality it describes as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

Chief among these abstractions is the market. While the free exchange of goods and services is key to any flourishing economy, treating “the market” in isolation has some built in limitations. These include the tendency for competition to be self-eliminating (monopoly), the corrosive affect of encouraging the pursuit of self-interest on the moral context necessary to sustain the virtues the market order requires, the need for public goods and the existence of public “bads” (externalities), and the market’s blindness to judgments of value such as those pertaining to the distribution of wealth or the overall scale of the economy in relation to the surrounding ecosystem.

Daly and Cobb also criticize the reliance on GNP as a measure of economic well-being. They argue that it doesn’t accurately reflect income, much less genuine economic welfare. Homo economicus is the model of the human self posited by much economic thought. It assumes a human being who’s interested primarily in maximizing utility understood in terms of consumption. Economics qua economics forbids us from making value judgments about individual preferences and seeks instead to understand how those preferences can be maximized. Finally, “land,” the economic stand-in for all of non-human nature, rather than being seen as a productive and living system with its own intrinsic value, is reduced to a largely passive and inert commodity. An overly idealistic point of view tends to see all resources as having their ultimate source in human ingenuity, presdisposing economics to ignore the question of the finitude of resources.

All of these abstractions, Daly and Cobb contend, serve to create an overly individualistic and short-term picture of the world and lends support to similarly constituted policies. Their goal is to reconceive the context of economic life as being in service to community, including the wider community of non-human nature.

To this end, they advocate a shift from short-term to long-term thinking, with particular attention to the scale of the economy. Their argument here is fairly simple: the economy is situated within an ecosystem which is finite in size (i.e in terms of resources). Therefore, the economy cannot grow indefinitely. They define “scale” as population x per capita resource use rate and maintain that our trajectory of growth is pushing against the limits imposed by the natural ecosystem within which our economic life exists.

Consequently, what they think is necessary is an economy that is oriented away from growth and toward more of a steady-state model. Economic well-being shouldn’t be measured in terms of increasing consumption, but by a combination of economic and non-economic welfare. Individualism should be replaced by a vision of human beings as persons-in-community whose relationships to others are seen as constitutive of their identity. Economic development should focus on the well-being of the community as a whole rather than individuals.

Concerning this last point, Daly and Cobb see communities as the fundamental building blocks of a sound economic order. But they are also decentralists who would like to see a revival of local communities over against the atomized cosmopolitanism that globalization promises. They envision a world in which one’s primary loyalty is to one’s local community, with increasing and overlapping circles of loyalty expanding outward. Unlike many on the Left, they have no particular affinity for “post-national” globalism.

In fact, Daly and Cobb acknowledge that in our world the only entities currently able to resist globalization and foster steps toward an economic order more in line with their aspirations is the nation. They are more or less unapologetic nationalists, resulting in some surprising policy prescriptions that would put them at odds with much of the Left. They are against free trade and for protectionism for domestic industries by means of tariffs, they favor population control, and the form they advocate for most developed countries, including the US, is a curtailment of immigration, particularly illegal immigration. Sounding for all the world like Pat Buchanan, they argue that a chief function of the nation-state is to secure its borders against unwanted immigrants. They oppose not only economic entanglements with foreign nations, but also foreign aid. All nations need to be self-sufficient, at least in essentials. Finally, the support a defense policy of what could fairly be called non-interventionism and suggest that a United States less enmeshed in a global market would have less cause for foreign meddling.

The keystone of Daly and Cobb’s position, then, is a community of more or less self-reliant communities whose economic life is geared to stability and self-sufficiency rather than expanded growth. This is rooted in what they describe as a biocentric and theistic vision that sees all of creation as related to a good God and having value apart from human needs and interests. Their emphasis on the value of the biosphere leads them to support sustainable and organic agriculture and to favor subsistence agriculture over agriculture for commodity export as well as a tax system similar to that proposed by Henry George that treats land as a trust rather than a commodity.

A lot of what’s contained in this volume will be familiar to anyone who’s paid much attention to debates about the economics of sustainability. What I find appealing about Daly and Cobb is their desire to foster a more decentralized, humane, and participatory economy instead of increased centralization. I also think they’re more realistic than some in viewing the nation-state as the best hope for gaining some measure of democratic control over economic life. Too often folks on the Left put what appears to me as an unrealistic hope in international institutions like the UN which, after all, are even further removed from popular control and participation than most national governments.

However, I still can’t help but have some reservations about Daly and Cobb’s vision. On a sheerly factual level, I wish they’d spent more time making the case of a finite economy. To a certain extent they seem to cherry-pick their opponents, using the most extreme-sounding quotes from people like George Gilder. I would’ve liked to see more engagement with serious opponents of their view. Secondly, they seem to me at times insufficiently appreciative of the real benefits of liberal individualism. Like many who oppose “community” to “individualism” they tend to paint the former almost exclusively in glowing terms that downplay the genuine difficulties of close-knit community. There’s a real tension between individual liberty and community control, however democratic. To the extent that the community exercises control over a particular area of life, it leaves less room for indvidual discretion. There’s a genuine balancing act there and I’m not sure Daly and Cobb have paid much attention to it (their discussion of population control, for instance, is disturbingly sanguine about China’s coercive policies without actually advocating them). Finally, they don’t, in my view, deal adequately with the objection that participation in an expanding economy is necessary for many people in the world to escape from grinding poverty.

Overall, though, Daly and Cobb seem to me to be asking the right questions: Is an ever-expanding economy consistent with the limits imposed by ecological fragility? How do we reconcile the need for democratic control over the economy with individual freedom? What kind of balance should be struck between ties to local community and a more cosmopolitan outlook? How do we honor the value of God’s creation without sacrificing vital human interests? These all strike me as among the most important questions we face in the 21st century, even if I’m not satisfied in every case with Daly and Cobb’s answers.