Taking Ecological Economics Seriously
Let’s not mince words. The established mainstream of the economic thought is driving human societies to collective suicide. It deserves a more evocative label than neoclassical, neoliberal, or even market fundamentalism. Let’s call it what it is: A “Suicide Economics” for a “Suicide Economy.”
Suicide economics gets it wrong on nearly every major issue because it is built on a foundation of fallacies. It ignores natural limits, confuses means and ends, uses the wrong measure of value and the wrong unit of analysis, and it relies on a single improperly defined criterion function. And this is only my personal favorites short list. Let’s go through these five fallacies one by one.
The first fallacy, the **failure to address natural limits**, is a foundational theme of ecological economics. No need to say more about that here.
The second fallacy, the **confusion of ends and means**, is reflected in the convention of treating people and nature as externalities. The practical implication is that rather than treating the well-being of people and nature as the purpose of economic activity, suicide economics treats people and nature merely as means for making money for people who have money, a grotesque reversal of ends and means. As David Batker pointedly asks in his documentary: What’s the economy for anyway? The answer should be obvious. Serving people and nature is the only legitimate purpose of an economy.
The third fallacy, the **wrong measure of value**. Suicide economics uses money rather than life as the basic measure of value. So gold, which we could easily live without, is considered more valuable than air, soil, and water, which we cannot live without. This leads to the destruction of air, soil, and water to extract gold from under the ground so we can refine it—all at enormous cost to people, soil, air, and water—and then lock it away back underground in great vaults. And this seems to make perfect sense to suicide economists. There is truth to the cliché that “An economist is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
The fourth fallacy, the **wrong unit of analysis**, is expressed in the choice to build the analytical structure of suicide economics around the firm rather than the household. This leads to measuring economic performance by financial returns to pools of money aggregated as firms, rather than by contribution to increasing the health and happiness of people, households, and communities. Consequently, maximizing corporate profits becomes more important to policy makers than assuring that people have living wage jobs.
The fifth fallacy is the **improperly defined single criteria function**. Have any of you had the experience of piloting an airplane? If you haven’t, perhaps you can at least imagine trying to pilot an airplane with your windows blacked out, an airspeed indicator as your only instrument, and a decision rule that says do whatever increases your airspeed. You are absolutely guaranteed to fly the plane right into the ground—which is exactly what we are doing with the economy by using GDP growth as our primary indicator of success.
Successfully piloting an airplane under conditions of limited visibility requires a whole dashboard of instruments: altimeter, rate of climb and descent, air speed, a directional indicator, engine rpm, fuel gauge, oil pressure, engine temperature, etc. Making policy adjustments to guide a complex national economy is no less complicated and requires a dashboard of indicators.
Promoting these fallacies as truths, suicide economists have demonstrated their ability to misdirect society to create an economic system that converts the real living-wealth of the many to the phantom financial-wealth of the few and convince the public that it is a gain for everyone. The results conclusively demonstrate that it is a very bad idea and people are waking up to the reality that suicide economists have a limited grasp of reality, are knowingly fronting for the ruling oligarchy, or some combination of the two.
