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Leonhard
Bauer
“Economics and Religions – Setting Up of Authority”
Instead of religion it is nowadays science that explains to us
what’s happening, what’s going on and what’s
the right thing to do. Largely we have replaced religion by science.
It determines our potential for technological control of the environment
– so it is claimed – and of societies and by that
or the other way all human beings too.
Science versus religion that could constitute the difference.
They are considered to be antithetic, separated or subordinated
which way ever. But both are institutions. Each of them is based
on their respective belief systems (cognition) and their value
systems (principles by which one judges) and their action systems
(behaviour patterns). Religion differs from other institutions
– in our case science – by the fact that their subsystems
refer to super-human (metaphysical) beings. Sciences were considered
to be based on propositions verified or not falsified by experiments.
And the humanities had to take (natural) sciences mould as its
undisputed model.
It can be shown that economics and religion besides of fulfilling
quite similar or better identical functions, the one in a (still)
agrarian dominated and the other in a (post)industrial society,
have both metaphysical “assumptions”, “contentions”.
In religion nobody will be surprised, but in economics you have
to demonstrate and to prove it. The central assumption of mainstream
economics claims that desires, wishes of individuals (agents)
are infinite. Whatever human beings may think, feel or dream it’s
finite. And that remains valid even for 7 billion inhabitants
of the world. Parallels are intersecting in infinity, but to apply
this in finite space makes all solutions possible. Neither in
religion nor in economics a nomothetic reality and consequently
an algorithm is acceptable. In economic theory as well as in religion
it makes sense to deal with power, chance and a variety of different
decisions.
Fred Block
“Reworking Embeddedness: Fictitious Commodities and
Coordination in Market Societies”
While the concept of economic embeddedness is now widely used
in the social sciences, it has lost much of its critical and analytic
edge. This paper is intended to revitalize the concept by showing
how Polanyi’s discussion of fictitious commodities leads
directly to an understanding of the centrality of non-market forms
of coordination in both the day-to-day and long term functioning
of all market societies. The analysis begins by arguing that one
must add a fourth fictitious commodity to Polanyi’s triad
of land, labor, and money. This fourth is market competition itself–another
product that markets alone cannot produce. The paper goes on to
show how providing these four fictitious commodities requires
the existence of multiples forms of non-market coordination that
fully embed a market economy.
Pierre-Yves Bonin
“Ressources naturelles et répartition internationale
des richesses”
Plusieurs philosophes contemporains proposent une répartition
internationale des richesses sur la base d’une appropriation
collective des ressources naturelles de la planète. (Pogge,
Beitz, Barry) Cette proposition s’heurte à de puissantes
objections. Les plus importantes s’articulent autour des
questions suivantes :
1)Comment définir les ressources naturelles ? La définition
la plus appropriée inclue les facteurs environnementaux.
Comment cependant évaluer et comparer des facteurs aussi
divers que le climat, l’accès à la mer, l’eau
potable et le zinc ?
2)Comment déterminer que la répartition naturelle
des ressources naturelles sur la planète est injuste ?
Est-il vraiment évident que les pays riches (Etats-Unis,
Canada, France) possèdent plus de ressources naturelles
que les pays pauvres (Chine, Inde, Brésil) ?
3)A qui appartiennent les ressources naturelles ? aux peuples
ou aux individus ?
4)Quel est le rôle des ressources naturelles dans la prospérité
économique des pays ? Plusieurs économistes sont
d’avis que les ressources naturelles n’expliquent
que très peu des écarts de revenu entre pays riches
et pays pauvres.
5)Existe-t-il des méthodes efficaces d’exploitation
collective des ressources naturelles ? Plusieurs craignent la
création d’entreprises internationales peu efficaces,
d’autres craignent que les pays peu développés
se voient retirés la souveraineté sur leurs ressources
naturelles.
Daniel Bousfield
“Democratic Imperialism and Protest: The Double Movement
of Governance and Dissent”
In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi argued that free markets
and free governments were the two pillars of liberal capitalism.
As a universal order based on human rights and democracy has become
the justification for intervention across the globe, the distinction
between liberal politics and liberal economics is being blurred.
The mechanisms of disciplinary neoliberalism and new constitutionalism
have been reformulated to include the demand for a specific form
of parliamentary democracy and permissible types political activity.
Just as neoliberal economic policy clearly defines, enforces and
places limits on what are acceptable types of liberal economic
policy, the imposition of democracy in countries like Afghanistan
and Iraq uses similar guidelines to define the configuration of
state institutions as well as acceptable types of representation
and governance.
Polanyi’s insight into the process of liberal expansion
has a particular relevance in the way that dissent and opposition
is configured in this process of democratic imperialism. Even
as liberal democracy is being held as the benchmark of successful
governance across the world, dissent and protest within most democracies
has reached unprecedented levels. This double movement of triumphant
liberalism and extra-parliamentary politics has exposed the failures
of liberal politics to address the challenges being posed by waves
of global protest. The anti-capitalist and anti-corporate elements
of these protests, combined with the importance of social and
cultural
issues in these movements has given Polanyi’s work a new
relevance. This paper will use Polanyi’s work to examine
the links between democratic imperialism and social protest. His
focus on social resistance to market democracy and the inherent
failures and limits of liberal economics provide a valuable foundation
for contemporary critique.
Peter G.
Brown
“Are There any Natural Resources?”
Local and regional environments have for many centuries been
seen as, or as being composed of, "natural resources."
These in turn have generally been considered fully available
for human use, irrespective of any use to which any other
species, purposefully or not, might put them. The global environment
has more recently, though less routinely, been seen in this
way. Access to these natural resources has never for long
gone uncontested, but their very existence has rarely, if
ever, been questioned. I question it now. I consider three
widely credited arguments for seeing our natural environment
in exclusively human-use terms. I find each of these arguments
-- the Judeo-Christian-Muslim, the rationalist or Aristotelian-Cartesian,
and the utilitarian or neoclassical-economic -- unsatisfactory,
leading me to doubt the validity of any natural-resource view.
I then consider, and I ultimately recommend, an alternative
perspective, one based on Albert Schweitzer's much-admired
but seldom-adopted "reverence for life" ethic. |
Paul Leduc Browne
“Public good, private accumulation, informal labour:
the social division of home care in Ontario and Québec”.
The Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada has
defined public health care as a moral economy, an economy
based on need and solidarity, rather than profit and competition;
but, as the Commission also points out, health care is a mixed
economy. It may be characterized by a social division of care
between the market (commodity exchange), non-market (state
redistribution), and non-monetary (gift and reciprocity) economies.
In this system, many health-care providers operate according
to the logic of profit-maximization; however, their practices
are embedded in a redistributive system that is meant to shield
its users from market inequities and externalities, preserving
health care as a public good.
The balance between private accumulation, public redistribution
and reciprocity in Canadian medicare has always been contested.
In recent years, endogenous and exogenous factors have increased
the pressure to expand the role of the market throughout Canadian
health care. This paper will analyze the impact of privatization
and commercialization on the social division of care through
a comparison of home care in Canada’s two largest provinces,
Ontario and Québec. Although Québec has opted
for state provision of home care, while Ontario has proclaimed
its allegiance to the market mechanism of managed competition,
home care in both jurisdictions is provided by a mix of public,
private for-profit, not-for-profit and informal agencies and
individuals. The paper will outline and analyze the differences
between the two models. |
Ayse Bugra
“Poverty as a Problem of Coexistence”
This paper deals with poverty as a problem of coexistence
of those who can and those who cannot earn their livelihood
in the context of actually existing economic relations. In
the eighteenth and nineteenth century social policy debates,
one encounters a tendency to explain poverty on the basis
of individual characteristics of the poor. “Blaming
the poor” thus formed the background to policy measures
directed at preventing the disruption of the social fabric
by the undeniable reality of indigence. However, through the
social and intellectual developments which have culminated
in the rise of the twentieth century welfare state, it has
become widely accepted that the poor were poor for reasons
beyond their control. In the post-Second World War era, poverty
could not be eliminated in its divers manifestations in different
parts of the world, but the idea of social responsibility
constituted the basis of the attempts at poverty alleviation
within particular nation states and at an international level.
Contemporary neoliberalism has significantly undermined this
particular understanding of social responsibility without,
however, replacing it with the historical tendency of blaming
the poor for their plight. In this context, poverty appears
as the outcome of “economic necessity” without
any moral foundation to justify the misery of an increasingly
large part of the world population. The paper discusses the
problem of coexistence in such a social policy environment,
in which poverty is approached in a moral vacuum where social
responsibility is denied without any justification other than
the requirements of the self-regulating market economy. |
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