Table Of ContentCO-DESIGNING
ECONOMIES
IN TRANSITION
RADICAL APPROACHES IN DIALOGUE WITH
CONTEMPLATIVE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Edited by
Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino
And Zack Walsh
Co-Designing Economies in Transition
Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino
Zack Walsh
Editors
Co-Designing
Economies in
Transition
Radical Approaches in Dialogue with
Contemplative Social Sciences
Editors
Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino Zack Walsh
Department of Economic and Social Claremont School of Theology
Sciences Claremont, CA, USA
University of Turin
Turin, Italy
ISBN 978-3-319-66591-7 ISBN 978-3-319-66592-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66592-4
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Foreword
Environmentally, time is running out for the world as we know it. As we
find ourselves in what Paul Crutzen termed the Anthropocene epoch, the
earth could be up to seven degrees hotter by the end of the century. But
perhaps a name even more apt for our epoch is what in this volume Zack
Walsh refers to in his chapter as the Capitalocene, for much of what is
currently disruptive environmentally can be traced to the normal func-
tioning of the now worldwide capitalist economic system. From external-
ized costs to air and water quality that result from ever fiercer capitalist
competition to the proliferation of ever more commodities to satisfy a
culture of consumption, the capitalist system has become as out of con-
trol as, per The Communist Manifesto, the conjurings of the sorcerer’s
apprentice.
Even apart from the environment, things are not well. World capital-
ism struggles, both north and south, to generate the number of good jobs
that could accord everyone a middle-class income. With the newest
advances in artificial intelligence, automation will make good job genera-
tion even more difficult. And as things stand, the world’s richest eight
people now enjoy the same wealth as the world’s poorest 50%, with exec-
utives—at least in the USA—making now hundreds of times the income
of average workers.
The effects go beyond the economic to the political and spiritual.
Often the jobs that are produced are alienating, done exclusively for
v
vi Foreword
extrinsic reward rather than for intrinsic fulfillment. As in a game of
musical chairs, each job-holder comes to be in permanent competition
with many other job-seekers, making job insecurity an ever-present anxi-
ety. It is hardly surprising therefore that among the economically inse-
cure, suspicions arise across ethnic divides over any special treatments,
regardless of the previous disadvantages for which those treatments are
supposed to compensate. It is unsurprising as well that those economi-
cally insecure would begrudge immigrants and even refugees, whom they
judge as threats. Thus, even professed religious values are displaced by
perceived threats to economic interests.
In such milieu, it is also unsurprising to find parents regarding higher
education principally as a way to enhance their children’s employability.
While in a market economy self-marketability is an ever-necessary con-
cern that certainly needs to be addressed, too often the students too,
sometimes grudgingly but more often with enthusiasm, come to regard
their entire being as commodities to be bought and sold on the market,
eschewing therefore coursework in the arts or humanities that will not
somehow eventuate in cash. The students forget—and are encouraged to
forget—to feed also their souls as well as their future coffers. They forget
and are encouraged to forget that we are meant to be more than just fac-
tory products and our education more than just cultural capital inputs to
our employability. We are also called and need to learn how to be good
citizens, not just of our own countries but of the world. And beyond
good citizens, good people. But our institutions of higher learning, them-
selves increasingly under competitive pressure, increasingly regarding
their students as customers, are themselves losing devotion to their greater
call.
If ever there were a time calling for good citizenship and good person-
hood, it is now. Across Europe and the USA, we witness the rise of a
mean-spirited—and in the USA certainly a vulgar—populism, motored
by resentment, fear and disrespect. Before now it would have been hard
to imagine a movement and a presidency that was intent on building a
literal wall across a national border to keep neighbors out. It is a move-
ment, unfortunately, that begets its opposing mirror image: a correspond-
ing resentment, a corresponding fear and a corresponding contempt. The
Forewor d vii
resulting polarization, perhaps most acute in the USA but apparent else-
where as well is something from which we all need redress.
Especially in the USA, which paradoxically presents itself as the bas-
tion of democracy, economic inequality distorts both the political process
and national cultural consciousness. Against the specter of big money
that always threatens to run more conservative candidates against them,
US Republican Congress people have been pulled so far to the right that
they fear even to acknowledge the human contribution to climate change.
It is an alienation as it were from the world and from truth, and it legiti-
mates and encourages similar alienation culturally. Republican constitu-
encies, looking to their leaders, find legitimacy for untenably extreme
views. To win votes, even the oppositional Democratic party is likewise
obliged to concede ground to politically induced idiocy and move right-
ward itself. Thus, the land most committed to the freedom of free enter-
prise must also struggle to find cultural support for the universal health
care that is taken for granted in most other advanced industrial
societies.
Suffice it to say that the night is dark and we are far from home. And
the social sciences have not always been guiding stars. As professions,
economics and political science have often served instead to justify the
current world order. Just think, as mentioned in this book, of the homo
economicus that dominates professional economics, a model of the human
actor as what philosopher Harry Frankfurt once termed a wanton, that is,
a creature who can only want without moral reflection or prioritization
among felt wants. Sociology often has been more critical, but with the
exception of anthropology, the whole of the social sciences have generally
been tied to a positivist philosophy of science that holds, among other
things, to a rigid split between facts and values. The social sciences have
accordingly been ambivalent about addressing moral facts that carry an
ineluctable value component.
Even more have the social sciences been at pains to distance themselves
from anything that smacks of spirituality. Understood perhaps as per-
sonal religion sans the organization, even spirituality can seem too other-
worldly to fall under the examination of empirical social science. That
sentiment too is a legacy of positivism, which sees values as purely subjec-
viii Foreword
tive rather than anything objective and all matters of an ontological
nature as meaningless metaphysics.
But if the social sciences refuse to move from facts to values or toward
addressing ontology, then they cannot address, as the chapters in this
book do, what the title of Margunn Bjornholt’s chapter explicitly refers
to as “what really matters”. What matters is clearly a question of values,
but if we ask what as a matter of fact does happen to matter to people,
our question remains entirely empirical, entirely factual, and not particu-
larly evaluative in itself. Conventional sociology thus has no problem
with such questions. In different ways, it asks them all the time.
But if we ask what should matter or what matters ultimately, then we
are no longer asking empirically what others think matters but as analysts
making value judgments ourselves about what ought to matter. It is here
that positivistically inclined social sciences would demur, denying that
what should matter is a properly scientific question.
Positivistic social sciences are certainly correct that what ought to mat-
ter is not strictly or at least not entirely an empirical question. It is a ques-
tion about values. But the collapse of the fact/value distinction goes both
ways. In other words, just as many facts are theory and value laden, so are
values theory and fact laden.
The theory- and fact-laden nature of values is what distinguishes values
from brute tastes, like a preference for vanilla over chocolate, about which
there is nothing to argue. In contrast, when it comes to values, there is
much over which we can argue. One once common argument, for exam-
ple, to value capitalism over socialism was that capitalism aligns better
with human nature, held to be selfish, aggressive and greedy. That capital-
ism does align better with human nature is a theory and whether human
nature is as described is a matter of fact to be determined empirically.
Were humans shown to be more altruistic and social in nature, that deter-
mination would undermine at least this particular rationale for valuing
capitalism over socialism and hence call the value itself into rational
question.
An evaluative preference for capitalism over socialism could be saved
by alternate reasoning, but that is the very point here. The point is that
unlike brute tastes, rationally held values depend on some sort of rational
reasoning that is in part theoretical and factual. Thus, arguments about
Forewor d ix
theories and facts should affect the values we hold and, if we operate in
good faith, lead us to values that are more rationally tenable.
Not to entertain such value-laden questions is to leave important areas
of our social life unaddressed. In fact, it is to leave unaddressed what
really matters or most matters.
When we ask specifically about what most matters, we are driven to
fundamental ontology. Who are we and what are we about? What is most
conducive to our collective flourishing?
These questions have a spiritual dimension but they are accessible to
reason. Even Karl Marx, the historical materialist, trod in this direction
when he spoke of species being. And, indeed, it would be difficult for
Marx to speak of alienation without any specification of that which we
are alienated from.
The contemplative traditions are likewise a call in this direction, an
inspiration to be mindful of who we really are and are meant to be. It is
especially welcome therefore to have a book such as this that seeks to
reimagine a new economics from a mindful, contemplative perspective.
Not only transdisciplinary, the volume is also transnational in character.
With both theoretical expositions and practical exemplars of alternative
economic forms, the book offers an important opportunity to think
through our way ahead.
Doug Porpora
Foreword: Toward Contemplative Social
Science
The current crisis in the economy could teach us to look beyond material value
and unrealistic expectations of limitless growth. When things go seriously wrong
such as in the financial crisis, it is often because a new reality is still being
viewed with outdated concepts, and this is certainly also the case in the domain
of the economy today. (The Dalai Lama)
As this quote, expressed by the Dalai Lama in 2009 after the eruption of
the financial crises (Tideman, 2016), indicates, the changing economic
reality calls for a fundamentally different way of thinking and seeing.
Philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1962) defined this as a shift in paradigm,
meaning a fundamental change in the mode of perception, frames of
reference and underlying beliefs and assumptions. French novelist Marcel
Proust (1923) described this shift in vivid terms: “The real act of discov-
ery consists not in finding new land but in seeing with new eyes”.
The current book testifies that an increasing number of scholars rec-
ognize the need for such shift in perspective. They seem to agree with
my view that the economic crisis has been created (and persists),
because our political and economic leadership employs flawed and
increasingly outdated frames of reference, based on limited assump-
tions about the current economic reality and the multifaceted drivers of
human behavior.
xi