Towards an Anthropological Economics
Economic philosophers have a history of not being able to predict the future. Marx could never have known how much the New World would act as a safety valve to depressurize the boil of Europe’s working class. Adam Smith could never see how the steamship and the vast resources of the American West would threaten what he saw as England’s eternal agricultural hegemony. This is part of the problem with traditional economics: it is designed to explain a certain given way of being. Most economic theories are developed around the culture of the economist developing them. They are, therefore, offshoots of their cultures, while their creators pass them off as universal and empirical explanations of eternal truths.
An anthropological approach does not suffer as much from this problem. By this way of thinking, an economy is simply how a culture exploits its environment in order to survive. The means, resources, and resource allocations are all at the heart of how a culture creates an economy, and an understanding of a culture’s economic potential is a measure of these. So an economic model for an Inuit population living above the Arctic Circle would of necessity be different than that of the Germans or French. It would simply be silly to expect the same set of values to apply to the material lives of these disparate cultures.
Recent trends toward true-cost accounting have made steps in this direction, but they’re needlessly recidivist and reformational; they still begin with current economic theory as their basis. If we consider economics to be at its most basic level how a culture accesses and allocates resources, we can come at it from the correct orientation to begin with.
In this way, we no longer need to predict the future to determine the success of our economies, no longer need be hidebound by the present or recorded past. An anthropological approach is less likely to be shackled to ideology, or, as is just as common, by tradition and class warfare masquerading as ideology. Instead, we are forced to confront the world as it is and ask ourselves honestly “What is our environmental condition? What do we need from it to survive? When are we taking too much?”
This is a much more sensible approach from the get-go, and it has the simultaneous effect of making us more in control. Fealty to ideology forces us to ignore the facts when they fail to comport with our theories. Thus the oil and gas industries have spent millions of dollars trying to deny global warming. Thus Mao’s China adopted agricultural practices that killed millions of Chinese. Being beholden to ideology leads to corruption of the political system as well, as companies that cannot deal with reality go groveling to the government for handouts or gear the law in their favor. Thus the oil and gas industries get their war in Iraq and big business gets laws that help them break labor unions. In contrast, an anthropological approach can be much more practical, matching resources to supply, supply to need.
Free-market capitalists will argue that this is “anti-freedom” because it would necessarily restrict some parts of the market. But the market has demonstrated that its principles are at odds with one another. According to free-market theory, the market itself is supposed to self-regulate meager supply and disparities in need. Under the theory, as resources decline, the cost of them becomes prohibitive and those who exploit those resources move on to more promising ones, preserving the remainder. Instead, of course, the market destroys those resources, as those who profit from them allow themselves to see only the rise in price, not the future collapse. The gap between those who have and those who want widens and the very resources that culture needs to survive disappear, threatening the culture itself. This happens because at the core of the free market system there is a basic contradiction. It posits both that markets will regulate themselves and that individuals will control themselves, acting in their own “rational self-interest” and therefore not trading short term gains for long term suffering. But the theory also posits that people are essentially selfish and acquisitive. Selfish and acquisitive people do not act rationally in the long term: if you believe that others are also selfish and acquisitive, you cannot trust them not to take all of a resource, and so, in order to prevent them from taking it all, you must take as much of it as you can as quickly as possible. The immediate then always takes precedence over the long-term in a perfect free market system and resources are always squandered rather than conserved.
Anthropological economics has no problem with the free market as long as it works as advertised, but this contradiction forces some regulation of the market if a culture that uses it is to survive.
But the anthropological approach is also not beholden to communism as formulated by Marx. It is collectivized only in the sense that it considers the collective needs of individuals within the culture as matched with their environment. If incentives need to be in place in order to motivate people to do what needs to be done, so be it. Anthropological economics is a form of bricolage: work with what you have in order to do what needs to be done. There is no ideological weight given to complex civilizations versus bands of hunter-gatherers. Unlike other economic theories, the anthropological approach is open to future contingencies and methodologies as they are developed and found useful. It is essentially humanistic and ecological as it is born of the nexus of people and their environment, based on that relationship.
–Lael Ewy
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