Redesigning economics for ecological realism: 3 areas of advancement! - by Jonathan Dawson, head of economics at Schumacher College Economics as we know it today is broken. Unable to explain, to predict or to protect, it is need of root-and-branch replacement. Or, to borrow from Alan Greenspan, it is fundamentally “flawed”. But where do we look for inspiration in facilitating what is the mother of all paradigm shifts? Interestingly, the most insightful and strikingly innovative ideas are coming from all directions other than the economics profession. Ecology offers the insight that the economy is best understood as a complex adaptive system. This moment of history calls on us to rewrite the dictionary and create new stories, much as the generations following on from Copernicus did to reflect the new world-view that emerged from his astronomical insights. The new language and stories that we need will emerge from the language of ecology and will speak of connection in place of separation; networks in place of nodes; synergy in place of win:lose or cut-throat competition. In fact, this new vocabulary is already emerging from new internet enabled phenomena such as open source software, crowdsourcing and biomimicry. A core task of today’s thinkers, activists and entrepreneurs is that of re-civilising and re-enchanting the grey science that is neoclassical economics. The good news is that this project is already well underway, even if it is sometimes difficult to see as it is not encoded in the dominant language of everyday use. The term the industrial revolution was not coined until one hundred years after the process could, in retrospect, be seen to have started. History is likely to make the same observation about the ecological revolution through which we are currently living.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 08:45:32 +0000