Dismal Science : how thinking like an economist undermines community
- New Delhi OUP 2009
- 359 p.
Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode other forms of community. In the past, for example, people supported each other in adversity. A fire or illness was an occasion on which the community pitched in. Now if my house burns down, or I become disabled, I turn not to my neighbors but to my insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community engaging in mutual help, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations.
Marglin dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished as people define themselves in terms of how much they can afford to consume. Over the last four centuries, this economic ideology has become the dominant ideology in much of the world. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance in our lives that this ideology has fostered.
9780198063353
"Market-social aspects, Social structure-economic aspecti"