3 - The market utopia

Summary

Only economists still put the cart before the horse by claiming that the growing turmoil of mankind can be eliminated if prices are right. The truth is that only if our values are right will prices also be right.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen Energy and Economic Myths

The market ideal

The model of valuing and choosing that has been my target in Part One is used not only to explain but to justify: it plays an important normative role. It plays a crucial (though not always acknowledged) role in the justifications offered by economists (and those influenced by them) for political and legal institutions, and public policies, programs and projects, and in the solutions they advocate for a variety of social and environmental problems. Not only is there no place, in the explanations offered by neoclassical economists and other Rational Choice theorists, for those capacities and dispositions (described in Part One and put to work in Part Three) that make us truly social and (therefore) moral; the economists actually idealize and want us to inhabit a world from which they are banished. In the present part, I explore this ideal world and what it means for the lives of humans and their communities and for biological communities. I am going to pay special attention to biological communities, or ecosystems. Economists (and others influenced by them) have a distinctive way of thinking about our relations with the natural world, and about the nature of environmental problems and what we should do about them, and it tells us a lot about the model of choice that forms the foundation of Rational Choice theory.