Address to the annual Human Economy Session
at the Eastern Economics Association Conference
Boston, 11th March 1988
My theme is the blessings which we still enjoy, in spite of economic growth; the rediscovery of the present when it moves out of the shadow which the future has cast on it during three development decades. And this is the moment, I think, to plead for research on the non-economic boon which we best discover when the hope in further so-called development fades.
I purposely speak of blessings and boons when I refer to the rediscovery of walking and cycling in lieu of transportation; of dwelling in self-generated space in lieu of claims to housing; of planting tomatoes on the balcony and meeting in bars that exclude radio and TV, of suffering without therapies and of preferring the intransitive activity of dying to monitored medicide. I do not use the word ‘value.’ I know how recently this economic term has slipped into our discourse to replace ‘the good.’ But I recognize the danger of trying to preserve the notion of the good. Today, the term ‘good’ characteristically denotes management; the professional ‘for your own good’ in the mouth of teachers, physicians and ideologues. I therefore try to recover the ideas of blessing and boon to speak about the rediscovery of joys, but also of sorrows, that I have observed in both rich and poor countries at the moment the expectation of marketable pleasures and securities comes to a crash.
The fact that blessing and even boon once had sectarian connotations does not worry me. For I want to argue that discourse about these experiences can have theoretical consistency and practical relevance only if it is conducted in a language which is devoid of economic implications, of references to productivity, needs, resources, decisions, systems, feedback, and above all, development.
I count it as a privilege that you invite me to discuss this theme among professional economists who see themselves as dissidents within their own discipline; that among you I may raise the issue of blessings — something economic language cannot grasp but only corrupt; that I may speak about an alternative to economics among academics who acknowledge in Boulding and in Kapp, in Mishan and, above all, in Schumacher their immediate ancestors, and among whom several claim to be inspired by Bateson. But I am also daunted by the challenge of submitting my thesis to this learned assembly because, as far as I can see, dissidence within economics has meant no more than the extension of the disciplinary umbrella of scarcity-related assumptions over facts and relationships that most main-liners leave untouched.
I am not an economist; instead I am something akin to a historian. I study history as an antidote to obsessive speculations about the future. For the historian the present appears as the future of the past. History heightens my sensitivity to the time-vector hidden in all our terms when we try to discuss public goods. Historical studies make me aware that most of the clear certainties by which I act, think and even perceive were neither suspected nor imaginable for the authors whose writings are my sources. I study history to become sensitive to those modern assumptions which, by going unexamined, have turned into our epoch-specific, a priori forms of perception. I am neither using history nor do I want to escape into history. I study the past to look out of its perspective at the axioms of that mental topology of thought and feeling which confronts me when I write or speak. And, coming out of the past and entering the present I find that most of the axioms generating my mental space are tinged with economics.
Preparing for this meeting, I read The Other Economic Summit (TOES) papers, and often reached for the book which Paul Ekins edited. Let me quote the words with which this book begins. ‘Economics is at an impasse. Its instruments are blunted. Its direction is confused.’ The public is indeed ‘becoming skeptical and bewildered.’ The American presidential campaign of 1988 mirrors this confusion. The post-war consensus about the status of economics as an accepted discipline is gone. While in the sixties economists were admired as society’s astronomers, they are now consulted more like astrologers. Investment just does not bring down unemployment. Nor does growth. Inflation is endemic. No intelligent political candidate speaks about development. Majid Rahnema makes AIDS the metaphor for something which until quite recently was called ‘takeoff’ — that point at which a culture loses its immunity against a self-sustaining transmogrification into an economy. At this point latent HIV manifests itself as AIDS: cultural self-sustenance quickly breaks down. Everywhere poverty spreads with progress. The new book by Rist and Sabelli has an appropriate title: ‘Once upon a time, there was something called development.’
Relentlessly, TOES authors pile up the evidence for counterpurposive outcomes of monetarization. But much more importantly, they have created concepts which make these paradoxical and painful results of growth into scientific facts that can no longer be ignored by the academy. A whole set of new indicators has thus come into being. Technical criteria can now discriminate between the costly growth of goods and the growth of costly waste. But some of these new concepts make the alternative economist into an advocate for the economic colonization of housework, sex or gardening. Paradoxically, the economic demonstration of the counterproductivity of economic growth confirms the belief that what matters for human beings can be expressed in economic terms.
What I plead for is a second look at those certainties that are common to alternative economists and their dragons. In the mirror of the past their assumptions about wants, needs, values and resources are of the same ilk. It appears blatantly illogical when Ekins, on the same page, defines the aim of TOES as the provision of scientific guidance in the optimum allocation of scarce resources for the maximization of human welfare, and continues with this sentence: ‘The very assumptions which form the basis of conventional economics are now unsound.’ Constant repetition of the desire to place economics at the service of people and their welfare, rather than of things and their accumulation, in no way touches the very assumption of scarcity by which homo economicus is imputed needs and desires. Economists, professional or lay, official or dissident, drive home the assumption of scarcity with every utterance.
I cannot help but see the TOES papers as ads for the Macintosh, with its barbs against IBM. In ad after ad after ad I am told that the Mac is run on an operating system that is designed as if people mattered. Let me assume that this is true. For reasons which you can easily imagine, this would only make me more wary of the Mac. As much as with conventional economics, their opponents also conceive of economics within any society in analogy with the operating system of a computer. Economists know and manage the programs. Calling needs ‘basic,’ values ‘human,’ development ‘personal,’ demanding a ‘sustainable use of resources’ and a rate of growth ‘moderated by cultural considerations,’ economics can be whitewashed, but none of its basic assumptions are touched. Its language remains useful only to grasp that which from a cultural good has been changed into a value by being recast as a social factor which functions under the assumptions of scarcity.
Any serious critic of conventional economics is inevitably caught in a dilemma: in order to formulate the implicit and unavoidable consequences of economic growth he has to measure the cultural destruction which results from such growth in monetary terms. This then leads the critic to couch his recommendations in a language which sounds like an ad for Band-Aids, or a religious exhortation. However, it is not this, but another discovery which makes reading some of the TOES papers fascinating for me. Now and then one of the authors turns from being a mere dissident into a true skeptic. Schumacher was one such person. Late in life he redefined intermediate technology (which he, after all, had originally named) as appropriate technology and became the initiator of a series of questions which now takes the form: ‘After development, what?’ Among the questioners, Kohr has been a teacher for many by suggesting that self-sustaining well-being depends on factors which only dimensional analysis can reveal; it cannot be reduced to any kind of welfare measured in quantitative terms.
James Robertson, in his TOES paper, provides a well-formulated example of a critique of economics as a field which goes far beyond a critique within the field. His article asks: ‘What comes after full employment?’ Full employment is by now recognized as a concept whose practical implementation is not a utopia, but an impossibility. Robertson discusses the evidence. He says that we are in the midst of jobless growth. Employment in many sectors is becoming an uneconomical way of getting work done, something similar to slavery in the past, becoming itself uneconomical. But it still serves some obvious purposes. For example, in an uneconomical and increasingly unethical way it serves to redistribute gains. But maybe it is time to disengage our perception of myriads of human activities from the reductionist normative concept of employment.
When Robertson reaches the end of his paper, where he has deconstructed the conventional current category of work, he notices that, in so doing, he has simultaneously deconstructed the discipline within which he argued: ‘The age of economics has, in fact, coincided with the age of employment. It is only over the last two hundred years that employment has developed as the dominant way of organizing work… The question is whether economics will turn out to have been a fairly short-lived structure of reasoning … while employment has been the dominant form of work, or whether economists will be able to extend their discipline to deal with choices that reflect the needs and activities of real people as contrasted with those of homo economicus.’
Robertson, in this sentence, deals with economics as that discipline which formalized the mentality that prevailed in an epoch in which employment was the dominant form of work. Accepting the cogency of his reasoning, ‘employment’ can be replaced by other terms, for example, by ‘needs.’ The age of economics coincides with the progressive discovery of human needs, something which economists now define as finite, few, classifiable and universal. I want to focus on need, and deconstruct the naturalness of this concept in analogy to what Robertson does with work. What we perceive and experience as needs is a social creation even more recent than work.
What we define as needs was unknown in past epochs. Michael Ignatieff in The Needs of Strangers correctly criticizes my former attempts to speak of a ‘History of Needs.’ What in the past was homologous to our needs has a place so different within the constellation of social assumptions that the two are incomparable. A recent epistemic break marks the appearance of what we call ‘need’. Therefore, we cannot trace the history, but can only examine the late modern sociogenesis of needs as we have learned to perceive them.
It is a delicate task to speak about the sociogenesis of needs. We need needs — our own and those of strangers — to keep our integrity intact. We must try to find a line of reasoning which avoids conjuring up either anger or nostalgia. When, for instance, I contrast the death of an old man in the corner of his hovel with the death of one whose ‘needs’ for intensive care have been fully met, I do not compare the desirability of two conditions or situations. The example only stresses the impossibility of using the same words when speaking about both men. Please note what I am saying. I hunt for no lessons in the past. But I believe that history, when properly practiced, makes us more clearsighted about the condition of Needy Man which homo economicus is.
Only quite recently have we begun to tolerate the definition of persons in terms of their needs. Looking at the second volume of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement confirms this. Under the entry ‘need, a substantive’, the 1976 Supplement lists a new meaning: ‘Psychol: A state of physiological or psychological want, that consciously or subconsciously motivates behavior toward its satisfaction.’ The first quotation that is given by the dictionary to support this new, modern usage is dated 1929. Now, fifty years later, it would be difficult to use the word ‘need’ and prescind from this connotation. Needs have by now become motivating wants.
Then, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the sixties added words like ‘needs test,’ ‘needs analysis’ and ‘need pattern.’ These neologisms indicate that needs are lacks that can be operationally verified and managed. They now constitute a lack which I recognize in the other, and which may be certified by one of the many specialized experts in needs recognition. Increasingly, my own needs are legitimate if they can also be identified in others.
Since 1960 needing has become a learning goal. Education in needing has become an increasingly prominent task. Physicians no longer confine themselves to defining the needs of a patient. They accept the ‘duty’ of educating the patient. The patient must now recognize as his own the needs which are diagnosed. This is the root meaning of ‘informed consent and compliance to the therapy recommended.’ Equally, social workers are no longer satisfied with the administration of their client’s needs. They are trained to bring these needs to consciousness and to advocate their translation into claims. This management of the formation rather than just the satisfaction of needs is a preparation to move social policy-making beyond mere welfare. Since needs can be managed, no needs shall arise in the coming utopia that cannot realistically be satisfied by collective action. By passing from the mere imputation and management of satisfaction to the felt incarnation of needs, the service professions attempt to give leadership on the route to a Skinnered Eden.
Finally, during the seventies, the term ‘basic needs’ has come into economics. And in this way it became a political keyword. A new breed of economists elaborated policy recommendations based on the ethics of effective need satisfaction. The proponents of this new, ethically based economic order are consistently under attack by hard-nosed economic technicians. However, they are rarely criticized for their methods of imputing needs, or for using needs as measures of potential demand. They are usually labeled socialist, an epithet which designates someone who translates imputed needs into precise entitlements that can be used to measure the obligations incumbent on others.
What is at issue here are not the technical, mathematical ways in which various schools of economists have given expression to something which in ordinary language is now referred to as needs, but the use of this term in ordinary discourse. Not only in political debates, but also in casual conversation, unmet ‘needs’ are increasingly used in the definition of persons. And this began only a few years ago. The birthday of the ‘under-developed’ — the extremely needy — is the 10th of January 1949, when President Harry Truman brought him into existence in the speech with which he launched the Point Four program. Other analogous definitions-by-the-negative have slipped into the language in a more surreptitious way. Illiteracy, as a noun, was first used in Boston in 1982 in the Harvard Educational Review. Since then, statistical entities like the ‘undiagnosed’, ‘the untreated’ and ‘the uninsured’ have jelled into subjects with professionally definable needs and claims.
The use of needs, then, to define the human condition has become axiomatic. The human is perceived as the animal in need. The ultimate consequence of the transmogrification of cultures into economics, of goods into values, is the disembedding of the individual self. It then seems natural to define the person by abstract deficiencies rather than by peculiarity of context.
This perception of the human as a needy being constitutes a radical break with any known tradition. And a similar situation obtains with the meaning currently attributed to equality, a definition based on this ‘miserable’ view. Within the needs discourse, human equality is anchored in the certainty of the identity of all peoples’ basic needs. We are no longer equal because of the intrinsic dignity and worth of each person, but because of the legitimacy of the claim to the recognition of a lack.
The needs-defined discourse also characterizes our alienation from each other. We live among strangers who are no less strangers for the fact that we feel responsibility toward the financing of one another’s care. Needs, translated into demands, mediate our responsibility for the other. But it is just this which exempts us from responsibility to him. An example clarifies the issue:
In Japan, the assumption that people need special care because they have become old, sick or unbalanced was far from general in 1985. During that year, Mrs Hashimoto from the United Nations University contrasted two comparable communities, one in the USA and one in Japan. In Japan 70 percent of the old as against 26 in the USA live with their children, and of these, 66 percent (as against six in the USA) live in three-or four-generation households. This will not surprise anyone acquainted with Japanese family traditions. In Japan, marriage adds a new member to the household and, unlike our tradition, leaves the structure of the household intact. As a consequence, it is not surprising that in Japan formal care targets only exceptional cases of proven needs, while in the USA it targets all the old whose needs and consequent entitlements are assumed as a matter of course. What is startling for me in Hashimoto’s analysis of her interviews is this: in the USA, those few families that do shelter their own after the age of 65 insist that they provide informal ‘care’ to old people in view of those persons’ special needs. In Japan, the old simply live in the household, regardless of any perception of their needs. The old are given something best described as ‘hospitality,’ but they ‘need’ neither formal nor informal hospitalization or care.
Notwithstanding the high levels of modernization in Japan, most parents with children over 35 count on the blessing of old age within the household. Economists can calculate how much is saved by domestic care in comparison with what a bed and upkeep in an old people’s home would cost. However, the language of economics is unfit to express either the boon or the burden experienced daily in the four-generation household by its members. Economic indicators can only measure abstractions, comparing phenomena in Tampa with those in Yokohama. By definition, they miss the joys and sorrows possible in a culture. The consequences of utility choices made by an economic actor under the assumption of scarcity are something quite different from the immediacy of loving this person. The latter experience results in blessings whose range runs from the heights of laughter to the sad bitterness of tears.
The needs discourse uproots grandmother from the household of which she had so far been a part, as much as the urn with an ancestor’s ashes. When she is then turned into a subject within the needs discourse, a new person, a senex œconomicus comes into being. This new person is a stranger who by somebody’s choice is hospitalized in her own bed. The household henceforth is experienced as a center of care. Grandmother from now on receives what she needs as an old woman. She no longer simply receives her due, irrespective of any claim based on an economically definable need.
During the early eighties, the needs discourse disembedded millions of elderly Japanese from the context of experience which up to then had defined both their status and the household. Even the current Japanese economy is unprepared to meet the needs which were created by this reinterpretation of age within an economic rather than a cultural context. Last year a high-level Japanese mission journeyed to Mexico. It came to negotiate an agreement which would allow Japanese enterprises to open one million beds for the disposal of aging Japanese in a tropical climate, and offered in exchange an industrial development package. The elderly, formerly experienced as a boon and a burden within the household, were turned into a disvalue for the economy. Professor Ui Jun claims that the major contribution since 1970 which poor countries have made to the Japanese economy has been the provision of opportunities for the disposal of waste and other forms of disvalue.
What I have characterized as the transformation of a culture into an economy is usually discussed in terms of the growing monetarization of the society. For a couple of decades I have pleaded that the process be studied in terms of the shadow which spreading economic structures throw over the non-economic cultural context in a developing society. In the shadow of economic growth, cultural boons are disvalued. Cooking for granny is redefined as work in the employ of the household whose contribution to the economy can be measured by one of many methods. Or it is discussed as an undesirable remnant of the past, which ought to be eliminated through further development. In both perspectives, giving grandmother her due has been turned into a disvalue once the activity — in this case, cooking late breakfast — is construed as a value which is produced to satisfy her needs.
Economic value arises and overshadows blessings when and where the cultural context is laid waste. The creation of disvalue is the logical precondition for the appearance of economic concepts and the experiences these concepts induce.
I here choose the term ‘disvalue’ for the same reasons for which, earlier, I chose blessings. With these terms I want to designate respectively loss and boon of a kind that cannot be gauged in economic terms. The economist can price a loss. He can calculate external costs, that is, those losses to others that are caused by a product, and that can be internalized into its price. He can calculate depreciation and risks. He can measure the losses caused by obsolescence. For example, he can calculate the amount of damage that has been caused to millions of clients by the recent switch of IBM to a new model. But with concepts that formalize choices under the assumption of scarcity, he has no means to gauge the experience of a person who loses the effective use of his feet because vehicles have established a radical monopoly over locomotion. What that person is deprived of is not in the domain of scarcity. Now, to get from here to there, that person must purchase passenger miles. The geographic environment now blocks his feet. Space has been turned into an infrastructure for vehicles. It would be misleading to call this the obsolescence of feet. Feet are not ‘rudimentary means of self transportation’, as some traffic engineers would have it. However, since most people are by now ‘economized’ (a condition perhaps similar to being anesthetized), they are blind and indifferent to the loss induced by what I call disvalue.
My meaning becomes more clear when disvalue is contrasted with waste. The latter once meant the abuse that deprives a fertile tract of land of its fruitfulness, in the same way that human geography is now deprived by vehicular traffic of its proportionality to feet. But this is not what waste now means. Since about 1840, waste has meant a new kind of stuff, of which I find no evidence in earlier sources. Peasant societies and earlier towns knew no waste. Even at the onset of industrial production, waste still meant what falls off the workbench. It then comes to be recognized as a stuff produced by industry that is a ‘no-good’ to such a degree that it must be removed at almost any cost. Waste, therefore, became an eminently economic category. It could be used as a measure to recognize when disutilities outgrew utilities. But both these economic terms, utilities and disutilities, acquire their respective values to the degree that the matrix that engenders blessings is being destroyed, that is, disvalued. People only then become dependent on motorized crutches when their feet have been crippled by a new environment.
In this new environment, people can no longer avoid transportation. But even worse: the belief arises that in comparison to an accessible world this new environment is a greater good. Indirectly, good of a lower kind is attributed to a pedestrian world. As a consequence, a decline in transportation is seen as a loss.
I am here to plead among economists for help in establishing a discourse in which — being careful not to reduce these substantively non-economic experiences to economic terms — a decline in economic production raises a new question: is this a condition for the recovery of blessings? In such a discourse the key issue is the limitation of economics, and especially the removal of the shadow thrown by economic structures onto the cultural domain. For this purpose we need to learn how to speak in a disciplined way about public issues, choosing words that do not surreptitiously drag in assumptions of scarcity. Only insofar as values come to be recognized in their subsidiary relationship to what I call ‘blessings’ am I able to speak in a disciplined way about public life after the crash of development. When that happens, we can speak about the renunciation of values as a condition for the good life.