Faced with the climate crisis, economics called upon to reinvent itself

2023-05-19 08:00:07

“The destruction of the commons seems irreversible, threatening the earth’s habitability and biodiversity. We do not have the institutions to face this challenge, nor do we know what scientific discipline can make this event its object. (…). Humanity, taken as an economic agent of the Anthropocene, does not know how to act, it is paralyzed (…). The claims of economics to provide the measuring instruments to guide individual and collective action are contested. Can economics still teach us and guide us in the face of the challenges of the Anthropocene? » These excerpts from a “call for papers” for the 6^e international symposium on economic philosophy, which will be held at Sciences Po Lille from June 29 to 1^is July 2023, bears witness to the disarray of a profession.

Economists have a certain influence on political decisions and claim to hold the upper hand in the humanities and social sciences. But for the most critical among them, as for ordinary citizens with a slightly attentive ecological conscience, not only are they no longer able to understand the economic, social and above all environmental “polycrisis” that is hitting humanity, and a fortiori to remedy it, but they are largely responsible for it!

Criticism of economics has hitherto drawn its boundary within the profession itself, between “orthodox” and “heterodox”. The doxa, to defend or to slay, depending on your point of view, was neoclassical economic theory, born in the 1870s (Austrian school, Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall), which took hold since the beginning of the 1980s at the helm of economics faculties, academic journals, nomination juries and economic policies, based on three pillars.

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First, an economy works “well” (that is to say, it is growing and distributing wealth optimally) when it is in equilibrium, namely when economic agents rationally anticipate the competition of their interests. respective individuals through the market, without external forces – the State, politicians, public institutions – coming to “distort” the game of anticipations. Second, the optimal contribution of resources – natural, financial and human – and the optimal redistribution of wealth, including between national economies, are ensured by competition, technical innovation and the freedom to trade and move on a global scale. world, which allow everyone to assert their “comparative advantages”. Third, money is “neutral”, in other words the quantity of money in circulation reflects these optimized exchanges and not the political or social balance of power, under penalty of generating either inflation or a credit shortage.

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