The Dismal Science "How Thinking Like An Economist Undermines Community"

How Thinking Like An Economist Undermines Community

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Marglin, Stephen

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ISBN:9780674026544
Editorial: Harvard University Press
Fecha de la edición:2007
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Dimensiones: 0 cm x 0 cm
Nº Pág.:376
Idiomas:Ingles,Inglés

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/ Análisis Económico

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, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback - say the barn burned down - neighbours pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbours, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, 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.

Preface
1 Economics, the Market, and Community 1
2 What Is Community? And Is It Worth the Cost? 20
3 The Cutting Edge of Modernity 36
4 Individualism 58
5 Some History 80
6 From Vice to Virtue in a Century 96
7 How Do We Know When We Do Not Know? 116
8 Sources of the Modern Ideology of Knowledge 136
9 Taking Experience Seriously 153
10 Welfare Economics and the Nation-State 173
11 Why Is Enough Never Enough? 199
12 The Economics of Tragic Choices 223
13 From Imperialism to Globalization, by Way of Development 245
Appendix A The Limits of Dissent 265
Appendix B The Distributional Roots of the Enclosure Movement 299
Notes 309
References 333
Note on Sources and Permissions 351