Review of For the Common Good
This is an economics for our time.
While reading For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, I was struck by its prescience. When former World Bank economist Herman Daly and theologian John Cobb, Jr. first published this collaboration the year was 1989. The problems that they considered as looming possibilities and inevitable challenges are now either upon us already or knocking louder and louder at the door. Tragically, their warnings about the need for drastic corrections in our practices and attitudes, corrections which they deemed urgent even then, remain generally ignored even now in these dark hours of economic and ecological collapse. What they call the "wild facts" are now bearing fangs and leering hungrily at us...but somehow we still, in general, do not honestly acknowledge the dangers we face.
Their driving concern rests on a logical thesis that is so simple it should be indisputable if not for the mummery of neoclassical economists. Economic growth, as we understand it and measure it, and upon which the entire system depends, is unsustainable in the face of Earth's biophysical limits. Growth means more spending, more capital, more extraction, more pollution, more land, more water, more cows, more fish, etc. The economy cannot grow without growinginto ecological space previously left undisturbed, or at least less disturbed, by human manipulation. The economy is situated within larger, natural systems upon which it depends - what Wendell Berry calls the "Great Economy." As greater shares of the Great Economy are taken up by our human economy, the capacity of both to sustain themselves becomes increasingly questionable. Technology cannot simply be assumed as our deus ex machina to save us from our creaturely limits. Economics as the practice of growth, a tradition no more than two centuries old, needs to come to an end.
From there Daly and Cobb set out to make other claims. They reiterated the now oft-stated critique that the economists' anthropology, Homo economicus, is a distortion of human nature that has been incorrect descriptively but, unfortunately, has turned into a prescriptive formula. Human beings may not naturally function as individualistic, self-interest maximizers, but the capitalist assumption that they are has become a mandate that they shall become. Our economy, built around narrow measures and definitions of success and "welfare," has engaged in a process of destroying community at all levels of human organization. This is a related point to the "limits to growth" concern because a revival of community virtue and orientation will be needed to shift economic practice from growth to sustainability, or what Daly and others call a "steady state economy."
The repeated fallacy that Daly and Cobb say is responsible for economic distortions of natural order and human character is called "misplaced concreteness." This fallacy occurs when economists abstract too severely from concrete experience and attentive observation, turning partial and heuristic models into timeless truths. Abstractions about the "market" or "land" become reified in economic dogma, detached from the contexts of their historical origins and floating free in the Platonic world of forms. These models are then appealed to for justification without recognition of changing circumstances over time and place that have displaced them and so make them misplaced as descriptors of reality.
Daly and Cobb do not devote all their energies to criticism. Part III of the book they devote to fairly specific policy ideas for the
Many of the issues and concerns that drive the current communities of sustainability advocates are already present in this book: resource depletion, global warming, agricultural practices, relocalization, ending free trade, and the matter of overpopulation. Meanwhile, they also refer to Catholic social teaching, particularly the doctrine of subsidiarity. Their proposals therefore make them natural allies of the Catholic distributists in articulating an economic "third way" to capitalism and socialism. What I appreciate about Daly and Cobb is their thorough and informed discussion free of the (dare I say it) "sectarian" feel of many greens and many distributists. For example, they don't bash "capitalism" in toto (or socialism, for that matter). They speak approvingly of markets and defend them as valuable economic spaces that have done much good and may continue to do so, provided they are tempered by a broader social and ecological framework.
If you're languishing in the confusion of how to understand economics from a Christian vantage point, tired of the capitalist-socialist dichotomy but longing for something meaty that cuts to the heart of the matter while offering something substantial in alternative, then I do suggest checking out this book. It may be over 20 years old, but the same problems are with us and their solutions are no less applicable in the second decade of this new century. In fact, the need for their voice to be heard is more urgent now than ever.
