Transrational Resonances by Josefina Echavarría Alvarez Daniela Ingruber & Norbert Koppensteiner

Author:Josefina Echavarría Alvarez, Daniela Ingruber & Norbert Koppensteiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Postmodern Economics

I will begin with the postmodern family, which will be characterized by the erosion of the hegemony of the nation-state, disillusionment with the vector of progress, and symbolic money. It is a tenet of modern economics that the nation-state is the only legitimate actor on the world stage. In postmodern approaches to economics, we see this privileged position of the nation-state eroded from above and from below. On the supranational level, various multilateral organizations, conventions and treaties limit the sovereignty of nation-states, but more importantly reduce the scope of policy interventions that nation-states have at their disposal to manage their domestic economies. This is a key argument against the globalizing effect of free trade agreements. The grass-roots anti-globalization protest movements are in fact an example of the erosion from below. At the same time as there is an increase in the apparatuses resembling global governance, there has also been a romanticization of the vernacular , an increase in small-scale and local economic endeavors, such as community-supported agriculture, local markets and local adjunct currencies. This ambivalence, sometimes referred to by the neologism glocalization (Robertson 1994; Bauman 1998), means that on the macro level, nation-states have fewer levers to pull to adjust the political economy of the country, and on the micro level, people are creating their own local solutions that offer a postmodern twist of the logic of the nation-state.

Parallel to the glocalization effect, the doubt of the postmodern condition calls the foundation of economic institutions into question. The use of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or rather the rate of change of the GDP, as the universal measurement of wealth, prosperity, and human well-being has fallen under criticism from postmodern perspectives. Despite its elegant simplicity in solving the age-old problem of how to compare unlike objects such as apples and oranges by comparing them to a third objective standard of value grounded in the epistemological certainty of numbers, there are three main critiques of GDP: it fails to account for non-market services , it includes destructive activities and it fails to account for the future prospects of asset bases (Stiglitz et al. 2008). The logic of this perspective, rational application to the postmodern condition, thus leads to proposals to amend GDP with ever more detailed variables. Consequently, we get proposed solutions such as accounting for all possible “ecosystem services” and assigning them a numerical value (Costanza et al. 1997). It inevitably returns to the essential critique put forth in Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) that the perpetual growth of GDP is fundamentally unsustainable.

Postmodern perspectives are generally united in their critique of the vector of progress pointing in the wrong direction. This critique began with the early environmental movement arguing that expansion of an industrialized economy would increase environmental degradation and would thus be leading away from, rather than towards, a utopian dream. It was further extended beyond the horizons of environmentalism to include all teleological processes with the emergence of post-development critique. This of course included the notion

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