Thinking an economy of the living

Keynote, Felwine Sarr

ERMA conference ” Money, Structural Transformations and Public Policies. “, Tours November 2023

The exercise I am about to embark on is that of an economic forecast. It is somewhat perilous because I am addressing a discipline that, on the strength of its successes, is sure of its facts, and has built itself over the centuries on the idea of its ability to explain reality and the objects it sets out to elucidate (debt, inflation, unemployment, production) using its own categories.  A discipline that holds to its order of discourse, and it is this that I would like to question somewhat.

We are experiencing a global ecological and economic crisis. An instrumental relationship with our ecological home, inherited from the mechanistic cosmology of Western modernity, has led us to overexploit the resources of the biotope and endanger the conditions for the reproduction of life on earth. Social, economic and environmental unravelling is one of the major challenges facing the world today. In this context, the need to rethink not only the place of the economic order, within the social order (here social is understood in the broad sense : including all living things), but also its nature, is imperative.  

The first observation is that of the entropic nature of a world-economy whose metabolism negatively affects the biotope. How, then, can we think of an economic order that, while metabolising the biotope’s resources, preserves its sustainability and regenerative capacity ? How can we think of an economy (theory, praxis and axiology) whose aims include the order of living things as a whole?

The second observation is that of a world-economy which is experiencing a crisis of purpose. This is reflected in the fact that the dominant economic system does not allow the majority of human beings to satisfy their fundamental needs with dignity.  The ” crisis ” lies in the fact that, as an order of means (knowledge and know-how), the world-economy not only fails to fulfil its function of adequately providing for the needs of human communities, but jeopardises the ends it sets itself. Economic science, when it became an autonomous discipline at the end of the 18^th century, had set itself the goal of helping to increase the well-being of the greatest number.

One of its most significant symptoms of this crisis of purpose can be found in the inequalities of income and well-being around the world, which this system generates in a structural way.

African countries are caught up in a global economic system that is detrimental to them. They are faced with major challenges in terms of education, health and employment for young people, as well as the need to meet the continent’s present and future economic needs. Despite the large availability of resources on the African continent, the way in which it is integrated into this global economy, and the structural conditions under which it operates, mean that it is unable to respond adequately to its economic and social needs. This is not the only reason for the continent’s difficulties in ensuring its economic prosperity, but it is a significant one.

This raises the question for African countries of the right economic system to adopt, the right economic practices that take account of ecological constraints, but also the rich heritage of economic knowledge and know-how produced on the African continent over several centuries, and on which it is also necessary to build. This integral archive could serve as a resource for thinking new economic forms ; relational economies, embedded in territories and socio-cultural practices; in short, economies capable of meeting the needs of human communities while not negatively affecting the biotope and the living order.

What I am inviting us, researchers in economics and the social sciences, to do is to undertake an epistemological work on the economic order (but also in the order of imaginaries) that consists of re-posing the question of what a good economy is for life. A good economy for human communities, but also for all living things, i.e. the human /non-human assemblages that enable our lives.

This work requires us to think about a paradigm shift that would induce a change of discursivity, of analysis and evaluation grid, of criteriology, of indicators and value scale, of normative regime ; but also of practices in the field of economics. This work seems to me necessary and urgent for Africa and but also for the rest of the world.

I come back to the first observation, which is that of the entropic nature of the dominant economy.

Since the industrial revolution, we have entered an era in which human activity has become the major geological constraint and is causing profound changes to the Earth’s ecosystem. The Anthropocene is characterised by the fact that human activities are leading to accelerated destruction of biodiversity and widespread growth in entropy. It imposes its rate of production on living things and does not allow them the time they need to regenerate. We live under the regime of a world-economy whose metabolism negatively affects the biosphere.

The endangerment of the conditions for the reproduction of biological life, already anticipated in the 1970s, has become a palpable reality at the beginning of the 21st century. The various scientific reports, particularly those of the IPCC, document this abundantly. People living around Lake Chad are already experiencing it. The lake has dried up and lost 90% of its surface area in 40 years. Of the 55 million internally displaced people in the world in 2020, ¾ will be due to natural disasters linked to climate change[1]. In the space of 100 years, half of all living species have been destroyed. We could thus, like Bernard Stiegler, write entropocene with an e and without an h.

How then can we think of an economic order which, while metabolising the resources of the biotope, preserves its sustainability and capacity for regeneration. How can we avoid the entropy of the living ? [2]Come up with an economy whose aims include the order of living things as a whole. (Axiology, theory and praxis). I will return to this aspect later.

• While acknowledging the significant improvement in living conditions and the phenomenal increase in global prosperity since the end of the Renaissance, induced by the development of the capitalist economy. But we can’t help noticing that there is a crisis of purpose in the world economy, the symptoms of which are certainly the inequalities of income and well-being around the world, but also the inability of the majority of human beings to satisfy their basic needs with dignity in this economic system. The crisis lies in the fact that the current economic order is not fulfilling its fundamental mission, which is to contribute to the well-being of as many people as possible. A majority of people across the planet are struggling to secure the conditions for a dignified life. We have an economic system that keeps the majority of human beings in a perpetual struggle to survive, feed themselves decently, look after themselves, access education, etc.

• Inequalities in income (within rich countries and between them and low-income countries) and in access to resources, have increased over the last century. They are linked to the world economy’s value-added production system and the ways in which it is redistributed, to the rules of international trade and the international division of labour, but also to the ways in which wealth is redistributed endogenously within countries.

• The World-Economy is structured by an unequal capture and redistribution of added value and technological innovations; and by unfair competition between markets and producers in different parts of the Globe. The result is monopolies, asymmetries and domination by the industrialised countries of entire segments of this global economy. Globalisation has also led to a privatisation of the gains from trade and a mutualisation of its costs.

• The international division of labour has turned emerging and so-called developing nations into producers of raw materials that are processed in industries in North countries. Value added is thus transferred from the countries of theSouth of the Globe to those known as the North

[1] According to International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (CNC). Article published in le Monde on 20 May 2021.

[2] A living thing is one that forms its own substance from that which it draws from its environment (this is the difference with inanimate objects). To do this, levivant needs the resources of its ecology, which it transforms into energy to maintain its structure. In this way, it ensures its regeneration, development and evolution by assimilating and metabolising the resources of its biotope. To remain alive, it adapts and its capacity for transformation is one of the conditions that makes life possible. So life is synonymous with transformation and perpetual mutation.

What would a living economy be, or, look like?

This would be an Economy that does not negatively affect the order of living things and whose action is negentropic[1] : an economy of living things would be a carbon-neutral economy, and whose rate of production matches the rates of regeneration of the biotope.

Beyond the need to meet the needs of human communities, an economy of living things would be a non–anthropocentric ; economy that, while meeting the needs of human communities, does not hinder the capacity of living things to regenerate.

We can no longer afford the luxury of not drawing the consequences of the impact of our economic way of life on our biotopes; nor of enshrining its aims in a cosmopolitics of the living. In particular, by thinking about an articulation of social, economic, ecological, political and cultural orders that ensures the sustainability of living things as well as their growth.

A living economy could be based on a reassessment of the usefulness of all sectors of economic life with regard to their contribution to health, care, well-being, social cohesion (human communities), but also to the preservation of living things and the perpetuation of life.

Nurses, doctors, supermarket cashiers, bus drivers, all jobs related to care revealed during the Covid 19 pandemic their essential character for the life of our societies, while they are the least well paid jobs by the current economic system which overpays capital, middlemen, bullshit jobs[2] and captive market jobs, and underpays those who help to nurture, sustain and care for life. A reassessment of the market value of work and its remuneration could be based on its contribution to sustaining life, preserving a healthy environment, and collective intelligence.

When I asked myself what a good economy for living things might be in practical terms, two perspectives caught my attention. Isabelle Delannoy’s concept of the symbiotic economy and the idea of building an economy of the commons with living things. I would like to briefly present them here, but also raise the questions they raise.

What Isabelle Delannoy[3] calls a symbiotic economy, is an economy whose metabolism does not negatively affect the social, environmental and relational orders. It is a regenerative economic model that asserts the possibility of developing a symbiotic relationship (i.e. one of mutual growth) between natural ecosystems and intense human activity ; and this in all areas of the economy. It’s about making choices about production, resource allocation and redistribution so that when the economic order grows, so do the social and natural orders with which it is linked. The Idea is to work towards a symbiosis of the natural, social, technological and economic orders (with the idea that the symbiotic relationship is one of mutual growth).

To do this, it is necessary to construct indicators that make it possible to measure the symbiotic degree of an economic activity and to know whether it, positively or negatively affects the orders with which it is interrelated (social, natural, …). This choice of new purposes assigned to the economic order implies a new criteriology.

The dominant convention for measuring the growth of the economy is to measure the wealth produced by summing the added values produced annually. This concept of GDP growth, as we know, does not take into account the environmental, human and social costs of the world’s productive apparatus.

In reality, including in growing countries, we are in bad-growth economies, based on an accounting system that fails to account for its true costs and inadequately names its assets and liabilities. The price of goods should incorporate their environmental cost and reflect their carbon content. What we call economic growth leads to a decline in living things, and as we have already mentioned, the current economic system encourages entropy. This reality should lead us to change our indicators and start by correctly assessing the impact of the economic order on the biotope and on all living things.

In different parts of the world, there already exist relationships to the economy and to territories that are different from those promoted by the dominant economy. These are linked to agro-ecological practices, short circuits, degrowth, etc.)   several alternative proposals incorporating the ecological constraint emanate from what is known as the green or blue economy. But these proposals do not form a system.

[1] In the universe, energy dissipates and matter continually disorganises. We are all subject to the principle of entropy. Living things are perishable, but they can nevertheless defer their entropy by homeostatically maintaining their structure and reproducing it. To combat entropy, negentropy transforms living things into energy to maintain life; it is through such a process that we maintain the ideal temperature of our bodies (35-42). Humans can also produce negentropy through artificial processes.

[2] See David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (2018), editions les Liens qui Libèrent.

[3] Isabelle Delannoy developed this concept in a Workshop on the Symbiotic Economy (the Symbiotic Workshop). The idea is to think of a radically new regenerative economic model that affirms the possibility of developing a symbiotic relationship (i.e. one of mutual growth) between thriving natural ecosystems and intense human activity, in all areas of the economy.

Questions to be answered

Can these practices reverse the trend ? Are they destined to remain marginal? Should this new emerging order, these different practices, be systematised or not? Should these practices be homogenised, or should there be a plurality of relationships to the economy and of economies? Should we be working towards a low-frequency, homogenising culture, or towards high-frequency, singular cultures that coexist and exchange? There are also questions about transition (ecological, energy, political). What incentives are needed? How can it be implemented? The most pessimistic projections by collapsologists point to ecological collapse. Is it possible to change course before the predicted collapse ?

In this context, the role of university research (that of researchers in economics, life sciences : environment, ecology, humanities and social sciences) seems to me to have to go beyond making its objects intelligible, but to contribute to :

• Think about sustaining life and increasing its quality. To do this, think about the conditions for new forms of life; new relationships with the living. The economic order plays a key role in this new relationship to living things to be articulated.
• Propose models that allow the economic gesture to be de-automated and reconscientized. Which make it possible to grasp all its implications and fit it into a system that gives it meaning.

A Second perspective would consist in constructing an economy of the commons with the living as a whole :

The ecological crisis and widening economic and social disparities on a global scale, make it imperative to produce commons and preserve non-rival and non-exclusive spaces, guaranteeing a right of use and access to common resources for the greatest number. We urgently need to move away from the private appropriation of the resources necessary for life. Biodiversity, water, air and wetlands are all commons whose management rules should be co-defined by the stakeholders.

One of the roots (origin) of the ecological crisis can be considered to lie in a representation of the centrality of our humanity in the order of the living, in a cosmology of separation and in the transformation of the rest of the living into objects subjected by an instrumental reason to our exclusive ends. Thus, responding to the ecological challenges posed by our techno-scientific civilisation requires us to rethink the cosmologies that underpin and structure our relationship with the living, our place within this order ; as well as the languages that give meaning to the links we maintain with it.

One of the questions this state of affairs raises for us is what kind of common (what kind of society) can we build with non-human ? How can we think about interactions with forms of life that are traditionally excluded from human societies (animal, plant, mineral forms etc.)?

At the origin of any community, there is the establishment of a common symbolic code that allows its members to think, say, and experience reality in a relatively univocal way. Anthropology has shown that societies are based on a founding narrative, a myth, which shapes a certain conception of the world and its organisation, and establishes a hierarchy of specific values often conceptualised by a social and linguistic code internalised by its members. Modern societies, and Western industrial society in particular, are no exception to this structure. The latter must legitimise its evolution and its appropriation of the future through a mythology that reflects its cosmologies and social ideologies. From this perspective, economic discourse functions as an ecomyth guaranteeing the maintenance of the industrial social order. It fuels representations of the universe and society, legitimises institutions, ensures beliefs, shapes ways of living and thinking that enable reality to be ordered and arranged in accordance with the message initially delivered by the narrative. The Wellbeing, the Progress, the Growth are the key concepts of this cosmology and condition its reading of reality.

We are therefore governed by an order of discourse : an ecomyth. An international expertise that forms a system. It is a multi-dimensional material made up of economic theories, trade agreements and mainstream management literature, which mixes theoretical and systemic registers. These are languages that reinforce each other through heterogeneous discursivity. This is what Foucault called an archive. We are governed by a language that makes up a system, and the question is how to get out of this language and the representations it induces.

So, in order to build common ground with living things as a whole, is it necessary to developa language of the commons and a language of the economy of living things ? The language of the commons with living things to be built is the prerequisite for any paradigm shift. It is first and foremost an instrument for reorienting our perception and understanding, helping us to name and clarify the realities and value of working together with living things. Without this language (of the commons with living things), the social realities to which it refers remain invisible or culturally marginalised  and therefore politically inconsequential. Therefore, the discourse on the commons with living things is an epistemological intervention that and a way of reintegrating social, ecological and ethical values into the management of our common wealth (through negotiation and transaction)

This language makes it possible to formulate political claims and value hierarchies (transaction universe). It also enables us to break out of the narrow social roles in which we are confined (those of the consumer, the voter, the citizen).

Karl Polanyi shows how market culture from the 17th^th through the 19th century gradually supplanted kinship, custom, religion, morality, and community to become society’s main ordering principle. Rather than seeing “the market” as an autonomous “natural” realm that exists outside the Earth’s natural systems and our social needs, the idea is to reverse the Great Transformation and re-enchant it with the social, the economic and the ecological.

It’s about reintegrating the market, capital, into social life. Ensuring that capital investments ; finance, production, international trade, are subordinated to societal needs and as well as those of an economy of the commons with the living as a whole.

To do this, develop institutions and standards that are based on the wealth of possibilities for social cooperation with biotopes and that go beyond the producer/consumer dyad. (Examples: community forests, municipal water management committees, agricultural land trusts to support local family farming, “biocultural heritage” protected areas to manage biodiversity, “omni-commons” structures that provide administrative/legal support for commons-based businesses (Japan, Quebec, Italy)

At this point in my talk, I’d like to give my remarks a slightly more philosophical tone. I have a feeling that the hardened modellers and econometricians will wonder what I’m talking about: are we really talking about economics here? I’d just like to remind you that economics is not just a highly formalised order of knowledge and know-how (maths/statistics)  in its early days, it was a moral philosophy that questioned its aims.

The civilisational crisis we are experiencing and which is forcing us to rethink our relationship to life, to death, to the earth, is a crisis in the way we inhabit our primary ecological home which is the earth. As Pierre Madelin and Val Plumwood put it, we need to move away from the denial of belonging to the earth, which leads us to wish to eradicate the otherness of nature by subjecting it to our will. Assuming the physical and sensitive reality of the world means recognising the otherness of natural things, their given nature, and admitting the other-than-human foundations of our being. It means taking the measure of the continuity between humans and nature, but also of the latter’s own agentivity. The difficulty, then, is to relativise an excessive anthropocentrism on the one hand, and on the other, an ecocentrism that would tend to deny the singularity of human beings. It is certainly impossible to avoid any instrumental relationship with nature/the living but it is possible to admit its unavailable part as well as its agentivity.

There is a link of continuity between individual, social bodies and ecosystems which implies that damage to ecosystems affects social bodies and vice versa. The issues of the social, political and environmental link therefore need to be considered together. And the economy should henceforth be thought at this scale : that of the living being as a whole.

In a reflection on how to live a good life in a bad life, Judith Butler points out that we cannot consider human bodies without evoking the environments, the machines, the complex systems of social interdependence on which they rest and the whole of which form the conditions of possibility for their existence and survival.

For Butler, thinking about a livable life consists in drawing the consequences from the fact that since humans are animal-humans, their existence depends on support systems that are both human and non-human. We live within social organisations of life and biopolitical regimes that dispose of our lives. We cannot subsist without these social forms of life. The complex relations that make up bodily life must lead us not just to think about the human ideal, but to deal with the complex set of relations without which we do not exist (Donna Haraway). My own life, my social life, is more extensive because it is articulated with those of other living beings. To understand and take note of the fact that our condition as living humans is consubstantially linked to that of living things and to the interactions we have with them.

This means cooperating with existing communities by establishing mutual relationships with them, based on reciprocity, care and repair. Caring for and repairing the living is necessary for us because through this gesture we self-repair and self-preserve.

How might all this translate into economics ? By a necessary mutation of the discipline. Before reflecting on this, let us examine how the discipline has responded to the questions posed by its interactions with nature/biotope.

Arnaud Orain, in une histoire des savoirs perdus de l’économie, the subtitle of which is contribution à l’équilibre du vivant, points out that although part of political economy has its origins in rural economy, the latter intends to regulate the natural order through the market and prices. The equilibrium sought by political economy is not that of species or living organisms, but that of goods and services. The idea is that to increase people’s material well-being, nature must be reduced to a matrix that transforms natural beings into products (commodities) through the exercise of monetary (capital) and human (labour) forces. When we proceed in this way with nature, what happens to living things? Quesnay was already pointing out at the time that: ” the natural order that is most advantageous to men is perhaps not the most advantageous to animals “. In the course of its evolution from physiocracy to political economy, the latter became a science of government and gradually moved away from the natural sciences.

• One of the epistemological challenges of our discipline, economics, is that it was built along the nature/culture divide. It that it has taken over the dualistic ontology (which is a separatist ontology)

• Economics, in order to respond to ecological challenges, should once again become a science of the living that incorporates the fact that nature is not an abstract magnitude, onto which we can project the principles of market equilibrium, but a living reality of which humans are a part. The equilibrium of the living world requires respect for the principles of species regulation. economics could thus be transformed into a science of interdependence.

• Despite the fact that economic market forces are primarily responsible for the climate crisis, economists pay relatively little attention to the environmental issue. Out of 47,000 articles published in the 50 most important academic journals in economics from 2000 to 2020, only eleven dealt with biodiversity, i.e. 0.02%. Of the 9 most important journals in the field, out of 77,000 articles only 57 articles have been published on this subject since their creation.

• In this conference, I noted that out of 24 sessions, 3 are devoted to the ecological question (12.5%). For a number of economists, the environmental crisis should be treated as a negative externality (or negative common), which a market mechanism could regulate without making it disappear; by seeking, for example in the case of greenhouse gas emissions, the optimal level of pollution. A second approach associated with William Nordhaus would be to seek the optimal level of global warming. This would have a limited impact on wealth growth, since it mainly affects the primary sector (agriculture), which is contributing less and less to GDP in developed and emerging countries. Another approach is to economise on nature. Nature provides services to humans that can be priced. This would involve taxing those who destroy these services and rewarding those who promote them.

• The idea is widespread among economists that nature abounds with energy sources that are currently expensive to exploit, but if oil becomes scarce, they will be exploited and the market will adapt.

The problem will remain badly posed as long as economists think within the framework of sharing between humans (who have needs) and nature seen as an entity external to them that provides it with resources (inputs). Here, the economy is seen exclusively as a cycle of material transformation. In this conceptual framework, pollution and the dispersion of energy (which will no longer be reused), will no longer be considered as negative externalities, but as inevitable consequences of the system.

This means no longer thinking of the economy in terms of modern physics, but in terms of biology and the life sciences. Even the Meadows report of 1972, although innovative at the time in incorporating feedback loops between population and pollution, is based on an input/output model, which is founded on the paradigm, resources-scarcity.

We could try to think differently. Non-renewable energies are not as rare as they are made out to be, they are abundant, and rather than regulating or preserving them, we could make them purposeless, i.e. without price or ownership. Secondly, if we think of the existence of a general interdependence between species, including human beings, and the non-humans we call renewable resources (forests, plants, animals), then nothing can be fundamentally and exclusively thought of as a resource. Within ecosystems, living organisms maintain their structure in a homeostatic way and, in order to reduce their entropy, they spread and regulate themselves. A science of living things would reflect on these interdependencies.

Crisis of economics as a science.

The economics of life should be conceived as a science of life, which reflects on how exchanges and interactions between humans and non-humans are articulated. By establishing a matrix of relationships between all species, Herman Daly in 1938 laid the foundations for an approach that involves substituting an analysis in terms of resources for an approach based on the biophysics of interdependence. Ecological economics, however, remains strongly influenced by a dualist ontology; it insists on distinguishing the economic sphere from that of ecosystems  and for the most daring of its promoters, it is simply a matter of reflecting on the interfaces between the two systems  it is struggling to become a genuine science of living things. So if humans are an integral part of ecosystems, what justifies this division between the sciences? Interactions between species (including humans) determine their existence and their future. The latest IPCC reports (2022) take a particular interest in the question of critical zones and note the weakness of our knowledge of the interdependence of living things. In a report published in 202, the economist Partha Dasgupta stresses that it is the lack of knowledge about the interdependence of living systems that prevents economists from proposing relevant public policies to combat deforestation. The report concludes that the productivity of nature for humans has been steadily declining over the last twenty years, and stresses that the market is not the right measure to assess this, because nature is an indivisible entity.

Also, it is not possible to separate the functions of ecosystems, because their total output is greater than the sum of the outputs of each  it is therefore understanding the interaction that counts.

It is therefore a question of going back the way political economy went, which consisted in substituting the equilibrium of species for that of commodities and prices. The equilibrium of the living world or the symbiotic relationship (mutual growth) could be considered as objectives to be achieved by the economic order. Better cooperation between economics and the life sciences could thus contribute to the development of a science of life.

In conclusion

Can economics revive its ambition to be a moral philosophy turned towards the good of the greatest number and no longer be satisfied with being an order of means, but a place that thinks about the ends to which it contributes ?  Can it extend this greatest number to all living things and make society with it?

Thinking the axiology of a new living economy : a negentropic and symbiotic economy, an economy that is not exclusively anthropocentric ; means defining and broadening its aims, rethinking its approaches, its tools, its criteriology, its modes of evaluation, its languages and its operating modes.

Would we be willing to lose our language (the one in which we are comfortable and which configures the worlds in which we move) to embark on this new adventure ?