Political Economy of Ruin

The devastation of the earth and the immiserization of billions of its inhabitants cries out for redress. Alas, naive paens to government to right wrongs fail to realize the complicitcy of public policy, often covert, with the ravenous agents of ruin, often, like Enron, big corporate names in such industries as agriculture, energy, chemicals, and transportation.

As stated in the mission, this site aspires to promote sustainability. To do so will require understanding the political economy of ruin. The word ruin, in the 12th century Latin, meant a headlong collapse and could pertain to a physical, moral, economic, or social deterioration. Synonyms include laying waste and destruction. You get the picture. Better still, read a case study of ruin involving the activities of the Enron Corporation, the Clinton administrtion, and a stretch of rain forest from Brazil to Bolivia.

However, we must examine the political economy of ruin systematically. Neo-classical economic theory contains no hard critical edge, rather provides ideological cover for the perpetrators of the political economy of ruin. Offshoots, even subfields, such as environmental economics, stubbornly adheres to many of the bedrock assumptions of laissez faire inherent in neo-classical economic theory. Still, economic analysis, merged with its inescapable political implications, needs some systematic treatment. Here goes.

Ecological Economics

Ecological economics finds three economic problems to be solved:

The efficient production of goods and services for human consumption, using the factors of production: land (really nature or natural capital and natural flows), labor, and capital built by past labor.
The distribution of goods and services within what prevails as norms of equity.
Despite its lack of consideration in mainstream economics, the sheer size or scale of the economy relative to the supporting ecosystem.

Neo-classical economics looks to the free market to provide ideal solutions to the first two problems and neglects the third entirely, or almost.