Perinomics: a yet to exist discipline
from Edward Fullbrook
Humankind urgently needs a new discipline. Our very survival may depend on it. Natural science tells us that the economy now threatens humanity with calamity and potentially with extinction; and the daily news tells us that the economy’s forty-year upward redistribution of wealth, income and power threatens democracy and social order. But meanwhile the only discipline that directly engages with today’s economy is the one whose “wisdom” has guided it to its present state.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that economists have knowingly guided us to the ultimate precipice. But we find ourselves on this precipice today because economics’ conceptual framework (equilibrium, utility, independent agents, marginalism, linearity, micro reductionism, and GDP obsession) has blinded us to the larger reality, the one that includes the biosphere and society.
Because of the scale of today’s economy and the size of the human population, it is now the economy’s effects beyond the economy itself that are the most significant and pressing when it comes to human welfare. But economics’ underlying conceptual system prevents it from considering these effects except on an ad hoc and usually casual and non-professional basis. Therefore, humanity urgently needs a discipline that brings together on equal footing natural science, social science, and economics so to provide the broader narrative.
To get discussion going, I am giving this yet to exist discipline a name, “perinomics”, its Greek etymology being “surrounding or enclosing accounts” rather than “economics”’ “home or family accounts”. The creation of perinomics would quickly enable five significant things.
- It would bring natural scientists, social scientists, and economists into the same room.
- It would provide an on-going narrative focused on the economy’s impact on the biosphere and society.
- Because perinomics would identify itself as a discipline separate from economics, it would immediately sidestep the power structure of economics that marginalizes the teachings of those who dissent from the traditional “wisdom”.
- In public discussion regarding the economy, perinomists would soon command a prominent place on the platform.
- The new discipline’s agenda would be publicly welcomed by many natural scientists.
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
I think United Kingdom is the brain-centre of the World with beautiful universities and secondary schools today.
László Kulin
social expert
Hungary
Dear Edward,
This is an excellent idea, congratulation! We need a new structure of science, newly defined fields, see my old idea of quantum political economy (QPE). It substitutes the inappropriate Newtonian-mechanics formalism of mainstream economics by the quantum-mechanics.formalism, re-invents probability theory and draws form brain research (see Roger Penrose’s speculations), pattern tecognition, and algorithm theories (e.g. Stephen Wolfram). With sufficient finance (e.g. like the Santa Fe Institute) this would be a central element to help the human species survive capitalism.
Btw my just finished paper ‘Predictions and Hopes’ fits well into this project: https://legacy.econ.tuwien.ac.at/hanappi/publications.html
All the best Hardy Hanappi
I think this is an excellent initiative. I look forward to seeing some sort of forum into which we can all contribute to its success. One thing I ask is that it be made available to the general public, because “political awareness follows public awareness”.
I admire your optimism, Mr. Fullbrook and Mr. Hanappi. But my advice would be to save your breath. Maybe take up a musical instrument, if you want to do something interesting and rewarding. My own experience, based on my feeling that the world needs an improved and relevant economics, is that you cannot get trained economists to change their minds about anything. You can’t even get them to argue with you! I have posted many comments on this site about my own proposed way of starting up a new system of thinking about economics, a way that is based entirely on true and observable facts and that uses sound reasoning to draw conclusions. Crickets! If you study the history of the so-called “discipline” you may well come to the same conclusion I have, that the purpose of economics and economic education is to create a professional class of trained experts who will not understand certain things and who will never ask certain kinds of questions.
Sadly, everything you say is true. However, I perceive this initiative as being an attempt to circumvent the community of orthodox economists, and create a community of independent convinced ecological economists capable of addressing the economy in its totality, and as such is worth supporting.
One could start by referring to Ecological Economics Principals and Applications, Chapter 4, “The economic system is a subsystem of the global ecosystem…” This is what sticks in the throat of the orthodox economist.
Edward, I think it’s an excellent idea and a good name to encapsulate a crucial feature of our lives. I hope it gains some standing. I’m a little doubtful that will happen any time soon.
Further to deshoebox’s comments – I never tried to address neoclassical economists, it was clear they would not be listening. They would not enter the same room as natural and social scientists, but if they did they would just continue to talk to each other.
I wouldn’t want to be on the same platform as them. I would want to command attention, but I don’t know how to do that when editors/reporters/commentators don’t recognise you as having any authority or right to speak.
But we have to keep trying.
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life?
TENNYSON. (In memoriam A.H.H. stanza, LV).
My purpose in adding this thought is to clearly show the difference between what we sometimes confuse between macroeconomics and microeconomics. There has always been much confusion in our inability to know where one stops and the other begins. Since this particular set of discussion points is about expanding the Big Picture, it must be only macro- that is of concern.
However, it has one general feature which we should not fail to recognize and include. This is one of dualism or as some call it pluralism–two opposing things happen at the same time, and the result gives a lot of people much confusion about of what it really comprises because they both happen at once! Like the above stanza, we need to take a more distant view of the whole thing in order not to mistake the wood for the trees.
I find this macro- way of thinking is sufficient for providing explanations in macroeconomics and that the above suggestion for taking an even broader viewpoint is due to a reaction to the situation where the dualistic situation has been skipped by some thinkers, and there is a need to bring them better into focus on what is really happening.
To launch this as a subject it would be necessary to obtain sponsorship to endow a chair at a prominent university or to create an institute carrying out research. A cheaper alternative would be a virtual organisation of the like-minded. There would be no shortage of participants. The homogeneity of economists is overrated on this blog; I guess quite a few would be interested in signing up.
Such a group, however, would risk becoming a mutual admiration society which found it difficult to break through into broader public debate. RWER itself is an estimable organisation which I am happy to support but its impact on public debate is invisible, at least in the UK where I live.
Why not ask Bill Gates if he would endow a double chair in perinomics? Then find an interested and prestigious university to hire a leading biologist, physicist or ecologist for one position and a leading economist or social psychologist for the other. If Bill puts up enough dosh you’ll get the academics. If he doesn’t you’re looking for another climate-conscious billionaire.
Yes, this is a both much needed and great initiative. That is why, in my two books, I speak about Oikonomics rather than economics, trying to recover this multidimensional ecological, political, cultural, historical and social understanding of the economic process which has been completely lost within contemporary hegemonic economic theory which tried to look at it as if the mathematical, mechanistic methodology of Newtonian physics was the right way of looking at a complex historical process.
That is why I am convinced, too, that an historical, phenomenological approach to the oikonomy is the only way forward. Moreover, how can we expect to understand how to manage our house (oiko-nomos) without knowing its underlying reality (oiko-logos)? That is why in my Oikonomy – The Art of Living and Living Well and my Regenerative Oikonomics – A New Perspective on the Economic Process I dedicate a whole part and several chapters to understand Nature’s oikonomy, where all our economic activity starts and depends on. There is a lot to look at and learn from. Hope, little by little, we manage to do and undertake this important and needed task of bringing the economic theory back to Earth and reveal its pernicious ideological role in our current world, leading us further and further towards an abyss as seen by the deepening ecological, political, social and financial imbalances. This, I guess, is our responsibility as economists. Let’s do it.