Emancipatory Social Science
Christian Arnsperger
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Guest Introduction
Christian is an economist whose work can help answer the question: how might economics become an emancipatory social science?
Christian holds a PhD in economics, is a professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, a former advisor to the alternative bank of Switzerland, and was a long-time researcher at the Belgian National Science Foundation. He's the author of Critical Political Economy and Full-Spectrum Economics, among other books on political economy with an existential and ecological focus.
As an economist unafraid to venture into questions around spirituality, or the evolution of consciousness, his works are highly interdisciplinary, including a fusion of Ken Wilber's integral philosophy with post-neoclassical economics, and a dialogue between Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Hayek.
Our conversation is about emancipatory social science. What is it, and how might economics move in its direction. More broadly, we cover:
- What emancipation means in the context of social science
- What Ken Wilber’s philosophy can bring to economics
- Christian’s loving critique of complexity economics
- The idea of a society’s "critical spirit", which functions as a parallel to price signals
- The role that greater variety can play in changing the course of the economy as a complex system
- And the role that actual policies, like a basic income, or a job guarantee, or empowering people to work fewer hours, might play in making that kind of deep existential variety, variety in our forms of life, actually viable
Enjoy!
Time Map
- 11:45 – What does ‘emancipatory’ mean in the context of emancipatory social science?
- 24:40 – What is missing from economic theory, from capitalist society, that prevents us from realizing the emancipatory potentials that the development of the means of production and technology make possible? In short: what are critical and existential reflection?
- 32:50 – A critique of complexity economics, and more generally, of all modeling-first approaches to economics.
- 49:00 – What does an economics beyond computational modeling look like? On the return of field work, sociology, and anthropology as bases for economic work, as well as philosophy, and existential psychology.
- 1:06:10 – What is a society’s ‘critical spirit’? It can act as a parallel to price signals in a market economy, but rather than calibrating supply and demand, it calibrates the ‘normative atmosphere’ in which humans form their existential aspirations.
- 1:12:35 – Variety as a key leverage point in how we can consciously change the trajectory of complex market economies. From “disordering potentialities” to “rational non-conformism”, how can we use variety to change the course of complex market economies?
- 1:21:20 – What actual policies – like a basic income for example – might play a role in actually creating a society that supports deep, existential experimentation, rather than endless variations on the same capitalist form of life?
- 1:35:57 – What role might the reduction of ‘socially necessary labor time’ play in empowering a more emancipatory economy?
- 1:42:20 – On the tension between legibility and diversity. How should we think about using centralized governments to provision resources, when governments have a built-in incentive to maintain the ‘legibility’ of its population, or to prevent from too much decentralization?
Links from the Conversation
Christian's books: Critical Political Economy and Full Spectrum Economics
Christian's website
Erik Olin Wright's presentation outlining 'emancipatory social science', and his book Envisioning Real Utopias where it's elaborated
Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth
Danielle Carr's piece in the NYT on reification
Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom