still against maximisation

I have another piece published at Open Democracy, this time on the topic of economic 'maximisation'. I'd already had a crack at this bizarre notion in this blog piece, but then Anthony Barnett saw this intriguing Paul Mason newsnight film, and asked me whether I'd like to pick up these ideas in a slightly more, ahem, inclusive style.

The claims I'm putting forward aren't so very far from what I argued in Reinventing the Firm, some of which was influenced by Stuart White's work on radical liberalism. As I put in the OD piece:

Profit, after all, is simply that which is left over. All societies, as the French social theorist Georges Bataille explored, have some way of dispensing this excess, be it sacrifice, public gifts, retention or hedonistic over-consumption. But any economic model that seeks to generate as much of it as possible is clearly self-destructive in the medium or long-term.

Ecological systems may represent a helpful model in this regard. At least rhetorically, they move us away from a mechanistic view of the economy, towards something more adaptive, softer and oriented around survival. A more nuanced understanding of both capitalism and nature might recognise that ‘survival of the fittest’ isn’t some quasi-Fascist appeal to supremacy, but a recognition that survivors are those who fit in with their surroundings.

But ideally we manage without scientific analogies at all. The first question is how we can return to thinking of business in optimising terms, rather than maximising. Then the deeper question is how we became so deluded as to treat surplus extraction – surely a bi-product of making, exchanging and consuming – as our raison d’etre in the first place. The fact that surpluses are simple and quantifiable, while achieving them is complex, is an absurd justification for elevating the former above the latter in our hierarchy of economic goals and needs.

Comments

[Bruce Davis]

Bizarrely, I have just been watching old videos of Camberwick Green with my kids to fill a wet Easter afternoon in which Windy Miller's 'happy (this is 1966 - organic is still to be invented!)eggs' are chosen over Jonathan Miller's 'the modern mechanised farmer' (sic) mass produced eggs by the residents of the Green. JM cannot compete because he couldn't engineer the collection of the eggs in a free range way and cover his costs. He is forced to sell his eggs at the railway junction 'where one egg is much like another as long as they make the grade'. Both are happy (or at least Windy Miller decides not to rub it in too much even though the 'modern farmer' had ridiculed his little egg operation at the beginning of the episode. Optimisation is not only winning in the local economy, it is also morally superior! Cbeebies eat your post modern heart out.

[Dick Pountain]

Couldn't agree more. All the measures that need to be taken to solve our current problems - credit, finance, transport, climate change, education, you name it, involve not entirely abolishing markets but regulating them in ways that are bound to generate less that maximal profit. And despite the panic cries of market fundos, that doesn't mean a return to the stone age.

The problem is finding ANY politicians with the courage to enforce them

[Anthony Barnett]

Just seen this. It seemed to me that the comments discussion after it were about firms making things whereas the logic - or rather dislogic - of maximisation does its pernicious work at the level of finance.
Cheers!