spirituality – Stephen Hinton Consulting

I really recommend listening to this Youtube with Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice and John Christensen, co-founder of the Tax Justice Network.

The subject was the idea of homo economicus – the supposed rational economic actor at the heart of mainstream economics – and its critics.

John traces the origins of the concept back to the late nineteenth century, when economics shifted from being a branch of moral philosophy into the mathematically-driven neoclassical framework most of us were taught at university.

One of the key figures was Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, a mathematician and economist at Oxford. Edgeworth drew on Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy – the idea that human beings are rational calculators of pleasure and pain – Edgeworth sought to create a perfectly tidy model of human behaviour. We were, he argued, calculating machines engaged in constant cost-benefit analysis, each of us pursuing our own utility.

Modern models of the economy, like – the DSGE models used by the Bank of England and the UK Office for Budget Responsibility – still rest on the fiction of a single rational agent – or homo economicus – who knows everything and always restores balance.

And these models continue to shape policy. They produce neat forecasts that always return to equilibrium, because the assumptions guarantee that outcome. They are sadly blind to the lived reality of power, inequality, exploitation and environmental breakdown.

Investors in peace, one of my projects, something else. We don’t see homo economicus, we see homo pax. Our true nature is peace and as long as we don’t realise and get to enjoy and appreciate that, we will continue to be homo errorum leading to homo insatisfactus (man of error, unsatisfied man).

This is where Investing in peace and political economy overlap: as long as economics and business continue to model their art on misguided views of what it is to be human, they will continue to guide policy in the wrong direction.

If you are working with economic policy we urge you to look closer at yourself: what is it you really want, what is driving you? Can it be that is something you share with the rest of the people on the planet?

Gail Tverberg, an insurance industry actuary, turned her skills towards understanding the world energy situation some twenty years ago. And she has been following and analysing the impact of oil, gas, etc on the world since then. In a recent blog post she summarizes the situation with the world economy as “Brace Yourself”.

In many ways, the situation of the industrial age is the situation of man finding oil. With oil, which is transportable, concentrated energy, we could create, build, organise society to offer a level of material comfort only previously enjoyed by kings.

But like life itself, all developments have endings. Maybe 21st century man dreams of the comfort offered by a spaceship, or of a world of technical toys. In her article, Gail suggest that the industrial age has peaked already. In 2008. You can forget the dreams. And we are on the way down. Hence the Brace Yourself warning.

Life, which for the majority got more and more comfortable, is now getting less and less comfortable for many. And this is only the beginning.

Our very way of life – the paradigm if you like – is based on having vast quantities of easy to get, use, transport and develop energy. The sky is the limit. We can dream. Except it isn’t. It’s not as if the amounts of resources we can use are unlimited, sooner or later, with expanding world population, there is less and less per capita to go round.

Gail points out that everything evolves to increase complexity. From single celled organisms to a biodiverse array of ecosystems, from simple tribes to complex societies. She sees the hand of the creator behind it all, and yes, the predicament with dwindling resources she sees as a step in the evolution of man.

From a peace perspective I can only agree, that there is a hand of the creator in there. Indeed the hand of the creator is within us all. It’s the longing for peace, the essence of life itself. We need peace, we need to feel it, and connecting with that longing is the compass for getting the best out of the situation we are in.

To have a wonderful life is built in. We need peace with ourselves, and if there is basic security of food, housing, inclusion, that is easier to focus on. So we need to have another dream, one based on the deepest longing we can find.

With any luck, humanity might survive.