Is It Possible to ‘Decolonize’ Economics?* – Developing Economics

Calls for decolonizing disciplines, fields, even businesses have proliferated. The goals and meaning are not always clear, but any decolonizing process necessarily entails deconstructive and reconstructive tasks. In Economics, the first task must challenge dominant and domineering paradigms – orthodox and heterodox – and expose mechanisms of exclusion in the profession (Zein-Elabdin and Charusheela 2004). The constructive task, at least in part, consists of developing a theoretical vocabulary of economic meaning and well-being based on contemporary understandings of ‘value’ and its genetic relationship to questions of power and justice. Amartya Sen has aptly noted that “what moves us, reasonably enough, is not the realization that the world falls short of being completely just – which few of us expect – but that there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate” (2009). I would argue that historical injustices, such as those brought about by colonialism or other forms of lasting domination, cannot be remedied without reconstructing the meaning of economic value and valuation. Confronting value, power, and justice as a mutually constitutive problem is a necessary step for any project of ‘decolonizing’ Economics.

More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen noted that “economics is helplessly behind the times” (1898). His remark then was made in reference to the rise of Anthropology and new biological sciences. Today, this statement could well serve to depict the sluggishness of Economics to engage with postcolonial critique. Nowhere is this engagement more needed than in theories of value where a contemporary view is lacking. Value is a dauntingly complex concept; it is interpretive rather than discoverable. For the sake of this argument, I broadly frame it as a reference to what enables material sustenance and general well-being. Among other things, a new theoretical framework must seek to: a) revalue different types of work, especially those performed by women and ethnic and cultural subalterns; b) recalibrate ‘humans’ relationship with the ‘natural’ world; and c) redefine ‘poor’ countries’ contribution to life in ‘rich’ parts of the globe. So far, most economists have studied social disparities in income and wealth, ecological degradation, and global inequality as analytically separable problems without much attention to their common foundational reliance on major concepts of value inherited from industrial European modernity. In this brief commentary, I suggest that new, less “behind the times” interpretations of value in Economics are long overdue.

Postcolonial Critique and Economics

Postcolonial critique is distinctly premised on the rejection of all forms of cultural and cross-cultural domination. This seems far removed from economic analyses only because of the deeply rooted dichotomy of economy/culture in economic discourse. As I have argued elsewhere (2016), the theoretical split of ‘economy’ from ‘culture’ as two fundamentally different analytical spaces arises from the dualistic ontology beneath most of economic thought – culture having do with the spiritual and cerebral, while economy is concerned with more tangible provisioning, accumulation and resource management. Despite abundant denunciations of reductionism and mind/body, ideal/material dualisms, this philosophical foundation persists at a deep unrecognized level that obscures the substantive relevance of a discourse on cultural hegemony to the discipline of economics.

Although originating in literary criticism, the work of such pioneering postcolonial theorists as Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presented a project with profound implications for economic thought. From the very beginning, in his classic Orientalism, Said wondered “[h]ow did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world?” (1979) [emphasis added]. In “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” (1985), Spivak grappled with “the role of the economic text in the determination of Value” and pointed to pervasive “complicity between cultural and economic value-systems.” These theorists did not speak in the familiar language of economics, but their insights have challenged the philosophical underpinnings of many taken-for-granted beliefs, including the holy grail of ‘development’ – that “theatre for orientalist imaginations” (Said 1979).   

Economics today endures in an institutionally bi-polar regime of a mainstream, or orthodox paradigm (different variegations of Neoclassicism) and a heterodoxy (a body of critical philosophies), even as each pole becomes internally more differentiated. As is well known, Neoclassical economics represents the vision in which individual optimizing decisions culminate in supremacy of ‘the market’ as a medium of resource distribution and management. This vision underwrites major policy making and dominates the public perception of Economics as a ‘science.’ The term heterodoxy, on the other hand, conveniently distinguishes from the Neoclassical perspective a diverse group of philosophical approaches – most visibly Marxian, Institutionalist, Post Keynesian, and Feminist. While the critical interventions of postcolonial theory have led to considerable intellectual transformations in some social science disciplines, the impact on Economics has been minimal and mostly limited to heterodox circles (Zein-Elabdin 2011). More robust engagement with postcolonial critique should help economists to cross from a general awareness that culture (as a broad common, though always contested, frame of reference) grounds economic behavior and thought, to an understanding of the significance of cultural difference for theorizing economic value. This understanding should open up economic thought to a more transformative presence of societies and cultures that have been erased from the theoretical realm of value creation.

The Problem of Value in Economics

A new theory of value in Economics comes along only once in a very long while. We have carried on for centuries under two archetypal concepts, each iconically associated with a few names: labor (Smith, Ricardo, Marx) and utility (Bentham, Jevons, Menger). Labor theories of value emphasize the process of production, while utility theory gives precedence to subjective valuation, thus locating economic value in the realm of market exchange. In the political economy tradition, although Marx understood value more broadly as an indication of a social relationship, predominant interpretations of his work have tended to restrict the universe of value producers to those engaged in a capitalist work relationship. Departing from both labor and utility, Veblen depicted value as the product of judgments about worth and serviceability made by individuals and institutions under specific historical, cultural, technological conditions. This more holistic view is capable of capturing more of what’s created outside of market exchange or capitalist production. Unfortunately, as I have argued elsewhere (2009), in the 20^th century discourse of international ‘development,’ institutional economics prioritized the “instrumental” part of its value theory with calls for “replacing” or “transforming” “old” institutions and cultural values that stood in the path of technological progress in ‘less developed’ countries.

Thus, all major schools of economic thought, in different forms and to different degrees, embody a denial of the contemporaneity and serviceability of economic rationalities or modes of organization that may violate the epistemic boundaries of market/capitalist industrial society. This denial impedes the emergence of more adequate interpretations of value in a culturally diverse, highly unequal, and ecologically threatened world.

In the last few decades, feminist and ecological critiques have revived the question of value in Economics. Most economists are now aware of the failure of national income accounting methods (GDP, GNI, …) to accurately measure humanly created and naturally available value. Today, more attention is given to unpaid labor and some methods of quantifying environmental value, though inadequate, are well-established. Most critical interventions, however, have not extended to a cross-cultural context. The main reason lies in the latent habit of theoretically locating all value in the undeniably impressive material achievements of industrial modernity, which inevitably limits its economic interpretation to labor, market price and technological advances. Economics has yet to admit, let alone come to terms with, the problem of value stemming from processes of European colonialism in all its varieties, which continue to unfold for ‘low-income’ countries, ethnic minorities in Europe, and Indigenous and Aboriginal peoples in North America, Australia and New Zealand.

Among other things, identifying value with price underestimates the contribution of low-income economies to high-income ones. Africa’s economic worth is reduced to its minute share of world GDP, a measure that primarily reflects commodity terms of trade between primary and manufactured goods. As many have pointed out before, these terms merely reinforce global inequalities that originated under colonial rule. What if, instead, the value of ‘raw materials’ is linked more substantially to the value of the final products they help to create? For example, cobalt is a vital input in the making of cellphones and electric cars, yet its largest producer, the Democratic Republic of Congo, is one of the world’s poorest countries. What if the level of income in DRC – or any producer of cobalt, coltan, or cocoa beans – were to be determined by how much its people and materials support affluent life in other world regions? This example does not answer the question of value or explain DRC’s economic woes, both of which go far beyond simply resetting relative prices, but it goes a long way toward illustrating some of what Sen might call “remediable injustices.”

Four years ago, the attack by COVID-19 helped reveal the depth of inequality and dispossession in the global centers of extreme affluence. It made more visible the subaltern segment of American society designated as “essential workers” – the cleaners, grocery store clerks, delivery truck drivers, garbage collectors and others on the frontlines of the pandemic, who comprised almost half of all workers in low-paid occupations. Many received less than the minimum wage and held multiple jobs to make ends meet (Kinder, Stateler and Du 2020, Kinder and Stateler 2021). The standard economic justification that grocery store clerks or janitors perform ‘unskilled’ work merely exposes its own normative judgment and inability and unwillingness to conceive of a world in which wages signify the social value of work. Cobalt or coltan producers in DRC are not as far apart from subaltern workers in the US as the colonial discourse of development proclaims them to be. What they share in common is an institutionalized conception of value reflected in the vast gap between essential workers’ pay and the social value of their work, and between cobalt or coltan producers’ income and the price of an iPhone or a Tesla.

A Concluding Note

If the call to decolonize Economics is to be more than a fashionable gesture, it must be granted that current ideas of value were conceived within the theoretical bounds of national economies and against a, more or less, culturally homogeneous Euro-American backdrop. Theorizing economic value today requires taking account of labor, individual subjectivity, and technological change, but also of how and how much the cultural subalterns of Economics contribute to the creation of value. Above all, a contemporary theory of value must be consequentially aware of its own implication in past and present inequities and systems of domination, and current disciplinary and global dynamics of power.