concepts encourage worldviews, personality structures and justification logics that
might be very transformational, but not toward the goals and principles that the
sustainable development agenda has adopted.
“Economic thought systems matter because they are at the heart of an intellectual battle
over the future direction of society,” wrote MIT scholar Otto Scharmer and researcher
Katrin Kaufer in their 2013 book on working toward more sustainable economies. The
mainstream belief system, they continue, “has given Wall Street a de facto veto over public
policy making that no other group or industry enjoys.” Simon Johnson, another MIT
professor and former IMF chief economist, is cited by them: “by 1998, it was part of the
worldview of the Washington elite that what was good for Wall Street was good for
America” (all from Scharmer/Kaufer 2013: 71).
The following summary is thus also the conclusion of this chapter. It briefly runs
through the four big ideas listed in Table 3.1 and why they fall short when we seek
to understand how to satisfy human needs while respecting nature’s law. The
discussions above have shown that they are scientifically flawed. Yet, through their
materialization in today’s market and government structures, these ideas have
become very real in their impact on people, their decision-making and their freedom
to do things differently and more sustainably.
The reflexive ontology behind this book sees the opening up of worldviews and
belief systems as the first step in system innovation strategies: identify which
arguments, practices or laws are built around flawed assumptions and ideas and
understand how they hamper more sustainable developments. Engaging in transforming such path dependencies will of course always be a highly political, contested and power-ridden process whose outcome no one can predict. But shedding
vested intellectual interests often comes before shedding economic vested interests:
sense and legitimacy of the status quo start crumbling and alternative practices
multiply, inspired by an emerging imaginary that there are indeed alternatives.
Trying to understand the world by dividing it into pieces creates an imaginary in
which the relationships and generative rules underlying system dynamics get lost
behind numbers and detailed descriptions of the individual pieces. This atomistic
view of mechanical systems suggests that the single items remain unchanged and
between them one can detect and thus manage linear and reproducible causalities in
an additive or subtractive approach. System dynamics are viewed as predictable and
controllable as long as the properties of the individual parts are understood well.
There are no time delays or feedback loops that allow one to anticipate the fact that
stopping a particular cause will no longer stop a particular reaction once system
dynamics have reached tipping points. General ignorance of the Tyranny of Small
Decisions is related to this: large output changes need large input changes. It is this
‘particle’ worldview or paradigm that leads to the common juxtaposition of
incremental versus radical change.
But applying this view to complex systems filled with humans is not helpful, as
the financial crises show. Using it to inform strategies of human need satisfaction
offers very little insight about the matter it is supposed to address: utility or happiness is a relative and context-dependent experience and not a thing that can be
privately held and hoarded. Meanwhile, natural capital is a web of life and not a
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3 Why the Mainstream Economic Paradigm Cannot Inform …
might be very transformational, but not toward the goals and principles that the
sustainable development agenda has adopted.
“Economic thought systems matter because they are at the heart of an intellectual battle
over the future direction of society,” wrote MIT scholar Otto Scharmer and researcher
Katrin Kaufer in their 2013 book on working toward more sustainable economies. The
mainstream belief system, they continue, “has given Wall Street a de facto veto over public
policy making that no other group or industry enjoys.” Simon Johnson, another MIT
professor and former IMF chief economist, is cited by them: “by 1998, it was part of the
worldview of the Washington elite that what was good for Wall Street was good for
America” (all from Scharmer/Kaufer 2013: 71).
The following summary is thus also the conclusion of this chapter. It briefly runs
through the four big ideas listed in Table 3.1 and why they fall short when we seek
to understand how to satisfy human needs while respecting nature’s law. The
discussions above have shown that they are scientifically flawed. Yet, through their
materialization in today’s market and government structures, these ideas have
become very real in their impact on people, their decision-making and their freedom
to do things differently and more sustainably.
The reflexive ontology behind this book sees the opening up of worldviews and
belief systems as the first step in system innovation strategies: identify which
arguments, practices or laws are built around flawed assumptions and ideas and
understand how they hamper more sustainable developments. Engaging in transforming such path dependencies will of course always be a highly political, contested and power-ridden process whose outcome no one can predict. But shedding
vested intellectual interests often comes before shedding economic vested interests:
sense and legitimacy of the status quo start crumbling and alternative practices
multiply, inspired by an emerging imaginary that there are indeed alternatives.
Trying to understand the world by dividing it into pieces creates an imaginary in
which the relationships and generative rules underlying system dynamics get lost
behind numbers and detailed descriptions of the individual pieces. This atomistic
view of mechanical systems suggests that the single items remain unchanged and
between them one can detect and thus manage linear and reproducible causalities in
an additive or subtractive approach. System dynamics are viewed as predictable and
controllable as long as the properties of the individual parts are understood well.
There are no time delays or feedback loops that allow one to anticipate the fact that
stopping a particular cause will no longer stop a particular reaction once system
dynamics have reached tipping points. General ignorance of the Tyranny of Small
Decisions is related to this: large output changes need large input changes. It is this
‘particle’ worldview or paradigm that leads to the common juxtaposition of
incremental versus radical change.
But applying this view to complex systems filled with humans is not helpful, as
the financial crises show. Using it to inform strategies of human need satisfaction
offers very little insight about the matter it is supposed to address: utility or happiness is a relative and context-dependent experience and not a thing that can be
privately held and hoarded. Meanwhile, natural capital is a web of life and not a
112
3 Why the Mainstream Economic Paradigm Cannot Inform …