I participated in the annual Anton Lubowski memorial lecture hosted by Stellenbosch University at the weekend. This year’s theme was on social justice. In my contribution I raised two issues, one of which I want to flesh out here, and both of which have to do with the orthodoxy of liberal and “neoclassical” economics.
On a point of clarity, since Thorstein Veblen added “neoclassical” to “economics”, the new blend is often thrown about willfully, and sometimes pejoratively — not without some justification. I guess I am urging caution, even while I use the term as a reference to physics envy among mainstream economics.
When preparing for the lecture, I settled on a basic definition of “social justice”. In this sense, social justice refers to: access (greater equality of access to goods and services); equity (overcoming unfairness caused by unequal access to resources and power); rights (equal and effective political and legal rights); participation (expanded opportunities for real participation in the decisions that govern a person’s life); and protection (the availability of social safety nets and equality before the law).
Unless you’re a revolutionary — performative or otherwise — these elements of social justice are fairly unproblematic. In my talk, I took the liberty of adding two things: dignity and respect. Neither of these is easy in terms of convincing policymakers, economic rationalists or people who only believe in things that can be measured or observed by the senses — crude empiricists. It does not help that, much like “beauty”, you cannot legislate dignity or respect, and it would be difficult to enforce or prosecute people who “indignify” or disrespect others.
However, economists — the orthodox ones referred to above — may be the most difficult to convince, especially since they are the ones with the loudest voices. And they’re generally the most resistant to state intervention. To the extent that there is a neoclassical economics “school”, as Veblen implied more than 100 years ago (and not to draw too crude a caricature), adherents are all about cost-benefit analyses, supply and demand, and typically hide their illogic or irrationalities behind thickets of mathematics or algebraic formulas. And they mistake the beauty of their models for the truth.
One problem with defining dignity or providing a normative theory of it is the manner in which it becomes associated with organised religion. Some would defend theological, general spiritual and personal interpretations, where dignity is used interchangeably with “the highest good”. This itself becomes impossible to attain in the lived world. In this frame, dignity and the highest good are meted out only by the Abrahamic God, after death. It is probably best to stick to the world we live in, and start at the (rather rarefied) top.
Dignity is a pre-eminent feature of SA’s constitution. Section 10 of the Bill of Rights reads: “Everyone has an inherent (inborn) dignity and the right to have his or her dignity respected and protected.” As much as one may agree with that (I personally disagree with the “inborn” part), it is policymakers, especially social policymakers, who will receive most resistance from economists.
If, however, we untie the concept of dignity from the spiritual and religious horse, it becomes really difficult to define economic dignity. We could say that providing someone with a job, a house, utilities, a social welfare safety net and access for their children to education and health care is necessary. But is it sufficient? If we are to find a metric that can help us establish whether dignity has been restored to a person, as it were, we may have to calculate and analyse the cumulative impact of political economic policy on human overall wellbeing. Again, would that be sufficient, as a means to determine whether economic dignity has been achieved?
One of the first steps, I believe, is to dispense with the conception of things such as GDP, low inflation, macroeconomic, fiscal and financial stability as ends in themselves. I should be clear; these are necessary metrics and aspirations, but if you continue to have a growing precariat, and a potentially volatile periphery at the edges of economic life, you might be heading for disaster. We cannot get away from qualitative judgments when defining the goals of economic dignity.
On this basis, we may need to establish a metric that is more meaningful, such as an Economic Dignity index. Such an index would look at the various effects of economic policies on human wellbeing, from access to health care, education, affordable housing and sanitation (including consistent supply of utilities) to environmental quality and worker participation.
To get to this point, we may want to revise our national accounts system, ease the dominance of GDP as a measure of assessing everything, and start gathering significantly more information to assess and monitor economic performance and social progress better, so we can address more deliberatively those things that citizens care most about — including and especially dignity.
• Lagardien, a visiting professor at the Wits University School of Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank, as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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