Moral Economies of the Future

Summary & notes for the article Moral Economies of the Future – The Utopian Impulse of Sustainable Prosperity by Will Davies. Published by: Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity

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Introduction

The discipline of ‘economic sociology’ is predicated on exploring the ways in which amoral, technical aspects of capitalism derive from moral commitments and norms (for example, how money  originates as a promise or market exchange as normative reciprocity). ‘Moral economy’ seeks to demonstrate “the ways in which economic institutions are fundamentally constituted as normative conventions” – that the distinction between economic ‘value’ and social ‘values’ is misguided, (p. 1), for example: how statistics “depend[s] on the moral assumption that all human beings should be counted, for public policy to be justified…” (p. 2) The sociological question is then: which normative/ethical frameworks are at work where (and which are being suppressed)?

What Luc Boltanski calls the ‘sociology of critique’ is a way of mapping the moral arguments and conflicts that focus on the failure of capitalism to deliver on these moral promises. Davies’ issue with the form of these investigations is that “they [tend to] focus on the present and the living.” (p.2) There are two particular problems with “treating economic actors as operating [only] within shared and contemporary moral spheres” (p. 2-3): the problem of (1) ‘integenerational justice’ and; (2) the commitments people have towards their so-called ‘afterlife’:

1. The “individual and intergenerational lifecycle is implicated in questions of economic justice.” As inequality rises, “income is increasingly linked to the ownership of assets, rather than to labour” and exacerbates itself. “Moral instincts to conserve goods for future generations are diverted from public assets and traditions and towards private ones” For the less well-off, “decisions to spend money now can have ramifications that last decades into the future”; for the more fortunate, they are “protected from this by accumulation of wealth and asset price inflation that began decades in the past.” (p.3)

2. The anthopocene forces us think with a ‘vastly extended time horizion’, “well beyond what any orthodox economic or moral frameworks are capable of capturing.” In response to this shift, frameworks within moral and political philosophy are being developed to accommodate the interests of unborn generations and dispense with the linear view of the future as a continuation of the present.”  (p. 4)

The question of temporality (and its representation, valuation and calculation within contemporary capitalism) then becomes a moral & political problem – moral economy must be reconfigured to take the concept of time and the norms which institute it (i.e. financial instruments) more seriously. For Davies the question becomes one of how “capitalism confronts (or avoids) demands for a radically different economic future and concern for the radically distant economic future.” (p. 4)

The future as economic artefact

Modernity changes ones experience of time at an individual and societal level – history, after the 18th century, is no longer cyclical but rather something that unfolds progressively – we expect things to change over time. This change occurs first as a form of ‘philosophical conciousness’ and then as an ‘explicity cultural formation’ with the emergence (after Jameson) of aesthetic modernism, sci-fi and future-oriented political projects. Davies’ contention is that “there has been comparatively little sociological attention to the ways in which its particular institutions, norms, and practices embed this orientation towards the future.” (p. 5)

In line with Jens Beckert, he argues that the productivity of a capitalist system is, in part, bound to ‘the unpredictability of the future’. Focusing on Beckert’s term ‘fictional expectations’, we see how “actors represent the future in such a way that it appears as if it were an empirical reality that can be acted on…” Money is a key example of this, it functions effectively only when “we invest confidence that it will retain its value in future and that others will continue to accept it in future. Saving money is a way of preparing for a future that cannot be known in advance.” Credit money in particular, “takes on a transcendent moral quality, thanks to the hopes and trust that are invested in it.” (p. 6)

The moral aspect of this institutional relationship to the future lies in how economic actors “involve promises which are in principle binding” – key examples may be CSR and branding/reputation-building.

Outside of the firm, in the wider economy, we also see how “[e]conomic promises regarding the future are often parasitical on political and social promises provided by the state.” Institutions leverge guarantees given by state actors to face the future with some confidence (however this is waining). ‘Calculative devices’ and other forms of rationalisation may also be used, but this does not “alleviate the ontological unknowability of the future, [which is] therefore ultimately dependent on the power of human imagination and binding power of moral commitments.” (p. 7-8)

Following Beckert, there is a ‘politics of fictional expectations’ – if power in the economy is coterminous with one’s ability to reify their image of the future, this power is unevenly distributed, and even where it does aggregate there are dangers:

“One of the dangers of over-dominant imaginaries is that economic actors start to take the future for granted, allowing the ‘pretence’ that is at work in fictional expectations and forgetting that it isn’t real.” (p. 8)

Neoliberal futures

“A central proposition of neoliberalism is that centralised political visions of the future are inherently faulty and potentially dangerous.” (p. 8)

Translated into Beckert’s terminology, the neoliberal economist’s problem with governmental planning, is that it imposes a ‘fictional expectation’ on society, regardless of whether individuals wish themselves to invest it with credibility. Their alternative is to propose a form of the future that no collective can control or intentionally design (such as is found in Keynesian approaches of planning), but rather one in which a multitude of “private visions […] can be developed, propagated and sold to investors and consumers.” Davies argues, after Philip Mirowski, that the legitimation for this kind of marketised future comes from the neoliberal “epistemological premise that there is no reliable knowledge on which authoritative public policy could be founded…”  The only role of the state is therefore to maintain and manage a decentralising ‘political framework of society’ which is as steady and constant as possible. (p. 9)

The effect of this arrangement privileges economics at the expense of politics:

“Just as the opportunities for political actors to represent the future then goes into decline, the opportunities for economic actors to do so expands greatly […] …there is no type of future eventuality that can’t potentially be incorporated into this paradigm via instruments of risk management, forecasting and insurance.” (p. 11)

Techniques of ‘risk-modelling’ and ‘future-mapping’ developed for neoliberal markets therefore come to permeate an increasing portion of individual and collective life. Problems (social, environmental, etc) which therefore appear as ‘effects of corporate strategy and capitalist growth’ are then retooled as opportunities for new strategies and growth. “The moral economy of neoliberalism is one that seeks to represent all commitments – including those to the future and to future generations in calculable monetary terms […] it requires individuals and firms to respect obligations of debt, contract and compensation...” (p. 10-11)

‘The future’ lost and found

Critics of neoliberalism (Berardi, Jameson, etc) argue that neoliberalism’s emergence has brought about a so-called ‘end of the future’ “in the sense that it emerged in the 19th century as a [modernist] space of political fantasy and promise.” This now-postmodernist sensibility of an a-histortical politics displaces the hope for a radical, collective future into a desire for “discovering different spaces or different bodies as they co-exist in the present.” In line with much other neoliberal thought, ‘exuberance’ over the future is diplsaced from “the realm of political society and culture into the institutions of finance.” (p. 11)

“In Beckert’s terms, it is the fictional expectations of professional risk assessors, credit-raters and model builders that come to count.” (p. 11)

There is a problem internal to this financialisation of the future, however, in that risk assessment (and other forms of expectation-building) “doesn’t just represent the future; in altering behaviour in the present, it also changes the future that ultimately elapses.” As Elena Esposito writes: “Economic theory has failed to observe itself and its relationship with its object of study.” Donald Mackenzie describes this ‘self-cancelling prophecy’ as ‘counter-performativity’ – financial models and techniques “project linear futures, while transforming society in non-linear ways.” (p. 12-13)

A second issue appears in how inequality and generational wealth close down the (supposedly productive) openness and uncertainty of the future. Through asset-inflation, the rise of rentier capitalism, and inheritance, capital serves not as a “…a tool for engaging with uncertainty, [but rather] as a means of minimizing it, reproducing advantages in the process.” This again breaks with the modernist idea that the future will be different ot the past, as inequality appears increasingly as an inbuilt feature of neoliberal society. (p. 13)

Davies then argues that instead of capitulating to a ‘neoliberal epistemology’ which simply demands more risk-taking, we might instead seek alternate ways of imagining and represeting the future which are ‘non-financial’ and ‘uncalculated’ – namely the concept of utopia.

Borrowing from Ruth Levitas, Davies turns to the ‘utopian impluse’ as a methodology for reviving the capacity “to represent alternative imaginary futures [as] a necessary first step towards then considering the plans and political artefacts necessary to pursue them”. This methodology is another form of moral sociology, the impulse an essentially ‘normative’ and ‘critical’ one, “seeing as it stems from a feeling that something important is lacking in the present.” (p. 14) Importantly:

“By retaining a sense that they are fictitious and imaginary, utopian representations of the future have a realism that financial calculations lack. […] In that respect, utopias needn’t only exist as future imaginaries, but – in a postmodern fashion – can be separated across space, not time existing in the present” (p. 15-16)

Imagining sustainable prosperity

A common critique of capitalist growth is that it is unsustainable yet assumes its own infinity. However, Davies notes, looked at from another (perhaps sociological) angle it appears too sustainable, suriving ‘all manner of social, environmental and financial crises’ and discrusive critiques. The anthropocene, however, in its emergent complexity and extended temporality, poses a severe problem to a “mentality of both ‘planning’ and ‘risk’” (p. 16):

1. If 20th century planning was predicated on the knowledge of experts who “imagined, designed and implemented [the future] as a collective project”, the 21st century ecological crises we face are, in this sense, ‘unknowable’. After Dale Jamieson, “we cannot wait until all the facts are in before we respond. All the facts may never be in” (p. 17). Similarly, the rising prosperity which enabled an ‘experience’ of collective futurity was itself predicated on accelerating industrialization and extractive practices.

2. 21st century risk-management, on the other hand, cannot deal with the very long-term, non-linear nature of ecological crisis. Costing ‘externalities’ into capitalist production might work for short-to-medium term investment strategies, but not for multi-generational effects. Secondly, as discussed, the discursive position such strategies create for themselves edge out alternate (collective) proposals for reform, even integrating anti-capitalist sentiments as a source of legitimisation (Boltanski).

Ultimately, Davies says, “[d]ifferent types of moral commitment to the future are required, accompanied by different institutional mechanisms for mediating these commitments.” (p. 18) “The task today is to refresh optimism – and credible optimism – regarding the future, but in ways that cannot simply mean a nostalgic revival for the modernism of the 20th century.” (p.19)