Racism, the economy, and ethics: where does it all begin?
Paolo Ramazzotti
Chapter 13 in Handbook of Teaching Ethics to Economists, 2023, pp 208-225 from Edward Elgar Publishing
Abstract:
The chapter discusses the relation between racism and the economy in terms of the divide between open and closed-systems approaches, a divide that reflects different value judgments concerning the relation between the economy and society. It begins by discussing the variety of views within the closed-systems perspective, suggesting that they are insightful, especially for countries where discrimination was institutionalized, but that they implicitly consider racism an exogenous interference with the rules that underlie the economy. The discussion then considers the alternative, open-systems view, which suggests that socio-economic interaction in a capitalist market economy originates in an institutional set-up that includes racism as a constituent part, that is, both as a means and as a consequence of distributive conflict. The social and policy implications that the two views lead to raise important ethical issues about what ends policy is supposed to pursue, that is, whether priorities and actions should be strictly economic or involve society as a whole. In the latter case, the uncertainty associated with extensive institutional change raises further issues concerning what role economists should have in the pursuit of a possibly different society. Given that change also affects people’s identities, a final issue is whether one can envisage a shift from a society where racial self-identification is important in the struggle against racism to a society where racial self-identification reiterates the racial divide.
Keywords: Economics and Finance; Teaching Methods; General Academic Interest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781802207163.00017 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21269_13
Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com
Access Statistics for this chapter
More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().