Toughest Challenge of Economics: Human Society Isn’t Immortal

Adolfo Figueroa

Chapter Chapter 8 in The Quality of Society, Volume II, 2021, pp 179-211 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Economics needs new foundations for the Anthropocene age, in which the human society confronts the risk of its collapse. The unified theory of capitalism, by internalizing the ecosystem into the economic process, has proposed such foundations. This essay summarizes the foundations of the unified theory and the way it explains the risk of collapse of human society. Economic growth is seen as an evolutionary process, for there are limits to its reproduction. In particular, the growth process leads to the disruption of the ecological equilibrium, which in turn implies a collapse of the human society, as we know it. Then the essay presents the policy implications of unified theory for the Anthropocene age and shows that the power elites have no incentives to apply such policies. Therefore, the new public policies would require meta-policies, namely, policies to change the current power structure of capitalism so that the pro-growth policies that power elites promote can be changed.

Keywords: Anthropocene age; Ecosystem equilibrium disruption; Evolutionary processes; Institutions; Meta-policies; Power elites; Power structure; Pro-growth public policies; Society collapse risk; Unified theory of capitalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-79565-8_8

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-79565-8_8

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