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Community Economics is a school of economics

Community Economics

The thought leader for this topic is Marcus Petz. Other thinkers involved are Thomas Greco, Hans-Florian Hoyer, Horace Otieno

Marcus Petz realised during his PhD research that there was a gap in how we describe economics. However, other thinkers have also considered community economics and approaches related to it even if they did not coalesce around the idea of a school and way of working. Econet is now working to turn those concepts into an explicit description and community of praxis around community based economics.

How is it distinct from other schools?

Community economics is very much carried out with practitioners and scholars being active in its praxis. It is akin to citizen science in this sense. It is largely integral in how it operates.

Compassion rather than economic rationality is considered within community economics.

Notable practitioners / scholars include Thomas Greco.

A notable example is CERN Latin America which is mentioned by Alison R Guzman in Archiving Ancestral Knowledge to Co-Create New Economic Paradigms

Investigation

To investigate if Community Economics is a distinct form of economics an initial thick description of economists and economics is needed. This can be accomplished by looking to see:

  • Who are community economists (self-described or ascribed by others) - and what are they like?
  • How do community economists figure things out and is this the same way that economists figure things out?

Thus we began an anthropological exploration of economists (so we need to give concrete examples e.g. Joseph Stiglitz) and how they figure things out (so we collect examples). We hope from this exploration to develop an archetype of an economist. This archetype can be contrasted with different kinds of economists - feminist, ecological, community (e.g. Thomas Greco) etc.

We can explore this contrast by using AI to assess their published work. We could for example take a typical book and then assess it. We could see if codes (already derived from out initial work) are found in accordance with the economist archetype and the different kinds of economist archetypes.

We hypothesize that there will be distinctions so that it would be possible to identify differences that are meaningful between different economists. The null hypothesis is of course that there are no significant differences (that the distance is insignificant - i.e. the same distance as the variation found between different individuals within the population of all economists as between any subgroup) and that effectively all economists do things the same with the same techniques, but merely have different political view points / presentation styles.

We have already tried to identify who we regard as meeting the mainstream economists archetype. There is a historical development of economics as a discipline and thus ancient economists - such as those in classical Athenian times do not meet that description (e.g. Plato), similarly in the 19th century we have political economy as a broader discipline and so the physiocrats or Adam Smith would be of that broader age and not meet the narrow current archetype description - they are father figures and we would expect some over lap and some differences.

There is also a difference in granularity which must be considered - that is that mainstream economists commonly deal with macroeconomic perspectives and community economists deal with microeconomic phenomena. It can also be that a community approach is not the same as a nation state approach - but perhaps this is merely a function of geographical economic perspective rather than a distinct worldview?

See also