Help Andrius and Marcus investigate:
How do economists figure things out?
Marcus Petz is the thought leader on Community economics and Syntropic finance other Econet thinkers engaged in these endeavours are Leland Beaumont, Horace Otieno, Gorazd Norčič, Hans-Florian Hoyer - others have been invited and will be added if they want.
Research questions
Making sense of economics should allow us to make sense of community economics.
- Are they the same discipline?
- Or do they differ in their methodologies, assumptions and possibilities?
What is meant by community economics (CE)?
- What are the pressing economic questions within CE?
- How does community economics relate to macroeconomics / microeconomics?
- What are the processes of inquiry and exploration within CE?
- Are mathematical formulae, econometrics useful for CE? Cf. geometrical or narrative approaches?
How can CE be turned into a school of thought e.g. as the neoclassical synthesis is an economic school?
- Who are the key thinkers of CE?
- What is the history, present and future of CE?
- What are the boundaries of CE?
- How action oriented or how theoretical is CE?
- How can CE be useful for dealing with the polycrisis?
What is a potential / model methodology for SyntroFi?
- What are the stages - from nothing to climax?
- Is there one kind of economic succession (as Clements described for forests) or different pathways (as Tansley suggested for forests succession?)
- What are the tools needed at each stage?
- If using the ESG (ecology social governance) approach of Elkins do all 3 have to develop in concert? - At the same time or can governance develop afterwards?
How can we make sure the natural (ecological) also develops as the financial develops (social world of man)?
- How do different biodiversities - alpha beta and gamma compare with economic diversities?
Are there any existing case studies e.g. Agroforestry DAO in Brasil.?
- Can we do action research with Stephanie Rearick and MAN in Madison to bring about SyntroFi so that we can make a model for technology transfer elsewhere?
- How does SyntroFi overlap with DeFi, BioFi, MycoFi, etc. ?
Our Research
How Economists Figure Things Out We are collecting and systematizing the ways that economists figure things out at this page:
Motivation: Towards a community economics
What is community economics? Is it a discipline? If it is what are its boundaries, ways of functioning and finding things out? How does it look like in terms of Wisdom language - and can it be approached through that language?
What is the relationship to other subdisciplines of economics - what are the kinds of economics and where is the overlap? (Leland to draw Venn Diagrams to show this:
- Ecological
- Feminist
- Household
- Peasant
- Agricultural
- Anthropological
- Integral (different meanings here)
- Austrian
- Heterodox
- Mainstream
Granularity: Micro Meso Macro
Key thinkers / texts
- The Palgrave Handbook Philosophy and Money Vol I & II https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-54136-0 and https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-54140-7
Economics is at present part of a connected global economic civilization (only one which derived from other economic civilizations as seen in the Palgrave Book I)
- Adam Smith
- Physiocrats
- Milton Friedman & Chicago Boys
Community in Community Economics
- Community in ecology / biology
- Community in Sociology - "The Little Community" of Redfield
- Community as a part of society / a sociological perspective which leads to socio-economics (different from community economics??)
- Community with "no such thing as society" / against sociology
Disciplines (*sister sciences / †technologies - of implementation of economic praxis) that are connected to economics (how are they connected? Where are the boundaries? Flow chart of connetions?)
- Finance (DeFi, ReFi...)†
- Accounting†
- Numismatics - study of money and money forms
- Economic Geography
- Socio-economics
- Law† - legal regulation of economic actions
- Public Policy† - the policy mix (a mix of fiscal and monetary policy)
Does an economic art exist? What might it be called? Described??
The Ecological Question
If we think of SyntroFi (which has synergy between the human and the natural realms) - then ecological aspects have to be brought into economics and Ecology, Environmentalism must be considered too.
"By identifying communities of use, we can see how the individuals in these communities collectively use a form of money. Usage varies not only between individuals, which can be aggregated as mainstream economists do with M1, M2, and M3 (Mishkin 2004) in terms ofliquidity, but also within cohorts of income, as the Vimes Boots Index references (Srinivas2020), or subcultures, e.g., ethical degrowthers (Nørgård 2011), compared with adolescents’ discretionary spending (Gentina, Tang & Gu 2018). These aggregation levels have an analogue, in looking at biodiversity with alpha, beta, and gamma diversity (Babu 2016).Ecological niches (Gavish, Giladi & Ziv 2019) are analogous to cultural niches as found in a subculture (alpha), between 2 subcultures (beta), and within the whole economy/culture(gamma), respectively. Just as we can think of the different ecological communities acting synergistically to create higher levels of biodiversity and complexity that are more resilient, we can take the same approach to monies, which we can test with gaming." from (PDF) Le Grand Jeu and the potential of money games for exploring economic possibilities. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378150137_Le_Grand_Jeu_and_the_potential_of_money_games_for_exploring_economic_possibilities [accessed Oct 30 2024].
Ideas
Compare with ecology
- Underground exchange: Fungi provide minerals and nutrients from the soil and tree roots feed the fungi with sugars.
- Atmospheric exchange: animals breathe oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. Plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
Sundry ideas that we may want to keep in mind.
- Andrius: I suspect that the initial way of figuring things out is justifying ownership. The central way may be determining the functions of money. Once money is well grounded, I expect there are four ways of looking at it and six ways of pairing those, describing what it means to have an economic system.
- Andrius: Luce Irigaray wrote about [[https://www.theorytranslator.com/index.php?structure=three_minds#795 | three types of women]: mothers are all use value, virgins are all exchange value and prostitutes embody both values. I relate this with the three minds (answering, questioning, investigating). This suggests that we may find two branches of values - the unconscious considers natural value and the conscious considers exchange value. Then the two branches come together to ground a system.
- Andrius: I suspect there are 4 functions of money and, if we pair them, we get 6 properties of money.
Messages
2024.10.24 Andrius: Hi Marcus! Good to see you active here! We can leave messages at the bottom of this page. 2024.10.30 Marcus: I see you Andrius. I added some more on Games - and from that paper some of the assumptions of mainstream economics that help us in seeing what is the disciplinary norm and how with community economics we have a contrast. I like the addition of different thinking - this is covered under different economic philosophies (you see refs to explore these in the paper I shared with you to be presented at RAMICS in Rome in November).