A movement of economics students after the millennium, calling itself “post-autistic economics,” later took the form of the real-world economics review. Legions of heterodox economists formed the interdisciplinary World Economics Association in 2011, soon acquiring 15,000 members. Their priorities are to reconnect the study of the economy to the real world; to make its findings more accessible to the public; and to place economic analysis within a framework that embraces humanity and the world we all live in.
The human economy approach shares these priorities. It is not an exclusive concept or method, but an umbrella term for a conversation between people who draw on many intellectual and political precedents. We encourage work pitched in dialog with related approaches such as moral economy, global commodity chains, health services, popular and informal economies. We hope to launch many nodes of enquiry united by a desire to make the economy more human than we currently find it. We do not aim for an exclusive monopoly (our side3), but to build a plural, inclusive and decentralized network. The economy is not a remote object reported online and on the TV news. It concerns how people should manage their lives to get by or improve their lot. The economics tradition has a variable history of answers to this question.
World society now undermines the national vehicles for living that dominated the last century. Professional economic discourse seems increasingly impersonal and remote from daily life. The human economy approach seeks to bring together scholars, activists and practitioners for whom connecting what people do and human interests as a whole is of urgent concern. We trace our own origins to the alter-globalization movement launched by the first World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in 2001. Our aim is to build a conversation among ourselves and with other specialists, ultimately with the public. This is based on empirical investigation and comparison as much as on developing a theoretical and methodological framework for planning research.
Our basic method is inspired by the ethnographic revolution that launched social and cultural anthropology in the last century. The economy is always plural and people’s experiences of it across time and space have more in common than the use of contrastive terms like capitalism and socialism would suggest. We focus on the multiple institutions that mediate experience of economic life. We promote economic democracy by helping them to organize and improve their own lives. Our findings should be presented to the public in a spirit of pragmatism and made understandable for individual -*readers’ own use.
This is all compatible with a humanist perspective. It must be so, if the economy is to be returned from remote experts to the people most affected by it. But humanism is not enough. A human economy must be informed by a vision bridging the gap between everyday life (what people know) and humanity’s common predicament, which is impersonal and lies beyond the actor’s point of view (what they don’t know). A variety of ideas and methods could be drawn from many disciplines, including anthropology, grand social theory, world history, philosophy, and literature.
We need to make a world society where all people can live together. Small may be beautiful and a preference for initiatives grounded in local social realities is unchallengeable; but large-scale bureaucracies, whether governments, business corporations or international organizations, are essential too if our world is to embrace economic democracy. This dialectic of small-scale humanism and large-scale impersonal institutions is illustrated in several chapters of Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes (2022). Since we anchor economic strategies in people’s everyday lives, local circumstances and hopes for wider connection, the movement should be one of extension from the local towards the global. We can’t arrive instantly at a view of the whole, but we can engage more with the world that lies beyond local and national institutions.
Money and markets are intrinsic to our human potential, not anti-human as often depicted. They should take forms more conducive to economic democracy. It helps to recognize that money and markets span the social extremes of our lives. Human motivations for economic action are more holistic than economists allow for, taking in wellbeing, the good life, and happiness, for example. These have traditionally been shaped by organized religion. A human economy approach must revisit the complex interaction between religion, education, and economy.
The principles of an economy, conceived of as a specific strategy, must be discovered, articulated, and disseminated anew. Such an economy, to be useful, should be based on general guidelines for what people do. It is not just an ideology or a call for realism. The social and technical conditions of our era—urbanization, fast transport and universal media—should underpin any attempt to implement these principles of human economy. We do not assume that people know best, although they usually know their own minds and circumstances better than those who presume to speak for them.
In origin economy privileged budgeting for domestic self-sufficiency; political economy promoted capitalist markets over military landlordism; national economy sought to equalize the chances of a citizen body. Human economy could be a way of envisaging the next stage, linking unique human beings to humanity. It would bring together an extended sequence, house-market-city-nation-world, whose typical social units do not replace each other, but rather co-exist.
The human economy idea may have its origins in small-scale informal activities and a humanist ideology, but effective resistance to a transnational corporate takeover or a xenophobic dictators’ alliance will require practical combinations of self-organized initiatives on the ground and large-scale bureaucracies of the public and private kind. It will also require global social networks such as those from which we drew our own impetus. For, as Albert Camus told us in The Plague (1947), the human predicament is impersonal; there are powerful anti-humanist forces in our shared lives. We must build bridges between local actors and the new human universal, world society. To be human is to depend—as a unique personality in concrete social groups—-*on impersonal social conditions. In confronting the corporations, we must be sure that we are human, and they are not. The drive for economic democracy will not be won until that confusion has been cleared up.
Several of the authors considered here insisted that economic arrangements are historically particular, even if some forms are widely distributed in his history. We cannot afford to neglect comparison. With this in mind, I list a few types:
Domestic economy: (the Greek original) budgeting for household self-sufficiency, anti-market
Religious economy (Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Hindu): city and country in God’s natural plan, for commerce against usury
Political economy: capitalist markets against military landlordism
Urban economy: independent cities trading with the world
National economy: moderating capitalist inequality in a citizen community (macroeconomics)
Market economy: rational individual choice in a free market (micro-economics)
Socialist economy (cooperative, state, communist): control by the workers in a workers’ state
Capitalist economy: one-world capitalism, free flow of money, financial globalization
Human economy: house-market-city-nation-world, human beings for all humanity, economic democracy.