By Nacho Martín.
Many have accepted the principles of market economy: competitiveness, desire to eat and look forward to continuing to increase our material welfare. Then we want more than is logical. We made our principles of neoclassical economics: We value the individual versus the social, competition versus cooperation and expansion against stability. Often hastily abandoned native values, and accept these new principles, or on its own conviction, or after some time coexist with a market offering, in varied colors, textures and flavors, everything imaginable and unimaginable.
However, John Gowdy, an anthropologist, an economist and professor of social sciences and humanities, writes Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gathers a very different view. This man, interested in ecological economics, argues that the market is a myth. It is a myth because the values \u200b\u200bunderlying the neoclassical economics are universal values, such that discipline claims, but cultural and relative. The principles underlying the economy are not attributable to the human race per se, but to a particular culture and historical moment. In this sense, these assumptions (individualism, competition, expansion) could be false, and the idea of \u200b\u200b"economic man" is a myth.
In particular, the need to save to get real, if rare, is a cultural construction. Other cultures (Gowdy speaking hunter-gatherers, who still do not practice agriculture and directly from nature) maintain a balance between what you have and what they need, and seem to want some more. By contrast, we as consumers seem addicted to a continuous flow of goods that never seems to satisfy.
Likewise, the idea of \u200b\u200ba single productive activity that occupies most of our time is beyond the Hadza, as another example. They seem, through community activities, reduce their working time to three hours a day, devoting the rest to social exchanges, dances and other recreational activities that we would consider.
In contrast to our culture, the idea of \u200b\u200bredistribution is also widespread among hunter-gatherers, where the hunted animals are distributed to all without seeming important who or what killed it, weakening the concept of property so inherent to our culture.
Finally, most hunter-gatherer societies were "aggressively egalitarian" by limiting the power and individual authority. The existence of inequalities could be a result of our beliefs, rather than an inherent quality of human societies.
All this goes to show that the principles of market economy is a belief, rather than describing one immutable law of nature. It is therefore a matter of judging our society based on their results, and given the multiple disasters generated climate change, mass extinctions of plants and animals, overpopulation, deforestation, acidification ocean pollution and others, these results seem questionable. Other cultures that are not based only on the myth of the market are possible and perhaps increasingly necessary.
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