La economía : entre la eficiencia, el poder y ¿la simpatía?

Abstract

While understanding "economics" is undoubtedly important in order to understand social life, it is also true that the all too common reduction of social life to this significant but partial aspect of social decisions not only impoverishes our vision and understanding of social life, but it also turns us into "poor economists".

The study of economics usually emphasizes the traditional argument about the "efficiency of egoism" according to which -in Smith's famous words- "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." However, it is seldom taught -or learned- that it was the same Adam Smith who warned about the importance of sympathy, so that it is not only our ability to make the best out of our material exchanges with other economic agents which matters but also -and specially- our ability to care for others.

The push for economic efficiency arises from our concern about scarcity, that is, with the fact that economic resources are bound by their alternative and exclusive uses. The search for efficiency would then be the search for making the most out of existing resources. Making the most... for whom? The traditional answer to this question -that efficiency has to do with the size of the pie while equity or justice deal with how it is distributed- is a poor and misleading answer.

The magic of the market, which remains as impressive today as it was when Smith first discovered it, works through prices and competition. But prices -the language of the market- are not as neutral as they would seem, and competition is far from the perfect abstraction of neoclassical theory. Prices and competition constitute a system of power through which we make our decisions on how -and for whom- the resources of society -labor in particular- should be spent. Prices, then, are but a reflection of our relative power.

Finally, there is a wide range of individual and collective decisions dealing with all those things which are so dear to us that, paradoxically, we refer to them as "priceless". These things are not really "optional" in the economic sense, either because they do not demand from us any significant trade-off in terms of our scarce resources; or because we, as a society, do not want to treat them through the efficient-but-limited rationality of market relations and individual maximization. These are not minor or exceptional decisions, and they affect the most aspects of our lives.