At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, a characteristic of societies around the world is the existence of inequalities of all kinds. It is not just about economic inequalities, which are increasingly analyzed. What characterizes the current era is the plurality of inequalities: capital-labor, capital-nature, capital-gender. That is to say, income, wealth, gender and climatic inequalities which are, ultimately, the expression of the different distribution of economic and political power in societies. A profusion of inequalities that conventional economics has proven incapable of resolving.
A broad reflection on the means of dealing with such diverse inequalities constitutes the content of the work. inclusive economy (FUHEM, Catarata, University of Alcalá) coordinated by Oscar Caballero, professor of applied economics at the University of Valladolid, in which 30 specialists belonging to the Inclusive Economy Group participate. The book supports the need to incorporate other approaches to address social challenges. “Our conviction,” they explain, “is that to account for the conflicts and inequalities that run through the current economic system, it seems reasonable to integrate economic approaches that have traditionally been concerned precisely with studying these problems, these conflicts and these inequalities. » They refer to feminist economics, ecological economics, institutional economics, post-Keynesian and Marxist economics, which have taken up the study of social conflicts that conventional authors avoided.
The objective of building an inclusive economy based on an integrating pluralism, however, presents objective difficulties which are not hidden. They refer to the role of economic growth, the ecological dimension of models, the relevance of limits for the functioning of the economic system or even the way of interpreting the growing role played by technology.
This is a non-dogmatic approach that reflects how the shortcomings of conventional economics in the face of new challenges have also been shared by some heterodox approaches. We therefore recall that the reference report The limits of growth (edited by Donella Meadows, 1972), which warned of risks to planetary sustainability if growth were maintained, was the subject of criticism from both mainstream economics and Marxist authors. Either silenced by a post-Keynesian economy, concerned with full employment, or by a feminist economy which went in other directions. A distancing that has been corrected in recent years.
The roots of inequality are best explained by inclusive economics. Jorge Guardiola, professor at the University of Granada, says that “there is a broad consensus that inequality finds its fundamental cause in political issues.” Remember how political and union mobilization made Sweden one of the most equal countries in the world, after historically high inequality. There is a final thought: “what would have happened if, in the 1960s and 1970s, authors like Georgescu-Roegen, Sraffa, Robinson, Pasinetti or Galbraith had triumphed in their challenge to conventional ideas? Although late, it is always better to rectify.
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