Seminars

  • Founded
    1971
  • Seminar Number
    523

This seminar was founded to study the most compelling questions of the day which then related to the war in Southeast Asia, its causes, and consequences. Today the seminar continues to examine vital current issues with an emphasis on their economic, political, and philosophical dimensions. Such issues have included welfare policy, homeless­ness, and strains in multicultural democracies, and violent conflicts within and across nation-states. The underlying nature and structure of the political economy giving rise to these issues are also considered. In this regard, sessions have addressed the extension of democ­racy to economic enterprises, refashioning American government, developments in welfare states, and new principles of income distribution. Theories oriented to deepening democracy and realizing human rights both in the US and abroad are also an ongoing focus.


Co-Chairs
Omar Dahbour
odahbour@hunter.cuny.edu

Carol Gould
carolcgould@gmail.com

Rapporteur
Christian Alexander Jensen
caj2167@columbia.edu

Meeting Schedule

10/12/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:30 PM
A Discussion of Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis
Carl Wennerlind, Barnard College
Abstract

Abstract

Modern economics presumes a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings are innately possessed of infinite desires and society must thereSfore facilitate endless growth and consumption irrespective of nature’s limits. Yet, this vision of scarcity is historically novel and was not inevitable even in the age of capitalism. Rather, it reflects the costly triumph of infinite-growth ideologies across centuries of European economic thought―at the expense of traditions that sought to live within nature’s constraints.

The dominant conception of scarcity today holds that, rather than master our desires, humans must master nature to meet those desires. This idea was developed by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson, who laid the groundwork for today’s hegemonic politics of growth. Yet proponents of infinite growth have long faced resistance from agrarian radicals, romantic poets, revolutionary socialists, ecofeminists, and others. These critics―including the likes of Gerrard Winstanley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt―embraced conceptions of scarcity in which our desires, rather than nature, must be mastered to achieve the social good. In so doing, they dramatically reenvisioned how humans might interact with both nature and the economy.

Following these conflicts into the twenty-first century, I will argue that we need new, sustainable models of economic thinking to address the climate crisis. Scarcity is not only a critique of infinite growth, but also a timely invitation to imagine alternative ways of flourishing on Earth.





02/28/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
7:30 PM
TBD
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