Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy

Abstract

Crisis, value, and hope are three concepts whose intersection and mutual constitution open the door for a rethinking of the nature of economic life away from abstract models divorced from the everyday realities of ordinary people, the inadequacies of which the current world economic crisis has exposed in particularly dramatic fashion. This rethinking seeks to bring to center stage the complex ways in which people attempt to make life worth living for themselves and for future generations, involving not only waged labor but also structures of provisioning, investments in social relations, relations of trust and care, and a multitude of other forms of social action that mainstream economic models generally consider trivial, marginal, and often counterproductive. A holistic understanding of how people organize their economic lives is attentive to both the temporality of value and the relationship between different scales of value. It is attentive to the spatial configuration of economic life in many societies in which the future has become synonymous with geographical mobility. It is attentive to the fact that making a living is about making people in their physical, social, spiritual, affective, and intellectual dimensions.