Ben Wolcott ‘14, an honors Economics major and a course major in Sociology and Anthropology argues that traditional economics is not equipped to assess the social and political dimensions of divestment.
…Mainstream economics is a tool that has strengths and weaknesses. At its core, neoclassical theory examines the incentives around actors’ instrumental self-interest in order to describe and predict action given constraints. Unfortunately, neoclassical economics hurts our understanding of both the benefits and the costs of divestment. I will start with the benefits. While mainstream economics can help us understand situations that encourage people to act in their rational self-interest, it is worse than useless in describing how actors’ value-commitments impact their decisions.
Ultimately, everyone engaging in this conversation should examine why economists have so much say on a question that is mostly political. In America today, neoclassical economics is a dominant discipline. While its tools can be useful, it often fails to appreciate the complexities of human action. … Economics is often called the “dismal science” partially because it views people as instrumentally rational and cannot meaningfully conceptualize action based on value-commitments. We need every tool at our disposal to address climate change, and it would be dismal if we abandoned divestment due to economic arguments.
Read the full article from The Daily Gazette, now archived in The Phoenix.