How Economics Overpowers Culture | Lisi Krall
How Economics Overpowers Culture | Lisi Krall
Our journey from agriculture to capitalism
Appears in this episode
“Agriculture severs the ties of humans to the more-than-human world. We're no longer embedded in the rhythm and dynamic of the more-than-human world.
“But the development of capitalism is a particular institutional and energetic interpretation of what began with agriculture. You get this expansive, dynamic, interdependent system, growth system that functions unto itself as if it isn't connected to its biophysical roots.”
How can we change an economic system that has a life of its own?
10,000 years ago, homo sapiens began farming a grain surplus. This surplus led to the creation of societal and cultural hierarchies which divorced our species from our long relationship with the natural world.
This week’s guest, Lisi Krall, argues that our current economic system of fossil-fuelled capitalism is an interpretation of that same system—and we must repair our relationship to the more-than-human world if we are to change the system. But it is a momentous challenge. One, she argues, we must not think culture alone can overcome.
Lisi Krall is a Professor of Economics at the State University of New York Cortland where she researches political economy, human ecology, and the evolution of economic systems. She's also the author of Bitter Harvest: An Inquiry into the War Between Economy and Earth. She explains how systems self-propagate, evolve and dominate culture, arguing acts of local resistance are key to building a sustainable world, and warns against projects like the Green New Deal, which she claims is the status quo masquerading as the solution.
How Economics Overpowers Culture | Lisi Krall
The last 20 minutes of this episode are pure gold dust. The duality of people existing in their own bubble and being disconnected from the more than human world, and how the current economic system can be more or less sustainable but missed the point that it does not encompass the rights and wild impulse of the more than human world.
In quiet moments I often feel deep sadness for how we treat the more than human world, in a general sense but also in particular around factory farming, and find myself making a commitment to do what I can to change the way we humans behave.
Another triumph, Rachel!
There is so much to explore in this multi-vectored conversation. I am imagining multiple small group gatherings of people who care at, to steal another great phrase of yours, the vanguard of public discourse, replaying this tape, and stopping it at various points along the way to unpack different points as a way of bringing people into a new 21st Century Citizenship in an evolving new 21st Century Social Contract.
Two points that are very present for me in the afterglow.
One, here again, as in so many other conversations, there is a critique of capitalism that: never mentions the word "capital"; never discusses its functioning as money for finance; never explores the role of finance as money for enterprise in what Delilah Rothenberg of The Pre-Distribution Initiative insightfully calls predistribution that shapes the patterns of distribution within the economy; and never deconstructs the institutional structures of finance, to find out who decides, and how they decide what they decide and how they are held accountable for the authenticity and integrity of the decisions that they make, and for their institutional exercise of institutional powers, true, or not so true, to their institutional purpose.
Two, this:
@14:49 “our challenge is not just a matter of getting a handle on greedy corporations. It’s much more complicated than that”
Yes, and no.
Greed is both a human weakness and an institutional failing. Greed as a human failing rarely breaks the social contract. Corporate greed often does. So, what we need to do is see corporate greed as an institutional failing, and then pull on that thread to see what institution is actually failing. When we do, we find the answer in a most unexpected place: it is the institution of The Pension Promise that is failing its institutional purpose, and breaking the social contract in consequence.
The good news here is that correcting the institutional failing of The Pension Promise is really not very difficult to do. We just have to agree that we need to do it!