By RICARDO ABRAMOVAY*

Considerations on the recently released book by José Eli da Veiga

1.

The utopia that dominated the 1989th century and collapsed like a house of cards in XNUMX offered the undeniable intellectual comfort of transforming, in an irrevocable and complete way, the very foundations on which modern societies were built. It was like starting from scratch. The price system, profit, private companies and what Karl Marx called the “anarchy of production” would be replaced by rational decisions coming from the planning intelligence that, supported, in theory, by democratic social participation, would signal to the central bodies what the needs and desires of society were.

This utopia was important even in democratic countries and its ultimate political expression was the government of “Union Popular” of France, which, under the presidency of François Mitterrand, in 1981, began the nationalization of the ten largest economic groups in the country. The bold move did not last a year and after its reversal no significant political force, anywhere in the world, advocated what the European left called the “nationalization of the large monopolies” as a way to combat inequalities, avoid waste and use material and biotic resources for the benefit of society.

But this melancholic ending did not in the least suppress the ethical and normative values ​​on which the utopia of the twentieth-century left was based. All the more so since the spectacular increase in wealth throughout the world since the end of the Second World War soon revealed its feet of clay due to the destruction of resources and ecosystem services without which well-being and economic dynamism itself were increasingly at risk.

The utopia of the 21st century is not and cannot be conformist and condescending. It maintains and, above all, expands what marked the social emancipation projects of the 20th century. Its emphasis is, first and foremost, the expansion of the substantive freedoms of human beings, to use the expression of Amartya Sen, who exerted a decisive influence on the work of the various programs and agencies of the United Nations.

The achievement of this freedom presupposes not only human rights, but requires breaking with the notion that nature is merely a means, whose unlimited use can be perpetuated, since its exhaustion will be compensated by what our technological ingenuity is capable of creating.

But instead of bearing the mark of the storming of the Winter Palace or an electoral victory that turns the rules of the game upside down, the utopia of the 21st century is like changing the tires of a car while the vehicle is moving. It does not propose to suppress the pillars of social life (markets, companies, profits) but rather to expand public goods, reduce to a minimum the predatory activities of human health and the environment, and promote social participation and technological innovation that contribute to achieving this goal.

Nothing expresses the utopia of the 2015st century better than the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), approved by the United Nations in 2030 and which will be revised in XNUMX. And despite the bad reputation that economic thought enjoys as synonymous with what Thomas Carlyle called the dismal science, which could only conceive of society as the unanticipated result of individual interests, transforming, in the footsteps of Bernard de Mandeville, selfishness into a social virtue, it is precisely in economic thought that we find the most fertile sources from which this utopia is nourished.

2.

This is what the impressive summary of the most recent volume of the trilogy that José Eli da Veiga has just published shows, The Anthropocene and economic thought. The first volume of the trilogy (The Anthropocene and Earth System Science, Ed. 34, 2019) discusses a relatively recent expression in the field of earth and life sciences: the earth system.

The term aims to break with the narrow specialization in which researchers in the disciplines that make up this scientific area are trained, given the urgent need to understand the fact that human activities over the last eighty years have not only caused changes in the biosphere, but have also become a force of geological nature, interfering in the behavior of the climate system and, consequently, in the oceans, atmosphere and soils. Hence the idea of ​​the Anthropocene.

In the second volume, the Anthropocene and the humanities (Ed. 34, 2023), the reflection turns to the sciences of man and society and some of the most expressive contemporary social thinkers are the object of reflection. The book is based on none other than Charles Darwin to show that, far from the vulgar idea according to which biological evolution can be summarized as a fierce dispute in which the strongest wins, life (and social life) is composed, above all, by cooperative processes presented in a decisive and little-known work by the creator of the theory of evolution, The Descent of Man.

And who would have thought that in the third volume, The Anthropocene and economic thought, the narrative would focus on how adjustments to the price system can contribute to addressing what Sir Nicholas Stern has called the most important market failure in today's society (climate change), the surprise will be immense.

Far from its caricatured image that sees it as the discipline that studies the allocation of scarce resources between alternative ends, based entirely on the idea that rational and self-interested individuals relate to each other based on the signals that markets transmit to what they buy and sell, economic science in the second half of the 20th century holds new features that José Eli da Veiga's book has the virtue of exposing in a dynamic, persuasive and, as could not be otherwise, controversial way.

3.

The presentation of the most expressive authors of economic thought of the last six decades on the Anthropocene revolves around two central questions.

The first breaks with the basic dogma of neoclassical thought expressed by one of its most renowned exponents, Lionel Robbins, who, referring to the relationship between ethics and economics, wrote in 1932: “unfortunately it does not seem logically possible to associate the two studies in any way other than juxtaposition”.

The thinking of economists who have turned to studying the Anthropocene, on the contrary, places ethics at the heart of economics. If the vulnerability of the biosphere is approached from a purely instrumental perspective, the result will be the conviction (which dominates conventional economic thought) that its eventual depletion can be addressed through technological innovations that will deliver to society the services that human activities have ended up destroying.

It is therefore not surprising that, in order to place nature as an end and not as a means, it is necessary to do what Lionel Robbins believed impossible. The approach of the most important economists to the Anthropocene thus presupposes the contestation of the epistemological (and, to a certain extent, ontological) premises on which the discipline is conventionally based.

This is not about denying the importance of markets, companies and profit, but rather about showing that the understanding of economic life becomes more fertile if it is expanded to include cooperation, solidarity and public goods and, more than that, the importance of treating the materials, energy and biotic resources on which the supply of goods and services depends with instruments that are not limited to what the price system signals.

It is this reflection on ethics that underpins the central discussion of the book: what is the purpose, what is the scope and what are the limits of economic growth? The mirage of a unified and all-encompassing solution to confront the destruction to which the gigantic wealth produced by the great acceleration, the degrowth, has been leading is rejected not because it is practically impossible or because the political-cultural forces that could put it into practice are not gathered.

The mistake of the degrowth proposal is that it has become, in a way, the other side of the coin of the growth myth. It refrains from studying social life based on the use of material, energy and biotic resources and the provision of services (in food, mobility, construction, health) to which this use gives rise.

More important than knowing whether the economy is growing or not is knowing how resources are extracted and transformed to supply goods and services and whether these goods and services contribute to improving or worsening both social life and the environment.

The proposal that arises from this analysis is that we need to “grow by decreasing” and “decrease by increasing”. The apparent paradox can be explained: however important the virtue of growth is in creating jobs, collecting taxes and stimulating innovation, these attributes will be overshadowed if the goods and services on which they are based are tobacco, the destruction of urban fabrics caused by the massification of individual cars (to the detriment of public transport) and the increase in the consumption of ultra-processed foods that are vectors of the global obesity pandemic.

These activities must be reduced to a minimum (decrease) while expanding those that increase the supply of public goods and those that regenerate ecosystem services that economic growth has been destroying up until now, such as renewable energy, quality food and the strengthening of protected areas (growth). Instead of focusing on this synthetic (and, to a certain extent, arbitrary) measure that is GDP, the fundamental thing is to examine the material, energetic and biotic bases of wealth formation and their real effects on human well-being and ecosystem services.

In short, the richness and diversity of the schools of thought presented in this book are antidotes to the skepticism of doomsday apologists and the cynicism of those who insist that there is not and will not be enough force to change the destructive trajectory that is leading to increased emissions, the increasing erosion of biodiversity, and different forms of pollution. Understanding economic thinking about the Anthropocene is certainly a promising path to avoiding this double paralysis.

*Ricardo Abramovay is a professor at the Josué de Castro Chair at the Faculty of Public Health at USP. Author, among other books, of Infrastructure for Sustainable Development (Elephant). [https://amzn.to/3QcqWM3]

Originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul.

Reference

Jose Eli da Veiga. The Anthropocene and economic thought. São Paulo, Editora 34, 2025, 224 pages. [https://amzn.to/4k879uG]

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