The Inclusive, Social Economic Point of View: Foreword to ‘The Doleful Dynamics of Competition: Inequality and Fakery in Modernity’

The purpose of this ‘Foreword’ to my article on the ‘Doleful Dynamics of Competition: Inequality and Faker in Modernity’ is to emphasize to readers the centrality of historical time in the analysis. Short-period analysis tends to imbue a positive perspective on the effects of competition. But as the time is extended through to, for instance, the historical long-run, the more negative impacts of competition tend to come more into view. In other words, as the temporal dimension lengthens we move from the more, typically economistic, view of orthodoxy, through to a more social economy perspective of reality, where a more diverse range of factors come into play (see Dugger, 1979).

Thus, an investigation gains so-called analytical rigor when narrowed down to exclude all but traditionally defined economic factors. Nevertheless, the gain comes at the cost of losing too much scientifically relevant information. Lost is the full range of impacts on and feedbacks between individuals, collectives, societies, and the environment. Broadening the range of inquiry brings in more negative than positive causes and effects. Therefore, narrowing the range introduces significant positive bias and bathes competitive social orders in a far more positive light than they deserve. It strips them of the negative information needed to see them in the full light of scientific inquiry. The lost negative factors are heavily social, political, and environmental in nature. They are also largely the dynamic feedback effects that drive the competitive process and strengthen the competitive social order.

These vitally important aspects of competition are generated over long periods of time by path dependence in an evolving world of cumulative and circular causation. Competition does not reach equilibrium. Competitive social orders are not static. They involve a cumulative and continuous process in which the ending point of one contest is the starting point of the next. Therefore, an unbiased study of competitive social orders such as ours cannot be limited to traditional economic factors, but must include all the relevant factors whose impacts are felt over time. This brings the inquiry into the real world where facts acquire theoretical significance within their contextual nesting in time and place.

Furthermore, a wider range of human choices are made than are allowed for in traditionally narrow inquiries. Self-interest is not necessarily limited by empathy and sympathy as in the invisible hand doctrine. Even if it were, the range of options varies. Choices in the pursuit of self-interest have included wide ranges of force and fraud. They must be included in an unbiased study of competition because some humans choose various kinds and combinations of force and fraud and because the results of such choices are significant. Even if economics is defined traditionally as the “positive” science of choice, force, and fraud also must be included in economic studies of competition and of competitive social orders.

William M. Dugger
Department of Economics, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, USA
Global Political Economy Research Unit, Perth, Australia
[email protected]