Social Enterprise and "The Other Cannon"

 


Is it time to dust off Rennaisance economics, "The Other Cannon", which sees creative production of good things as an almost sacred economic activity rather than consumption of anything produced as a sound economic activity? In this model, capital is required to support the production of needed goods and services (good goods model). In the current model inherited from the Family Tree of neo-liberal economists, capital is required to mobilise a consumptive workforce who must surely spend more than they earn to return a profit to capital (the greed is good model). A current example of Rennaisance economics might be the Social Enterprise movement. In this example the relationship between capital and labour is inverted. People with the knowledge and skills to produce good things employ those with capital who lack the knowledge and skills. Those with capital work for those who produce because they recognise that they need the goods or services. Leadership comes from the productive process. I think that the Social Enterprise movement may have been naively led astray by the idea that a Social Enterprise is a non-profit with some extra bells and whistles. It is a much more radical economic idea than that.

References

Reinert, Erik, and Arno Daastøl. ‘The Other Canon: The History of Renaissance Economics’, 1 January 2004, 21–70. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781845421625.00007.

The Other Canon Foundation. ‘Family tree’. Accessed 19 June 2021. http://othercanon.org/family-tree/.


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