Transcript Moral Economy, Poverty and Sharecropping

Moral Economy, Poverty and
Sharecropping
Five Theoretical Schools
Compared
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Sharecropping
• The sharecropping norms of 50:50 has, in
many parts of India, been changed to 2:1 ,
1:2, or cash rentals.
• These changes are hard for a neoclassical
economist to explain.
• Institutionalist economics has a strand –
‘new institutionalism’ - which tries to
explain these contracts.
• Other researchers were interested in
tenancy and landlords’ exploitation for
several decades.
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Purpose of Papers
• Pluralism paper (JDS 2006): Aims to
explore how differences of ontology and
moral strategy between four schools of
thought – focusing mainly on structuralists
and orthodox economists.
• Moral economy paper: To further examine
some of the ways that moral economy is
integrated into five schools of thought.
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Five Schools
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1:
2:
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Neoclassical Economics
New Institutional Economics
Marxist Structuralism
Formalist Economics (Basu)
Feminist ‘Gender and Development’
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3: Marxist Political Economy
• Structuralists look at the class basis of
landlord-tenant relationships
• Work relationships are important (Patnaik)
• Land ownership and pauperisation are
also central (interested in both static and
dynamic aspects of land distribution)
• They focus on exploitation if it exists
• Hence poverty and inequality are central
right from the start.
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Feminists
• Most feminists writing in the Indian political
economy genre have a structuralist realist
ontology and have a clear and explicit
orientation toward structure-agency dialectics
with strong attention to agency.
• E.g. Naila Kabeer, Linda Mayoux, P.
Swaminathan
• In the international literature, too, GAD has
superseded WID: e.g. Beneria, Jackson, who
make similar assumptions
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Feminists Writing on Tenancy in
India
• Agarwal proposed that women be offered
collective access to land that was arable but not
already privately owned.
• (Both Title, and “Use” access).
• She argued this would enable some very poor
women to improve their livelihoods.
• The suggestion follows many other microenterprise initiatives, but was different
• The Deccan Development Society, Medak Dt.,
Andhra Pradesh, had tried similar experiments
for landless women.
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(Jackson reacted strongly against)
what is being assumed by Agarwal
• Agarwal has assumed markets work as a
neoclassical economist would.
• She assumed that a modernised money flow to
the individual woman would be better than
subsistence.
• She assumes that making women busier will
help to empower them (this ignores their other
existing work).
• Jackson wrote a challenge to Agarwal (Journal
of Agrarian Change (2003)).
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Why is normativity important?
• 1. If we don’t have normativity, and claim value
neutrality, then we can’t fight poverty (or we are
contradicting ourselves);
• 2. Fevre: economic sociologists usually assume
maximising mentalities among the lay
population, and thus give away a huge ground
for interesting research and for complexity of
moral reasoning.
• It is better not to de-moral-ise sociology in this
way (this point is also made by Ben Fine and A.
Sayer)
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A Framework for Analysing
Proposals and Moral Claims
• 1. The analysis should iterate between
empirical research and moral reassessments.
• 2. There are usually two stages that can
be separated out purely to simplify the
strategies so that we can debate them:
– Stage 1: examine lay morality and
circumstances, e.g. values / structures.
– Stage 2: develop and examine difficulties with
meta-moral norms.
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Five Moral Reasoning Approaches
A neoliberal approach.
A human capabilities approach.
A compression of income approach.
A social equality approach.
A Pareto-criterion based approach.
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Sixth Moral Reasoning Approach
• Transformative Reasoning
– Actions are thought to change society.
– Some are conservative, reproductive.
• (morphogenetic, morphostatic)
– Those who see society as changing and
changeable tend to examine changes with
regard to their outcome and BY
COINCIDENCE are also the scholars who use
critical theory to seek emancipation
• They rarely consider feasibility
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Example of Transformative
Reasoning
• ‘land reforms would support poor people’s
access to land better by giving tenants
better claim over the land they work’
– Slightly oversimplified because change will
occur on many fronts all at once
– The land reform change will be a policy
change, a discursive shift, an incident with
“interval-emergent effects” (Elder-Vass),
– and at the same time a new set of
laws/regulations underpinning the propertyuse structure.
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Feminists Always Do This
• Explorations of women’s suffering and
their (changing) values are widespread in
Indian feminist literature
Neoliberal Economists Rarely
Study People’s Values
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Economic Dimension and Social
Dimension
• If a person separates out the economic
dimension without dealing with the social,
they will omit important areas of backlash,
re-perpetuation of inequality, and
underlying sources of corruption etc.
• If a person does the obverse, focusing
purely on the social (ignoring the
economic, the marketised, monetised),
they also risk incompleteness.
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Complex Moral Reasoning
• Takes into account the direct effect of any
change
• Takes into account resistance to structural
change – caste, class, gender, patriarchy,
and even legal change (institutions being a
subset of structures, and people creating
resistance to institutional change such as
the individualisation of the rental contract)
• Takes into account several meta-criteria
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Two dimensions of moral reasoning
• 1) considers counterfactuals
– A) hypothetical OR
– B) real comparisons with real situations
• 2) develops desires and visions of the
future
– A) this implies that some hypothesising is not
empirically grounded so much as ‘envisaging’.
– B) thus the discourses we use/choose to
describe empirical findings influence visions.
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Strategies vs. Moral Reasoning
In the economist’s overview we have
judgements about whether these
strategies are good ones, whether the means chosen
are appropriate to the ends, and whether
the surrounding legal structure and ethical discourses are
appropriate, humane, civilised or acceptable.
Within the economy we have people
and households with their selected strategies
(ST, MT, Long Term)
Please note that wide range of conflicting ethical judgements
that are now possible between agents both IN and ‘ABOVE’
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Conclusions (1: Pluralism)
• The five theoretical schools have points in
common, but are ontically distinct
• The feminist school is highly pluralist and
appears relatively sophisticated on moral
economy aspects as well as structure-agency
dimension of the ontology
• The debate shows strong capacity for moral
argument with data behind it
• Civil debates such as this JAC debate are
useful.
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Conclusions (2: Methodology)
• Qualitative evidence and theoretical
richness are required for good economics
research, because
– A. Theory is qualitative
– B. Models are heuristic
– C. Reality is complex so each theory only
accesses or focused upon part of it)
– D. Metaphors in theories are powerful
– E. QUAL. evidence augments QUANT.
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