Towards a Substantive and Democratic Macroeconomy: Linking Circular Flow Macroeconomics with the Substantive and Democratically Decided Aims of Societ

My primary interest is in helping to create ideas for an economic system which works to achieve democratically chosen, substantive ends for societies. I began work on this during my MA dissertation, which focused on what formal rationality and commensurability of price is, and how we might subsume some measure of formal rationality under substantive rationality. I used an input-output approach based on Leontief (1986), Sraffa (1960), and Wright (2015) and put forward the idea that the profit-cost binary could be complexified into a priority ordering system for the achievement of substantive ends, including environmental sustainability. This would allow production according to social priorities, and democratic control over which parts of the social product are allowed to vary in response to changing conditions. For the first part of the PhD project, I would like to take forward this idea and complexify the simple model, as well as find mechanisms which could achieve it in practice. The second part of the project will focus on democratic decision making, and how to deal with varying and incommensurable normative value structures in a way that prevents harm as much as possible. I began work on a way to statistically measure the level to which different value structures are incommensurable with each other at MA, and would like to think this through further.