Paul Hudson shares with us his epistemological perspective of economics and emergencies in the fifth blog in this series based on the IGDC/YESI Webinar event ‘Emergencies, wellbeing and social justice in the Anthropocene’
Paul Hudson is a generalist researcher in the fields of climate change adaptation, disaster risk management, and nature-based solutions, looking at the role of the individual in responding to the threats of climate change and disasters. Paul joined us in this webinar to discuss epistemological perspectives specifically in relation to economics and emergencies.
Economic Optimism
Economics at its heart sees itself as trying to achieve two things: First, how do you understand human behaviour in response to the incentives that we face in daily life – for example, how do you reward good things and punish bad things to change people’s behaviour. Secondly, how do we allocate what resources we have available to us to maximise social and individual happiness, welfare, wellbeing, or whatever you want to call it. It is the financial, environmental, and social consequences of our actions, in relation to what we care about as a society. However, this perspective can all too often get narrowly focused just on the financial impacts, but at its heart, it is more inclusive and holistic.
With this perspective, economics is at its heart is, in a way, incredibly optimistic, as if we look at any long term issue – like climate change, biodiversity change, sustainable development, we work from the basis that if you create the right framework, if you provide people with the right incentives, human innovation will get us out of any problem that human innovation has also got us into in the long run, or solve problems we have yet to experience. These incentives can be financial, e.g. tax breaks for research into new technologies, or social, e.g. a wish to protect society against something bad.
If you link this perspective to an emergency framing, then you see that it’s a great framing mechanism as having an emergency framework can play a major role in creating the narrative that says yes, we as a government, I as a person, we as a society, need to take strong action, I need to develop something, we can address these problems. For example, consider taking COVID19; In Germany, the initial discourse framed the problem as an emergency which required strong social and moral actions creating the incentive for people to comply with restrictions. Assuming, we can understand ourselves and how we work, we can use this emergency framework to create the narrative for action that is going to be good for us in the long run.
Short term nature of economics
At the same time framing some of these major global actions as an emergency is also potentially problematic because the way we look at emergencies is that they’re a short-term problem. They are a shock to the system that happens and goes away. However, a lot of our major global issues are long term in nature that over the years have been slowly manifesting.
If you say something is an ongoing emergency, then it can become tangible and it needs to be solved now. However, the longer the emergency goes on, the more likely it’s to become just part of our everyday life. What was once an emergency turns into just something that needs to be compared with, for example, the need to also work out how we are going to fund schools, how am I going to make sure my children have somewhere to live in the future etc.
Emergency framing might not be the way forward for long term issues
So overall it is a useful idea to have this ‘emergency framing’ if you want to provoke a response that is short, sharp, and immediate. But I would say, for a long-term problem it is probably not so helpful in the long run, because then it just becomes yet another problem that we must manage in our complex lives with competing needs and pressures.
There is only so much capacity that society has at hand to understand and process information and to act. This does not also consider how the context in which a person acts changes as new problems arise and what was once an emergency recedes in importance compared to another emerging problem.
If another issue becomes perceived as a more immediate emergency these longer-term issues get put back on to the back burner again and we just end up bouncing from addressing one immediate emergency to another immediate emergency. This is because they can potentially provide the strongest incentives upon which we base our behaviour. Therefore, in this mindset, perhaps what we had invested in previously and what we thought was a good idea previously does not look so useful in the face of the current crisis that we are facing. Rather, I would argue we need a more fundamental shift in what we consider as socially valuable and acceptable, to create the right system and incentives, financial or social, so that we can get out the problems we put ourselves into.
Checkout the full version of Paul’s talk:
About the author
Paul Hudson is a Lecturer in Environmental Economics.
He is a generalist researcher in the fields of climate change adaptation, disaster risk management, and nature-based solutions for both, looking at the role of the individual in responding to the threats of climate change and disasters (flooding especially).
Before joining the University of York, Paul completed his PhD research into the use of flood insurance at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, after which he spent four years at the University of Potsam’s Institute for Environment and Geography’s natural hazard risk research group.