Communication and the Transformation of Economics Essays in Information, Public Policy, and Political Economy
- Binding: Paperback
- Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
- Publish date: 12/01/1995
Focusing on the centrality of information/communication to economic and ecological processes, "Communication and the Transformation of Economics" cuts at the philosophical/ideological root of this neoconservative policy agenda. Mainstream economics assumes a commodity status for information, even though information is indivisible, subjective, shared, and intangible. Information, in other words, is quite ill-suited to commodity treatment. Likewise, neoclassicism posits communication as comprising merely acts of commodity exchange, thereby ignoring gift relations; dialogic interactions; the cumulative, transformative properties of all informational interchange; and the social or community context within which communicative action takes place.
Continuing in the tradition of writers such as Russel Wallace, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Polyani, E. F. Schumacher, Kenneth E. Boulding, and Herman Daly, Robert Babe proposes infusing mainstream economics with realistic and expansive conceptions of information/communication in order to better comprehend twenty-first-century issues and progress toward a more sustainable, more just, and more democratic economic/communicatory order.