Economic Humanism:
A Utopia Where Humanity Can Land
Piero Formica*
PUBLISHED :13 FEB 2025
PROLOGUE
Before venturing into reading this note, I suggest that you visualize yourself, willy- nilly, to be on board the economic train that must run incessantly. If the train slows down and then stops, the alarm goes off. If it backs down, it’s a problem. Recession hurts; if prolonged, it turns into the tragedy of depression. Running speed is measured by GDP. Regarding the direction of the train: is it moving towards well-having, possessing more and more, or is it directed towards physical, mental, emotional and social well- being? Are both directions reconcilable?
On the train, you are travelling with other humans and, perhaps, with dogs and cats, reminiscent of George Orwell’s (1903-1950)Animal Farm. If you belong to a developed country, on the train, you will find increasingly wealthier passengers in first class and increasingly poorer in third class. The train race widened the gap between one and the other. Wealth inequality tends to be even more pronounced than income inequality. Individuals and families with already so much wealth have enjoyed an exponential increase in their possessions over time and a disproportionate influence on governments, thus rooting even deeper divisions.
What about animal passengers? In Orwell’s words, they put it this way:
[Man] is the lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labor tills the soil, our dung fertilizes it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than is bare skin.
The economic train matters only in terms of how fast it moves. If its direction goes against nature, does it lose sight of Economic Humanism? This question encompasses the vexed question of well-being we bring to the reader’s attention.
Is Economic Humanism a utopia? Oscar Wilde writes in The Soul of Man under
Socialism.
Author Biography
Piero Formica*
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts , Innovation Value Institute , Maynooth University, Ireland. E-mail
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RECOMMENDED READINGS
- Bastiat, F. (1877). Essays on Political Economy. Putnam, New York.
- Harari, Yuval, N. (2015). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. HarperCollins, New York, NY.
- Imai Messina L. (2018). WA. La via giapponese dell’armonia. Vallardi Editore, Milano.
- Keynes, J. M. (1931). Essays in Persuasion. Macmillan, London.
- Orwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm. Secker & Warburg, London.
- Ovid (2001). The Love Poems, Book III, a translation into English by A. S. Kline. PiT (Poetry In Translation – www.poetryintranslation.com).
- Singer, P. (1975). Animal Liberation. HarperCollins, New York, NY.
- Stone, Christopher, D. (1972). Should trees have standing? – toward legal rights for natural objects. Southern California Law Review, 45, 450-501.
- Veblen, T. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. Macmillan, New York, NY.
- Wilson, S. (2015). Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
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