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Global Science Case Study

Decent Essays

Aklilu Reda
How can Economic Anthropology Contribute to a more just World

The anatomy of the global economic system, with its free market principles and econometrics based regulatory structures, spans the trajectories of successful wealth making and choices creating processes based on utilitarian assumptions founded in the heart of the capitalist economy. Throughout history, perhaps there is no powerfully affective, yet highly contested practice as the economy. It can be safely said that the economy touches the life of every one of us. Underlying the current economic system, economics setting the rules, regulations, applications and interpretations, required for the maintenance of self-regulating integration of different economic forms, …show more content…

On the other side, this economic advancement has produced a new degree of inequality and uncertainty in the entire economic system to the extent that economics itself is unable to come up with a remedy for such inequality.
As Wilk and Cliggett noted, the problem partly lies in the assumption which sees people as self-interested, whose economic behavior depends on their ability to analyze the cost benefit analysis of their opportunities and make a self-oriented choice to satisfy their personal interest. This perspective views people as rational beings, who weigh their situation and alternatives to maximize their benefit. The problem with this assumption is that it isolates human beings from their social and cultural context and their behavior detached from the cultural order which produces norms, values and mutual interdependence. Looked at from this view, economics’ obsession with complicated numerical representations of human economic modeling leaves other non-quantifiable factors, that constitute the economy, under represented or void of their rightful consideration.
The pressing need for a more integrated economic logics and models by the economists, and for that matter the formalist economic anthropologists, is in order to sustainably keep the global economy to be ordered and insure an equal opportunity for all to maximize their benefit from a well integrated market. There is a belief that

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