1

Moral Economy, Poverty and Sharecropping

Five Theoretical Schools Compared

2

Sharecropping• The sharecropping norms of 50:50 has, in

many parts of India, been changed to 2:1 , 1:2, or cash rentals.

• These changes are hard for a neoclassical economist to explain.

• Institutionalist economics has a strand – ‘new institutionalism’ - which tries to explain these contracts.

• Other researchers were interested in tenancy and landlords’ exploitation for several decades.

3

Purpose of Papers

• Pluralism paper (JDS 2006): Aims to explore how differences of ontology and moral strategy between four schools of thought – focusing mainly on structuralists and orthodox economists.

• Moral economy paper: To further examine some of the ways that moral economy is integrated into five schools of thought.

4

Five Schools

• 1: Neoclassical Economics

• 2: New Institutional Economics

• 3. Marxist Structuralism

• 4. Formalist Economics (Basu)

• 5. Feminist ‘Gender and Development’

5

3: Marxist Political Economy

• Structuralists look at the class basis of landlord-tenant relationships

• Work relationships are important (Patnaik)• Land ownership and pauperisation are

also central (interested in both static and dynamic aspects of land distribution)

• They focus on exploitation if it exists• Hence poverty and inequality are central

right from the start.

6

Feminists

• Most feminists writing in the Indian political economy genre have a structuralist realist ontology and have a clear and explicit orientation toward structure-agency dialectics with strong attention to agency.

• E.g. Naila Kabeer, Linda Mayoux, P. Swaminathan

• In the international literature, too, GAD has superseded WID: e.g. Beneria, Jackson, who make similar assumptions

7

Feminists Writing on Tenancy in India

• Agarwal proposed that women be offered collective access to land that was arable but not already privately owned.

• (Both Title, and “Use” access).• She argued this would enable some very poor

women to improve their livelihoods.• The suggestion follows many other micro-

enterprise initiatives, but was different• The Deccan Development Society, Medak Dt.,

Andhra Pradesh, had tried similar experiments for landless women.

8

(Jackson reacted strongly against) what is being assumed by Agarwal • Agarwal has assumed markets work as a

neoclassical economist would.• She assumed that a modernised money flow to

the individual woman would be better than subsistence.

• She assumes that making women busier will help to empower them (this ignores their other existing work).

• Jackson wrote a challenge to Agarwal (Journal of Agrarian Change (2003)).

9

Why is normativity important?

• 1. If we don’t have normativity, and claim value neutrality, then we can’t fight poverty (or we are contradicting ourselves);

• 2. Fevre: economic sociologists usually assume maximising mentalities among the lay population, and thus give away a huge ground for interesting research and for complexity of moral reasoning.

• It is better not to de-moral-ise sociology in this way (this point is also made by Ben Fine and A. Sayer)

10

A Framework for Analysing Proposals and Moral Claims

• 1. The analysis should iterate between empirical research and moral re-assessments.

• 2. There are usually two stages that can be separated out purely to simplify the strategies so that we can debate them:– Stage 1: examine lay morality and

circumstances, e.g. values / structures.– Stage 2: develop and examine difficulties with

meta-moral norms.

11

A neoliberal approach.

A human capabilities approach.

A compression of income approach.

A social equality approach.

A Pareto-criterion based approach.

Five Moral Reasoning Approaches

12

Sixth Moral Reasoning Approach

• Transformative Reasoning– Actions are thought to change society.– Some are conservative, reproductive.

• (morphogenetic, morphostatic)

– Those who see society as changing and changeable tend to examine changes with regard to their outcome and BY COINCIDENCE are also the scholars who use critical theory to seek emancipation

• They rarely consider feasibility

13

Example of Transformative Reasoning

• ‘land reforms would support poor people’s access to land better by giving tenants better claim over the land they work’– Slightly oversimplified because change will

occur on many fronts all at once– The land reform change will be a policy

change, a discursive shift, an incident with “interval-emergent effects” (Elder-Vass),

– and at the same time a new set of laws/regulations underpinning the property-use structure.

14

Feminists Always Do This

• Explorations of women’s suffering and their (changing) values are widespread in Indian feminist literature

Neoliberal Economists Rarely Study People’s Values

15

Economic Dimension and Social Dimension

• If a person separates out the economic dimension without dealing with the social, they will omit important areas of backlash, re-perpetuation of inequality, and underlying sources of corruption etc.

• If a person does the obverse, focusing purely on the social (ignoring the economic, the marketised, monetised), they also risk incompleteness.

16

Complex Moral Reasoning

• Takes into account the direct effect of any change

• Takes into account resistance to structural change – caste, class, gender, patriarchy, and even legal change (institutions being a subset of structures, and people creating resistance to institutional change such as the individualisation of the rental contract)

• Takes into account several meta-criteria

17

Two dimensions of moral reasoning

• 1) considers counterfactuals– A) hypothetical OR– B) real comparisons with real situations

• 2) develops desires and visions of the future– A) this implies that some hypothesising is not

empirically grounded so much as ‘envisaging’.– B) thus the discourses we use/choose to

describe empirical findings influence visions.

18

Strategies vs. Moral Reasoning

Within the economy we have people and households with their selected strategies

(ST, MT, Long Term)

In the economist’s overview we havejudgements about whether these

strategies are good ones, whether the means chosen are appropriate to the ends, and whether

the surrounding legal structure and ethical discourses are appropriate, humane, civilised or acceptable.

Please note that wide range of conflicting ethical judgements that are now possible between agents both IN and ‘ABOVE’

19

Conclusions (1: Pluralism)

• The five theoretical schools have points in common, but are ontically distinct

• The feminist school is highly pluralist and appears relatively sophisticated on moral economy aspects as well as structure-agency dimension of the ontology

• The debate shows strong capacity for moral argument with data behind it

• Civil debates such as this JAC debate are useful.

20

Conclusions (2: Methodology)

• Qualitative evidence and theoretical richness are required for good economics research, because– A. Theory is qualitative– B. Models are heuristic– C. Reality is complex so each theory only

accesses or focused upon part of it)– D. Metaphors in theories are powerful– E. QUAL. evidence augments QUANT.