Embodied Market Utopia: Human Flourishing in Economic Life

Capitalism is the utopia of liberal economics imposed on society and drives processes of disembodiment that abstract people from their relationships to others and to the world. Embodied economics offers a radical and concrete utopian alternative that aims to reinvent markets as communities. This chapter develops a critical reflection on market failures and externalities as conceptualized in the standard model, and the limits of potentially embodied developments are discussed through behavioral economics, Ostrom’s institutionalism, and happiness studies. The eudaimonic approach to well-being as flourishing is followed, in terms of Well-being, Inclusivity, Sufficiency, Empowerment, and Resilience (the WISER framework), and it is shown that radical institutional transformations are needed to re-embody markets: Universal Basic Income, personal liability, or definancialization are key to flourishing by creating autonomy in and from the market. In conclusion, a future research agenda in embodied economics to address some of the limitations of this book and to transform economic life, is presented.