Modeling the Economy as a Whole: An Integrative Approach

Abstract

This article integrates the social surplus approach with input-output, stock-flow consistent, social accounting, and social fabric modeling with a structure-agency methodology to develop a historically grounded model of the economy. The first two sections develop a model of the monetary structure of the social provisioning process. The third section introduces agency into the model in the form of the acting organization. The fourth section uses the social fabric approach and historical context drawn from social structures of accumulation to develop a socially embedded, historically contextualized, structured-agency model of the economy as a whole. The final section discusses the importance of the model.People have social, caring lives; they have households, parents, children, friends, colleagues, and a history; and they need to be fed, housed, clothed, married, schooled, and socially engaged. And the needed and desired goods and services are produced to sustain their socially constructed, caring lifestyle. Thus the social provisioning process is a continuous, non-accidental series of productionbased, production-derived economic activities through historical time that provide "needy" individuals and households the private and state goods and services (that is, the social surplus) necessary to carry out their sequential, reoccurring, and changing social activities through time. As such then, a continuous provisioning process implies that it is something like a going concern whose core processes provide the material bases for social provisioning and are similar to a going plant and going business. This means, in part, that

Social Provisioning and Financial Regulation: An Institutionalist-Minskyian Agenda for Reform

“…What is at stake in social provisioning analysis is the conception of an alternative framework: "Moreover, with agency and the provisioning process bracketed by the social fabric and social activities, the going economy as a whole cannot be reduced to simply a circuit of capital where the only interest of business enterprises and the capitalist class is to make more money." (Lee 2011(Lee : 1311.…”

The embedded state and social provisioning: insights from Norbert Elias

“…Thus heterodox economic theory is a theoretical explanation of the historical process of social provisioning within the context of a capitalist economy. (Lee 2009, 8, emphasis in original) Lee has developed this view in several recent papers (Lee 2008(Lee , 2011a(Lee , 2011b(Lee , 2011c. Besides these empirical grounds of the heterodox economic theory, he shows that heterodoxy is a community of economists who contribute to develop approaches such as Austrian economics, feminist economics, Institutional-evolutionary economics, Marxian-radical economics, Post Keynesian and Sraffian economics, and social economics.…”

Conspicuous Consumption as Routine Expenditure and its Place in the Social Provisioning Process

“…This particular definition allows for examination of processes and human agency in cultural context and historical time, and enables the exploration of evolution of resources, production, and consumption patterns, as well as of the sociocultural meaning of activities that constitute social provisioning. The structure of the economy—the schema of production and finance and the income flows relative to produced goods and services—are embedded within ecosystems and a historically specific sociocultural framework—including ideology and conventional wisdom (Gruchy ; Nelson ; Dugger ; Power ; Lee , ; Jo ).…”

“…The first two sections introduce social provisioning, the production and distribution of social surplus, waste, and the class structure of the capitalist economy as the context of consumption analysis. The discussion builds on Veblen's theory, but is not limited to his analysis; as well as on Lee (; ), adding a greater focus on households and on waste in the Veblenian sense. In the next two sections the article discusses discretionary and routine consumption expenditures, and argues that conspicuous consumption is a routine rather than an exceptional phenomenon and a process embedded within social provisioning.…”