ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the understanding of time in economic theory. Theorizing in economics, then, tends to take place in a timeless world. Economic theory underplays the role of freedom and imagination in human agency. Human life is simply a "temporal sequence of person-moments". It is increasingly understood that actual market behaviour takes place in time and sometimes under conditions of uncertainty, thus rendering the model problematic. Thanks to the expansion and intensification of market behaviour myopia may well be a central feature of western institutions in every sector, from politics to business to the media. The chapter examines how short-termism and discontinuity may have deleterious consequences for both the economy and for the quality of social life. Nowhere is the divergence between theoretical approaches and real-world economies starker than in the economic analysis of climate change. The standard economic evaluative approach is utilitarianism.