In this Development Research Seminar, Bas van Bavel questions the role of the market as the most efficient and effective way to generate well-being.
- Professor
- Date
- Tuesday 10 Dec 2024, 16:15 - 17:30
- Type
- Seminar
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- Room 4.39
- Location
- International Institute of Social Studies
For several decades, Western societies have relied on the market as main coordination system, expecting it to be the most efficient and effective way to generate well-being.
Both theoretically and empirically/historically, this expectation turns out to be unjustified. Rather, the market as a system turns out to have an endogenous dynamism, turning its well-being effects in the longer run from positive to negative.
In this Development Research Seminar, Professor Ban van Bavel will analyze this process and also look at how earlier societies tried to counter it.
In doing so, bottom-up organization, and the resulting associational organizations, have played a key role. This observation is perhaps a reason to look for ways to give the associative order a larger place (again) as a coordination system, alongside the market and the state, and as a full alternative to these now dominant coordination systems.
About the speaker
Professor Bas van Bavel is Professor of Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages at Utrecht University and head of the section Economic and Social History.
In 2019, he received the Spinoza Prize from the NWO, which will be spent on scientific research.
- More information
The Development Research seminars present cutting-edge research on development studies by noted scholars from around the world. The Series aims to stimulate critical discussion about contemporary development issues.
