Tiago Cardao-Pito

The current economic and societal production system gives money a magnified importance, overlooking other essential flows necessary for human survival and existence. It focuses on monetary indicators like profits, dividends, and GDPs to evaluate organizational production, while often disregarding outputs that harm the biosphere. Money is treated as the constitutive being (ousia) and attributed undemonstrated explanatory properties. Intangible flow theory helps eliminate this metaphysical status of money by recognizing that monetary flows are just one of many necessary flows for human survival and existence. Organizations deliver product-flows that require input-flows from and send output-flows back to the encompassing biosphere, whether they explicitly engage in environmentally friendly activities or not. Therefore, every organization is an ecological entity because it has a relationship with the biosphere, which participates in the manner through which humans integrate into their surrounding environment and relate to other living beings. Eliminating the metaphysical status of money integrates every organization in the biosphere, making organizations accountable for environmental harm caused by their activities. This can be achieved by deconstructing the metaphysical status of money in business models.

Purpose: Illicit financial flows are targeted by the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, these illicit flows are not entirely understood. Furthermore, they can benefit from economic norms, laws, and regulations that lack mechanisms to detect and penalize them. This paper investigates whether a recent test, the embezzler test, can be used to identify regulatory architectures that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes. Design/methodology/approach: To develop a more advanced version of the embezzler test in terms of definitions and practical implementation methodology. Findings: In this test, the definition of embezzlement can be understood to be the occurrence of illicit financial flows crossing the boundaries of organizations and/or countries. This is a multi-stage test, which intentionally simulates illicit financial flows to observe how well equipped is the regulatory architecture to deal with other financial offences that are related with these flows, such as theft, money laundering, fraud, corruption, market manipulation, and tax evasion. Originality: This is the first explicit test that has been presented to identify norms, laws, and regulations that facilitate illicit financial flows and related financial crimes. Research implications: Future research can employ the version of this test to stress test a large range of economic norms, laws, and regulations. Practical/Social implications: This test’s new version can assist achieve the UN SDGs’ illicit financial flow reduction target. Furthermore, it can be used to study both existing and proposed norms, laws, and regulation.

The dominant economic explanations of the 20th century are not comprehensive enough to describe the complexity of economy and society and their reliance on the biosphere. Intangible Flow Theory in Economics: Human Participation in Economic and Societal Production outlines a new theory that challenges both economics and the relativism conveyed in social constructivism, poststructuralism and postmodernism. To mainstream economics and Marxism, monetary flows transform us humans into commodities. To this new theory, flows of economic elements as physical goods or money are consummated by intangible flows that cannot yet be precisely appraised at an actual or approximate value, for instance, workflows, service flows, information flows or communicational flows. The theory suggests a systematic alternative to refute the human commodity framework and interrelated conjectures (e.g. human capital, human resources, human assets). Furthermore, it exhibits that economic and societal production is fully integrated on the biosphere. Conversely, contemporary relativism argues for the end of theory development, suspension of evidence and entrenchment of knowledge validity among local systems (named as paradigms, epistemes, research programs, truth regimes or other terms). Thus, relativism tacitly supports dominant theories as the human commodity framework because it preventively sabotages the creation of new theoretical explanations. Disputing relativist theses, intangible flow theory demonstrates that innovative theoretical explanations remain possible. This book is of significant interest to students and scholars of political economy, economic sociology, organization, economics and social theory.

Contemporary mainstream economics cannot be seen as disconnected from philosophical concerns. On the contrary, it should be understood as a defence for a specific philosophy, namely, crude quantitative hedonism where money would measure pleasure and pain. Disguised among a great mathematical apparatus involving utility functions, supply, and demand, lies a specific hedonist philosophy that every year is lectured to thousands of economic and business students around the world. This hedonist philosophy is much less sophisticated than that in ancient hedonist philosophers as Epicurus or Lucretius. Furthermore, it does not solve any of the systematic difficulties regularly faced by hedonist philosophy. However, the argument that economics is detached from philosophy works as a rhetorical artifice to protect its dominant underlying philosophy: Philosophical disputes would have to be addressed within the biased mathematical apparatus of quantitative hedonism. Economists and business students must learn to identify the underlying philosophy in mainstream economics and alternative philosophical systems.