CONCEPT
Moral Economy
Scott's 1976 framework for the <em>normative expectations of reciprocity and fair dealing</em> that subordinate communities develop to govern their relationships with the powerful — a standard by which exploitation is measured and contested.
The moral economy is the shared framework of norms through which a community defines what is owed between rich and poor, strong and weak, ruler and ruled. In peasant societies, the moral economy specified that landlords owed tenants subsistence security in exchange for labor; that prosperous farmers owed charity to the community in bad years; that obligations between unequals were bounded by mutual dependency rather than by market contract alone. Scott's 1976 The Moral Economy of the Peasant argued that peasant revolts were not driven by absolute poverty but by violations of the moral economy — by powerful parties extracting more than the traditional framework permitted. The framework extends to the AI transition: the displaced expert's contestation of the new order is conducted in the vocabulary of a professional moral economy whose terms the transition is violating.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework was Scott's first major theoretical contribution, published in 1976 and based on his doctoral research in Southeast Asia.