CONCEPT
Moral Economy of Expertise
The application of Scott's moral economy framework to professional labor — the customary norms of training, craft quality, and reciprocity that AI deployment is violating in ways structurally parallel to the colonial capitalism Scott documented in Southeast Asia.
In The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Scott argued that peasant rebellions were triggered not by absolute poverty but by violations of the moral expectations that had previously made poverty endurable. The framework has been extended by E.P. Thompson, and more recently by scholars responding to the AI transition, to professional labor. The moral economy of expertise names the customary norms that have structured professional life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: that expertise developed through years of training will be valued, that craft standards will be respected, that the informal reciprocities sustaining professional communities will be honored, that the apprenticeship relationships through which métis is transmitted will be protected. AI deployment, in many contexts, violates these expectations — not through any single decision, but through the cumulative effect of decisions that prioritize efficiency metrics over the conditions that sustain professional expertise.
