Introduction
Modern time is marked by a critical dynamic called commodification. Many items have become available for sale for the first time or have dramatically increased in availability over the past few decades. Commodification is a process applied to products, services, concepts, and other forms of innovation that do not initially have a market value and are turned into economic interest. Critical social science in the early twenty-first century has made significant efforts to comprehend the importance and scale of commodification and the dynamics driving it.
Commodifying Knowledge
The profit-driven motivation of society has reduced society’s educational potential by making knowledge a commodity. Education is not a priority for the federal government, which opens the market where students, as customers, must pay tuition in exchange for receiving an education. As with any privatized resource, this scenario has led to unequal access to education. Higher education has become a bureaucratic process as a result of the goal of satisfying students and their parents, who are viewed as consumers (Smessaert et al. 8). The tendency to shape education after the principles of the market, giving priority to efficiency and customer satisfaction while considering it a commercial transaction, has been impacted by ongoing concerns about finances and accountability.
Commodifying Nature
As old as economics itself is the debate and disagreement about how the human economy interacts with the natural environment. According to Kimmerer, a gift relationship with nature is an official exchange that recognizes our contribution to and dependency on natural growth (6). The idea that allows people to view nature in monetary terms has begun the commodification of nature. Ecological modernization is an attractive concept mainly because it reframes economic growth and environmental protection as complementary and mutually supportive. The price of ecological services and products, however, presents alarming new risks because it ignores the concept of incompatibility, which holds that many aspects of human existence and the natural world cannot be fully understood in terms of economics.
Conclusion
Consequently, the idea of progress and technological development through commodification is not benefiting humanity since it restricts the ability to think of solutions outside the economic realm. People are therefore faced with complicated, multi-layered ecological and social challenges. A little understanding of the total reliance on nature would deeply alter the modern outlook.
Works Cited
Kimmerer, Robin W. The Gift of Strawberries. Braiding Sweetgrass. 2020.
Smessaert, Jacob, Missemer, Antoine & Harold Levrel. The commodification of nature, a review in social sciences. Ecological Economics, vol. 172. 2020. Web.