saying the unspeakable
Oct. 10th, 2006 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaI studied a lot of economics in college. My minor was officially in "social science" but in my junior and senior year all of the social science i took was economics. Economics is defined as the study of human decision making regarding limited resources. They say this, and then you spend all of your time talking about theoretical conditions which bear varying degrees of resemblance to the real world.
It is only with hindsight, and experience, and conscious exertion, that i am able to see the depth and meaning of what was left unsaid in all of those lessons. I am also able to see this now because it is the same thing left unsaid in virtually all of our culture's discourse.
We are still leaving these things unsaid in economics classes 150 years after Marx tried to raise the subject. The academic field of economics is in collective denial, and this denial reflects in policy recommendations by economists which lead to the perpetuation of suffering.
Why, for example, do economists never speak about the fact that many people use violence, intimidation, and discrimination to get more resources? This is, after all, human behavior in response to resource scarcity, no? So by all rights it should be relevant. Also left unsaid is any insight into how our attitudes towards a thing change when we place a price tag on it. This too is human behavior in response to resource scarcity, and it affects the course of the economy and the shape of human society and even the pursuit of justice.
These matters are deemed irrelevant, or perhaps it is said that we can come back to those matters as soon as "the model has been developed." The model assumes rational behavior. The model assumes human equality, perfect information, a "level playing field."
Such a model, of course, has no room for violence or discrimination -- and no room for these things to even be tacked on as an afterthought, as a mathematical modifier, because the ubiquity of violence, discrimination, and injustice brings reality too far from from the abstract model.
It's like trying to represent a fractal with line segments; you might learn a little about the shape, but in the process you lose too much of the important detail of the shape's character to understand it.
Perhaps graduate-level economics is different, but somehow i doubt it; most discussion i see about graduate-level economics is mathematical, building on the "supply and demand curves" model. I've seen a few things here and there about "behavioral finance" or "neuroeconomics" but these fields seem to have the same blinkers to violence and oppression (or, even worse, are rooted in awareness of these things with the goal of using them to individual advantage, thereby perpetuating them).
It is only with hindsight, and experience, and conscious exertion, that i am able to see the depth and meaning of what was left unsaid in all of those lessons. I am also able to see this now because it is the same thing left unsaid in virtually all of our culture's discourse.
We are still leaving these things unsaid in economics classes 150 years after Marx tried to raise the subject. The academic field of economics is in collective denial, and this denial reflects in policy recommendations by economists which lead to the perpetuation of suffering.
Why, for example, do economists never speak about the fact that many people use violence, intimidation, and discrimination to get more resources? This is, after all, human behavior in response to resource scarcity, no? So by all rights it should be relevant. Also left unsaid is any insight into how our attitudes towards a thing change when we place a price tag on it. This too is human behavior in response to resource scarcity, and it affects the course of the economy and the shape of human society and even the pursuit of justice.
These matters are deemed irrelevant, or perhaps it is said that we can come back to those matters as soon as "the model has been developed." The model assumes rational behavior. The model assumes human equality, perfect information, a "level playing field."
Such a model, of course, has no room for violence or discrimination -- and no room for these things to even be tacked on as an afterthought, as a mathematical modifier, because the ubiquity of violence, discrimination, and injustice brings reality too far from from the abstract model.
It's like trying to represent a fractal with line segments; you might learn a little about the shape, but in the process you lose too much of the important detail of the shape's character to understand it.
Perhaps graduate-level economics is different, but somehow i doubt it; most discussion i see about graduate-level economics is mathematical, building on the "supply and demand curves" model. I've seen a few things here and there about "behavioral finance" or "neuroeconomics" but these fields seem to have the same blinkers to violence and oppression (or, even worse, are rooted in awareness of these things with the goal of using them to individual advantage, thereby perpetuating them).
