sophiaserpentia (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophiaserpentia) wrote2006-10-10 12:38 pm
sophiaserpentia) wrote2006-10-10 12:38 pm
Entry tags:
saying the unspeakable
I 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).
no subject
best,
Joel
no subject
The more I look at it the more it seems to me that the academic form of economics is an attempt to justify the policies of the ruling class.
It's built into the ground-level assumptions.
Most of my economic posts are attempts to fight that "model" which is why I tend to run into so much strife with people on my list who are trained in the academic forms of social science.
You have to go back before Keynes to get anything worthwhile in economics.
(though Kevin Carson - mutualist.org - has some promising ideas)
for instance...
2. mathematical models that serve merely to hide the assumptions in the logic
3. the whole perfect equilibrium nonsense
4. the "homo economicus" - the theoretical rational actor
4b. One problem with that is that it also opens the door to lots of nonsensical psychological or polylogical theories. Because clearly humans are not rational maximizers in the sense that the neo-classical theory talks about. Yet, that should be utterly irrelevant to economics. Any economics which relies on personal behavioral theories (except maybe as a verification) is off on the wrong foot, IMO.
5. though a few people do talk about coercion in economics, they haven't really done anything with private organized crime. That's an area of theory I've been trying to extend my thoughts into...
Re: for instance...
5. though a few people do talk about coercion in economics, they haven't really done anything with private organized crime.
I certainly don't have quotes to hand, but I remember that both Milton Friedman and Jeffery Sachs had very high praise for the development of the Russian street mafias, who were regulating where the trinket vendors could set up on the streets of post-Soviet Moscow, and how much of a percentage they could collect from those vendors (some of whom were former scientists and university professors who had been reduced to selling religious icons on street corners to survive). Friedman actually called it "the advent of pure capitalism" or some such nonsense.
Re: for instance...
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "crime bosses" in Russia now aren't former commissars.
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in the movie where he goes back to college after being a successful owner of a Big 'n' Tall franchise, he argues with the ivy league economics professor. The professor does economics by the book, and Rodney's character wants to know, "What about buying off the mob? What about bribing the building inspector? You haven't set any money aside for that!"
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Naah.
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Of course they have been used, of course, they may even have worked marvelously well now and again. "You will agree with my point of view or you will be tortured to death" is really quite persuasive in most cases.
Likewise, rhetoric assumes a rational actor and a kind of set of fair rules to be assumed by everyone arguing. Everything outside of those techniques is a logical fallacy.
Of course, I always point out that a lot of fallacious arguing techniques do work, though not in academic settings where you have a teacher who is holding you to an idealized set of good practices.
Of course, I'm usually teaching not just analysis, but practice. If I taught how effective it can really be to smear your opponent, and how best to calculate to do it, the world would not thank me. People figure that stuff out on their own.
More questions
1. Are humans "rational animals" (Aristotle) or "rationalizing animals" (Heinlein)?
1a. How much is "rational" behavior controlled by instinctual responses to external events.
2. Coercion seems to be as much a basis for human behavior as anything else. This can be (a)individual vs. individual, (b) group vs. individual, or (c) group vs. another group, with the second group being either a sub-group ar another separate group.
There are probably some game theoriticians working on these questions, as well as the ones you poised, but the work isn't going to be in undergraduate courses on economics. We don't want to confuse the idealistic undergrads with the hard facts of life do we?
Historical note: the first widespread use of game theory wasn't in economics; it was in war games run by the RAND Corporation.
no subject
To your point, I heard a nice interview with Noam Chomsky on NPR the other day where he said something to the effect of "All models built on the idea of a 'rational' consumer are useless."