HARRY: You mean the two
Assumptions are wrong. Well, you are a scientist. Show it. All you need is one
exception. that shouldn't be hard to find.
A religious dogma is something that is proclaimed as true without proof.
So, disprove it. Show everyone on Future Works that the two Assumptions are not true of human behavior.
AC
A religious dogma is something that is proclaimed as true without proof.
So, disprove it. Show everyone on Future Works that the two Assumptions are not true of human behavior.
AC
Now that we have moved to proof, Harry, how about some
proof that your two assumptions, the pillars of your system, are
true.
Proof please.
arthur
-----Original Message-----Mike,
From: Harry Pollard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2002 5:34 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: FWk: Re: Double-stranded Economics
Your analysis is wrong.
Though everything you say can be applied to the Neo-Classical stuff. They are the people who decided about 100 years ago to make economics mathematical, and therefore a science.
The problem with people sciences is you can't put people in test tubes, so you have to use the tool of imagination (a tool not unknown in the physical sciences).
"What if?" is the question in the social sciences - also not unknown in other sciences.
You said:
MIKE: "It is, I think, even worse to start with ad hoc generalizations of the
emergent properties of the aggregate and then employ them as
hypotheses from which, with the application of scientific reasoning,
we hope to deduce a science of the good society. "
Maybe you don't know what "ad hoc" means. The work of at least a century or two of thought doesn't seem to fit your use of the phrase. On the other hand it allows you to move along quickly, so maybe it's justified. I am also not sure how "emergent properties of the aggregate" applies to an Assumption about individual action.
Also, whatever you do, don't use an hypothesis as an Assumption. Try to get an axiom, a self-evident truth, if possible a Law, to use as an assumption.
You continued:
MIKE: "Harry has, IIRC, repeated several times his premises:"
I don't know what "IIRC" means but you should know they are not my premises. I would love them to be mine, but they are not. They are a century or two old and I use them because they seem good to me - and are particularly appropriate to the subject of human behavior - and therefore Political Economy.
You went on to quote the two Assumptions:
MIKE:
' 1. Man's desires are unlimited.
2. Man seeks to satisfy his desires with the least exertion.
I don't see this as any less a religious dogma that "All have sinned
and come short of the glory of God." '
HARRY: You mean the two Assumptions are wrong. Well, you are a scientist. Show it. All you need is one exception. that shouldn't be hard to find.
A religious dogma is something that is proclaimed as true without proof.
So, disprove it. Show everyone on Future Works that the two Assumptions are not true of human behavior.
Then start thinking again about your statement that: "Hard science is essentially statistical in nature."
How do you know what to measure? Maybe "soft science" tells you. Do you march into the lab and say "Hey! What shall we measure today?"
You should understand that there are two kinds of knowledge. The knowledge of truths and the knowledge of things. I fear that in the schools they spend much of their time on the knowledge of things. Learn this and repeat it back tomorrow.
They should be learning truths.
The knowledge of truths is the knowledge THAT things are so. While you must know things, they aren't much use without a knowledge of truths. A "truth" can be used across the gamut of the subject. A "thing" isn't transferable to another thing - except perhaps with a truth.
The two Assumptions are truths.
They say THAT people's desires are unlimited and THAT they will seek to satisfy them with the least exertion. This can probably be used across the gamut of the social sciences - and certainly across the subject of economics.
These Assumptions apply to every person and people is what Classical Political Economy is all about.
The rest of what you wrote was interesting, but had nothing to do with our subject.
Harry
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike wrote:
Pete Vincent wrote:
> When mathematics is applied to the problem of the nature of the physical
> world, it's called physics, and it works pretty well, within its domain.
> When mathematics and sometimes, by extension, physics, are brought to
> bear on problems in the real world, where dirt and warm bodies and
> other inconvenient things get in the way of purely analytic solutions,
> it's called engineering, and that is where economics rightly belongs.
I have a slightly different take on why science, as typified by
physics, doesn't work well when we move it to economics (or the other
so-called social sciences.)
Hard science is essentially statistical in nature. Thermodynamics is
well described by statitical mechanics and math that applies to
large ensembles of indistinguishable particles of ideal gas.
Polymer and Protein chemistry is really about properties of
statistical ensembles of possible molecular spatial conformations or
charge distributions of a single molecule that appear when large
numbers of molecules are put together.
As for solid state physics, it depends on quantum physics and in QP,
*everything* exists smeared out in a haze of ontic probability.
The problem with applying "science" to society is that we profess to
care about the individuals of which it is composed. I don't want to
be sacrificed to the equivalent of the heat sink in order that the
steam engine economy may have the emergent property of producing
usable work. Nor, presumably, does anyone. Our notions of civilized
society suggest that we should not want that for anyone else, either,
and should try so to structure society that it is not the default case
for anyone.
As soon as we commence to derive putative laws of collective human
behavior homologous to the laws of physics, we commence to treat
individuals as inconsequential elements of an ensemble whose emergent
properties we attempt to predict but whose elements we regard as
indistinguisable particles.
In policy making, in political economy, in civitas, we seek -- or
claim to seek -- such good as fairness, justice, compassion and so on.
But justice on the average is no justice. Median fairness is no
fairness. The notions of humanity and those of the statistics of the
aggregate are contradictory. Or rather, they are orthogonal: The
values of humanity project into the phase space of the statistical
aggregate with zero dimension and vanish.
This doesn't say the all of economics is logically false, only that
the things ordinary people thing important tend increasingly to vanish
from the models as they are refined.
It is, I think, even worse to start with ad hoc generalizations of the
emergent properties of the aggregate and then employ them as
hypotheses from which, with the application of scientific reasoning,
we hope to deduce a science of the good society. Harry has, IIRC,
zrepeated several times his premises:
1. Man's desires are unlimited.
2. Man seeks to satisfy his desires with the least exertion.
I don't see this as any less a religious dogma that "All have sinned
and come short of the glory of God." Libraries are bursting with
exegeses of the doctrine of original sin, closely reasoned by good
minds. But none of it leads to an insight about the human
condition -- why folks do what they do or how they may contrive to get
enough to eat -- that may be called "scientific".
So my "slightly different take" doesn't differ greatly from Pete's.
We need to think about "engineering with heart", "...with conscience"
or "...with empathy".
> You see, as any sociological study of economists will tell you, and
> has been discussed here before (where were you?) economists more than
> any other group of people sorted by any measure, regard people as
> venal, greedy, contemptible, robots, "Homo economicus" I think Ray
> suggested for these imaginary creatures, who defy all human virtues in
> order to act according to the arbitrary dictates of the economists'
> dog-eat-dog fantasy world. Real people, by contrast, sometimes
> actually treasure concepts like fairness, compassion, and non-material
> goals.
Yeah. What he said.
> And each culture possesses such individuals in different numbers, and
> values them to differing degrees.
In the fifties, one of the resounding cold war criticisms of communism
was that it was based on the hypothesis that people are Homo
economicus rather than whole persons. Well, the cold war is over and
the Bad Guys won -- the guys who construct us all as Homo economicus
and who have the power to make this the dominant social paradigm.
> Only a robust engineering structure can hope to keep up with the
> vagueries of human nature well enough to make a functioning economic
> model which takes this sort of variable into account.
I'm not sure that robustness is sufficient but I find it hard to put a
name to what other qualities are needed, probably because they are
quaities not normally associated with engineering. And because those
elusive qualities are not associated with engineering, I remain
distrustful of engineering as sufficient replacement for inadeqate
science or pseudoscience.
In another, entirely satirical context, I bill myself pseudonymously
as an Epistemological Engineer in the belief that engineering what
people know is either an oxymoron and therefore funny or,
alternatively, that is doable but evil and deserving of ridicule.
I've done a modest amount of readng about architecture in connection
with my work in ornamental metalwork. In that pursuit I stumbled over
the work of Constantinos Doxiadis [1]. He is deeply concerned about
building humane habitation on an urban scale and his book is a blend
of theoretical reflection and practical thoughtfullness that I think
Pete would approve. Yet his humanely engineered designs for
residential quarters of Baghdad leave me with a chilling sense of
refined holding pens or upscale relocation camps.
I remain uncomfortable with the idea of people egineering for us what
they have decided is good for us. Even with *humane* engineering,
it's all to easy to reduce the humans to inconsequential elements who
must be constrained to conform to the parameters of the engineered
structure, be it an economy or a community.
- Mike
---
[1] Doxiadis, Constantinos A., Architecture in Transition, Jutchinson
of London, 1963.
******************************
Harry Pollard
Henry George School of LA
Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042
Tel: (818) 352-4141
Fax: (818) 353-2242
*******************************
