Re: McCloskey & Post-Autism

[Doyle Saylor]

Title: Re: [PEN-L:30084] McCloskey & Post-Autism

Greetings Economists,
The term "Post Autistim" economics or "Autistic Economics" is an anti-disabled phrase.  The point that JD makes is I think relevent:

JD,
The piece by McCloskey reminded me of a basic point: "autistic economics" is not identical to "bad economics," so that one can embrace bad economics without autism. (However, I'd say that _all_ autistic economics is bad.)

McCloskey opposes "autistic economics" of Debreu, Roemer, _et al_ by embracing the empirically-oriented Chicago-style economics of Stigler _et al_. She's right that the latter isn't autistic, but it's really bad stuff, ideological, dishonest, etc.

Perhaps we should invent the category "sociopathic economics" to refer to the empirically-oriented version of Chicago economics. After all, the DSM-IV, the diagnostic bible of psychologists, has more disorders than simply those on the autistic spectrum.

(Strictly speaking, sociopathy or psychopathy is called "anti-social personality disorder.")

Doyle,
However, I'd like expand on the disability theme derived from the phrase, "Autistic Economics" that purports to use to illuminate the economic problem supposedly revealed.  The problem so lableled is excessive reliance on mathematics and game theory modeling in some contemporary Economics.  The point of the phrase is to point at the lack of communications between theory and practical life.

Current theory about Autism indicates that some sort of language issue impedes someone with Autistic symptoms from acquiring the skills to make speech.  And one major theory icalled "Joint Attention" theory suggests that an Autistic persons has difficulty in attention structure that makes sharing attention with another person difficult.  That symptom is a fundamental defining aspect of Autism.  The symptom then describes a lack of response to another person in the normal human mode of interaction that infants show in order to learn language.  Joint Attention is a theory of language acquisition for human beings (and incidentally appears to account for why Autistic symptoms occur), that is that infants first learn to share attention with car givers, and that is the basis for language.

>From an economics point of view setting aside the bigoted anti disabled label of "Autistic Economics", the theory of Joint Attention might have some insight about what is going on with an over reliance upon mathematics and game modeling theories.  The question is do we use such theories as the label, "Autistic Economics" covers, use these economic theories in a language-like way?  And language-like refers to sharing attention structures as the theory of Joint Attention suggests.

Underlying this question are deeper issues of knowledge and body structure that have to understood by Marxists, and other left oriented persons.  Without going off to the deeper structures right this moment I would suggest a decent reading, "Cycles of Contingency", Oyama, Griffiths, and Gray, editors, MIT Press, 2001. (see chapters 5, & 6 by R. Lewontin), and "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory", S. J. Gould, Belknap Harvard Press, 2002.

Returning though to my point in an economic sense, it is the language like sharing of information that the Bigoted Anti Disabled Phrase, "Autistic Economics" strives to draw attention to.  Can we in some sense examine the issue economically?  That is can we say that a language like component of Economic theory is worth investigating and understanding about how to conceive of the global economy?

One way I've thought about this issue is to compare the relative sizes of domestic products in telephone and movie areas.  Telephone commerce produces a great deal more revenue than does movies or television.  While what a movie shows to an audience has language like features, actors speak to the audience, there is not a "sharing" of attention that is implied in an exchange.  That is if I pay attention to you as you speak to me, and vice versa we share attention, but there is no awareness of my attention from the movie screen like a human listeners brings to conversation.  An economic theory might suggest a product like a movie is not meant to be exchanged in a language like "Joint Attention" structure and that fundamental limit sets boundaries upon what that information created for a movie can do.  Whereas what can be done with "Joint Attention" language like exchanges of information accomplishes wholly different material processes.  In fact makes the work process possible.

There is a relationship between these issues and what Michael Perelman writes (in several of his books)  in regard to the current controversies concerning Intellectual Property (IP).  Business models that reacquire restricting the language like sharing of information implied in "Joint Attention" structures have a definite dampening of economic activity which Perelman refers to as the diminishment of innovation.  However, that concept is better understood technically from the above references to evolutionary structure and in particular to the needs of language like "Joint Attention" structures.  That question restated is ;what is the relationship between material structure and knowledge and contingency' that underlies work and information exchange.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor