Ed Weick wrote:
I'm in this colour.
Ed
> As a non-economist, I'd like to suggest two things economists can do
and
> the context they
> can do them in:
>
> (1) They can try to discover what their social surround, e.g., the
> global economy,
> is doing in terms of human labor, including both its deployment , its
> waste, etc., and
> project: If "you" (i.e., their social surround, e.g., the global
economy)
> keep doing what I have discovered you are doing, here's what's likely to
> be your future....
Discovering what one's social surround is doing is not easy.
Definitely. But I'd like to think a justification for graduate
education is to enable persons to undertake difficult
tasks.
I would agree that there is one overall social surround, the global
economy. The way it functions and changes impacts on thousands,
possibly millions, of differing lesser social surrounds right down to
the individual household. These lesser social surrounds are often
very different from each other and one has to learn about them before
one can be prescriptive with regard to the problems they face.
Definitely. A challenge is to elucidate how the global shapes the local
in each particular case, and,
conversely, how the local, in all its apparent colorful "localness" may
just be implementing
the global (a different kind of "invisible hand").
I'm also not necessarily saying economists (or any other specialists)
ought to be telling
people what to do -- although there surely are cases where they
should. But persons
cannot choose options they do not know exist at all or that they do not know
are possibly implementable in their own situations. I am thinking here,
e.g.,
of Paolo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", e.g.
I've had the opportunity to learn something about several social
surrounds, and if I had the job of fixing them up and making them work
better, there is no way that I would recommend the same measures for
each of them. The error that economists often make is to apply what
they've learned in grad school to just about every situation they
consider, or to apply what works in one social surround to others.
Geoffrey Sachs is a very good economist, but when I was in Russia in
1995, he had become something of a bad joke among thinking Russians
because he was associated with the privatization scheme that, in the
light of hindsight, did far more harm than good. Out of their
history, ordinary Russians had little understanding of "private" or
"property". He thought he was recommending the right thing and
providing a better future for Russia but things couldn't work out that
way.
Again, I think it can be useful to subvert by expanding imaginative
horizons, both
by sketching out alternatives and also by exposing what those in power are
doing more completely.
>
> (2) Discover other possible ways to deploy the resources of their
social
> surround,
> and project: If you did this [or that or this third thing or...]
> instead, here's
> what's likely to be your future....
What I've found is that people in bad social surrounds are able to
collectively find their own path to a more secure existence. In the
slums of Sao Paulo, fundamentalist religion provided a basis for
positive association, collectively taking on projects to enhance the
community and providing welfare to those in need. In rural Costa
Rica, the cooperative movement underpinned by the Catholic Church was
effective in providing for peoples' needs and holding communities
together. In both cases, the stability of the social surround was the
key factor.
You are saying that, in both these cases, the poor conceived their own
way to improve their
situation, and used, in the one case, fundamentalist religion, and in
the other
case, the Catholic Church, to leverage their self-originated visions for
bettering
their lives?
People felt secure in undertaking things because they had a sense of
continuity. This was not the case in Russia in 1995. Everything was
falling apart and nobody knew what to do. There was little capacity
for cohesion.
This certainly sounds reasonable. Isn't this a good reason for breaking
unions,
not giving pensions, etc., i.e., to help keep the workers from attaining
a level of security and cohesion on the basis of which to act
autonomously instead of struggling to survive in the
market"?
>
> Now, those alternative projections need to include such things as
> regulation, "the Scandanavian model", humanistic marxism, etc., not
> just the fantasies the people currently in political and corporate power
> want to have elaborated and implemented.
>
> Economists need, I would propose, to ferret out what the politicians
> and CxOs don't want anyone to see in what they are doing -- including
> not seeing it themselves, and then to project possibly appealing
> possibilities for
> human social life that persons can't imagine.
>
> I think that would be useful work, which would use all the knowledge
> persons can acquire in a graduate education, and challenge highly
> intelligent persons' minds and spirits....
>
> \brad mccormick
I think that the most important task is to understand before you
advise and recommend.
Definitely. Help others understand better so that they can
make more informed and responsible choices instead of
just following a new leader instead of the old leader.
As for the "wisdom" of the people, I often think of the film
"The Return of Martin Guerre".
Perhaps "we" would do well to get our own house better in order, and
be a model for the rest of the world by eliminating the renting of persons
here, like, a century and a half ago, we stopped the purchase of persons.
Now *there's* a job for economists: To figure out how to organize
a society of 300,000,000 individuals
in which all are not just formally but materially peers aka citizens
(i.e., where
not just all have the right to tweak voting machine levers periodically,
but in which none are bosses and none are employeds -- again,
something like the citizens of the classical Greek polis).
\brad mccormick
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Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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