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.
