|
Harry, I pointed out many exceptions which you
ignored. Just say that Man's desire for eternal pain is
infinite. Man's desire for death is infinite.
Liebestod? John Waters and his movies?
Sounds pretty kinky to me this aphorism of yours. Those who
believed that Man's desires were infinite and that it was OK went on the largest
sexual binge in history in the baths of New York and the
world. Should man's desires be infinite?
Their binge ended in a plague.
Or maybe we could say that the desires of a child
seem infinite but are limited by their experience to food clothing
and shelter. And then they go passive and want
it with the least effort. The language of a child is
concrete while the language of the adult is abstract. You must prove
which stance you are speaking from in order to make your meaning
clear. But I must say, dealing with the whole list seems like
you are Bruce Lee and the rest of us are the villains. You have a
lot of guts inside your simplicity. But you don't convince me in
spite of your tenacity. The most common state of humanity is
boredom. I have no doubt that some of the systems that you mentioned
worked and I will give you that George made it work, although I have to take
your word for it. But why did it change? No system
works that doesn't cover all of the bases and lasts more than a few years before
it is thrown out.
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2002 11:36
PM
Subject: RE: FWk: Re: Double-stranded
Economics
Arthur,
Jolly good, Arthur!
They are
axioms - self evident truths. That's why no-one can find an
exception.
You don't have to prove a self-evident truth. After all -
it's self-evident.
More seriously, it is almost vital to have
self-evident truths as assumptions, then as Russel said, use as few as
possible ("Two are better than sixteen.") At least, I suppose you should with
something incontrovertible (perhaps the same thing).
After all, you
intend to build a network of reasonable logic on this base.
It had
better be right.
I fear the Neos replaced the careful thinking of the
Classicals with an edifice resting on air. As one looks through what is
considered important in a current textbook, one must be struck by
inconsequentiality of it all.
We must start thinking of economics as a
real science and I can't see much hope of that unless we look back to before
the rot began.
Now this a hard thing to say to a professional
economist, who has learned all kinds of useful skills (even though Ed never
did get to try out his indifference curves). Also, economists seem to be
the best of the crop. Maybe they have to be to draw out the worthwhile from
the complications.
"Publish or Perish" ensures that a veritable
blizzard of paper sweeps through academia - much of it exposing such important
things as imperfect competition (who said it was perfect?) Joan Robinson made
a career out of this nonsense.
But, what about the perpetual poor who
grace our society?
And a bit above the polloi are a middle class
desperately trying to keep the perks of the somewhat well-paid professionals -
and they do so by working umpteen hours to say ahead of the
mortgage.
And the rich? Henry George suggested that when poverty exists
in a society, riches are not enough. You keep struggling to get more because
over your shoulder you can see the leering face of poverty - a poverty that
may catch you.
Economists don't really appear to do a very good job,
do
they?
Harry
___________________________________________
Arthur
wrote:
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
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
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike,
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
******************************
Harry Pollard
Henry George School of LA
Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042
Tel: (818) 352-4141
Fax: (818) 353-2242
*******************************
|
