Ed wrote:
Harry Pollard:> Ed, > > Humanity gave up instincts for reason - which accounts, perhaps, for its > survival. Instinct provides the perfect biologic response to an event. > However, if things change, the instinct may kill rather than cure. > > So, imperfect reason, which is not tied to a "perfect response" has > advantages. > > Animals may flee from the fire. Man may flee - or turn toward the fire with > the intention of putting it out. And may thus become consumed by it? Moths do the same thing, though perhaps for different reasons.
Poor analogy, as you know.
I'm not sure I've ever mentioned this thinking, but I've long thought that we replace instincts with habits. The disadvantage of habits is that, unlike instincts, they do not provide a "perfect biological response" to a stimulus.In response to instincts versus reason, all I can do is refer to one of my long-ago mentors, a very wise man who taught me many things when I first arrived in Ottawa as a very young and very dumb economist, ages ago. He had several huge cats, and I recall him dumping cat-nip into one of his kitchen sinks, with the cats roiling around in it. He derived much of his wisdom about human behaviour from those cats. "See, Weick, see. Those cats are just like people, and people are like pussy-cats, 10% conscious and 90% unconscious, and it's the unconscious part you have to worry about!"
The enormous advantage is that, again unlike instincts, they can be changed when circumstances change. Animals which rely on instincts that no longer are valid in a changed situation are in trouble - and may become extinct. (We are good at changing situations.)
There are 6 billion of us, where there used to be a handful. (I've already mentioned what Desmond Morris told me - thereby denying my contention that reason is our advantage. He placed the credit for our superiority on our genitalia, which can be used practically any time - and are.)> As we have not only survived but prospered, I think we may say that > humankind reasons pretty well. How many people have been killed or enslaved because a few have prospered?
Killing and enslavement probably seemed right at the time. Both have been with us since the beginning. But, cooperation and trade have also been with us
I almost asked which you were for and which you were against. But, there is no need. I know which you favor.
Before a doctor treats his patient, he should know what a healthy patient looks like. He should know where he is trying to go with his nostrums.> One of the ways in which exciting Classical Political Economy is superior > to humdrum neo-Classical economics is that we don't make the mistake of > assuming that others behave as we do. In fact, we are wide open to > observing people's behavior - no matter what it happens to be. I disagree. Hand in hand with Classical Political Economy went exploitation of the very worst kind. Nineteenth Century empire builders didn't much care about human behaviour. What they cared most about was that the "inferior races" bow down and serve their imperialist interests. People like the Classicists "reasoned". Other people had strange practices and customs and were incapable of governing themselves. And I'm not only referring to Asia and Africa. It was during the flowering of Classical Economics that Ireland lost half its population to starvation, disease and emigration because the British authorities did not consider it rational to release food to them.
So, the Classical Political Economists first show a healthy economy, then the real life variations become clear and can be examined. Importantly, it then becomes possible to expose the problems and work out ways of treating them.
This "exposure of the problems", the neo-Classicals have been unable to do and almost invariably turn toward alleviating the effects. The well-worn analogy of placing a band-aid on a seeping sore is appropriate.
Look around the present economy and you will see band-aids upon band-aids, with the causes of problems buried ever deeper beneath the palliatives. (Yes, Keith, this does make things complicated.)
You bring in the Irish famine. Well, Ireland is a good example of the correctness of Classical thinking. Several years ago, John Ward did a series of articles on the 1846 report of Thomas Campbell Foster of the Middle Temple, barrister-at-law, whom "The Times" had appointed as its own "Commissioner to study the condition of the people of Ireland".
Foster took his job seriously and wrote down what he saw - though he betrayed the superiority to which you allude when viewing the Southern Irish (I took my first steps in Ireland a little to the South of Dublin. So, I came to Canada about a century after my ancestors did the same trip. Of course I came on the Queen Mary.)
We know the Irish subsisted on potatoes. Perhaps we aren't aware of how much this was so. This is Foster writing:
"I am informed on good authority that a labouring man requires eight pounds of potatoes per day when they form the sole diet. Taking an average family--a wife and four children, and allowing the wife six pounds and the children three pounds each of potatoes per day--we have a consumption of twenty- six pounds of potatoes per day, leaving the refuse and six pounds of potatoes per day for the pig. But a middling-sized pig will require, I am informed, about twenty pounds of potatoes per day to feed it."
One notes that, in similar fashion, the French ate very large amounts of bread as a principal portion of their diet.
When the potato crop failed, there was plenty to eat, but not for the starving Irish. Conditions were horrendous. The report of Quaker James H. Tuke to the Society of Friends details the horrors of the workhouses of Donegal.
It makes distressing reading. I won't cite from it.
One illustration - not from Tuke - described the room in one workhouse which had a hinged wall. When people died, they were pushed through the wall on to a ramp where they slid into a mass grave.
I said "plenty to eat". Remember, this is green and verdant Ireland. In 1845, the value of wheat, barley, oats, and flour exported to England was £4,968,165. This from Foster, who also calculated that livestock exports, sheep, butter, porter, and flax exports totalled between £ 4 million and £5 million. Needless to say, some £10 million was a huge sum 150 years ago.
I don't know the exchange rate, but perhaps $40 - $50 million worth of food exported at 1845 prices?
It perhaps gives a poke in the eye to the revisionist historians who suggest that the famine was an insoluble problem.
So, the colonialist English were taking the Irish food and starving the "brutish peasantry", eh? That's a good story and it fits in with your remark:
"What they cared most about was that the 'inferior races' bow down and serve their imperialist interests."
Except it wasn't true. It's one of those band-aids used to hide the real situation. It also saves the exertion required to think about it. (Remember, we try to avoid exertion - that's a Classical Assumption. Preconceptions come cheaper than thought.)
Who exported the food? Well, it was the Irish farmers who preferred exports to giving the food to the starving peasantry.
So, it was their fault? Well, not quite. The farmers rented their fields from the Irish landlords. If they didn't export, they would be unable to pay their rents and they would lose their farms. So, off went the produce to the ports.
Who owned the farms? Well, this is what Quaker James Tuke reported about Donegal:
"This county, like most others in Ireland, belongs to a few large proprietors, some of them, unhappily, absentees, who large domains sometimes extend over whole parishes and baronies, and contain populations of 8,000 to 12,000".
Remember, this isn't Texas. It's a little island just to the west of the UK.
So, do we blame the farmers? Or, the rents that non-payment would lead to eviction? You'll note the parallel with today. It is convenient to blame the "capitalists" for depriving labor of their sustenance - yet capitalists are between labor and the high cost of acquiring a place to do business.
We don't think of paying rent so much now. Instead, rent is capitalized into a sale-price, a hefty speculative premium is added - then we try to pay the required mortgage - whether for a house or a factory.
The mortgage brings in the banks as co-conspirators. We now can rail at the capitalists and the banks, while the real problem - high land costs is missed entirely.
One item of cheerful interest about the Irish famine. The American Choctaw Nation (I don't know which group) sent $170 to Ireland to help the starving. A gleam of light in the darkness!
> When someone does something that you perceive to be irrational, it may >well be from your point of view, but probably isn't from his. Amen! We are rational. They are not, so we have to be rational for them. > There again, if people are not very good at being rational, there chance of > surviving may not be so good - or, as the biologists say - their breeding > time is lessened. Hence the less rational among us tend to disappear. Throughout history, many people were not rational in the sense required by their imperializer or conquerors. So you made them rational and thus of service to the "common good" of the latter. Nineteenth Century Americans and Canadians exterminated the buffalo and almost exterminated the plains Indians because it was rational to convert the plains to agriculture. Previously, millions of Mexican and Peruvian Indians died because it was rational to use them as slave labour on the economiendas or in the mines.
It's called Monday Morning Quarter backing.
> So, I would think the this Basic Assumption of the neo-Classicals is true. Rationality? Humbug!
Until this moment, you seemed quite rational. Harry ****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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