re: What is wrong with the mainstream economics?

[Eric Nilsson]

Jks wrote,   >You need a common scale of some sort, some ranking mechanism. Otherwise you can't decide which of two outcomes is more efficient or if they're indifferent.     This is of course right _if_ you explicitly model how someone decides whether to chose between the vector [embalmed Bentham, war in Iraq, and 2 poems] and the vector [no embalmed Bentham, no war in Iraq, and 3 games of pushpin].   But the beauty (sic) of high NC theory is that they do NOT model this explicitly. They only say, “we don’t know what is going on in people’s heads but they do make a choice of one of these two vectors and observations of this choice is what stands behind the preference orderings we use for individuals.” As far as the implications of all of this for an internal ranking mechanism within people, the NC’s just say, “That’s not our issue and we don’t care what goes on within people. The choice itself takes place within a black box we have no interest in investigating. As far as the claim of incommensurability of likes and dislikes, all we can say is that people _do_ make decisions between things that on the surface are incommensurable but this must imply that people can, and do, compare these things that others think are incommensurable. How else do people make the choices that they obviously make?”   They have a good point on this last claim: some meta-metric might exist that allows weighting of various apparently incommensurable likes and dislikes. But, hey, if Martha N says this ain’t possible I’ll have to rethink all of this.   Eric .