ravi wrote: > The article goes on to refer to a "paradox" and its "resolution", both of > which I have found puzzling for a long time. > > The supposed paradox is that human beings choose "irrational" behaviour > i.e., behaviour that does not maximise benefit to self.
"Irrational" behavior also involves not discounting the future the way economists assume people do. And more. Economists use the irrational assumption that our preferences are fixed, immune to social influences. If "tastes" are endogenous (determined by the economy and the rest of the society) then a lot of economic theorizing -- especially normative stuff -- goes out the window. It's possible that we don't want what we buy in the market as much as we rationalize what's available in the market as being something we want (as in the theory of cognitive dissonance from social psychology). > This is a "paradox" only because narrow self-interest is defined as > "rational" [corrected]. > > The supposed "resolution" of this is that studying MRIs demonstrates the > chemical reward system wired in the brain that generates this behaviour. > > This to me is not a resolution of a paradox, but a mechanistic explanation > of its operation. There's a real problem with the notion of economic "rationality": it's either tautological or wrong. If we defined "rational" behavior as narrow self-interest, then it does not fit with empirical data. On the other hand, if we introduce "fellow feeling" (or something like that) into a person's objective function, then that opens the model up for saying "what people want is what people want" (as in "revealed preferences"). (BTW, the model isn't really tautological, because it can't deal with the notion that we suffer from conflicting emotions & goals (ego vs. id vs. super-ego, etc.)) I think if economists are trying to explain human behavior using MRIs, PET scans, etc., they should change their approach. Rather than starting with homo economicus, they should start with neuroeconomic results and then try to summarize its conclusions with a model. > The mathematician (and populariser) Morris Kline once pointed out that > sometime in the 19th century, science (and math) shifted from explanation to [mathematical] description. A description, IMHO, is not an explanation. Right. in economics, there's this bizarre conflation of "models" (mathematical descriptions) with "theories" (intuitive understanding of causative links, etc.) These are hardly the same. > The "paradox" however can be resolved, it seems to me, without resort to the > extreme reductionism of studying chemical activity in the brain. Rather, a > broader idea of self-interest (and accompanying game theoretical models) > might demonstrate that a person does benefit from both selfless behaviour > and participating in a system of morals. There are a bunch of "evolutionary game theory" stories about this. Erstwhile pen-l contributor Gil Skillman presented a paper on this stuff at the last Allied Social Sciences Associations meetings. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
