On Sat, May 30, 2009, Sandwichman wrote:
> Mirable dictu! So it turns out that you and I actually agree, Jim. What you
disagree with is a distortion of my position ("as Tom seems to do").
You reject economic growth as a normative concept. I reject economic
growth as a normative concept. You agree with my position that
rejecting economic growth as a useful concept only makes sense if
there is an alternative concept to do the work previously done
(however badly) by the concept of economic growth.<
For what it's worth, this is what I have been saying for a long, long
time: I reject economic growth as a normative concept. I don't
understand why this has been missed. (The only normative content is
that if real GDP does not rise sufficiently (or if it falls), all else
equal the unemployment rate rises, by all standard measures.)
FWIW2, when I use such phrases as "as Tom seems to do," I mean it
literally: I use such phrases because I am unable to read people's
minds simply from their prose. I do not pretend to be able to
represent anyone's positions accurately, except my own. (Somehow
people still misunderstand what I write. My poor prose!)
> Where we may differ is that I maintain there is indeed such an alternative
but that it makes no sense to stipulate that the alternative can only
be justified *from the perspective of economic growth as a normative
concept*.
In other words, the alternative stands on its own feet. It is in no
way subordinate to the concept of economic growth or its constituent
parts. That
would be like having to justify the Copernican system *in terms of* the
Ptolemaic one. Both impossible and absurd. So although economic growth
may have been a useful but flawed concept for describing some aspects
of the world, it is *not* a useful concept for evaluating the
suitability of a replacement. On the contrary, it is a toxic concept
for the latter purpose.<
Aha! again we agree. We agree that "economic growth" (presumably
measured using real GDP) may have been "a useful but flawed concept
for describing some aspects of the world," except that I think it is
_still_ useful.
I'd bet, for example, that there's a strong correlation between real
GDP growth and environmental degradation, perhaps with some other
explanatory variables thrown in. If so, if one wants to understand the
source of environmental degradation, one's knowledge of the world is
increased, perhaps marginally. (This kind of exercise should _never_
be one's sole source of knowledge.) In turn, it gives us more power to
change things, again perhaps to only a marginal extent.
(Can environmental degradation be quantified? We can try. We can use
such a measure until a better one comes along. In any event, having
some sort of measure usually _adds to_ our other knowledge rather than
subtracting from it.)
> ... For example, nowhere in my last message did I say anything about
> literary critics as a group being more ecologically aware than economists. I
> wrote only about Kenneth Burke's prescience.<
You seemed to be arguing that literary criticism is a major force --
perhaps superior to economics -- for an ecological perspective. And
since pen-l's main purpose is discussion, I discussed. In any event,
whenever I write on pen-l, I do _not_ simply address the person whose
missive I'm responding to. I address the larger pen-l audience.
As I said somewhere (on or off-list, I forget), I think that the major
contribution of "lit crit" to ecological economics is that any model
-- or even any theory -- that purports to say anything about the world
outside of our brains is in effect a metaphor. This applies outside of
economics, for example, to the efforts by the folks that Tom calls
"lit critters" to describe the world. Thinking and empirical
description cannot be done without metaphors (or other kinds of
analogies and abstraction).
> By the way, for the record your parenthetical remark was in an on-list
> message.
you are right, sir.
raghu writes:
> ... There is no shortage of concepts to replace the growth mania. Some of
> them are even fashionable e.g. sustainability. Sustainability is a very
> well-defined and meaningful concept and if it is more complex than GDP, that
> is only a virtue.<
I don't see why sustainability and "economic growth" should be seen as
only substitutes, so we have no choice but to choose one over the
other.[*] They can be complementary instead.
For example, if the statistical exercise sketched above finds that Y
amounts of real GDP growth leads to X amount of environmental
degradation, then we can see _part_ of the notion of sustainability as
saying that we need to have Y growth of real GDP equal to the level
that produces _zero_ environmental degradation. Of course, a lot of
other empirical knowledge is required. No single source of information
should be relied on (unless we have no choice).
> Isn't it a mistake to insist that the concept to replace economic growth
> needs to be quantifiable as a single number that increases in time?<
If forced to substitute one concept for another, it's quite possible
to substitute a non-rising number for real GDP growth. It may not be
a single number, either. It might be a vector of numbers -- or
qualitative data, for that matter. Again, I doubt that one single
measure or indicator can be used.
In response, Tom writes:
>That's what I was saying (pretty much). There is no shortage of concepts to
>replace growth. I would, however, impose a further stipulation: the
>replacement should be "at least as parsimonious as" the idea of growth, which
>puts sustainability on somewhat shaky ground.
> The rule of parsimony does not imply that an alternative to growth needs to
> be "quantifiable as a single number that increases in time." For one thing,
> GDP only qualifies as a measure of economic growth through a process of
> circular definition. <
Aha! Again we agree! We seem to agree that real GDP can only be used
to calculate "economic growth" when we define the latter in terms of
real GDP. It does not purport to measure improvements in human
welfare, as I have said before, contrary to the assumptions made by
Chicago schoolmen (and -women) and their ilk. Rises in GDP only
measure increases in the exchange-value corresponding to production of
products sold through the market. It misses, as I've said before,
such important phenomena as external costs and benefits.
> Furthermore, if we are to accept Marx's argument, the process of monetization
> of transactions masks the underlying social domination. ...<
Again we agree! Real GDP can "grow" simply by converting non-commodity
relationships between people into commodity relationships. This is
usually seen as a problem with reference to poor countries, but in the
age of neoliberalism, it's a serious problem in the rich ones too.
It's another aspect of the deviation between exchange-value and
use-value.
> A brief detour into the history of statistics shows a unmistakable
> preoccupation with the quantification of deviance, disease and death: crime,
> suicide, epidemics, unemployment etc. What if the precondition of statistical
> quantification is either that the object of quantification expresses some
> form of social dis-ease (either its presence or absence) or, alternatively,
> it conceals an uncomfortable truth, such as the enforced subordination of
> labour to capital? Could there then be an unambiguous and *objective* index
> of health, well-being or happiness (with *objective* being the key
> constraint). I'm not absolutely sure the answer is "no", but there certainly
> is no easy and readily available answer.<
yes. I think it's important to separate the common social-scientistic
effort to ignore all non-quantifiable data (the "preoccupation" that
Tom refers to) from the use of quantified data for _some_ purposes
(while being conscious of their limitations).
BTW, I doubt that there can ever be "an unambiguous and *objective*
index of health, well-being or happiness." All we can get is more
knowledge on the subject than we had before (though perhaps only a
marginal amount more).
For example, there's this graph in a 2006 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC
PERSPECTIVES article by Daniel Kahneman and Alan Krueger. It refers to
the data showing that in China between 1994 and 2005, average real
income (measured as part of the National Income and Product Accounts)
rose by 250 percent. During the same time period, the graph shows
that subjective well-being (as measured by the percent of people
saying that they were "satisfied" with the way their lives were going)
_fell_ from about 78 about about 53 to percent, while the percent
saying that they were "dissatisfied" roughly doubled, from about 20 to
about 40 percent. These kinds of data, as I've said before, indicate
that even though real GDP numbers do measure something important, they
hardly capture the human condition and can be hiding a contradictory
phenomenon.
Note: this does not say that individual satisfaction _actually_ fell
or that dissatisfaction _actually_ rose. We can't say anything close
to that without more information. For example, how many strikes were
there, despite the government's antagonism toward labor unions? I'd
bet that these data would be roughly consonant with the "happiness"
numbers.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
[*] I've never understood the common tendency -- among academics but
in a lot of other walks of life -- to see theories, concepts, and the
like that refer to similar phenomena as always being in competition
with each other.
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