From: Wim Nusselder (wim.nusselder@antenna.nl)
Date: Sat Aug 23 2003 - 15:56:58 BST
An attempt at applying a MoQ to economics:
Economics needs a new paradigm. The present one, serving economic growth and
those who benefit from it, has quit serving humanity. GNP is less correlated
with human well-being and humanity than it used to be. Being a stream
quantity and not a stock quantity (as 'growth' wrongly suggests), GNP can be
compared to a running tap. As long as thirst is humanity's main need and
want, a faster running tap correlates with more well-being and a decrease in
suffering that impedes human flourishing. This correlation becomes less when
some people, having quenched their thirst, use it to indulge other wants,
when a faster running tap becomes a measure of status and power and when
restricting others' access to one's tap induces ruinous conflicts.
I define economics as (our study of) the way in which we organize that
people get what they need (some more than that, other not at all). Or, less
morally biased: (our study of) the way in which we organize that people get
what they want.
The key concept is want...
THE ORIGIN OF WANTS AND WANT
Every system of ideas is founded in metaphysics. Or in denial of the need
for it, which amounts to an anti-metaphysics which has the same founding
function.
That is, if metaphysics is understood to mean our answers to three
questions:
1) How can we know? (epistemology)
2) What can we know? (ontology)
3) How can we know what we should do? (meta-ethics)
My answers are:
1) We can only know by experience.
2) Only Quality or value can be known experientially.
3) We can only know what we should do by attaching differential meaning to
alternative actions.
I experience, therefore I am. I act to give my existence meaning.
Experience is structured and patterned.
Structure enables us to distinguish different experiences. The
smallest entity of experience is a 'Quality event'. Quality
events differ at least temporally or spatially from each other.
We can distinguish myriads of other 'qualities' however that can
be present in a Quality event (or not).
Recognizing a pattern implies experiencing similarity (equality
of at least one quality) between Quality events that are
temporally or spatially different.
Patterns 'demand' explanation. It is an essential human urge to
ask 'why' a pattern exists and endures. Children learn early that
the 'normal' answer is that 'someone wants it'. Someone
apparently values creating, preserving or reproducing that
pattern. Experiencing a relatively stable (in time) or consistent
(in space) pattern of values implies experiencing the value of
creating, preserving or reproducing it.
Children also learn early to want things themselves. They are asked why they
do things. They learn to identify with a pattern of values in their
experience, with 'I', a pattern of creating, preserving and reproducing
other patterns. They learn to extrapolate the development of these latter
patterns into the future and that an accepted answer to 'why do you do
that?' describes a future state in such a development: something they want!
'I' is a collection of 'wants'.
Children learn that some wants are more acceptable to others than
other wants. Some kinds of wants somehow never come true whatever
they do ... apparently someone else does NOT want it...
They learn 'how to get what you want' and 'to want no more
than you can get' as two sides of the same coin.
We do things because we want things. We want things that give our
existence meaning.
Any possible action has a (superficial) instrumental meaning: it
is (or is not) a way to get something we want.
The metaphysical question 'how can we know what we should do?'
can thus be split into 'how can we know what we should want?' and
'how can we know how we can get what we want?'.
The first sub-question is still metaphysical. My answer is still
that we can only know what we should want by attaching meaning to
possible wants.
The second sub-question can be reduced to the non-metaphysical
question 'how can we get what we want?', IF we assume (as our
culture does) that we experience our wants independently from
what we can get. If that assumption is true, we can determine
experientially whether we have got what we wanted. Any
possible 'way to know how' to get what we want is then
falsifiable: just try it (that 'way to know how'), apply the
results (the knowledge) and if we don't get what we want, it
apparently was a wrong way.
We not only do things because we want things, however. Most of what we do is
involuntary. Usually we do not attach meaning to a want before doing
something that gets us at it. We do not answer prospectively 'why should I
do it' but retrospectively 'why did I do it'. We do not act, but we behave
and rationalize our behavior
afterwards.
Even our actions, the things we do do with prior motivation, are
more often than not motivated with avoiding things we don't want
rather than getting things we want.
Our inability to choose between all the things we could get, often makes us
choose a course of action that leaves open as many options as possible. Just
making money for instance, or saving for possible future wants what we don't
really want now. For money is a to make other people do what we want them to
do.
And last but not least, for lack of really wanting something
ourselves, we often take for guidance what other people have
got, supposing that if they (apparently) wanted it, it must
be worth wanting. Homo sapiens, 'the knowing human', has always
been a predominantly social animal, knowing relatively little
individually and drawing heavily on collective knowledge about
what we should want and how we should get it. Historically
the main 'way to know WHAT to want' AND 'way to know HOW to
get it' has simply been to copy other people's behavior and
motivating our actions with the help of whatever stories are
available about why people (or Gods ...) want things.
On the other hand even if we do something involuntary this
behavior is driven by differences in quality between behavioral
options. We often do experience quality in what we do after we
have done it even if we haven't consciously wanted it previously.
Reflexes (e.g. closing your eyes when something comes to close)
are an extreme example. Prospectively motivated actions are only
the other extreme with a lot of retrospectively rationalized
behavior in between.
Prospectively motivated action is the best guarantee that we get
what we want, but if we usually don't really know what we want
(apart from avoiding some things, leaving options open and
keeping up with the Joneses), why bother...
Most of what we do therefore forms patterns of values very
similar to the patterns we experience in the instinctive behavior
of related animals or patterns of values that are more distinctly
human but equally irrational.
Want, defined as unsatisfied wants, is a rather elusive phenomenon...
It is against this background that I want to develop my economic thinking
and my political economy, a system of ideas about how we organize that the
members of our society get what they want and how we should organize it.
Such a system of ideas should establish four things:
1) How can we know what people want?
2) What is the present economy, i.e. in what (organized) way do
people now get what they want?
3) What should the economy be?
4) How can we change (where necessary) the present economy?
[to be continued]
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