Effort to save humankind from impending catastrophe
from Asad Zaman and RWER issue 85
The methodology and ideology of modern economics are built into the frameworks of educational methods, and absorbed by students without any explicit discussion. In particular, the logical positivist philosophy is a deadly poison which I ingested during my Ph.D. training at the Economics Department in Stanford in the late 1970s. It took me years and years to undo these effects. Positivism uses clever arguments to make you deny what you feel in your bones to be true, and make you believe what your heart says must be false – for example our supposed knowledge of subjective probabilities of unknown events.
The roots of the problem go back to the famous Cartesian argument that “I think therefore I am”. Although it is clever piece of logic, it has a deadly effect. I know that I am alive because I can feel the blood flowing in my veins, the tingling of my skin, and a thousand other bodily sensations. “I feel therefore I am”. Denying this experience as a valid source of knowledge reduces me to a brain floating in a vat, which is exactly what logical positivism entails. In fact, despite Descartes, it is impossible to reason our way to certainty. We can only create an illusion of certainty. Descartes’ argument is deeply flawed, and illustrates the weakness of human reason. When we formulate the concept of “I”, isn’t existence automatically part of this? Did I not exist when I was a baby, and was unable to formulate these thoughts? Do I blink out of existence when I go to sleep? If someone has a hard time grasping philosophical concepts, is his existence thereby of a lesser quality? This and many other difficulties make this argument incoherent.
Modern economics is much like this. It starts by making assumptions which are dramatically in conflict with everything we know about human behavior (and firm behavior) and applies mathematical reasoning to situations where it cannot be applied, quantifying the unquantifiable and coming to completely absurd and ridiculous conclusions. Nonetheless, speaking from personal experience, the brainwashing is powerful and effective. It is a slow and painful process to undo. I have often thought about launching a “Positivists Anonymous” club, to help others attempting the same transition, of unlearning positivism.
Based on my own experiences and difficulties in unlearning, and also the experiences of Keynes and many others who have unsuccessfully battered the gates of the citadel of neoclassical economics, I have come to the conclusion that this is a hopeless task. We do not expect to be able to convert the economists. This revolution will not be televised. Our only hope is to work on an external revolution – take the message to outsiders, not to economists. [Recent surveys show that despite the collapse and rejection of positivism in philosophy, economists continue to think in positivist terms.] Even among non-economists, the collateral damage done by positivism and by neo-liberal thinking, is immense. This article is a preliminary examination of the difficulties in making a paradigm shift; that is, I will not discuss the major second step of what an alternative paradigm could be, and how we could create and promote it. Awareness of these difficulties is necessary for those who attempt to launch a revolution, since we need to create converts to a new paradigm. Economists are hopeless as a target audience, but even non-economists will be tough nuts to crack if our message is radical. This is because economic frameworks have become widely accepted – witness the popularity of Freakonomics. Nonetheless, it seems necessary to make the effort to save humankind from impending catastrophe, not just on the environmental front, but on many others as well. read more
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—— Ugarteche, Puyana and Madi ——
Gerson Lima / Maria Alejandra Madi
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
————— Michael Hudson ————–
Maria Alejandra Madi / Jack Reardon
————- Edward Fullbrook ————-
—————— Steve Keen —————–
————— Richard Smith —————
————– Gustavo Marques————
– Victor Beker and Beniamino Moro –
————– Lars Pålsson Syll ————-
—————– Stuart Birks —————-
Edward Fullbrook and Jamie Morgan
———— Armando Ochangco ———-
Shimshon Bichler / Jonathan Nitzan
————— Mauro Gallegati ————–
————— Herman Daly —————-
————— Asad Zaman —————
—————– C. T. Kurien —————
————— Robert Locke —————-
Real-World Economics Review Blog 
I could have written the first paragraph, word for word, substituting “U.C. Berkeley” for “Stanford”. The entire article is excellent. Thanks, Asad.
One more comment as I reflect on the end of Asad’s essay. One of my senior hobbies concerns what we call “community-based ecological forest practices”, called by some in the profession “ecological forest management”. As I have reviewed the degree to which this laudable philosophy has penetrated the profession, advocated by such luminaries as Jerry Franklin and Jim Furnish, I conclude that substantive, long-term change will only come from education beginning in elementary school. Perhaps the same is true for economics. This will take many generations to accomplish, if it is possible at all in a corporate capitalist plutocracy.
Thank you for this, Prof. Zaman. I agree (and have thought since about 1985) that a new paradigm is needed for economics. I worked for a number of years developing a foundation for one but have found it almost impossible, even in this forum, to raise any interest. I have not been able even to get an argument about it started here! So yes, this is a challenging project, but I don’t think we need fo analyze the difficulties first. I advocate for getting out a simple and readily understood idea as a a starting point, something that every non-economist is at least likely to accept, and build from there. I was lucky, I guess, in that I did not study economics as an undergraduate and therefore was never indoctrinated into the prevailing ideology. I studied philosophy and mathematics and then spent ten years working in various manual trades before ever taking a course in economics. That happened in graduate school and my immediate reaction was that most of the fundamental assumptions of conventional economics are false and that economics builds on these shaky premises using bad logic. My own idea for a new foundation for a true and useful economics has only three elements. First, a definition of what the economy is; second, the idea that there is enough to go around; and third, that every person born on Earth has an equal and inalienable right to a life-sustaining share of all those things necessary for a healthy, secure, and productive life. If anyone is interested in discussing this, or even arguing against it, I am available. I further think that whatever the new economics is, it should be possible to incorporate into school curricula starting a young age so people finish high school with a sound understanding of what the economy is for and how it is inextricably linked to public policy, an area over which ordinary people should be able to exert some influence.
Nice article, but I am always a little puzzled by pieces which call for a paradigm change in economics, and cite the quantum revolution as a model, but fail to join the dots. For example, as an alternative to basing models on individual utility-maximization, we can model them in terms of a probabilistic propensity which is subject to effects such as uncertainty, interference and entanglement. Doing so in a consistent way requires a shift from measuring probability using a 1-norm (classical probability) to a 2-norm (as in quantum mechanics). While the approach will be unfamiliar to classically-trained social scientists, it still seems strange that these mathematical tools have been around for over a century, but are only now being considered in other areas such as psychology, political science and economics, even when the classical mechanistic paradigm has obviously failed (see https://u.osu.edu/quantumbootcamp/). There are many reasons for this reluctance to apply quantum ideas and methods to other fields, but a main one might be the educational training discussed in the article, which has taught economists to see everything through a classical lens.
Third comment: reading something that contains this relevant quote from Goethe: “Man himself, inasmuch as he makes use of his healthy senses, is the greatest and most exact physical apparatus; and that is just the greatest evil of modern physics that one has, as it were, detached the experiment from man and wishes to gain knowledge of nature merely through that which artificial instruments show.” I will leave it to others to put [sic] around the gender pronouns.
All these truths coming out from Prof Asad Zeman and all the Comments so far . BRAVO !
I said all this in my “Paradigms in Progress : Life Beyond Economics” ,(1991) and in my even earlier ” Creating Alternative Futures : The End of Economics “(1978) and “The Politics of the Solar Age ” (1981) as a cabinet-level science advisor to the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) , which now is considered by Biden to be rebooted !
I summarized my case against economics in “Mapping the Global Transition to the Solar Age:From Economism to Earth Systems Science” , Foreword by NASA Chief Scientist D. Bushnell , London, (2014) now a free 56 page download at ethicalmarkets.com . see also my current articles ” Time To De-Throne Economics” and : Valuing Love Economies” in Wall Street International magazine http://www.wsimag.com
Perhaps the paradigm shift (picture) is to “look” at money without seeing a generator of wealth?
In economic models, we see money as a store of value, a unit of account, a means of transferring value, and a wealth generator. Let us stop making it a wealth generator by eliminating interest and its derivatives from the monetisation of assets – like dividends and commissions. Instead, give investment returns by giving more goods and services (or the money from those sales) to those who invest, rather than giving more money with or without the sales. When we do this, we save the cost of money, and that means we produce the same amount of goods and services, but we transfer less money, and that – believe it or not – is a real saving. (which is why Sales and discounts are so popular).
Our models become computational models like the highly successful weather forecasting simulation models. The computational models still use the traditional economic formula “in the small” to generate the next state. Many simulation runs handle the random fluctuations. We use climate modelling for long-term forecasts where the input parameters change, and we run the same simulations.
Money is an incredible invention, but one thing it doesn’t do is spontaneously create more money with time.
In response to Asad , econoclast, Dr. Hazel Henderson, Although i am not an academic for some years i have been trying to make this very point in my comments. From my perspective and the observation that economists ways of thinking will not change until they are forced to change. Therefore from my observations it seems that change will not happen until the education system changes and that has to include taking the conversation to the the whole community. Thus i am heartened to see that the mentioned people have the same idea. Further more i back up this observation from the conversations i have had from many people from all walks of life Ted
Is it not the forceful one point of view from an investors perspective that oppresses us all and it is that which is being told as the only possible way there is and ever was and nothing else has ever worked as perfect as this. It is the single most powerful point of view, the one key element in neoliberal societies which is the sole reason of existence allowed for everything.
In particular, the logical positivist philosophy is a deadly poison which I ingested during my Ph.D. training at the Economics Department in Stanford in the late 1970s. It took me years and years to undo these effects.
If you had gotten your Ph.D in history, you would have avoided this indoctrination. David Landes and others, including myself, were opposinng. I wrote you about this.. Not acknowledged
All these comments are illuminating and we do need to hurry. My personal escape from neocolonial economic propaganda came by entering graduate study of economics at U.C. Santa Barbara, after studying math and sciences. Dr. Jerry Karcz was my advisor.
Now we are on the verge of extinction and I have new fiction to share.
Fiction lets us enter described reality where ideas like food sovereignty and real autonomous democracy are already functioning background. A dollop of fantasy helps regular the new system.
Please enjoy my short story at https://www.constituentassembly.org/Chapters/Book-1-2021-with-cover.pdf
This story is shared with you because Assad wrote what he wrote and I was tricked by an old retired astrophysicist. My new short story was online in spanish and a friend wanted to see an english paperback version, Here’s what he wrote…
Garrett Connelly is a philosopher of Democracy. He seeks solutions to the problems of democratic applications. Instead of Zuckerberg’s “Move fast and break things,” Garrett’s philosophy might be “Move fast and make things.”
In his book Pacifica he invents a mind melding machine that manages to bring together multiple beings, both human and nonhuman in a distant future. Then in an experiment in current day reality he designed a program to test an algorithm approximating the future hypothetical system. His latest endeavor deals with the problem of Gerrymandering. Que Sera Sera is a short story that uses the idea of Puerto Rican independence as a background to an innovative project organized and run by junior high school students. The students hold a contest to design a computer program that will optimize redistricting by constructing boundary lines for voting districts within a region based on minimizing the total length of such lines while keeping population numbers equal within districts. The story introduces a host of interesting characters and their surprising interactions.
I think readers would like to see more of the story. — Ted Scott
en español https://www.constituentassembly.org/Chapters/Story-2021/ch1-2121.es.html
Partially done in Portuguese https://www.constituentassembly.org/Chapters/Story-2021/ch1-2121.pt.html
In my book I point out that old concepts are extremely hard to think outside of, and the efficacy of genuinely new ones just as hard to perceive. The power of new paradigm concepts is both their simplicity and efficacy. So orthodoxy is not the only thing to overcome. It’s also mindset as in science only vs wisdom, which being the integrative impulse requires both knowledge-data and philosophy
The important thing to remember is that paradigm concepts change entire patterns, not just a policy idea or other reform. Thus the emphasis must be a focus on both the operant problem that will effect change, and on the level of analysis, i.e. the pattern. The willingness and ability to commit intellectual integrativeness, especially of apparent opposites is also key.
The truth is no theory is going to resolve the deeply rooted problems of modern economies (monetary scarcity and yet a tendency toward destabilizing asset inflation)…unless we have a monetary and financial paradigm change. Any legitimate insights will simply end up being “epicycles”.
Another idea we need to re-examine is the the whole concept of a free economy. Even under the best of circumstances the present economy is not free and certainly is not free flowing. It is in alternate states of financially goosed and strangled chaos because of the current paradigm of Debt Only, and because it has no effective rational and ethical restraints on economic agents, especially the financial ones.
Thanks for the entire article, Asad, hoping others followed the link to “read more” and hence this bit: about why we see EITHER the old lady OR the young one in your gestalt example.
“Even though the point is almost trivial, it is of vital importance for what follows, so let me
amplify and explain further. When a baby is born into the world, his eyes and ears are
assaulted by a rich range of sensory impressions, which make no sense and have no
meaning. Exactly the same sensory impressions become very meaningful and clear as
learning takes place, which allows him to parse sounds, and to process visual data in images
of three dimensional objects. Obviously, our internal processing equipment is of central
importance in the process of assembling observations into a three dimensional image of the
world around us.”
Deshoebox says he took a course in economics in graduate school “and my immediate reaction was that most of the fundamental assumptions of conventional economics are false and that economics builds on these shaky premises using bad logic. My own idea for a new foundation for a true and useful economics has only three elements. First, a definition of what the economy is; second, the idea that there is enough to go around; and third, that every person born on Earth has an equal and inalienable right to a life-sustaining share of all those things necessary for a healthy, secure, and productive life”.
I am indeed “interested in discussing this”. I don’t disagree with the “three elements” but see these (like Kevin and Craig’s conclusions) as ideal outcomes, with Asad’s “internal processing equipment” providing the logical foundations. Working with family differences and computer logic while studying the physiology of motivation during management studies, I eventually realised the brain has not three but four types of logic, mastered by babies in the order of feeling discomfort, making movements, mastering language and using language to trigger memory, initiate actions and make considered judgements. We only need three of these to function effectively, but we differ in which three. My wife has an exceptionally good visual memory and learns by doing what she is told, whereas I have a poor verbal one and have to work out the meaning of words. So I have had to learn the meaning of truth and falsehood in the logical use of words, whereas she became accustomed to assume what she is told is true.
I found that ‘true’ and ‘false’ are logic words, representing judgments on propositions that an object inherits family characteristics: that it is a member of a defined class, part of a whole, or – as with deshoebox’s “three elements” – the effect of a defined cause. The problem of defining the cause is that the further back we go in history towards the childhood of mankind, the less the reality has already been defined, until one is left putting words in the mouths of not yet existing ancestors to judge for themselves whether the human family had a cause or was just found under a gooseberry bush, needing to explore logic to find ways of developing the argument from that. [Keynes’ non-linear geometry and Kuhn’s paradigmatic analogies].
So how to proceed? (I agree with Garrett that this is an issue of considerably urgency). I had been inoculated against what Robert found to be the “deadly poison” of Logical Positivism. In the long term (if there is to be one) I agree with deshoebox and Ted inasmuch as Catholics long ago worked out that the way reach ordinary people is through the schooling system, i.e. via the primary schools. On my recent travels I picked up a book where these arguments are rehearsed in depth by the retired Labour politician, Roy Hattersley (a professed atheist) on “The Christians: The Church and its People in Britain and Ireland, from the Reformation to the Present Day” (2017, Vintage Books), discussing rapid divisions even within the Christian family which I am attributing on the one hand to conflicts of personality type and on the other to the introduction of printed books with much the same effect as information technology: the ability to widely disseminate lies and the flat-earth version of Descartes’ coordinate geometry. [This last agreeing with Keynes and David above, about geometry and quantum mechanics].
As I see it the personality type problem leads even Hattersley to some misunderstanding of those he criticises, though he recognises it in a conflict even between the Catholic converts Manning and Newman. It was encouraging, though, to find in his “Introduction” that “During the six centuries from the Reformation to the present day, the Catholics of Great Britain and Ireland were far more sinned against than sinning”. As many of us are sinners, that was kind!
Apologies, Asad, for not seeing your formatting.