from Asad Zaman
In the previous post (Three Types of Models 5), we discussed three types of models. The first type is based purely on patterns in observations, and does not attempt to go beyond what can be seen. This is an “observational” or Baconian model. The second type attempt to look through the surface and discover the hidden structures of reality which generate the observations we see. The best approach to this type of models has been developed by Roy Bhaskar, so we can call it a critical realist model or a Bhaskarian model. The third type of model creates depth and structures in our minds which create the patterns we see in the observations. The question whether our mental structures match reality is considered irrelevant. These may be called Kantian, or mental models. The models of modern Economics are largely Kantian, while Econometric models are largely Baconian. The key defect of both of these approaches is that they GIVE UP on the idea of finding the truth. Max Weber’s ideas about methodology played an important role in this abandonment of the search for truth, but it would take us too far away from our current concerns to discuss this in any detail. Briefly, Weber thought that heterogeneity of human motives made “explanation” of social realities via “truth” impossibly complex. Instead, he argued that we should settle for a weaker concept based on “ideal-types” – deliberately over-simplified models of behavior which create a match to observed aggregated patterns of outcomes. We now discuss the disastrous consequences of this abandonment of truth in greater detail.
There is a famous article of Milton Friedman on methodology in economic theory, which recommends the abandonment of truth: read more
from Blair Fix
Yesterday I was reminded of what got me interested in economics. I’ll preface this by saying that I make my living as a substitute teacher in Toronto. It’s not glamorous, but it pays the bills. It gives me time to do research from outside academia.
When I’m in high school classrooms, I always browse the posters on the wall. It’s funny what you see. You find things (both good and bad) that you’d never see in institutions of ‘higher learning’. It’s a daily source of amusement for me.
Yesterday, while browsing the posters on a classroom wall, I came across a copy of the ‘Barefoot Economics Manifesto’. I was delighted to rediscover this document, and surprised that it was sitting quietly in an otherwise normal classroom.
If you don’t know, the ‘Barefoot Economics Manifesto’ was a clarion call to reject neoclassical economics. I’m not sure when it was first published, but it seems to have come from Adbusters. (I can’t find the original document. If you know more about it, leave a comment.)
The manifesto goes by several names. Some call it the The True Cost Economics Manifesto. Others call it the Kick It Over Manifesto. Regardless of what you call it, here’s what the manifesto says: Read more…
We are shocked and horrified to learn of the terrible attack on the Jawaharlal Nehru University on the evening on 5 January 202, by a group of armed goons who targeted a peaceful gathering of teachers and students. We note that this terrible event comes in the wake of a prolonged struggle by the students against a fee hike that would force nearly half of them to abandon their studies, and after an even longer series of protests by the faculty and students of JNU against the many arbitrary and illegal actions of the JNU Vice Chancellor over nearly three years. We are extremely concerned at the apparent failure of the Delhi Police (which is directly under the Home Ministry) to identify the perpetrators despite much photographic and video evidence, to register the complaints made by faculty and students about the attack, and the malicious attempt to pin the blame for the attack on some of the victims.
It is clear to us that a Vice Chancellor who exposes his faculty and students to such terror and who is guilty of many other actions undermining the academic and other functioning of the University, cannot remain in office. As academics from universities across the world, we join those who demand that the JNU Vice Chancellor should be removes forthwith, as he has lost all national and international legitimacy.
Signatories: Read more…
Source: World Inequality Database
from Blair Fix
I recently read David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. If you’re not familiar, David Graeber is the anthropologist who wrote Debt: The First 5000 Years, a seminal book on the history of money and credit.
In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber takes aim at pointless work. Graeber describes a bullshit job as:
a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
Bullshit Jobs is based largely around testimonials from people who feel that they have bullshit jobs. The testimonials are often hilarious and sometimes touching. I recommend reading the book for the testimonials alone. Graeber’s theory is icing on the cake.
One of the things that amused me in the book was the testimonial from Warren, a substitute teacher:
Warren: I work as a substitute teacher in a public school district in Connecticut. My job just involves taking attendance and making sure the students stay on task with whatever individual work they have. Teachers rarely if ever actually leave instructions for teaching. I don’t mind the job, however, since it allows me lots of free time for reading and studying Chinese, and I occasionally have interesting conversations with students. Perhaps my job could be eliminated in some way, but for now I’m quite happy.
This amused me because I currently work as a substitute teacher in a public school district in Toronto. Yes, I’m a PhD graduate who earns a living substitute teaching. Like Warren, I enjoy the job for the free time it affords. I have lots of time to do research (and write this blog).
For his part, Graeber isn’t sure that substitute teaching is a bullshit job (by his definition). If it is, it’s one of the best ones: Read more…
from C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
Anyone who has been following the upsurge of protests across the country in the wake of the CAA-NRC moves of the government would have been impressed and inspired by the role played by young women. They have been forthright and fearless in articulating their concerns and demands, even in the face of overt repression by the state, and there is no doubt that they provide much hope for the future of the country.
These young women have already displayed much courage and resilience—but unfortunately these qualities are likely to become even more necessary, because in addition to Indian politics and society failing them, the economy also deals them a terrible hand. Many of the multidimensional problems Indian women have to deal with (like violence, lack of autonomy, lack of assets, restricted mobility) are interlinked, but the very poor employment generation and the associated lack of productive income opportunities has become an underlying context that particularly affects young women. Read more…
from Maria Alejandra Madi
This post was written by Carmelo Ferlito. He is a senior fellow at the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS)
I taught economics in Malaysia for seven years. My students were mainly second and third year university students who attended my economics classes (microeconomic theory and policy and history of economic thought) after having already learnt the basic notions of macro and microeconomics.
Most of my students were double majoring in economics and finance. My impression is that, in general, they could see the relevance of finance in their daily lives (it can help in making or saving money) while they struggled to get enthusiastic about economics, which instead was perceived as a set of abstract graphs and formulas, somehow alien from real people’s lives.
Students’ cold relationship with the subject goes hand in hand with the growing disillusionment with the discipline that followed the global financial crisis in 2007 and the apparent inability of economists to see it coming and to deal with it afterwards. read more
from Blair Fix
Have you noticed that economists are missing a word in their vocabulary? In microeconomics you’ll see words like ‘individual’, ‘utility’ and ‘maximize’. But you won’t see the word ‘environment’ anywhere. It seems that in microeconomics, individuals maximize their utility in a void. [1]
To frame my argument, we need to leave economics behind for a moment. The problem is that economists treat the environment as something that is passive. It’s a stock of resources or a trove of ‘ecosystem services’. We can affect the environment, but it can’t affect us.
In contrast, I want you to think of the environment as something that is active. To get into this headspace, I want you to think like an evolutionary biologist.
from Ted Trainer
The 720,000 pound Prize has been awarded for studies carried out in “developing” countries over several decades, applying randomised trials to determine the effects of interventions like school meals, small monetary incentives for school attendance and work motivation (Nobel Media, 2019.) Especially noteworthy are devices for reducing “…purchasing of temptation goods”, (…conceivably also of use in rich countries.) These are identified as “nudges”, only likely to make small differences in the right direction but claimed to be capable of adding to significant effects in large populations. Much if not all of this work would seem to be unambiguously worthwhile, such as exploring how to improve vaccination rates. But there are disturbing criticisms which go far beyond these studies to indict the tunnel vision and ideological nature of conventional economic theory and practice.
The focus in these studies is on getting individuals to perform better within the system. The faulty individual is the problem; as Mader et al. (2019) say, “The idea is to ‘help’ poor people overcome supposedly irrational ‘risk aversion’ in order to be more entrepreneurial, or more ‘time-consistent’ and save for a rainy day.” Even leaving the issue of fault aside, this focus on individualism is the first problem; like “micro-finance” which helps the budding entrepreneur to invest and get ahead, it is about helping the most able and energetic to succeed, presumably on the assumption that if enough do so a good society will eventually result. This is to ignore the possibility that the problems are due to faulty social structures rather than faulty individuals, and the possibility that the best solutions would involve collective effort to establish radically alternative structures and systems. Read more…
from Lars Syll
People are obviously not so impressed by the “queen of the social sciences”. And rightly so. Mainstream economics today is more like an ideological-religious conviction than a realist and relevant social science that people can trust for making their lives or societies better.
from Asad Zaman
from Michael Joffe
If you are interested in “creating greater economic equality, reducing the power of corporations” and so on, you have to understand how economic power works. I am using “power” here not as an ideological category, but in the sense of causation, the degree of one’s ability to bring something about. It is obvious that in the economy, some people and some organisations (e.g. firms) have more influence than others. What they want to happen is more likely to happen. This is causation, and it is power. So it is nothing whatever to do with the mere theological discussions that Ken Zimmerman appears to think this is about. And it is absent from economic theories (not just neoclassical ones).
To quote discussions among anthropologists about universal human laws etc is just silly. We have ways of finding out how causation works. In biology and other natural sciences, they have worked extremely well. We have known how the human circulatory system works for 400 years. We know a lot about e.g. the causes of many diseases. Read more…
from Peter Soderbaum
There is a tendency in mainstream neoclassical economics to claim value-neutrality. Economics is believed to be close to natural sciences where the scholar is standing outside observing what goes on in the economy. It is believed that experiments can meaningfully be carried out to arrive at “evidence-based” results. There is a focus on markets and markets are understood in terms of supply and demand as mechanistic forces. While reference to more than one perspective can add to our understanding, any ideas about value-neutrality have to be abandoned. Values and ideology are always with us as argued by Gunnar Myrdal:
“Valuations are always with us. Disinterested research there has never been and can never be. Prior to answers there must be questions. There can be no view except from a viewpoint. In the questions raised and the viewpoint chosen, valuations are implied.
Our valuations determine our approaches to a problem, the definition of our concepts, the choice of models, the selection of observations, the presentations of our conclusions – the whole pursuit of a study from beginning to end.” (Myrdal, 1978, pp.778-779)
Rather than arguing that “our valuations determine our approaches” I would say that “our valuations influence our approaches” but otherwise I strongly support Myrdal’s arguments about the many more or less conscious choices made by the scholar. Another social scientist, Tanja von Egan-Krieger (2014) who has examined mainstream economics as well as three heterodox schools (institutional economics, feministic economics and ecological economics) refers to “the illusion of value-neutrality” in her book.
Neoclassical economists such as the leading textbook writer, N. Gregory Mankiw sometimes make a distinction between “normative” and “descriptive” statements implying that the latter can be neutral in value terms (2011, p.32). But even descriptive statements are part of some viewpoint or worldview where choices about what to describe have been made. read more
from Blair Fix
Let’s talk sustainability. Unless you’re an anti-science crank, you probably agree that we’ve got a problem with carbon emissions. We need to drastically cut emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change. On this we should all agree.
The question that’s open for debate is how to cut emissions. I think we actually know very little about how do to this. But even worse than knowing little is thinking we know a lot when we don’t. As the old saying goes, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
This post is about false solutions to climate change. These are ideas that seem like plausible ways to reduce carbon emissions, but that fall apart when we look at the evidence. If we’re serious about sustainability, we need to abandon ideas that won’t work. Read more…
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