What IS The Project? Part 4 …and Methods

…because this is an important part of why the project hasn’t been attempted before. Because, quite frankly, before now, it simply could not have been done.

This is simply because the pieces necessary to truly understand what economics is about simply weren’t all in place until just a few decades ago. It is generally agreed that the field of economics arose as a field of quantitative study with the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776 (easy year to remember). Smith’s work is very, very good, but he was dealing with quite a few intellectual and scientific deficits compared to today. I suppose that economists just went on their merry way trying to what they could with what they had; then new economists had to do new stuff while answering what the old economists did. Eventually that became a hard enough job that nobody bothered to ask why the old economists did things the way they had been doing them in the first place, and whether or not that was the right way to do them. So, here we find ourselves not.

However, the “expanding wavefront of human knowledge” has given us so much more information about topics close to the source of economics. Now is the time to take a serious look at the foundations of the discipline in light of new discoveries and new and better ways of looking at the world. These ways are here now; and by putting them together just right, we can finally get an answer to the question I asked: What, exactly, is economics about?

In mathematics, dynamic systems have been studied for a few hundred years; but it took high-speed computer modeling to be able to get a conceptual grasp on these systems. In addition, the scientific study of Complex and Complex Adaptive systems are new developments, yet they are perfectly suited, not just to describe economics (as they may be used today) but to get a handle on the stuff of economics itself.

In biology, Wealth of Nations was published eighty three years before Origin of Species. There is no better analogy for economic change than biological evolution. Not that a lot of people understand evolution, either, but presumably more people study it. And recasting economics in light of evolution is just a fine idea. More on that later.

Beyond evolution itself, there is the impact that evolution has had on psychology and the cognitive sciences. Dobzhansky famously said that “Nothing in biology makes sense save in light of evolution”; extending this to ethology and psychology (which, after all, are just products of biological evolution) just makes sense. As I indicated before, there are schools of thought within economics that take psychology seriously; but it really should have a more fundamental role.

Within physics, one should not that the foundations of thermodynamics were preset in Smith’s time but that the first texts on the subject were not written till the early- and mid-1800’s. That thermodynamics is a fundamental aspect of economics is a thesis I shall do my best to convince you of, because it is most assuredly and emphatically true. There is even a branch of (heterodox) economics that addresses this connection, viz. thermoeconomics. I mentioned this before: it is an incomplete assessment of economics, but it has a slice of the pie that most of the rest of economics is badly missing.

Perhaps even more important than thermoeconomics, is the thermodynamic perspective on biology. Yes, there is one. Yes, it’s VERY important. One of my sources (though, to be perfectly honest, I only skimmed it) is the book Bumblebee Economics by Bernd Heinrich. Point in fact Heinrich has the single biggest slice of the pie that there is. The book looks at bumblebee behavior from the perspective of energy budgets, an economy where activity is a function of energy receipts, costs, savings, and expenditures. It is almost axiomatic that modern human economic activity is descended from that kind of energy economy. Learn this stuff. It will be your friend.

There are two more pieces of the puzzle that I will mention briefly. The first I have already talked about at length: the naturalization of the human sciences. Heinrich’s book is absolutely beautiful science, about bumblebees. It obviously does not map one-to-one onto human economics. However, understanding that the origins of human economics do map onto Heinrich’s bumblebee energy economy is something that cannot be done till one takes the leap into naturalization. That is truly a modern, and even a late, development.

Lastly, I want to take another critical shot at philosophy. Philosophers have been caught up with the old, tired, reductionism/holism debate for a long time now. And while there is an awareness, now, of emergence and how emergent phenomena dissolve old reductionist/holist antinomies, a decent understanding of emergence has yet to… ahem… emerge from philosophical investigation. This, I suspect, is because the kinds of philosophers who tend to look at emergence are exactly the kinds of philosophers who got into philosophy because they couldn’t hack math and physics in the first place, so they have NO clue how actual scientists get a conceptual grasp on them.

So, yes, I do have some ideas on that subject, too. Perhaps even an entire new branch of metaphysics; I don’t know yet. I am not good at pure abstract theory, but, hey, I was having some problems myself and I got tired of being held up by the same problems. So I tried to fix them, and kept trying till I found something that worked. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t; but it gives me a way to move forward in discussing other problems. I’m not sure, yet, whether my “new branch of metaphysics” is a necessary part of economics. If it turns out it is, feel free and try to shoot me down and we’ll see what happens. If not, well, then the time it took me to write these two paragraphs, and you to read them, has been completely wasted. Alas.

Anyway, that’s it. THAT is what you need to be familiar with in order to understand what economics is. And to the extent that economics can be understood, once you have a grasp of all these different aspects, it is an exact science. Or so I believe. It certainly has laws and generalizations, hypotheses, predictions, and observational consequences. I think that qualifies it.

So there we are. From here on out, anything I write is pure content. But I think that this introduction has been necessary. This is where I am coming from, and I am looking for challenges. I don’t assume I’m right, but I do suspect I am. Unfortunately, though, I haven’t had an audience sit still long enough for me to actually discuss it with them. So… let’s begin. 

So what IS the project? Part 3: Sources...

If you’re still here, then I have to thank you for your patience. Even if the previous posts didn’t enlighten you any, there were still important for me to write, so, here we are. But the previous four posts did have a point: in spelling out the trajectory that got me started, I hope to make the direction I’m headed more clear and precise.

Economists clearly do not have a grasp on what’s at the bottom of economics. Now, this is amply demonstrated, I think, by the fact that both Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman have Nobel prizes. A friend of mine once told me this joke: If you ask 12 economists a question, you’ll get 12 different answers, or 13 if one of them went to Harvard. The South Park episode “Margaritaville” has a brilliant commentary on fiscal policy, comparing it to alectryomancy.

Clearly, economics is a mess; yet in a sense, this is not economists’ fault. Their job is economics, not meta-economics or the philosophy of economics. Yet as a philosopher, I have to look in shame at my own discipline: we haven’t exactly been doing our job, either. To my great embarrassment, my observation of the state of philosophy of economics is more or less precisely analogous to that of political philosophy. Rather than doing what philosophy does best, namely questioning assumptions, digging deeper, looking for roots, philosophers have merely taken the content already in common currency among the practitioners of the field, and tried to pretty it up for them.

There is so much fertile ground in politics for exploring the relationships between governments and populations, cultures and societies; to say nothing of providing a framework for a true political science from which to evaluate the effectiveness of political systems on honest metrics. I suppose that before that can happen, sociology needs to get its house in order, and I’m working on that, too. But, one huge project at a time, I always say.

Likewise, what philosophy of economics there is, is just the prettifying of messy and inherently inconsistent economic concepts. That’s not what we philosophers are supposed to be doing! But, our professions lingering shame is my great big opportunity, one which I am grabbing with both hands right now.

Economics is in dire need of a robust, well-established, and agreed-upon ontology, and that is what I am attempting to devise.

For those not familiar with philosophical terms: ontology is just the study of what there is. It’s what used to be called metaphysics before wiccans and ghost-hunters stole the term for their own idiotic ends. (One reason I HATE Borders and will shop at Barnes and Noble till I die is that in the former, the Metaphysics section is populated by Silver Ravenwolf, and in the latter, by Aristotle.) Basically what I’m saying is, nobody, especially the economists, have any clue what economics is actually about; and what I am attempting to do, is actually figure that out.

Or rather, what I actually have done. I’m pretty sure I’m on to “the truth” as it were, about economics. Here, the fundamental naturalistic stance has been vital: by assuming that economic activity is continuous with human activity in the evolutionary past, one is forced into looking at the most basic features of economics, in biological and physical terms. By abstracting away from anything that requires the complex sociological and linguistic frameworks that current economic activity requires, a much clearer picture of what economics is emerges…

…with the caveat that this assumes some fairly non-standard biology and psychology, looked at from the standpoint of an unusual application of physics. And by nonstandard I don’t mean “inaccurate,” but rather interpretations that are not generally regarded is useful or common in their respective fields, yet which are to be found in the available literature. Just because it’s not how biology and psychology are normally taught doesn’t mean that it’s incorrect to look at them that way….

So what IS the project? Part 2: Orientation

So. Naturalism in Philosophy of Mind was making progress after centuries and millennia of stagnation, but only by sacrificing common sense and alienating anyone who wasn’t willing to give up long-cherished notions of what it means to be human. Didn’t bother me any, but, I’m weird. In a lot of ways, the revolutions taking place in the cognitive sciences and their implications for things like philosophy, ethics, free will, and understanding what it means to be human, are just the next, inexorable steps of the Copernican Revolt, and are every bit as shattering in how they dethrone man from the center of his universe.

Indeed, it’s why I left academic philosophy: 50-100 years from now, Daniel Dennett will be hailed as the greatest philosopher of mind since Descartes, and EVERYONE will be in fundamental agreement with his positions – either that, or we will be sliding back into a new Dark Age. But while I had already seen the light, my temperament was too much like Dennett’s to do anything but ape him. What naturalistic philosophy of mind needs is the establishment of fortifications in the beachheads already opened by Dennett: the kind of rigorous articulation and defense that someone like Manuel Vargas brings to the table. Not being suited to that sort of rigorous, meticulous argumentation, I was out of luck for a groundbreaking career in Phil Mind.

Economics, however…

I had already found myself interested in economics, and kept wondering: What would economics look like through a naturalistic lens? The one lesson my experience with Philosophy of Mind stressed on me was that getting a handle on tricky questions from a naturalistic perspective could yield fruitful results; but that doing so required starting from naturalistic assumptions, rather than merely imposing naturalistic constraints on a given situation. Witness, for example, how purely wrongheaded many attempts at uncovering the evolutionary origins of language have turned out to be. A naturalistic approach to economics must end up with modern economics, but it must also assume that economic activity, as it takes place today, is continuous with human activity stretching back to evolutionary time. (Let us call this the fundamental naturalistic stance)

That constraint proved to be great fun.

It is, in fact, the only thing that could make my project both original and productive. Looking back with hindsight, it is fortunate that my efforts started on that tack: it has saved me from pitfalls that afflict other currents in economics that are kicking around presently, since I’m certainly not the only person around who is trying to integrate economics into a naturalistic framework. There is at least one “branch” or school of economics which ties economics directly to physics. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive science both have established camps within economics, and “evolutionary economics” attempts to model economics along lines similar to evolutionary biology. One very interesting and enterprising author even wrote a book describing how one can actually analogize economics to biological evolution. (This was actually a pretty substantial influence in my own work, and I want to give M. R. due credit because B. was such an important book; but since I can’t have you reading him yet, I have to withhold some information.)

However pure in spirit and noble in intent each of these approaches are, however, they still suffer from serious defects. At a minimum, they are incomplete: they do not explain different facets of economics in a coherent, systematic framework. In most cases, too, they are either unmotivated or inadvertent: yes, this might work, but why does it work? Why look at economics this way? And at bottom, those failures can be attributed to a failure to look at economics as being continuous with the natural order “from the beginning.”

But I didn’t know all this back then: not having studied economics at all, I wasn’t familiar with the above approaches to the subject. And, therefore, fortunately, was spared from going down those or other unfruitful paths. All I was armed with was my philosophical temperament for digging out foundations, and my commitment to the fundamental naturalistic stance. As a result, I kept turning over the same question, over and over, became obsessed with it, really. And it was in asking that question that I started down the path which has led me here:

What, exactly, is economics about?

So what IS the project? Part 1: Influences

Having talked about my motivations, it perhaps behooves me to actually discuss what I'm trying to do. The problem lies in the fact that I've been thinking about this stuff, thinking about it in a certain way, for so long, that while it makes perfect sense to me, it’s hard to communicate it with anyone else because of how fundamentally different my framework for thinking about it is from everyone else’s.

So while my immediate goal is, in itself, distinct from a historical recounting of how I got to where I am, as a practical matter, getting someone else into that particular mindset requires motivating thinking about economics in a certain way, and to a certain extent, doing that is best accomplished by biographical recollection.

Complicating matters further is the sheer breadth and diversity of subjects and influences which have contributed to the final shape of my ideas. In thinking about economics, it would be fair to say that I have been influenced by biology (especially evolutionary biology), physics (especially thermodynamics), psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, mathematics (especially dynamic systems theory and its cousin, chaos theory), philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics (particularly, the problem of material constitution). It has been influenced, as well, by work I have been doing in parallel on sociology and politics. Most unusually, I was strongly influenced by Frank Herbert’s Dune series (the six books he wrote; the concluding two books of the series written by his son finish the story nicely but lack the sophistication of the originals), in particular the implicit thought behind his approach to ecology and economics.

If you notice a distinct lack of any mention of economics (books, authors, etc.) in the above list, there is a specific reason for this, to which I will get to in a moment. I have read a miniscule amount of economics (if reading the entirety of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom can be considered miniscule) but have for the most part tried to keep my mind uncluttered of specific economic theories. So you may wonder, what have I been doing in all this time, and how does it relate to economics?

Here, biography and motivation are important. Having determined that, yes, there must be some fact of the matter about economics and that, no, economists sure as hell don’t know what it is, I started thinking about how best to approach the subject. At this point in my life, I was a recently recovering Dualist. Having grown up in a fundamentalist Christian church, I had some time before ceased to be a young-earth creationist, but had only recently finally studied and understood the explanatory power of natural selection in evolution. And I was applying my new-found understanding of the world to the area of philosophy that I was most interested in: Philosophy of Mind.

A result of my late/adult conversion to physicalism/naturalism, I was willing to discard a great deal of pre-intellectual, folk-psychological baggage about the mind that informs most people, simply because a) I recognized it as stemming from my own assumption of the existence of an immaterial soul, and b) since I had both explicitly embraced dualism and was explicitly discarding it, I could intellectually begin from a standpoint of “What would happen if we were to take Darwin seriously?”

Now if you think that a naturalized approach to understanding the human mind would be a comforting gloss over what you already think you know about it, you are very much mistaken. The scientific approach inexorably yields a perspective as divorced from common sense and familiarity in the realm of mind as it does in the realms of the very small (quantum mechanics) and the very fast and large (relativity). What I found in philosophy of mind was that as “traditional” philosophy of mind got mired in debates literally centuries and millennia old, and covered topics more and more arcane and abstract, my own thoughts on the subject quickly converged to the same positions as those of philosophers, like Andy Clark, Jerry Fodor, Robert Cummins, and especially Daniel Dennett, who were literate in the cognitive sciences.

More shockingly, I found that those of my physicalist peers who had grown up atheists, and therefore had been physicalists throughout their lives, universally rejected the positions I was advancing on topics in the Philosophy of Mind. Having the near-universally accepted tenets of folk-psychology foisted on them by dint of relentless exposure, and not recognizing how much of them were extrapolations from the assumption of an immaterial soul, their response to the obvious-but-counterintuitive consequences of a naturalistic philosophy of mind was as reactionary as anyone else’s.

Cool, I thought. But what does this have to do with economics?

Motivations for the Project, part 2.

Economic policy lies at the heart of some of the disagreements between Liberals and Conservatives. Cut taxes. Raise taxes. Privatize social security. Institute universal healthcare coverage. While some of the motivation for each of these actions may be an extra-economic consideration ("It's the right thing to do"), there is an implicit assumption that there will be a connection between a certain policy, and its economic consequences. But that assumption entails a far more fundamental, and much more important, assumption: That there is a fact of the matter about economic transactions. And lets face it: if you don't have that assumption, there's no point in arguing for one economic policy over another.

So: if, with respect to some social goal Y and some economic policy X, you're going to say "we should do Y" and then say "X will accomplish Y, so we should do X" you are committing yourself to a link between an economic state of affairs and a resulting social state of affairs. This is something that should be empirically testable, and which, therefore, should fall into the purview of (waaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiit for it...............) science!

So: Liberals and Conservatives will trot out their favorite economists, who will then trot out to argue why the proposed link between X and Y obtains. Or does not obtain. Depending on the political orientation of the economist. WTF??

It seems both sides are caught in an existential contradiction. On the one hand, in arguing for a given policy because of a certain (desired) social goal, they are implicitly asserting that there is a fact of the matter with respect to economics. But by trotting out, in support of their position, someone in a discipline where what they state is a function of their political orientation, they are denying such a robust, objective connection exists. Hmm.

Something is rotten in the state of Economics.

As I see it, we have two, and only two, options. We can give up on the idea that there is a fact of the matter about economics. We can, effectively, be economic nihilists: it just doesn't matter what our economic policies are, because there is no connection between them and the economic results. Well, if that's really what you think than you really should be a Libertarian: because whether the policy is one thing or another, the  results are epistemologically unavailable to us. Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out.

Since nobody argues that, then you must be in the other camp: there is a fact of the matter about economics. But if that's the case, there is a real answer as to whether the link between X and Y obtains. And that means either the liberal economist or the conservative economist is wrong. Yet the discipline of economics has been going on its merry way for TWO HUNDRED YEARS NOW, and still hasn't figured out  how to answer a simple yes-or-no question? For crying out loud: train 2 economists with differing political views for 10 years, giving them identical educations in economic theory. Train 2 monkeys or reasonably adroit 5 year olds how to flip a coin. Ask the economists an answer; then ask the boys to flip their coins. You should get reasonably consistent answers from either group.

Something is wrong with economics.

I clearly do not fall into the economic nihilism camp. Yet, if there are any genuine economic facts, then it seems they should be discoverable. Yet, after two centuries, the academic discipline of economics has failed to position itself in a place to discover them. Economists will argue all sorts of reasons why: economic conditions are never perfectly repeatable, so you can't really do scientific investigations of them; economics is a science about humans, so free will and human variability gets in the way of prediction; economic systems are chaotic and so prediction isn't feasible; etc. I don't really buy them. Oh, I'm sure they are applicable at some level; but I don't think they explain why economists can predict diametrically opposed conclusions from the same sets of assumptions. And the predictions certainly shouldn't depend on the political inclinations of the predictor! No, I think the issue is deeper than that. I think there is a fundamental problem with the discipline of economics itself, and that this is in part responsible for disagreements between Conservatives and Liberals on economic policy.

And that is why I am writing this blog.

Motivations for the Project, part 1

Once upon a time, I had a conversation with a buddy of mine that went something like this:

Buddy: I'd like to schematize the Bible in logical form to point out the contradictions to Christians.
Me: I'd like to schematize the US Constitution in logical form so we could explicitly logically check any given law for Constitutionality.
Buddy: That's a great idea. Let's do it. Now.

Long story short, my buddy and I spent the next few months of a Florida summer working on that project. We finished it. Every single line. Every single amendment. He even wrote a paper that got published in a scholarly journal.

I don't usually think small. Nor, for that matter, do I tend to attempt to resolve intellectual conflicts by quibbling over accidental or extrinsic issues. I studied philosophy because it is a temperamental affliction with me: I need to get to the bottom of things. If I want to know the Constitutionality of a law, then, well, I'm looking for strict logical consistency with the COTUS. And if that means I have to schematize the damned thing myself (or with help from a really smart, really hardworking, and really disciplined friend who keeps kicking my ass to stay on the project) then, well, that's what's going to be done.

I'm getting really tired of discussing politics with people who disagree with me.

Now. There's a truism in philosophy that, when two sides in an argument keep running into an impasse - usually defined as an explicit logical contradiction, but there are variations - it usually means that both sides are relying upon the same assumption or set of assumptions that are, themselves, self-contradictory. Two examples with which I am personally very familiar, and which constitute my strongest areas of interest in philosophy, were the Idealism/Empiricism debate in the philosophy of mind, and the Libertarian (Free Will)/Determinism debate.

While I'm grossly oversimplifying literally centuries of intellectual labor here, it took Kant to mediate the former debate with his Transcendental Idealism by arguing that the mind imposes a structure on empirical reality rather than deduces certain categories from it (presaging, by two hundred years, the cognitive revolution in science); and the Compatibilists to mediate the latter, arguing that determined agents can nonetheless be judged according to categories of responsibility normally reserved for free agents. It's all very complicated, but, well, there ya go.

If this sounds a little bit like the Hegelian dialectic of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, I suppose it might. I'm not a Hegel expert so I'm not going to judge. But, what does this have to do with politics? Well, for years, to me, disagreements between Liberals and Conservatives have had the same flavor as the old debates between Idealists and Empiricists or  Libertarians and Determinists. And I kept ending discussions with very smart, very articulate people with either an "agreement to disagree" or, more often than not, them going away exhausted. I tend to plumb the depths of the REASONS WHY we disagreed quite a few levels deeper than they were prepared to go. It's that "being a philosopher" thing again: I need reasons. I need to KNOW, more deeply, where we're not in agreement; I need to get to its fundamental basis. I need to get to the GROUND of what you and I think, and why we don't think the same.

So, I'm getting really tired of discussing politics with people who disagree with me. We either spin our wheels around the same topics or one of us goes away frustrated. And I wanted to DO something about it, try to figure out the deep reasons why these disagreements keep arising. Now, to the extent I have thought about the differences between Liberal and Conservative thought, I do not think that all the disagreements in policy or cultural inclination can be reduced to any single category. However, there is at least one entire class of disagreements where I think the approach of looking for commonly shared yet inconsistent beliefs might not only be possible, it might be quite fruitful:

Economic Policy.