JoelGinBH

@joelinbh.bsky.social

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Walks with dogs. Yooper in Maine. Hockey goalie. Amateur tinkerer. Dabbler in behavioral economics, history, statistics, and home renovations. Personal account Work account: https://bsky.app/profile/jhgrabermdibl.bsky.social

Cover of “No Ordinary Time,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin

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Sleeping senior beagle

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In practice we all start our own research from the work of our prede-cessors, that is, we hardly ever start from scratch. But suppose we did start from scratch, what are the steps we should have to take? Obvi-ously, in order to be able to posit to ourselves any problems at all, we should first have to visualize a distinct set of coherent phenomena as a worthwhile object of our analytic effort. In other words, analytic effort is of necessity preceded by a preanalytic cognitive act that supplies the raw material for the analytic effort. In this book, this prean-alytic cognitive act will be called Vision. It is interesting to note that vision of this kind not only must precede historically the emergence of analytic effort in any field, but also may reenter the history of every established science each time somebody teaches us to sel things in a light of which the source is not to be found in the facts, methods, and results of the pre-existing state of the science. [p. 41]

The act of measurement always involves some interaction and interference with the reality being measured. This generalized Heisenberg principle is especially relevant in economics, where the measurement of a success index on which rewards are based, or taxes calculated, nearly always has perverse repercussions on the reality being measured. Consider, for example, the case of management by quantified objectives applied to a tuberculosis hospital, as related to me by a physician. It is well known that TB patients cough less as they get better. So the number of coughs per day was taken as a quantitative measure of the patient's improvement. […]
Coughing steadily declined as doses of codeine were more frequently prescribed. Relaxed patients cough less. Unfortunately the patients got worse, precisely because they were not coughing up and spitting out the congestion. The cough index was abandoned.
The cough index totally subverted the activity it was designed to
measure because people served the abstract quantitative index instead of the concrete qualitative goal of health. Perversities induced by quantitative goal setting are pervasive in the literature on Soviet planning: set the production quota for cloth in linear feet, and the bolt gets narrower; set it in square feet, and the cloth gets thinner; set it by weight, and it gets too thick. But one need not go as far away as the Soviet Union to find examples. The phenomenon is ubiquitous. In universities a professor is rewarded according to number of publications. Consequently the length of articles is becoming shorter as we approach the minimum publishable unit of research. At the same time the frequency of coauthors has increased. More and more people are collaborating on shorter and shorter papers. What is being maximized is not discovery and dissemination of coherent knowledge but the number of publications on which one's name appears.

4. The desirability of aggregate growth is limited by the corrosive ffects on
moral standards resulting from the very attitudes that foster growth, such as glorification of self-interest and a scientistic-technocratic worldview. On the demand side of commodity markets, growth is stimulated by greed and acquisitiveness, intensified beyond the "natural" endowment from original sin by the multibillion-dollar advertising industry. On the supply side, technocratic scientism proclaims the possibility of limitless expansion and preaches a reductionistic, mechanistic philosophy which, in spite of its success as a research program, has serious shortcomings as a worldview. As a research program it very effectively furthers power and control, but as a worldview it leaves no room for purpose, much less for any distinction between good and bad purposes. "Anything goes" is a convenient moral slogan for the growth economy because it implies that anything also sells. To the extent that growth has a well-defined purpose, then it is limited by the satisfaction of that pur-pose. Expanding power and shrinking purpose lead to uncontrolled growth for its own sake, which is wrecking the moral and social order just as surely as it is wrecking the ecological order (Hirsch 1976).

2. The desirability of growth financed by takeover of habitat is limited by
the extinction or reduction in number of sentient subhuman species whose habitat disap-pears. Economic growth requires space for growing stocks of artifacts and people and for expanding sources of raw material and sinks for waste material. Other species also require space, their "place in the sun." The instrumental value of other species to us, the life-support services they provide, was touched on in the discussion of biophysical limits above. Another limit derives from the intrinsic value of other species, that is, counting them as sentient, though probably not self-conscious, beings which experience pleasure and pain and whose experienced
"utility" should be counted positively in welfare economics, even though it does not give rise to maximizing market behavior.
The intrinsic value of subhuman species should exert some limit on
habitat takeover in addition to the limit arising from instrumental value. But it is extremely difficult to say how much (Birch and Cobb 1981). Clarification of this limit is a major philosophical task, but if we wait for a definitive answer before imposing any limits on takeover, then the question will be rendered moot by extinctions which are now occurring at an extremely rapid rate relative to past ages (Ehr-lich and Ehrlich 1981).

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