See, and that's why I actively, deeply despise most of the people who call themselves " neo-classical economists" (and related heroes of humanity. Neo-cons, Neo-libs, the whole gang.) Because to some degree (usually well hidden between a lot of talk about the economy, as if it was a living thing that needs to be tended to, at the expense of people when necessary) that's what their logic really comes down to. Who cares about the poor? They are not what drives GDP. That's what counts. Obviously. What? You think the economy is there to serve the people?! People exist to act as fuel for the economy, stupid! I am happily going to predict that we have people in this community who would support the use of "economic modelling" as described in the article. Because from a real economist's point of view, those numbers really are all that exists. Everything else is "externalities". The mere fact that the cost of not polluting the air is compared to the cost of polluting the air (as measured in ruined environments ruining the lifes of living beings) and whichever seems cheaper wins... should be reason enough for every sane human being to demand that everyone involved in these calculations be kicked out of whatever office or capacity they're holding.
"People exist to act as fuel for the economy" I just realized how true this is. We can't live without a job. Then when you get a job, you're worked until you fall sick/too tired to continue/too depressed to continue/get hurt/psychologically burn out, then you're discarded or phased out until you start having potential again. We're fuel-cattle for the economy.
In order to play Devil's advocate here: If you're not capable of contributing to your society then what value do you truly have? Is it everyone else's responsibility to keep people alive for the sake of having more friends or family members around you than if they just died off? Although it's not even as simple as "pensioners are worth less because they earn less." Why do computer programmers who sell their souls to Apple or Google get to earn 6 figure salaries - why are they valued as highly as doctors? More valuable than teachers. More valuable than nurses. What the hell good is Facebook doing for humanity? That's more like a personal beef because I live in Silicon Valley and I do not work in tech. I teach special education. I'm far less valuable to my community than Twitter. Economic models are not based on the value of a human life to the benefit of their community. People are paid a lot because they will allow a company to earn even more. I'm paid comparatively less because I don't work at a for-profit organization and I don't contribute to this capitalistic culture of making and selling products or services. I just ensure that children will grow up to be empathetic. Something we obviously need more of.
I think the usual counterargument to this is that those who don't contribute to society have emotional and social value to those who do. Ie the reason we don't euthanize allentally handicapped people is because of the emotional trauma (and related loss of capital) that would cause is more costly than the expense of keeping a mentally handicapped and non-earning person alive. Not that this counters what you're saying in your comment--i don't think you value economic modelling highly--but it just goes to show how many hoops you have to jump through to make it look like human lives are valuable outside of their capital in economic modelling. I wish something like that were more immediately obvious.If you're not capable of contributing to your society then what value do you truly have?
Your explanation is way easy to understand. In fact, I'd never really considered how valuable it is to keep a person alive for the sake of the family's emotional health. I just have my own personal values about it which don't necessarily generalize to a community as a whole.
>If you're not capable of contributing to your society then what value do you truly have? Consuming. Same with the pensioners. They are not worthless to a capitalist society, they consume the goods which people and companies produce allowing them to have a job in the first place. And if I could play devil's advocate for a moment: Facebook can be used by grassroots organizations to affect change in their communities, it can contribute something to society. Professional athletes on the other hand... >I just ensure that children will grow up to be empathetic. I thought I heard a few years ago about some economic models that try to take these things into account, I can't remember where at the moment though. Does anyone know?
Consumers! of course, why didn't I think of that? I disagree that these social media sites like Twitter actually sparked revolutions. People will fight and revolt and protest with or without the internet. We've been doing it for literally forever. It's human nature to communicate when we have a problem. But, again, I have my own selfish point of view regarding internet technology and its value in society. Thanks for the enlightening POV . I'm not nearly as familiar with economic modeling as I believed I was. The perspective that there can be a value placed on empathy, for example, seems intuitive but I just sort of assumed it was ignored as a worthless personality trait for the sake of economic modeling.
I'm not saying social media can spark revolutions, but the have proved to be useful tools. Don't know if the rest of that was sarcastic or not :/
There's a great Steven Keen lecture about how self-serving the models are. Oh wow, this great period of low unemployment and steady growth is great. Then WHAM! Along comes a mean old externality that causes a financial crisis and ruins all your hard work. As if you had nothing to do with it.
It's easy to criticize. It's hard to come up with better solutions. The first half of the essay describes hard problems, and makes easy complaints about the way people have tried to approach these problems. Say you had to come up with the figure for damages caused by poor medical treatment leading to the death of a mother. That's not easy! Whatever you do, someone can complain that your number is wrong, and you are evil for putting a value on human life. Say you have a million dollars to spend to make the world a better place. You can install carbon sequestering filters on a factory to reduce the risk of climate change in the future, or you can save about 300 children from malaria today. That might be a hard decision for some people! The second half of the essay describes the ways in which deceitful people can use complicated models to argue for any conclusion they like. This can happen on both sides of any debate, and it's not a fair criticism of tools like economic modelling to point out that they can be misused. Good modellers aren’t afraid of explaining their assumptions. The clients who pay best, however, don’t want the best modellers. They want people who can write a fat report to slam on the fucking table. The lesson is to be skeptical and careful with models or any other kind of evidence, to be humble and reluctant in drawing conclusions, and not to blame the spreadsheets.There is a role for economists, and economic modelling, in public debate. Its role should not be to limit the menu of democratic choices. Instead it should be to help explain the trade-offs.
A few years ago, back when I was working on my M.A., I attended an economics conference (for background, my training is as a historian). I had never seen an economic model before, and I had no idea of what to expect (for those who haven't seen one, it's a really long mathematical equation with up to dozens of variables). The presentation that sticks with me, even to this day, was a presenter who was attempting to model whether revenge limits or increases violence in a conflict situation. After about seven variables, I was completely lost. I was also quite surprised when he declared that according to his equation, the possibility of revenge LIMITED violence. So, during the question period after the paper was presented, I pointed out that there was not, to my knowledge, a single moment in history where this was the case, and for that reason many societies (including the Vikings, which happens to be my favourite period of history) had implemented workarounds to limit revenge. I learned two things from that conference - the first was there are economists who think they can model things accurately without checking their facts, and the second was that not everything can be reduced to mathematics.
If the Vikings saw that the possibility of revenge led to a risk of unending cycles of violence, and therefore implemented peaceful workarounds to avoid revenge, isn't that a good example of the possibility of revenge limiting violence? If there were little risk of revenge following a violent attack, that would plausibly make violence more likely. Trying to model this behavior would indeed be difficult and complicated and, perhaps, not as reliable as that presenter suggested. By the way, I look forward to another episode of Fooling Garwulf!
Well, not really, I'm afraid. What they did was implement a system of blood payments, aka Weregeld, and make certain acts legally free from retribution (human sacrifice and execution for a crime being the two main ones). So, the actual result was that on raids, people would be sacrificed to the gods to prevent retaliation (in short, subbing in a form of violence they could get away with), and in blood feuds, you'd see violence followed by lawsuits to de-legitimize it, followed by retaliation, followed by more lawsuits. Seriously, the feuding families in the Icelandic sagas seem to spend about as much time in court as they do killing each other. So, to be pithy, the amount of violence was about the same, but there were more lawyers involved. And, thank you! The next installment of Fooling Garwulf goes up tomorrow afternoon, assuming all goes well.
If I remember correctly, there's a research out there that shows that most people in such positions have severe signs of being sociopaths, and that having sociopathic traits helps getting yourself there.
Having sociopathic traits isn't always a bad thing. Especially not for the person with the disorder since they are essentially never unhappy unless they're not getting what they want. No useless worrying and wringing their hands over things which they have no control of. A balanced person is able to be apathetic sometimes and empathetic sometimes - not always one or the other. Their arrogance, in our eyes, is just logical processing and categorizing of people and services and things the same way we organize and categorize animals for study.
I'll have to disagree on that one. While of course for the person itself it's not a problem, I find it to be a problem to everybody else - as they are used, abused then disposed of when not necessary. That applies to small things like interpersonal relationships to big things like how our world works. As for saying that a balanced person is to be apathetic, I also strongly disagree. There's a difference between not worrying for things you can't control and being apathetic. But (and that is a problem I find is much too common in our society) I strongly believe that only empathy is human - apathy is sign of mental illness.
Does anybody have a good summary of the results of economic cost-benefit analyses as applied to global warming? I was under the impression that many such studies came down in favor of action rather than inaction. Obviously reports paid for by private industry are going to be suspect, but not every study is funded in this way. Is the issue really economic modelling (which should of course try to make its assumptions as transparent as possible) or just the usual conflicts-of-interest in science?