http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_weakened_economy_needs_strengthened_humanities/
"A Weakened Economy Needs Strengthened Humanities"
by John Armstrong
November 12, 2008
MetaCornet
originally in
The Australian's Higher Education Supplement
November 5, 2008
The author makes several points. One of them I want to resist, initially. This is the claim that a background in the humanities makes one more economically rational (and if people were more economically rational then we wouldn't be in such a mess right now). I definitely don't want to rest the value of the humanities on this claim; whether it is true or not is difficult to determine. The author writes:
"When a society is in the grip of a powerful, repressive and traditional culture, there is much to be said for the role of the humanities as voices and agents of liberty. When even to question received opinion is dangerous, then critique is crucial. The first tasks are to create the liberal space of speculation, to tear down the idols, to encourage self-expression, to be sceptical of the rules, to see authority as inherently dangerous. It's entirely understandable that, in some societies in the past, these should have looked like the crucial tasks of the humanities.
But we do not live in such a society. Free expression is everywhere; for us the urgent questions are those around quality, depth of meaning, lasting value. Self-determination is the basic mode of modern life; we don't need to argue for that very much. In other words, we are due an epochal change. We should accept that the project of liberty is intellectually complete.
A second self-image in the humanities derives from the vision of neutral scholarship. This has been extremely important. The humanities in this guise were the fact checkers, the record keepers, the impartial line judges of culture. That may have been a sufficient role once. But it depends on having a high level of acceptance in your society."
If the humanities encourage the discovery of blind spots, and in general an eye for reality - for the importance of the facts - then I suspect that they would indeed make people more economically rational (if they help people to see the world aright...). (It is an interesting fact that economics courses have precisely this effect).
The author does discuss a final value to the humanities: their ability to help us determine what it is right to want. Frankly, I think this has nothing to do with economic rationality, or the state of the economy. But I do think it has a lot to do with the value of the humanities, and I don't think it's terribly detached from the first two values the author discusses. And frankly, I think it's a value that stands on its own - who could deny the value of knowing what is right? What is valuable? We do not need to turn to external sources to validate this value.
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7 comments:
What is the criterion of economic rationality?
One thing I'm alluding to are studies that show that students who go to college are more likely to compete than cooperate in zero-sum games. Mutual competion results in less for all; mutual cooperation results in more for all. Zero-sum games are ubiquitous in modern economic life. Should it really count as her becoming more /rational/, when someone learns to compete?
This is difficult, but let's give this a shot:
X course of action is more economically rational than Y course of action iff X would result in greater freely expended buying power. It is, however, critical that we set a time to the lengths of these courses of action - though I don't know how to do it. In other words, I don't know how long-term one must plan.
It is also important to say that expending one's buying power should be done efficiently - that if there is a course of action that would purchase the same things for less money, that would be more economically rational.
I use these formulations to avoid talking about preference-satisfaction.
But maybe these are just off-the-wall.
I also agree that if college inclines people to perform worse in these circumstances, then it makes them less economically rational, at least in that case.
The article states "One of the key strategic ideas deployed by Karl Marx was that the kind of economy you have powerfully influences the kind of culture you get.
So if you have an economy based on buying and selling, on financial speculation and the amassing of private wealth, then you get a culture that reflects this. If you are bothered about the culture, you have to take a long road through changing the economy."
So I would have two question. First, what culture/society is covered by this article? Certainly no more than Western culture. This article is clearly written from a euro-centric pov at best, and maybe really just an American one. My sense is that their is not as quite a disconnect in other countries.
That said, America has long disdained any intellectualism, and I would put the humanities in that category. So why would it surprise anyone to see that we have an economy that is disconnected from the humanities. We have long admired people with "street smarts", and successful business people (Gates, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.)
Drive into any town in America, and there will be a sign proclaiming the town as the home of the 19XX football/baseball/basketball champs. No signs for the championship debate or chess team. As a country we do not celebrate and value those academic pursuits. So we don't value them as a society, and we have a political structure that values personal liberty (but not community responsibility or obligation), so is it any wonder that our economic activitty is not tied to a more informed world view?
I'm tempted to agree with you, except for the comments about Europe. Considering the state of Iceland these days (as one example among many), I'm not sure that Europe really did things all that differently.
I'm okay with explaining economic rationality this way, so long as you're not willing to, say, "challenge the market paradigm." What I'm gesturing toward is the thought: why call 'rational' behavior that tends to produce terrible outcomes for all, like massive environmental damage, alienation, and global recession? We ought to figure out what behavior is rational from collectivity consequences inwards to individual behavior, rather than outwards from some preconceptions about how individual rationality works, and then outward to collective behavior. The very idea that prisoners' dilemmas are "paradoxes" should just show us how wrong the way of thinking about rationality that's constitutive of economics is.
The problem with prisoners dilemmas and tragedies of the commons is that there is no preference-satisfaction formula sufficient to account for the rationality of cooperative behavior. This thought I mean to be the same as the one in my first paragraph.
I am definitely on board with the claim that rationality and economic rationality are not the same thing. But perhaps this is because I'm not too worried about what's rational, in the way that it tends to get used in philosophy these days. Foot cites Quinn, as I recall, saying that figuring out what's rational would just leave us with the question: is it really that important to be rational?
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