Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Soz, read I'm at aporia and feeling phronetically challenged.
-
Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I assume that is largely based on your own observation of society generally? Or is it for some other reason?
My reason was in my first post on this thread. GDP growth means a lot more goods and services being produced, which also means more being consumed. If less people can't consume them because they can't afford them, then GDP growth is negatively affected.
That was my story anyway, and it's not really from phronesis so much as from hearing economists say it before and thinking it sounded plausible. But also plausible is that stalling growth could be putting less money in people's pockets in a climate of high inflation (and I think property values should be counted in this statistic as the single biggest cost in most people's lives), something that would affect wage and salary earners much more than capitalists, and thus inequality could rise. Indeed property inflation makes the rich richer and the poor poorer automatically, if incomes are not keeping pace with it.
So plausible mechanisms in both directions exist, and I'm left wondering how to choose between them. I'm not being disingenuous at all, it's a genuine confession that I don't know the answer, and I'd like input from as many people as possible as to how this even could be answered scientifically*.
It's definitely NOT the only question of interest here, but any question that has an answer carrying the strength of institutional scientific approval is always noteworthy by itself, so naturally I want to get an idea of what kind of strength that really is, and also how it could be improved. Of course I think we should take measures to reduce inequality anyway regardless of the answer, because that goes to the kind of society that I want to live in. But that doesn't make it unimportant to answer. If it genuinely were to turn out that higher equality costs growth, that's pretty important, because we might want to make the choice between being all poor and equal or some poor and some well off and some rich. However, this study contradicts that point, as Max pointed out in the blog itself, and that might be the main thing it achieves, even if we actually don't 100% trust the finding that increasing equality will probably improve growth.
And the question is, why should this knowledge of yours need to be subject to expert ‘testing’ or analyses?
Does my last paragraph answer that? The reason I want testing and analyses is because trusting my judgement on a matter of national economics is highly suspect and it's about something really important too. It really doesn't matter how old, virtuous or experienced I am, I can still be totally wrong.
*There have been an interesting range of answers, so I don't consider it to have been a waste of time. Bart thought that it was probably scientific already to the weak extent that any economic claim can be, Matthew thought it could barely be scientific at all, that the difficulties of conducting economic experimentation meant that it could only be very, very dubious, steve thought that it was probably quite unscientific because it was likely to have committed the ecological fallacy, but also that it is possible to be more scientific, and you appear to think that its scientific validity is not very important anyway.
And the main thing that I was actually wanting to elicit came at the end, an answer from qualified people who had actually studied the report. I'm yet to listen but steve's reporting they think it's dodgy. So I'm at eironea and falling back on my phronesis after all :-)
-
Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But at the moment it feels like you are taking pot shots at this work without any basis for it other than your reacons about cause and effect.
Can you give me an example of a "pot shot" I made? Since from the very outset I said that I actually agree with their conclusion?
-
Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Not true. Business courses teach students in the first year all about ethics.
They are taught that ethics has no place in business and should be avoided at all costs.
I also did a course called Business Ethics, again, as part an Applied Ethics course. I quite literally came away none the wiser to what the guy was on about at all, however entertaining he was as a lecturer. He clearly knew his Camus and Sartre, but I didn't really come away knowing what advice he'd be giving anyone about anything, when it came to conducting a business. I mean it's all about living the authentic life in existentialism. Well one can be an authentic first-rate hard-headed businessman bastard. Is that virtuous? Or is that counterbalanced if he's magnanimous? It's no wonder that business is practically conducted using laws, rather than ethical theories. He may be magnanimous, but he also fiddled his taxes, so now he can have an authentic white collar prison experience.
-
Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Google “marginal cow”.
OK, did that. I'm struggling to see where Marx and virtue ethics comes into it. It's an alternative way of working out how many cows to have in a herd, right? And the underlying methodology is entirely a profit maximization process, the only dispute being about how to calculate the costs. Ethically, it's utilitarianism, maximizing a good (in this case farm profit).
Why? Apply a Marxian analysis to the choices made/actions of these elite (corporate and politico) classes… and (for me anyway) David Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession theory looks pretty spot on.
But choices about how much stock to run is down to individual farmers, isn't it? Fonterra don't get to decide, do they?
-
Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to Katharine Moody,
What I find in practice is that all the economic analyses I read as part of my work are based on only one ‘school’ of ethical thought, that being teleological/consequentialism.
That seems highly likely to me. They're trying to be progressive, after all. They want to build a science. They want to make the tools by which to achieve economic ends with the best possible chances. Debating the ends themselves doesn't have to hold that up.
Had they understood other schools of moral thought (say, Aristotelian virtue ethics), their theory and tools would instead have been developed to discover the midpoint between excess and deficiency, rather than the highest value use.
Perhaps. But I studied virtue ethics in my philosophy degree and I couldn't make head or tail of it. Not sure how it would help people who maybe do a couple of weeks on it to make sounder choices about what to do with billions of dollars. Choice though it may be to "walk slowly and talk deeply" as the "magnanimous man" the embodiment of virtue, might, it's not helping to decide between rail or more buses.
Yes, I'm being dismissive of virtue ethics. Yes, there's probably a lot more to it. But I sure wasn't convinced after a year long course by a major fan of it on applied ethics. I came away thinking that it was giving more credence to pre-Christian philosopher's insights into how to make moral choices in the 20th Century than he deserved.
-
Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Why is that a horrid neck of the woods, if it is what it is, better to acknowledge it and understand it
My main problem with it is that it tries to boil all economic choices down to moral choices, rather than practical ones. I think that moral choice is at the bottom of economics, but it's not the whole business. The choice of whether to spend public funds on a railway, for instance, isn't just about class struggle. It's also about whether it would be the best use of the money even if the planners are entirely sympathetic to class struggle. Which are decisions that have to be made constantly. To attempt to put them onto an evidence based footing is important.
Furthermore, a great deal of the class struggle paradigm means that useful discussion becomes impossible, since the theorists themselves are part of the class struggle, so you end up with discussions about their ideas boiling down to ad hominems about their own personal interests.
Which is not to say there's no truth in it. I think there is. But I don't think pointing that out gives very much guidance to the resolution. If economics is not scientific enough, the solution is not to say that it's all vain ambition in the end, that nothing can be done about that, that all economic debate is a shouting match between tribes. Maybe something can be done about that. Maybe this statistic from the OECD isn't just a bunch of rich wankers trying to play a trick on the working class, but is actually them genuinely trying to grasp a phenomenon in the world. And maybe, with improved techniques, they could actually make progress on that. It's at least possible.
-
Monkey Selfie
It's the animal kingdom's critique of the entire human race.
-
Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I think I understand how we ended up with this discussion. You’re confusing political and economic ideology with actual science :P
No, I'm not confusing them. I'm saying one is a pale shadow of the other, and it could do better. It is worth discussing how it could do so, although of course giving up is an easier option. Call me a dreamer. This is a thread about how such scientific evidence as we do have suggests a course of action. It is also possible to take a course of action that is also scientific (and also happens to be the same course) in it's very nature, a conscious exploration of a possibility. Well, let's face it, on the evidence it's a high probability (so far as we can calculate by simply relying on external events to provide us with data). But it is not a certainty, not even close.
Our response to being wrong is to say “we were wrong, lets try something else with the aim of being right”.
If you were designing a political system, this is what it would do.
Isn’t that the premise for most if not all government policy.
It seems to be. But it doesn't have to be. It at least worth thinking about how it could not be.
-
Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to steve black,
I agree that you are right to feel uneasy about that.
I didn't just get a major in stats so that I couldn't question causation claims :-). Thanks for your reply and Bart and Matthew too, I have to split for the rest of the evening so hopefully the thread can get back on topic :-)
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 189 190 191 192 193 … 1066 Older→ First