Economics and Greed

[gilbertrollins]

(Removed at Users Request) economics has normative implications, how an old-school reading of it promotes and legitimates self interest, and how that idea is not a necessary theoretical consequence of economic assumptions, and that it is empirically incorrect that self interest leads to economic growth (you can't get cooperative organizations [firms] that way, nor technological increase).
 

(Removed at Users Request)

Edited February 1, 2013 by Eigen

[TakeruK]

it is empirically incorrect that self interest leads to economic growth (you can't get cooperative organizations [firms] that way, nor technological increase).

This phrase interested me because I often here people argue the opposite point (competition breeds excellence or something like that). I did not want to believe that self-interest is necessary for economic growth but I was feeling like that might be the truth. So it was nice to see the opposite point being made!

 

However, I am not well prepared to enter in a discussion on economics at all. So maybe this was just a really naive comment!

 

Anyways, that interesting phrase aside, I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Did you intend to start a specific discussion topic? 

[gilbertrollins]

The point was to introduce the paper, which shows that people who have ethical priors that greed is ok, or a good thing, are more likely to self-select into economics programs.  The kid I tutored is a walking contradiction, because he basically owes his entire existence to rampant altruism (including several of his internal organs), yet basically signed up for economics to reify the ethical positions batted around on Fox News (which isn't the point of a more sophisticated economics, but unfortunately programs have to teach who signs up, which includes a lot of "this is another business major, right?" kids).  

 

Self-interested exchange isn't a terrible bane, and you do get what economists would call marginal allocation from it -- the invisible hand postulate isn't entirely mistaken.  But very little of what goes on in the economy actually represents textbook, self-interested trades.  Most of it is highly cooperative and organized behavior, motivated by institutional rules and decision heuristics.  

[herbertmarcuse]

Thanks for sharing that article. Are you trying to achieve a self-fulfilling prophecy in your own thesis?  Unless I completely misunderstood you, I think what you're trying to look for is how individuals (such as the blind dude you described) and their prior contradictory attitudes on greed  likely explains how people "self select" into economics programs or similar majors. I would follow your thesis, if you had more supportive empirical evidence - like some sort of greed survey or did some sort of group experiment/participant observation on students who wanted to become potential business or economic majors. I would be happy to be your co-author if you decide to go forward with this.

[AaronM]

this study focuses on lying rather than greed specifically, and there are some obvious limitations, but I think it is relevant to the topic.

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/research-says-studying-economics-turns-you-into-a-liar/266423/

[gilbertrollins]

Thanks for sharing that article. Are you trying to achieve a self-fulfilling prophecy in your own thesis?  Unless I completely misunderstood you, I think what you're trying to look for is how individuals (such as the blind dude you described) and their prior contradictory attitudes on greed  likely explains how people "self select" into economics programs or similar majors. I would follow your thesis, if you had more supportive empirical evidence - like some sort of greed survey or did some sort of group experiment/participant observation on students who wanted to become potential business or economic majors. I would be happy to be your co-author if you decide to go forward with this.

 

 

It's well documented that economics students give lower-than-modal offers in Dictator and Ultimatum games, because of course the ostensibly positive education in human decision making translates into normative prescriptions for behavior.  That says nothing about kids with greed-is-good priors self selecting for the discipline.  

 

Sociology of science studies will in general I don't think be well received in economics, or at least have very little impact on methodology etc. if carried out because generally economists and economics students are of the opinion economics is wholly positive.  Heterodox and other people have been picking at economics for a long time about how it is inherently political, about how any science is inherently socially and ethically constructed and rhetorical (Michael Polanyi, Deirdre McCloskey, Philip Mirowski, etc).  There is enough of a history of heterodox economists, Wall Street Journal op-ed people, sociologists, and philosophers of science making this complaint that there are enormous defenses built up to it in economics by now.

 

All of that and the above said -- I do not believe a critical majority of advanced economics students or especially professional economists maintain a "Greed is Good" ethical philosophy, nor do they vote in such a manner.  A majority of economists vote democrat in fact, and get really annoyed with the stupid Ayn Rand interpretation of economic theory.

 

Posted the above cuz I wanted to give people a better idea of what team I'm playing for since I'd picked so many fights defending selective portions of the discipline.

[gilbertrollins]

 if you had more supportive empirical evidence - like some sort of greed survey 

This brings up something I'm interested in.  Economics got really excited about B.F Skinner behaviorism, along with the psychologists, after about the 1950's.  That's why there's such a huge emphasis on "revealed preferences" in economics -- agents vote with their feet, and through those choices we can infer their beliefs/desires ex post as long as we keep a couple axioms about preferences straight.  So there are no surveys in economics.  

 

Who in sociology has defended surveys and studying stated-preferences, or human science "at the lip," from the behaviorists?  Is this a common methodological issue? We learn in economics some nominal things about how crappy people's reports are of what they're willing to pay for things (it often differs wildly from what they actually will pay), and we learn fun facts like men on average report having something like twenty sexual partners and women report something like ten  (it's a statistical identity that should match).  There's also a long line of reasoning coming down from Hobbes in economics, that talk is cheap, commitments aren't credible unless people dedicate resources to them, etc.  

 

Where can I get the sociological side of this story?  What devices are used in survey methods in order to control for biased reporting (I know the basics of randomization and blinding, and a little bit about confusing people so they don't know what's being studied and game their responses, but that's about it).  

 

Also, since multivariate regressions are getting more common in sociology, how do you get enough variation with 1-5 discreet scale responses to questions, in order to really decipher the relative magnitudes of X and Y variables on the dependent variable?  It seems like you'd really want to get data with continuous variables, and have as few discreet measures as possible.

[herbertmarcuse]

Where can I get the sociological side of this story?  What devices are used in survey methods in order to control for biased reporting (I know the basics of randomization and blinding, and a little bit about confusing people so they don't know what's being studied and game their responses, but that's about it).  

[herbertmarcuse]

Sorry for the delay. As always, you raise a fruitful number of issues. Being more on the sociological and public opinion side, you might read up on some of the group experiment stuff developed by the Frankfurt school in Germany during the 1950s and 1960s. Not sure if  neo-marxian  social theory is your thing, but there is some fruit in their methodology and technique that they used and developed. 

 

http://www.amazon.com/Group-Experiment-Other-Writings-Frankfurt/dp/0674048466

 

Cheers,

HM

[gilbertrollins]

^Great stuff.  I find Marxism extremely obnoxious, but I try to be scholarly about it and understand what I mean to argue against.  

 

In any event, that book looks great.  These guys seem to be recognizing that you can't add up "independent observations" of opinions to derive public opinion any more than you can (in economics) add up "independent utilities," to derive social welfare.  Fundamentally people's opinions are recursive functions of one another, subject to the usual knock-on cascading/network/herding effects.  So there is indeed a great deal of endogeneity surveyors need to account for in understanding macrosocial mores.  Great stuff.  Will read thanks.

[herbertmarcuse]

Critical theory is something different than pure Marxism.

[gilbertrollins]

Well, sure.  Marx is at least decipherable.  

[jacib]

Critical theory is something different than pure Marxism.

 

Well, sure.  Marx is at least decipherable.  

 

This is the first thing on the board that I can remember that actually made me laugh out loud. 

[gilbertrollins]

I thought of critical theory earlier today when I read this.

 

The Law of Intention and Desire

Inherent in every intention and desire is the mechanics for its fulfillment . . . intention and desire in the field of pure pure potentiality have infinite organizing power.  And when we introduce an intention in the fertile ground of pure potentiality, we put this infinite organizing power to work for us.

 

 

Now that is some idiotic new agey spiritualist stuff that a large cohort of my friends post to Facebook every day.  So of course in that context it jumps right out at you as circularly-argued, meaningless assertions made in abstract language to overawe the reader and make them feel like the very act of reading it is per se spiritual.

 

But note how closely it mimics the style of the French structuralists.  Yet French structuralism is girded by academic hierarchy, so everyone fawns after it like it's prophesy, even though a room full of people doing critical theory are never sure if they're even talking about the same thing.  

 

This is where theory/philosophy go wrong.  When the very ritual of theorizing itself becomes the goal -- it predictably serves only theorists, and any sort of symbolic exchange will allow the theorist to feel like he is in the very act of theorizing incanting valid, privileged totems (closed-form existence theorems in mathematical syntax; vocabulary pushups and 8-adjective-strings in English syntax).  

 

Meaningless gibberish is meaningless gibberish, whether the syntax is logically and symbolically consistent among a tiny group of people or not.  Amazingly, after participating in this pseudo-religious theoretical circle jerk, critical theorists have the gall to point the finger and call everything except their own theory "ideological."  

 

Critical theory suspiciously never criticizes anything except the same hobby horses it's been criticizing since the beginning, and rarely if ever criticizes (much less tests against evidence) itself.

Edited January 14, 2013 by econosocio