On mechanisms, Marcia Angell's book, The Truth About Drug Companies, had this fantastic analogy. Aspirin is salicylic acid; it reduces fever; ergo, fever is caused by lack of salicylic acid. and then (she was talking about Prozac), SSRI's provide dopamine; they reduce symptoms of depression, therefore depression is caused by lack of dopamine.
On improvement and optimization. I finished reading The Score, and I like the point that games are OK because there are millions of them. So, even if you have a common objective *within* a game, you are free to move on to another game if you don't agree with that objective. Or, you can get together with your friends and change the objective. Therefore, its not necessarily the optimization that's the problem (although it might be), but what Nguyen calls "value-convergence" where everyone is optimizing the same thing.
My defense of economics is that traditionally done, that was the fundamental driving force behind what people were trying to do. Everyone is different, everyone wants to optimize their own thing, we can't see what they are optimizing. Then, the problematic becomes: Under what circumstances can there still be win-win improvements that allow people to do better, even if everyone is optimizing something different. You could argue `value-convergence' is totally ok because you have made `everyone's thing' into `your own thing.' But I think there are many ways in which you can get artificial value convergence if you tweak things around a bit, while still committing to the rationality (transitive preferences) that economics demand in its neoclassical form. For instance, I want to give up instagram, but I really can't because everyone else is using it. So, if we all committed jointly to giving it up, we would all be better off etc. I *think* if you are willing to define value-convergence as the real issue, rather than optimization, we have the language and the formal methods of showing where a problem may arise.
Then, if you want to move away from the individualistic approach to thinking about society and what society should optimize given that there are many, many circumstances where you may not get a win-win improvement, but you still want some kind of action (any redistributive act, for instance), I still think that Sen's idea of Capabilities remains the most powerful.
"Growth"? (It interests me that in the culture of maxxing and optimisation, the idea that the economy as a whole could reach a stable point from which no improvement is possible is anathema!)
Satisficing 🙂
Two thoughts.
On mechanisms, Marcia Angell's book, The Truth About Drug Companies, had this fantastic analogy. Aspirin is salicylic acid; it reduces fever; ergo, fever is caused by lack of salicylic acid. and then (she was talking about Prozac), SSRI's provide dopamine; they reduce symptoms of depression, therefore depression is caused by lack of dopamine.
On improvement and optimization. I finished reading The Score, and I like the point that games are OK because there are millions of them. So, even if you have a common objective *within* a game, you are free to move on to another game if you don't agree with that objective. Or, you can get together with your friends and change the objective. Therefore, its not necessarily the optimization that's the problem (although it might be), but what Nguyen calls "value-convergence" where everyone is optimizing the same thing.
My defense of economics is that traditionally done, that was the fundamental driving force behind what people were trying to do. Everyone is different, everyone wants to optimize their own thing, we can't see what they are optimizing. Then, the problematic becomes: Under what circumstances can there still be win-win improvements that allow people to do better, even if everyone is optimizing something different. You could argue `value-convergence' is totally ok because you have made `everyone's thing' into `your own thing.' But I think there are many ways in which you can get artificial value convergence if you tweak things around a bit, while still committing to the rationality (transitive preferences) that economics demand in its neoclassical form. For instance, I want to give up instagram, but I really can't because everyone else is using it. So, if we all committed jointly to giving it up, we would all be better off etc. I *think* if you are willing to define value-convergence as the real issue, rather than optimization, we have the language and the formal methods of showing where a problem may arise.
Then, if you want to move away from the individualistic approach to thinking about society and what society should optimize given that there are many, many circumstances where you may not get a win-win improvement, but you still want some kind of action (any redistributive act, for instance), I still think that Sen's idea of Capabilities remains the most powerful.
So, my vote would be for "Capabilities"
"Growth"? (It interests me that in the culture of maxxing and optimisation, the idea that the economy as a whole could reach a stable point from which no improvement is possible is anathema!)
Arete.
Flourishing.
craft
William James used words like “expedience” and “workableness”