Ecology and Economics

Ten Principles of Feminist Economics

Continuing our airing of heterodox economics perspectives, and our exposé of the mainstream, here are:

Ten Principles of Feminist Economics: A Modestly Proposed Antidote
By Geoff Schneider and Jean Shackelford

In mainstream economics today there is a particularly egregious recent trend toward producing lists of "key economic ideas" which tend to promote a narrowing of economic thinking, and in turn produce a more "scientific" and less inclusive approach to course contents. …

Since such lists represent what are widely proclaimed (by their authors) as universally accepted principles and therefore worthy of teaching to students, we might also wonder about the missing or other perspectives. Despite the inherent dangers of constructing a list that purports to cover the key economic ideas of any perspective, in this paper we yield to temptation and offer a feminist alternative to these standard principles of economics.

Some Principles of Feminist Economics [abbreviated here, omitting abstracted decriptions by Schneider and Shakelford]

1. There can be no such thing as a definitive list of the principles of feminist economics.
2. Values enter into economic analysis at many different levels.
3. The Household is a locus of economic activity.
4. Non-market activities are important to the economy.
5. Power relationships are important in an economy.
6. A gendered perspective is central to the study of economics.
7. Human beings are complex, and they are influenced by more than just material factors.
8. People compete, cooperate and care.
9. Government action can improve market outcomes.
10. The scope of economics must be interdisciplinary.

Hat Tip to Robert Vienneau, Thoughts on Economics.

Economics: Tendencies Toward 'Cargo Cult' Science

In a recently updated exposé titled Why Economics is on the Wrong Track ('book form' here [PDF], 32 pp., 2002 or find it and other McCloskey' books here) Deirdre McCloskey explicitly notes two "secret sins", argued as peculiar to economic (well, almost). These sins, which we will get to shortly, are bad enough to fill this post. But there is another sin worthy of mention. While not labeling it a sin "peculiar to economics" McCloskey notes that the economics profession, like too many others, while being both "institutionally ignorant" and "historically ignorant" is quietly dismissing its "history of economics" professors:

… Outsiders would likewise be amazed at the Historical Ignorance of the economist. They think that the scientific evidence about economies before the past few years would surely figure in an economist's data. It doesn't. One graduate program after another in the 1970s and 1980s cut the requirement that students become familiar with the economic past. I myself managed for twelve years to fend off the day of execution at the University of Chicago (now do you see the pattern?). The very month I left the department in disgust the barbarians inside the gates sent the economic history requirement to the guillotine, and since then Ph.D.s in economics from the University of Chicago have joined those at Minnesota, Princeton, and Columbia in ignorance of the economic past. At the same time almost all American graduate programs (my own fair Harvard was proudly among the first to do so) were abandoning the study of the past of economics itself. People call themselves economists who have never read a page of Adam Smith or Karl Marx or John Maynard Keynes. It would be like being an anthropologist who had never heard of Malinowski or an evolutionary biologist who had never heard of Darwin.

See also Tsvi Tisk's Utopianism Come of Age: From Post-Modernism to Neo-Modernism:

… I am absolutely dismayed at the ignorance so many professionals have of their own professions: economists and businessmen who do not know economic history or the history of economic ideas; engineers who do not know the history of technology; doctors who do not know the history of medicine or medical paradigms; teachers who do not know the history of education or educational ideas; politicians who do not know the history of politics or political ideas; scientists who do not know the history of science and scientific paradigms etc.

This lack of historical perspective and ability to critically analyze ones own professional self, in the context of ones own historical period, often results in an astounding hubris.

Note that McCloskey serves up a few more "sins" not solely attributable to economics and economists that you need to ferret out from Why Economics is on the Wrong Track. Let's look at the "sins" peculiar to econoimcs.

Two Sins Peculiar to Economics

• "qualitative theorems"
• "statistical significance"

For McCloskey, and me, the first sin is that qualitative economic theorems too often seem to have a life of their own, divorced from the contextual realities of the world. The second sin is that "statistical significance" is used as a shield to convince the gullible that "qualitative theorems" and the data that flesh them out are indeed important. Moreover, many economics practitioners aren't even aware that the 'shield' is in play, believing instead that they are being 'scientific' in ther writeups.

More below, but first, let's introduce the fourth sin via Michael Emmett Brady, in a comment from Truck and Barter on a post titled McCloskey is Oh So Wrong About Statistical Significance:

McCloskey and Ziliak [Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey ] are correct, but they have overlooked a much more serious problem for econometricians and econometrics. Benoit Mandelbrot has spent over 50 years demonstrating that the normal distribution is not an accurate or reliable representation, in general, for most time series economic data. It is interesting that neither Frisch, Tinbergen, Koopmans, Haavelmo, Marshack et al., ever did ANY goodness of fit test on their time series data to see if the normal distribution was a sound representation of the data. Of course, Keynes asked Tinbergen very politely to demonstrate that his data sets were "...HOMOGENEOUS, UNIFORM, AND STABLE.." over time back in 1939.

No econometrician has ever shown that their time series data pass any goodness of fit test. The test Keynes suggested be used in the A Treatise on Probability on pp.420-421 was the Lexis Q test. Let's hope that future econometricians don't provide the "answer" given by Paul Cootner to Mandelbrot in 1964, which was that they were going to continue to assume normality in spite of the fact that the actual data fit the Cauchy distribution [at] best because it would be too hard to apply the Cauchy. -- February 11, 2006 6:40 PM

{edited lightly by Iverson PS. One could do worse than to read through (maybe after I retire?) Brady's "best books" on "how one should study and organize the data and observations that comprise the social sciences."}

Brady's comment is similar, I believe, to Nassim Nichalos Taleb's "ludic fallacy". Taleb's "narrative fallacy" inter-relates with McCloskey's sin "qualitative theorems" which, when embedded in journal articles become a particularly uninteresting (except to the gullible) form of story-telling. We introduced both Taleb's "fallacies" a few weeks ago.

Note: For completeness, I must mention that this terrain has been traversed many times in many ways. Here are two:

'Grand Theory' and 'Methodism' Traps

• C. Wright Mills. 1959. The Sociological Imagination: Mills suggests that too often social scientists fail to deal with things contextually, instead opting for either "Grand Theory" (unanchored to real world observation, truth-testing, etc.) or "Abstracted Empiricism"—others call this "Methodism"— (dogmatic pursuit of narrow-niche endeavors that have more to do with applying data to elegant mathematical models (or even filling up "spreadsheets" or "taxonomic structures") than which testing the fit of method to real-world endeavors.
• Andrew Sayer. 1984. Method in Social Science—A Realist Approach: Sayer devotes the appendix to detailing pitfalls of falling into either naïve "narrative" or naïve "analysis" traps.

McCloskey on "Secret Sins" (from Why Economics is on the Wrong Track)

'Happiness' as Government Policy?

To move our ethics/policy conversation along further, let's cut to the chase and talk about 'happiness'. Here is some background reading (from debatingmatters.com). What caught my attention today, however, was this from Mark Thoma (Economist's View):

Should We be Happy with Research on Happiness?

What does research on happiness tell us?:

Don’t ask the state for happiness, by Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod, Commentary, Financial Times: The idea that government policy should be focused more explicitly on promoting happiness has been gaining support. Proponents of this view argue that happiness indicators, based on surveys that purport to measure how happy people feel, have stagnated over decades. An important reason is that governments have aimed to maximise ... gross national product, rather than a more holistic indicator of welfare based on happiness.

This premise is clearly false. Politicians have always sought to achieve many things that are not designed to increase GNP. The most recent public service agreements on the British Treasury website, for example, spell out government commitments to ... increase participation in the arts...

A decades-long flat happiness trend could be showing that government policies in general fail... But this would be a depressing conclusion. Instead, happiness advocates make a scapegoat out of GNP and argue that economic growth is irrelevant or detrimental to happiness.

The alternative view is that the happiness data over time contain little or no genuine information. ... Indeed, they show no correlation with a whole range of factors that might reasonably be thought to improve well-being, such as a massive increase in leisure time, a tendency to live longer and a decline in gender inequality.

Income inequality is often claimed to be a strong determinant of happiness, and this “fact” used to argue for more progressive taxation. Yet we do not see any change in recorded happiness when inequality goes up or down. ...

Government attempts to increase measured happiness, rather than making life better for us, may well do the opposite: create arbitrary objectives that divert civil service energies from core responsibilities; give many people the message that happiness emanates from national policy rather than our own efforts; and create pressure for government to appear to increase an indicator that has never before shifted systematically in response to any policy or socioeconomic change. These are exactly the mistakes of the target-driven mentality that now pervades the British public sector. ...

More sinisterly, the happiness view of the world has tendencies that are inherently anti-democratic. The expert with his or her clipboard and regressions knows better than ordinary people themselves what makes them happy. So local democratic or individual decisions can be overridden with a clean conscience. ...

Government does not fail because it does not measure happiness; it fails when its energies are misdirected on the basis of poor quality information.

Should these data be used to draw conclusions such as government intervention may not improve well-being and may actually make things worse? John Quiggin at Crooked Timber has written about the data used to make these assessments:

What’s wrong with happiness measurement?, by by John Quiggin, Crooked Timber …

A quick Google search turned up The pursuit of happiness is so problematic by Stephen King. I think my sentiments lie pretty much with King: The pursuit of happiness is indeed problematic! We are not going to get there by attempting to add it up. Better, I think, to work it out as we go about our culture-forming (institutions) and our personal and family and community decision-making, which too can not be reduced to formulae.

Continuing with the theme of "problematic", let me conclude with these quotes on happiness which help us understand the paradoxes embedded in the term. Better to base one's life on kindness methinks, than happiness. Perhaps a rule of thumb might be: kindness through service begets happiness, but kindness/service alone is not enough. There are other things that come into play, like "purpose," "integrity" …

"Government Will Have To Be Rebuilt"

(via Economists's View:) Jamie Galbraith is not taking any prisoners in his review of two books, Consumed by political theorist Benjamin Barber and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by environmentalist Bill McKibben:

The Sins of Affluence, by James K. Galbraith, Washington Monthly: Overwritten does not begin to describe Consumed, in which Benjamin Barber takes aim at kid culture, mass market juvenilia, and the infantilization of just about everything in American life. A political theorist ... at the University of Maryland, ...[Barger is the] author of sixteen books, including the best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld.... Barber is determined that Paradise has been Lost. ...

Consumed is..., to some degree, an instance of the problem it describes. Barber serves up some of the longest sentences since Proust, yet underneath is largely a simple moral tale, an allegory not more complicated than, say, social Darwinism or Horatio Alger.

Infantilization exists, of course. Dumbing down is big business. In a rare moment of syntactic simplicity, Barber gives the basic contours of the culture: “EASY over HARD, SIMPLE over COMPLEX, and FAST over SLOW.” The stages of capitalism reproduce the stages of physical and psychological development, except in reverse. We are trapped in a world dominated by the reduction of physical and cultural artifacts to the tastes and capacities of children. Fast food, fast sports, cheap love, shout-fest politics. No one with cable television could disagree.

And there are pleasures to be found in this relentless, one-message book. ... But you have to search for these gems, buried as they are in a vast bog of pop sociology and commonplace erudition.... One gets the picture very quickly: Standards have fallen. Yes! We know!

The question is, what are we going to do about it? ... Almost fifty years ago, in The Affluent Society, my father wrote about this problem, which he defined as “private affluence and public squalor.” His solution was “social balance”: public goods, including schools and parks and libraries and higher culture. Liberalism stood ... against corporate dominance, business thinking, and commercial culture. And it was backed by the power of trade unions, of churches, and of the educational and scientific estate.

Barber offers no similar recourse. Everything he would do, he would do through markets, not against them or by bringing them under control. He speaks mainly of the “slow food” movement, of Hernando de Soto’s property-rights-for-the-poor and of the Grameen Bank’s micro-lending programs, each of these ... presupposing that markets can be as much a force for good in principle as they are presently a force for ill in practice. ... The New Deal and the Great Society are not Barber’s antecedents. He seeks merely the willed capacity to conduct one’s own life beyond the reach of mass culture, and offers the wishful thought that sensible people, each acting alone, will somehow manage to do just that. Good luck. ...

Environmentalist Bill McKibben is a better, shorter writer, and in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future he shows himself to be an adept critic of capitalism writ large. That is because McKibben, unlike Barber, drills into the fundamental question of the planet’s physical limits. (The term “climate change” does not appear in Consumed...) For as McKibben points out, the carbon blanket—a “mirror image in the sky” of every drop of oil, every ton of coal ever burned—will change everything, and quite soon.

So what comes next?

Climate change and peak oil ... are inevitable; we will have to scale back. But McKibben has hope, founded improbably on an emerging field within—of all subjects—economics: happiness studies. Here researchers have found (and McKibben accepts) that happiness does not depend on economic growth, after the first $10,000 per capita in GDP. So McKibben sets out to find happiness in simpler, less eco-destructive lives. ...

[A] sphere that both McKibben and Barber largely ignore ...[is] public policy. The function of the government, in principle, is to foresee these dangers, and avert them. The powers of the government exist to permit the mobilization of resources required. And only government can hope to do the job.

This is bleak news not only in the present climate of thought, but also given the decay of the public sphere since at least 1981. Whatever government might have been (or seemed) capable of in the 1940s or the 1960s, it plainly is not capable of today. A government that cannot establish a functioning Homeland Security Department in half a decade, a government that is capable of creating the Coalition Provisional Authority or Bush’s FEMA, is no one’s idea of an effective instrument for climate planning. Plainly the destruction of government—the turning over of regulation to predators, military functions to mercenaries, the Justice Department to a vote-suppression racket, and the Supreme Court to fanatics—has been the price of tolerating the Bush coup of November 2000. Soon we will face the aftermath of all this, with the fate of the earth in the balance.

Therefore: government will have to be rebuilt. The competencies necessary will have to be learned. The necessary powers will have to be legislated. Safeguards—against corruption, against abuse, against predation, against regulatory capture—will have to be designed. The corporate consumer culture will have to be brought to heel...

At the same time, a new project of physical, technological, and urban social engineering will have to get under way. I’d rather it didn’t. But, to borrow Margaret Thatcher’s famous words, “There is no alternative.”...

Let's add back in Jamie Galbraith's concluding lines:

John Kenneth Galbraith, let me suggest, got it right, not merely in The Affluent Society but in Economics and the Public Purpose as well:

The role of the government, when one contemplates reform, is a dual one. The government is a major part of the problem; it is also central to the remedy. It is part of the problem of unequal development, inequality in income distribution, poor distribution of public resources, environmental damage and bogus or emasculatory regulation. And it is upon government that reliance must be placed for solution.

Sad, but still true.

More Heterodoxy: Max Sawicky on 'Why Economics Sucks'

Max Sawicky (MaxSpeak, You Listen!) has been flexing his wings lately as Heterodox views on economics get more press. Here (condensed slightly) is his latest, titled The Ten Boxes of Heterodoxy, Why Economics Sucks (via TPM Cafe). Sawicky prefaces his remarks with, "I believe much of what follows is recognized by mainstream, orthodox economic doctrine. It's just that economists act as if it is not." Sawicky:

The Ten Boxes of Heterodoxy …

1. Supply and demand (1) … in practice obscures anything interesting that affects market conditions. It bespeaks militant, ideologically-based reductionism.….
2. S&D (2). The outcome in an supply and demand model in principle has no inherently attractive qualities, in and of itself, since it depends on the distribution of ability to pay. …
3. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). … Solemn assurances that GDP is not synonymous with economic welfare fall easily by the wayside. More GDP (and less leisure time, less environmental quality, a less sustainable economic future) is always better.…
4. Commerce versus The Market. …When the Federal government tries to organize markets with the buzzword of "competitive sourcing," the results are … comical. There is plenty of commerce, but there are very few markets, even though economists pretend they solve most of our problems.
5. In Search Of: The profit motive. Professors tell their gullible students that business firms maximize profits. This induces efficient use of resources and fortuitous allocation of capital. But if you study the economics of firms, even under orthodox auspices, you find out they don't maximize profits.
6. The deficit's gonna getcha. Years of braying about the evils of budget deficits have failed to be borne out by the purported consequence — high interest rates. The entire traditional macro apparatus fails to allow for the interventions of large foreign lenders who aren't dumb enough to believe what the textbooks say.
7. Capital fundamentalism. As with reductionism of the S&D model, growth modeling zeroes in on private capital accumulation, even though a) other factors are demonstrably important and beg for attention; and b) private capital accumulation may be a consequence of other factors, rather than a cause and appropriate object for policy. …
8. Every import is sacred. Regulation of markets is allowed, unless the market includes parties from different countries. Then it is strictly verboten.
9. The unnatural rate of unemployment. Economists used to say it was 6.0, maybe 5.5 percent. Lower would give rise to ruinous inflation. The huge social benefits of another couple of percentage points less unemployment were — are — implicitly discounted. Current rate is 4.5. 'Nuff said.
10. "Power? You want the political science dept." Power looms over economic transactions, except in economic theory. Workers do not hire capitalists. Consumers do not choose merchants. Shareholders do not choose managers. Voters do not choose elected officials. …

Go to Max's post (and site) for added wit, insight, rebuttals (as comments), rebuttals to rebuttals (more comments), and links to much more…

Making World Development Work: New book

Making Development Work, edited by Grégoire Leclerc and Charles A. S. Hall challenges mainstream economic thinking. Now we just have to find some reviews of the book to see whether any of us want to shell out the big bucks for this tome. Anybody seen any reviews?

From University of New Mexico Press:

Making World Development Work
Scientific Alternatives to Neoclassical Economic Theory
Edited by Grégoire Leclerc and Charles A. S. Hall

---

Making World Development Work is about economic development and its relation to population, environment and resource issues in less affluent countries. These essays presented here criticize the way most large development projects are designed and conducted and are written by professionals from a broad range of disciplines involved in current development research.

Making World Development Work explains why overly simplistic economic models of development have led to many failures and unnecessary environmental destruction. The editors contend the preferred method of development is through a systematiic process that integrates the natural sciences with economics and one that is based on scientific method instead of ideology.

Leclerc and Hall review the logical and methodological basis of neoclassical economics and its application to development. They provide a series of historical perspectives, including less developed countries that have improved successfully and others that have not been as successful. They complete the demonstration with a portfolio of current development research innovations in the social and economic sciences as well as in the natural sciences, including a new logical basis for economics called biophysical economics.

Making World Development Work offers new ways to consider development including the limitations of cheap energy, environmental degradation, and human population growth as the fundamental issues for any economic model that can have any hope of working in the future.

Grégoire Leclerc is senior scientist with the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD).

Charles A. S. Hall is professor of environmental and forest biology at SUNY, Syracuse. He is the author of more than 200 publications and author or editor of seven books including Quantifying Sustainable Development: The Future of Tropical Economies.

While awaiting reviews on Making World Development Work, here is more on "biophysical economics" from the Encyclopedia of Earth

Valuing Non-Human Animals

How should we treat non-human animals (and I insist on the 'non-human' modifier to emphasize our own inclusion in the animal kingdom)?  Or, more generally, how should we figure out how to treat them?  NHAs cannot tell us how they're doing and are almost entirely incapable of fighting back, but are (or at least some of them probably are) capable of being hurt.  Indeed, if you were to add up, as a utilitarian would, all the suffering occurring on this planet at this instant, the bulk of it may well be among our livestock animals.  Our treatment of NHAs is a major thorn in contemporary society's side.  (cf PETA)  I say this as someone who has been advocating for better treatment of NHAs, particularly livestock animals, for several years now.  The reactions I get range from awkward embarrassment to outright hostility at the mere thought of caring about other species.

I bring this up now in response to our discussion about Dewey as a test for the experimentation, reflection, and deliberation he advocates,  which has some support here.  I am curious as to whether the ethics Dewey represents and utilitarianism actually reach different conclusions in practice.  I suspect the treatment of NHAs will serve as a worthy example topic because it is one which utilitarians harshly criticize widespread contemporary practice.  If Dewey's ethic sides with the popular practice, I will harshly reject it.  However, if it sides with utilitarianism, then perhaps we're all arguing over nothing.

A good reading on this is the Posner-Singer debate.  Singer is a utilitarian ethicist and leading figure in the NHA welfare movement.  Posner is a judge who cares about NHA welfare but rejects Singer's views.  The key philosophical difference between the two is on the moral relevance of species membership.  Singer argues (and I agree) it has none, that the only morally relevant matter is wellbeing.  Posner, however, argues that it does have relevance, and that we should support our own species (and cats should support cats).

Posner says this in his rejection of the idea that we should sacrifice human wellbeing for even greater NHA wellbeing.  He is unclear on the matter, because he recommends some such sacrifice, but not "too much", without any specification of what constitutes "too much".  We can, if we'd like, never define such terms and always just make them up as we go along.  (Perhaps this is Dewey's experimental approach?)  But, I would argue, this leaves us vulnerable to anyone doing anything and then arguing that to do otherwise would be "too much" of a sacrifice.  Can the experimental approach find limits to sacrifice?  Alternatively, in the absence of well-defined limits, how would it judge what's best?  If by deliberation, what if deliberation reaches gridlock?  What if deliberation reaches wretched conclusions, such as accepting widespread livestock suffering?

I also have a problem with Posner's us-against-them ideology because it promotes (or at least doesn't prevent) conflict.  Would he recommend that cats hurt us, if this was in their interest?  (Posner recommends humans hurting dogs here.)  Furthermore, Posner does not stop with species: "Americans have distinctly less feeling for the pains and pleasures of foreigners than of other Americans".  (same link)  When the interests of nations conflict, and both nations insist on doing what's best for them, if they are more evenly matched, war often breaks out.  However, if there is a power imbalance, we get oppression.  In human-NHA conflicts, the power imbalance is so large that we end up with today's massive-scale factory farming in which hideous treatment of NHAs is legally sanctioned and so thoroughly accepted that those who speak out against it are, for the most part, social outcasts.

Or at least they used to be.  Thanks to people like Singer (and many non-utilitarians too), supporting NHA welfare is more socially acceptable, if still not widespread.  Posner himself is no outcast but a highly-respected intellectual.  He says this:

What is needed to persuade us to alter our treatment of animals is not philosophy, let alone an atheistic philosophy (for one of the premises of your argument is that we have no souls) in a religious nation, but to learn to feel animals' pains as our pains and to learn that (if it is a fact, which I don't know) we can alleviate those pains without substantially reducing our standard of living and that of the rest of the world and without sacrificing medical and other scientific progress. Most of us, especially perhaps those of us who have lived with animals, have sufficient empathy for the suffering of animals to support the laws that forbid cruelty and neglect. We might go further if we knew more about animal feelings and about the existence of low-cost alternatives to pain-inflicting uses of animals. And so to expand and invigorate the laws that protect animals will require not philosophical arguments for reducing human beings to the level of the other animals but facts, facts that will stimulate a greater empathetic response to animal suffering and facts that will alleviate concern about the human costs of further measures to reduce animal suffering. (same link)

Setting aside the matter of religion, let me note that to improve livestock animal welfare, we'd need to either change our diets to reduce our consumption of animal products or pay more for them.  Whether this constitutes a "substantial" reduction in our standard of living depends on what we consider "substantial".  I have changed my diet, and while I did enjoy eating meat, I find my life still good (except, ironically, when people give me a hard time for my vegetarianism- and yes, this happens, and not infrequently).  Also note that Posner, loathe he appears to be to admit it, is himself engaging in philosophy, just of a different sort than Singer.  Any time we talk about what we should or shouldn't do, we are discussing ethics, even if these discussions don't resemble those of professional philosophers.

Should we adopt, as Posner recommends here, an empathy-based ethics system?  One objection to basing our ethics on empathy is that our empathy is often paradoxical and unsatisfactory, as Singer himself points out in The drowning child and the expanding circle.  While this example concerns only humans, it can readily be extended to NHA treatment: What when our empathies are blind to widespread NHA suffering (and they very often are)?  How do we know how far to extend our empathies, were we to attempt such a project?  We may be back in similar territory as above in imprecisely placing limits.

If we may accept an ad hominem argument, note that the rest of the time, Posner belongs to the (I would say) notorious Chicago school of economics, notorious for its incessant determination to place monetary value on everything.  (Here, Posner argued that humanity's existence is worth about 600 trillion dollars.  Would we sell our existence for this sum?  What would we do with all the money?)  I bring up his affiliation with the Chicago school because it would recommend anything but empathy as the foundation for our decisions.  Indeed, the school could be in some sense considered a strand of utilitarianism gone wrong.  It's certainly "atheist" as Posner would use the term.

I'll end here with questions:  How would you recommend treating NHAs, or, more generally, how would you go about deciding how to treat NHAs?  In particular, what would you do if broad discussion among humans lead to the conclusion (and it very well could) that we should keep the status quo of widespread NHA cruelty?

...Two great readings on NHA wellbeing- itself a challenging and fascinating scientific question- are Can fish suffer?: perspectives on sentience, pain, fear and stress (pdf) by K.P. Chandroo, I.J.H. Duncan, R.D. Moccia, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 86 (2004) 225-250; and The Moral Standing of Insects and the Ethics of Extinction by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, The Florida Entomologist, Vol. 70, No. 1. (Mar., 1987), pp. 70-89.  Briefly, these conclude that fish are probably conscious (and thus capable of suffering) and insects might be.

Some Principles Of Heterodox Economics

Since I like to pitch both 'hetererodox' and 'post-autisitic' economics perspective, I appreciated this from Robert Vienneau at Thoughts on Economics:

Some Principles Of Heterodox Economics

1. Methodology (rather than just method) is important to understanding economics.
2. Human actors are social and less than perfectly rational, driven by habits, routines, culture and tradition
3. Economic systems are complex, evolving and unpredictable - and consequently equilibrium models should be viewed sceptically.
4. While theories of the individual are useful, so are theories of aggregate or collective outcomes. Further, neither the individual nor the aggregate can be understood in isolation from the other.
5. History and time are important (reflecting (3)).
6. All economic theories are fallible and, reflecting (4), there is contemporary relevance of the history of thought to understanding economics.
7. Pluralism, i.e. multiple perspectives, is advocated (following on from (3) and (6)).
8. Formal mathematical and statistical methods should be removed from their perceived position as the supreme method - but not abandoned - and supplemented by other methods and data types.
9. Facts and values are inseperable.
10. Power is an important determinant of economic outcomes.

-- Andrew Mearman (2007). "Teaching Heterodox Economics Concepts", The Economics Network (June)

(I previously posted a quotation of ten principles of institutional economics.)

[appended below for spice, for comparision …]

On Dewey: Ends/Means & Experimentalism

Note: Here, I'm working off of Dewey's Moral Philosophy by Elizabeth Anderson and John Dewey Reconstructs Ethics by Jan Garrett.

Dewey is a very interesting one.  He and I are have a lot in common; I’m perhaps more similar to him than any other noted philosopher:  We’re both interested in ethics as a practical guide to behavior that can readily adapt to any circumstance.  We share a sense that the big work to be done is on the societal level, not the individual level.  We both seek broader discussion of ethics within our respective societies and are very active in education.  We have similar criticisms of deontological/rule-based ethics systems (“Thou shall not kill” etc).  We both strive to integrate actual human psychology into our thinking instead of assuming some ideal behavior.  We also share a strong interest in “decision procedures”, i.e. how we do or should make decisions, which goes beyond the more basic matter of which decisions are good.  We seem to have similar intuitions on what constitutes wellbeing.  Dewey even seemed fond of utilitarianism (it “represented progress in ethics” - link).

I will skip further discussion of our similiarities here (but feel free to ask for elaboration on any of these points in the comment thread).  I’m also going to skip over my concerns with his views on meta-ethics and philosophy of science.  Instead, I’m going to discuss his views on means and ends and his idea of experimental ethics, the latter of which I think has some merit for certain circumstances but is less good in others and is downright frightening in a specific class of circumstances- irreversible processes.

Regarding ends & means (also referred to as intrinsic goods and instrumental goods), I support Dewey’s criticism of the then-traditional breakdown, but I’m not sure I support his substitute.  In the then-traditional breakdown, ends and means are both things happening to the individual.  Anderson offers as an example of an end “getting to a lake” with a corresponding mean of “jumping across the ditch that’s in the way” (link).  I think Dewey is right to criticize the traditionalists where they claim that this means need not be valued.

The utilitarian’s breakdown, as I see it, functions much better: The means here would be both getting to the lake and being at it, while the ends would be the wellbeing experienced from both getting there and being there (including the wellbeing of both the individual in question and all other individuals who are affected).  I’m not sure if Dewey would accept this breakdown, and I’m less sure if Dewey would accept the utilitarian’s only valuing the ends (wellbeing) and not the means.  This passage in particular perplexed me:

“Although hedonism fails as a theory that gives us a fixed end, it does contain a methodological insight. Nothing is good that cannot be desired. All desire contains an element of enjoyment or liking. Hence, pleasure can be seen as a sign of the good, as evidence of what is valuable. Nevertheless, what makes desire a sound guide to the good is the fact that it incorporates foresight and reflection on the wider consequences of acting on it, not just that it incorporates a liking of its object.” (link)

Never mind that hedonism, whether egoist or utilitarian, seems relentlessly focused on pleasure as the ultimate, fixed end.  (Egoistic hedonism recommends maximizing one's own pleasure; utilitarian hedonism recommends maximizing everyone’s pleasure.)  What confuses me most is how intangible Dewey’s notion of the good is.  Does he actually think that action based on “foresight and reflection” is intrinsically good?  What if such action lead to horrendous outcomes, like, say, genocide?

Regarding experimentalism, I think there are some circumstances where this approach can be successful.  I'm imagining very new and exotic circumstances like wireheading.  If (and it quite possibly doesn't) my utilitarianism recommended large-scale wireheading ASAP, I would instead recommend a Dewey-esque experimental approach, sacrificing some total utility for the assurance that we weren't doing anything that we didn't realize was, for whatever reason, not a good idea.

It is only in these unusual, extreme cases where I’d recommend the experimental approach.  In most ordinary circumstances, utilitarianism works quite well.  Further, the experimental approach is attrocious with irreversible processes.  IPs include such things as biodiversity/species extinction or permanent reduction in carrying capacity.  Because they can’t be undone, these are not matters to experiment on.  If we’re going to do them, we better be sure they’re the right thing to do.  Note that utilitarianism is not always great on these either.  While it probably places more weight on preventing humanity’s extinction than anything else, it is indifferent to extinction in general, especially the extinction of non-sentient species.  However, I have at least some inclination to prevent their extinction in case we might later decide to value these, even beyond biodiversity's potential usefulness to sentient beings.

So, I’d recommend experimentalism for new, reversible moral dilemmas, caution for irreversible processes, and utilitarianism for everything else.  Where experiment or caution might substantially reduce total expected utility, I would side with utilitarianism.