The Child's-Eye View in Economics

A lot of life, money, time, and thought have been put into the study called “Economics."

 

It's an important and interesting study, but the first thing one notices about it from the outside is how very much disagreement there is among the people who are most informed, most conversant in the subject, people who have devoted their entire lives to studying economics.

Another thing that an outsider notices right away is the presence in economic discussion of metaphors, analogies, similes, comparisons on a symbolic level. Some of these metaphors are highly complex but some of the metaphors are extremely simple as in the attribution of agency to the stock market implied by the words “The market climbed higher today” or “The market corrected itself today.” It's hard to imagine the deception and damage that such metaphors can bring with them without having taken some area of study deeply and made a deliberate study of the matter.

These two observations, of deep disagreement and of the presence of inappropriate metaphors, might seem like child's-eye observations, unworthy of grownups who have the responsibility in the real world of getting things done.

But isn't that ultimately where the highly-sophisticated constructions of brilliant, life-long, highly-informed, experienced, persons in any area of study go wrong and thereby vitiate their entire life's work? It's in the basic assumptions such as in the image of what a human being is or what a dollar is, that we find what vitiates the very elaborate theories and distinctions of highly-sophisticated scholars.

So I think there is a lot of value to be found in what I am calling here the child's-eye view of economics.

Here is one example. I am listening to the CB during the night to the conversations of some truckers going on and on about the taken-for-granted evil of “government spending.” A lot of frustration, and hostility, is expressed, in loud voice, about government spending. Finally, I hear one sentence in low voice from a trucker out of the darkness say, “Well, sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money.” The remark put an end to all the discussion. Anyone who has ever tried to start a business or to run a business knows exactly what he was saying.

Here's one more example of what I am calling the child's-eye view. I am attending a town meeting in Durham, New Hampshire, which is primarily a university town. The issue being discussed is whether or not to build a new school, and various university people who value education highly are giving their highly-thought-out speeches for about an hour on why we should build this new school. There is a lot of heat back and forth between the university people and the ordinary townspeople as to whether or not to build the new school. Peter Macdonald stands up after about an hour of this and says in a quiet, simple voice, “We don't know yet what this new school would cost. Why don't we find out what it would cost before we decide to build it?” Peter Macdonald is often dismissed as a town simpleton, but his “simple” observation put a complete stop to a distressing discussion that had gone on for about an hour. Everyone at the town meeting was dumbfounded, silent. The moderator then tabled the issue and we moved on.

One of my teaching colleagues, an economist, was discussing this matter of basic assumptions with me in my office one day and said, “And we really don't agree in economics on what a 'dollar' is.” I remember colleagues in the art department saying that they don't really know what “art” is. I know that in sociology, which I studied deeply and taught for more than decade, that there is great disagreement on what a “group” is, and even on what the word “social” means.

I often think of the "efficient market hypothesis" and "the rational market hypothesis" and wonder if professional economists shouldn't give more respect to such as the following:

"Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber get paid how much?!"

"A Mini-Cooper costs how much?!"

The essence of objectivity and science is public observability, which therefore must include these questions.

Perhaps the main value of spending a lifetime in the study of economics is that it enables the student to understand the far-reaching implications of the basic assumptions that rely on the child's eye view.

I recently heard Thomas Cahill tell Bill Moyers that the basic issue is kindness – whether a person is kind or not. He may be right - it may all ultimately be about something like that, rather than, say, 'survival of the fittest,' or 'more.'