[lbo-talk] Philip Mirowski - Social Physicist

Vincent Clarke pclarkepvincent at gmail.com
Tue Mar 2 00:58:36 PST 2010



>
>
>>
>> As for the ‘quantification of human desire’ with marginal utility
>> theory – neoclassical economics hasn’t relied on a quantification of
>> utility for almost a hundred years. Google ‘ordinal utility’ and
>> ‘revealed preference’.
>>
>>
> As I said above, ordinal utility is now deeply tied to cybernetic-based
> reasoning. You won't hear those two words without terms like "closed-system"
> and "open-system" and "feedback-loop" and the like cropping up close behind.
> These are still attempts to quantify human desire, in some shape or form -
> even if they do so post factum. They're probably an advance on the old
> marginal theory, but they're not a break with the old modes of reasoning.
> I'll be rather elliptical here, because I think when talking about these
> sorts of issues such is necessary.
>
> Ordinal utility theory marks a shift discernible in many social sciences
> from notions of teleology to notions of teleonomy - I would argue that this
> is inspired by cybernetics. Now, the big philosophical joke about teleonomy
> is that it's really just teleology wearing a more modern looking mask.
> Teleonomy is basically what occurs when a scientist looks at the notion of
> teleology and says: "No, this cannot be true, but if I reject it my world
> descends into chaos - thus I will pretend as if it exists". Kant realised
> this a long time ago, so did Hume - we've been a long time catching up.
>
> As I said, ordinal theory is an advance, certainly - but it is not a break
> with the old method of reasoning.
>

Shit, actually, one other thing on that ordinal utility theory. As I said, it is an advance, insofar as it injects economics with a healthy dose of relativism (which is essential for democracy...) but I would argue that it doesn't really go far enough. There's a great passage in one of his seminars where Jacques Lacan is discussing the behaviorist observing the rat in the maze. Lacan jokes that the behaviorist himself - that distant scientific observer - is already deeply caught up in the experiment. We can be sure, he points out, that the behaviorist, if he didn't design the maze himself, he certainly chose the design. Lacan jokes that the poor little rat is running around in a material embodiment of the behaviorists desire - what the behaviorist finds in his experiment is his own desire staring back at him. His own desire to watch a rat run around a specifically shaped maze - its quite funny really.

This all sounds a little dumb, but it has serious practical consequences. Once the economist/social scientist is given direct subjective input into his theory - for example, when he determines what/how he will survey the consumer's behavior in the marketplace - you can be sure you'll find traces of his own desire in it. From Lacan's bad rat-maze jokes, I'll let Wiki have the last word:

Another entirely different problem is whether ordinal utility is indeed an observable variable in real world. For example, in closed hypothetical system like above, there are only orange and apple to choose from. Therefore, when an individual choose orange, one can definitely say that an orange is preferred over an apple. However, in real world, when a consumer purchases an orange, it is often impossible to say what good or set of goods or collection of behavioural choice (including not purchasing anything at all or doing something else) were discarded as options.



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