Category Archives: Culture & Civilization

Power to Choose the Mismeasure of Humanity

If you push enough oats into a horse some will spill out and feed the sparrows.

Horse and Sparrow Economic Theory

The rich man may feast on caviar and champagne, while the poor women starves at his gate. And she may not even take the crumbs from his table, if that would deprive him of his pleasure in feeding them to his birds.

Gauthier 1986, 218, Morals by Agreement, Oxford University Press


Yiddish Proverb

The power to choose the measure of success

The successful campaign to eliminate distributional issues from the core of the economic discipline has its mirror image in the popularity of GDP as the measure of economic success of a nation. While the pioneer of national accounting (i.e., GDP), Simon Kusnetz, explicitly said that GDP should not be used as a measure of welfare, and few economists would explicitly advocate such use, it is also true that economists as a group have done precious little to counter the popular opinion that growth, in the sense of maximization of GDP, should be the main goal of economic policy.

GDP is the money value of final goods and services that an economy produces in a quarter or a year (i.e., not including those goods and services used as inputs in production of other goods and services). This definition makes it … a reasonable yardstick of how much money moved around in a quarter or a year, and therefore captures to some extent how much economic activity in money terms there was in that period. It is a poor measure of actual activity in absolute terms due to using money rather than physically measuring human activity or indicators of human activity (e.g., how many tons of material were moving around in a year, or how many bits of information were exchanged in a year). Some activity that commands a large premium in money terms for institutional reasons, like investment banking, even if it is only one powerful person doing a moderate amount of work, will count the same as activities of hundreds of factory workers and much more than the activity of millions of housewives. Societal changes like providing more institutional childcare or reigning in the market power of investment banks can make a huge difference in terms of measured GDP, without significantly changing the actual activities performed. Because of this reliance on using money valuations, GDP has severe issues with accurately measuring technological progress. (Häring et. al. 2012, 28-29)

This method of measuring economic activity has two things going for it. It makes the mathematics a lot easier than measuring in a sensible way. And it conforms with the implicit assumptions if mainstream economics that an extra dollar is worth the same to a poor person than it is to a rich person, just as it makes no differentiation between types of activity, for instance whether they are good (i.e., charitable work) or bad (i.e. criminal activity). If a hedge fund manager makes five billion dollars in a good year, as John Paulson reportedly did in 2010 (Burton and Kishan 2011), this is must as good in GDP terms as 13.7 million people living on a dollar a day doubling their incomes. (Häring et. al. 2012, 29)

Policies that treat human beings as social creatures and try to reach the best results in the most important dimensions of human goals cannot flag their success with equally prominent and simple statistical measures like a single number where higher is “better.” The rich and wealthy benefit most from this way of measuring the economic success of a nation, since it de-emphasizes the gains of the mass low-income people relative to those of a minority if rich people. As far as nations are concerned, it benefits nations that champion the policies favored by this approach, with the US being foremost among these. (Häring, Norbert and Douglas Nial. Economists and the Powerful [Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards]. New York: Anthem Press; 2012; pp. 28-29.)

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Unless you have a PhD in economics, you probably think it uncontroversial to argue that we should be concerned about the unemployment rate. Those of you who lost a job, or who have struggled to find a job on leaving school, college, or a university, are well aware that unemployment is a painful and dehumanizing experience. You may be surprised to learn that, for the past thirty-five years, the models used by academic economists and central bankers to understand how the economy works have not included unemployment as a separate category. In almost every macroeconomic seminar I attended, from 1980 through 2007, it was accepted that all unemployment is voluntary. (Farmer 2017, 47)

In 1960, almost all macroeconomists talked about involuntary unemployment and they assumed, following Keynes, the quantity of labor demanded is not equal to the quantity of labor supplied. That view of economics was turned on its head, almost single-handedly, by Robert Lucas. Lucas persuaded macroeconomists that it makes no sense to talk about disequilibrium in any market and he initiated a revolution in macroeconomics that reformulated the discipline using pre-Keynesian classical assumptions. (Farmer 2017, 47)

The idea that all unemployment is voluntary is called the equilibrium approach to labor markets. Lucas wrote his first article on this idea in 1969 in a coauthored paper with Leonard Rapping. His ideas received a big boost during the 1980s when Finn Kydland, Edward C. Prescott, Charles Long, and Charles Plosser persuaded macroeconomists to use a mathematical approach, called the Ramsey growth model, as a new paradigm for business cycle theory. The theory of real business cycles, or RBCs, was born. According to this theory, we should think about consumption, investment, and employment “as if” they were the optimal choices of a single representative agent with superhuman perception of the probabilities of future events. (Farmer 2017, 47-48)

Mismeasure of Homo Economicus

Of the total employment growth in the US between 2005 and 2015, insecure employment in the categories of independent contractors, on-call workers and workers provided by contracting companies or temp agencies accounted for fully 94 percent.3a Outsourcing of employment plays a big role in what David Weil describes as the “fissuring” of the workplace — depressing wages, magnifying income and wealth inequality, and generating a pervasive sense on the part of those at the wrong end of the fissuring that the world is cheating them, making them angry in return.4 On top of this, many Trump voters are angry that the government is giving handouts to “shirkers”, and sticking them with the tax bill. (Fullbrook et. at. 2017, 65-66. Is Trump wrong on trade? A partial defense based on production and employment. In Trumponomics: Causes and Consequences.)

(….) [P]romotion of the low bar temporary contract or part-time “gig” jobs which comprised over 90% of Obama’s boasted job creation.20 (Fullbrook et. al. 2017, 210. Donald Trump, American political economy and the “terrible simplificateurs.” In Trumponomics: Causes and Consequences.)

The US might be less rich than official statistics make us believe…. After all, measuring GDP is an art as much as a science. What is usually portrayed as a straight forward act of objective measurement involves value judgments and much guesswork.

— Häring et. al. 2012, 33-34, in Economists and the Powerful
Power to measure success …

(….) These conventional metrics [i.e., GDP, misleading and deceptive unemployment metrics, etc.], however, ignored the fact that the QUALITY of the jobs was poor….. And the unemployment data ignores the quality of the types of jobs being created. Recent research by Professors Lawrence Katz of Harvard and Alan Krueger of Princeton based on non-labor force survey data (private sampling) suggests that “all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements.”3 That is standard jobs with predictable income, pension benefits and health care coverage, have disappeared and are being replaced by more precarious contract work and other types of alternative working arrangements. Quantifying this trend, the authors conclude the following:


Thus, these figures imply that employment in traditional jobs (standard employment arrangements) slightly declined by 0.4 million (0.3 percent) from 126.2 million in February 2005 to 125.8 million in November 2015. Unfortunately, we cannot determine the extent to which the replacement of traditional jobs with alternative work arrangements occurred before, during or after the Great Recession. (Fullbrook et. at. 2017, 326-327. Explaining the rise of Donald Trump. In Trumponomics: Causes and Consequences.)

(….) The final change I want to draw attention to is the increasing precarity of the U.S. working-class. They’re increasingly employed in part-time jobs … and in “alternative” work arrangements. As Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger (2016) ahve shown, just in the past decade, the percentage of American workers engaged in alternative work arrangements — defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers — rose from 10.1 percent (in February 2005) to 15.8 percent (in late 2015). And it turns out, the so-called gig economy is characterized by the same unequalizing, capital-labor dynamics as the rest of the U.S. economy.

What is clear from this brief survey of the changes in the condition of the U.S. working-class in recent decades is that, while American workers have created enormous additional income and wealth, most of the increase has been captured by their employers and a tiny group at the top as workers have been forced to compete with one another for new kinds of jobs, with fewer protections, at lower wages, and with less security than they once expected. And the period of recovery from the Second Great Depression has done nothing to change that fundamental dynamic. (Fullbrook et. at. 2017, 350-351. Class an Trumponomics. In Trumponomics: Causes and Consequences.)


3a Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, 2016, “The rise and nature of alternative work arrangements in the US, 1995-2015”, March 29. By the end of 2015, workers in the authors ‘alternative ‘ employment constituted 16 percent of total workers. (Fullbrook et. al., 2017, 66)
4 David Weil, 2014, The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad For So Many and What Can Be Done To Improve It, Harvard University Press.
20 “Nearly 95% of New Jobs During Obama Era were Contract, or Part Time.”, 21 December 2016. Accessed at,-contract-work-449057

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[T]he jobs shifted away to be done by separate employers pay low wages; provide limited or often no health care, pension, or other benefits; and offer tenuous job security. Moreover, workers in each case received pay or faced workplace conditions that violated one or more workplace laws…. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many companies, facing increasingly restive capital markets, shed activities deemed peripheral to their core business models: out went janitors, security guards, payroll administrators, and information technology specialists…. Even lawyers who handle our business transactions and consultants who work for well-known accounting companies may now have an arm’s-length relationship with those whom we think they are employed. By shedding direct employment, lead business enterprises select from among multiple providers [i.e., ‘preferred vendors’ as MSFT calls them] of those activities and services formally done inside the organization, thereby substantially reducing costs [they play vendors off of one another based on cost and create what is know in the recruiting/staffing industry ‘the death of the middle man’ race to the bottom] and dispatching the many responsibilities connected to being the employer of record [saving as much as ~30% in employee benefits no longer paid]. Information and communication technologies have enabled this hidden transformation of work…. By shedding employment to other parties, lead companies change a wage-setting problem into a contracting [and price] decision. The result is stagnation of real wages [and loss of employee benefits] for many of the jobs formerly done inside.

Weil 2014, 3-4

David Weil’s book The Fissured Workplace sheds light on the extent and nature of this “shedding” of employees by corporations. The evidence shows that increasingly employers are forcing workers into temporary, contract positions, or part-time “gig” jobs in a variety of fields. Female workers suffer most heavily in this new fissured economy, as work in traditionally feminine fields like education and medicine have been declining and shifting to the use of contract workers. The disappearance of conventional full-time work, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. work, has hit every demographic. Krueger, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was surprised by the finding. “Workers seeking full-time, steady work have lost,” said Krueger.

But it would be a mistake to believe that the highly skilled and highly educated technology/knowledge workers are immune from this kind of fissuring, for it is continuing apace within the major global technology corporations — know as “lead companies” — like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Wells Fargo (and banks in general), etc., continuing to lay off entire divisions and groups only to rehire them back as “contingent” workers employed by one of the lead firm’s designated “third party vendors,” or “preferred vendors,” or “partners.” The worker/employer power balance of entire industries can be shifted to favorably give corporations huge advantages by the use of opaque global supply chains that use technological smoke screens and employer delegated deception to hide the real nature of these relationships meant to disadvantage the workers economically.

It is now possible to do to white-collar high-skilled high-education workers what has already been done to blue-collar low-skilled low-educated workers, except now it is no longer necessary to “export” those jobs overseas when such technology workers can be shed by lead corporations and forced to work locally for a “third party vendors” (aka staffing companies) at a sometimes 50% to 60% reduced family income and sometimes with little or no employee benefits (e.g., healthcare, sick days, vacation days, etc.). Yahya under the section “Statement of the Problem” writes:

The emergence of knowledge-based economies (KBEs) in developing countries has the potential to leapfrog these economies to compete in the globalized services sector (Rooney et al., 2003). While reducing labour costs is a main reason for outsourcing, it is not the only driver: other determinants include the need to improve quality of service and providing new services for customers (Kaplan, 2002). The rise of the KBEs also illustrates that the distinction between white collar and blue collar workers is an archaic concept because both categories are subjected to the same conditionalities of business cost reduction and profit maximization. The advance of technological developments increased their commonalities, which made white collar service employment just as vulnerable as blue collar work. The convergence of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector has fuelled economic growth but has increased the displacement of service jobs from developed to developing economies (Rooney et al., 2003). The rise of the global IT industry and the outsourcing of various services to lower-cost developing countries are performed through the spatially unbundling of tasks and relocating them to the most productive locations (Wilson, 1998).

(Yahya 2011, 621, emphasis added)

Yahya is mistaken in his claim this form of the “fissuring workplace” improves quality of service, for it actually reduces the quality of service as evidence has shown. When family wage earners are forced to become “contingent” workers in the “gig” economy they are effectively turned into precarious workers who have far less social security in terms of job stability, wages, and benefits. Typically they are forced to work longer hours for less pay and fewer employee benefits, or sometimes non at all. The twin objectives of “fissuring” — reducing costs and simultaneously improving quality of service — turn out to be a chimera in reality leading to overstressed and underpaid precarious “contingent” workers suffering from increased socio-economic anxiety and workload exhaustion.

This has an overall destabilizing social impact on family wage earners — especially single women with children — and society in general. These “external” costs to families and society are rarely considered within economics typically being treated as “externalities” that are exogenous to econometric analysis. With the decline of the power of unions workers — in all classes and domains, from blue-collar to white-collar — are being subjected to increasing wage suppression tactics much of which is hidden behind intentional lack of transparency and technological smoke screens that give major corporations asymmetrical information advantage over workers in deciding wages and compensation values in the so-called “free market” which is in reality a highly rigged market.

Genuinely Creative Thought

2.2 The evolution of the mind: consciousness, creativity, psychological indeterminacy

If consciousness is accepted as real, it seems reasonable that one would allow for an active consciousness, for us to be aware of the experience of thinking and to engage in that experience. If we didn’t allow for engaged and active thought in consciousness, then consciousness would seem to be a passive “ghost in the machine” sort of consciousness. Siegel (2016) would appear to be in agreement with this notion insofar as he sees the mind as a conscious regulator of energy and information flow. But if we allow consciousness to be real in this manner, we allow the possibility of thoughts which exist for no reason other than “we” (the phenomenological “I” (Luijpen, 1969)) think them consciously and actively. The existence of such a thought does not itself break the principle of sufficient reason (Melamed and Lin, 2015), but the “I” thinking them might. That the “I” brings into being a conscious thought might be the terminus of a particular chain of causation. (Markey-Towler 2018, 8)

We call such thoughts to exist “genuinely creative thought”, they are thoughts which exist for no reason other than they are created by the phenomenological “I”. The capability to imagine new things is endowed by the conscious mind. This poses a difficulty for mathematical models which by their nature (consisting always of statements A ⇒ B) require the principle of sufficient reason to hold. Active conscious thought, insofar as it may be genuinely creative is indeterminate until it exists. However, that we might not be able to determine the existence of such thoughts before they are extant does not preclude us from representing them once their existence is determined. Koestler (1964) taught that all acts of creation are ultimately acts of “bisociation”, that is, of linking two things together in a manner hitherto not the case. Acts of creation, bisociations made by the conscious mind, are indeterminate before they exist, but once they exist they can be represented as relations Rhh’ between two objects of reality h,h’. We may think of such acts of creation as akin to the a priori synthetic statements of which Kant (1781) spoke. (Markey-Towler 2018, 8)

This is no matter of mere assertion. Roger Penrose (1989) holds, and it is difficult to dismiss him, that the famous theorems of Kurt Gödel imply something unique exists in the human consciousness. The human mind can “do” something no machine can. Gödel demonstrated that within certain logical systems there would be true statements which could not be so verified within the confines of the logical system but would require verification by the human consciousness. The consciousness realises connections in this case truth-values which cannot be realised by the machinations of mathematical logic alone. It creates. The human mind can therefore (since we have seen those connections made) create connections in the creation of mathematical systems irreducible to machination alone. There are certain connections which consciousness alone can make. (Markey-Towler 2018, 9)

The problem of conscious thought goes a little further though. New relations may be presented to the consciousness either by genuinely creative thought or otherwise, but they must be actually incorporated into the mind, Rhh’g(H)μ and take their place alongside others in the totality of thought g(H)μ. Being a matter of conscious thought by the phenomenological “I”, the acceptance or rejection of such relations is something we cannot determine until the “I” has determined the matter. As Cardinal Newman demonstrated in his Grammar of Assent (1870), connections may be presented to the phenomenological “I”, but they are merely presented to the “I” and therefore inert until the “I” assents to them accepts and incorporates them into that individual’s worldview. The question of assent to various connections presented to the “I” is an either/or question Newman recognises is ultimately free of the delimitations of reason and a matter for resolution by the “I” alone. (Markey-Towler 2018, 9)

There are thus two indeterminacies introduced to any psychological theory by the existence of consciousness:

1 Indeterminacy born of the possibility of imagining new relations Rhh’ in genuinely creative thought.
2 Indeterminacy born of the acceptance or rejection by conscious thought of any new relation Rhh’ and their incorporation or not into the mind μg(H). (Markey-Towler 2018, 9)

The reality of consciousness thus places a natural limit on the degree to which we can determine the processes of the mind, determine those thoughts which will exist prior to their existence. For psychology, this indeterminacy of future thought until its passage and observance is the (rough) equivalent of the indeterminacy introduced to the physical world by Heisenberg’s principle, the principle underlying the concept of the “wave function” upon which an indeterminate quantum mechanics operates (under certain interpretations (Kent, 2012; Popper, 1934, Ch.9)). (Markey-Towler 2018, 9-10)

2.3 Philosophical conclusions

We hold to the following philosophical notions in this work. The mind is that element of our being which experiences our place in the world and relation to it. We are conscious when we are aware of our place in and relation to the world. We hold to a mix of the “weak Artificial Intelligence” and mystic philosophies that mind is emergent from the brain and that mind, brain and body constitute the individual existing in a monist reality. The mind is a network structure μ = {H g(H)} expressing the connections g(H) the individual construes between the objects and events in the world H, an architecture within which and upon which the psychological process operates. The reality of consciousness introduces an indeterminacy into that architecture which imposes a limit on our ability to determine the psychological process. (Markey-Towler 2018, 10)

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My own philosophical views differ from the assumptions underlying Markey-Towler. To say that “mind is emergent from the brain and that mind, brain and body constitute the individual existing in a monist reality,” is essentially a form of physical monism that claims mind “emerged” from matter, which really explains nothing. If the universe (and humans) are merely mechanisms and mind is reducible to matter we would never be able to be aware of our place in and relation to the universe nor would there ever be two differing philosophical interpretations of our place in the universe. The hard problem (mind-brain question) in neuroscience remains a debated and unsettled question. There are serious philosophical weaknesses in mechanistic materialism as a philosophical position, as is discussed in Quantum Mechanics and Human Values (Stapp 2007 and 2017).

A Work in Progress

[E]volutionary economics is a work in progress…. The term “evolutionary economics” has been used to denote a wide range of economic research and writing…. [T]he authors, believe that the value of a broad theoretical perspective, such as that of evolutionary economics, should be judged in terms of the strength and quality of the understanding of empirical phenomena and the illumination of policy questions provided by research oriented by that perspective. We believe that the research done over the last thirty years oriented by evolutionary economic theory has amply demonstrated the value of that theory, and we want to increase the number of scholars who appreciate that. (Nelson et. al. 2018)

(….) At the root of the difference between evolutionary economics and economics of the sort presented in today’s standard textbooks is the conviction of evolutionary economists that continuing change, largely driven by innovation, is a central characteristic of modern capitalist economies, and that this fact ought to be built into the core of basic economic theory. Economies are always changing, new elements are always being introduced and old ones disappearing. Of course economic activities and economic sectors differ in the pace and character of change. In many parts of the economy innovation is rapid and continuing, and the context for economic action taking is almost always shifting and providing new opportunities and challenges. And while in some activities and sectors the rate of innovation is more limited, attempts at doing something new are going on almost everywhere in the economy, and so too change that can make obsolete old ways of doing things. Neoclassical theory, which is a significant influence on how most professionally trained economists think, represses this. (Nelson et. al. 2018)

[To be continued … but don’t hold your breath …]