Arnold Kling, one half of EconLog (don't know if he's the Donald Fagen half or the Walter Becker half) finally blew a gasket that's been holding back what I've wanted to say for a while; his way might not have been my way, but I still see it, the frustrating problem that he skillfully dissects in "Why People Hate Economics".
Hardly anyone feels guilty about using tax preparation software rather than paying an accountant to handle their tax returns. Yet many people would tell you that there is something wrong with outsourcing tax preparation to accountants in India.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm not an economist. Plenty of times I wish I was, but I'll be honest and tell you I'm just a regular guy. But this regular guy sees that economics has a point. A point that transcends the simplistic notions forwarded and hoarded by society's mainstream like so many nuts in wintertime.
It's difficult, ugly, complicated, unemotional and at times unrewarding, but this regular guy sees more reason and evidence in the economist's way than in the political way, the religious way, the emotional way, and this essay by Kling goes a ways toward making the case. If you want to understand part of the difficulty in getting the message out, read on.
In this post (dated 11/2005, little stale but hey) Kling goes over the constant battle between the motive-based thinking (type M) that politics latches on - the irrational human desire to substitute in motive for context, but provides an easy answer to "why" events happen - and the often-confusing and usually non-intuitive contextual thinking (type C) that often provides little or no answer to the same, but more accurately describes the consequences of events.
Type M thinking treats political conflicts as battles between good and evil. "Our" side is wise and sincerely motivated. The "other" side is stupid and evil.
Type C thinking treats political conflict as an inevitable competition among various interest groups. Actors in the political sphere respond to incentives, just as they do in other spheres.
Plenty have heard me say the "I" word and it comes through again - incentives. They are not the same as motives - incentives are not evil grand designs, they are the treats that come down the pipe when the hamster pushes the lever. They are the difference between your child being fed nutrient-rich food, or the cheap stuff. They are the difference between buying a twin, or buying a queen. They are the stuff of decisions both big and small, and we all respond to them.
Sincerity, honor, committment, hatred, apathy, cowardice, these emotionally-charged words, words that politicians will use to incite your rage or proud patronage, words that the news will create to get you to stay glued to their station, these words embody emotions that are merely results of incentives.
I know several people that do not like that idea. They don't like it for whatever reason, but they will deny it up and down and I will never convince them otherwise. Motive, grander measures of emotional investment, and some kind of implicit "universal ethic" is at stake, not simply the atomic grains of survival. I hear, "why", "why", "why", as the key question. "Why" will not simply be solved by simple dispositional attributions, subject to well-known errors.
- The gas prices went up because those damn oil executives are greedy.
- He won't marry her because he's scared of committment, all guys are.
- She got into a car wreck because she's a bad driver.
It's a fundamental misconception that things happen so simply, or with such an autonomous hand, as in the case of oil price hikes in the wake of Katrina:
For example, consider the run-up in gasoline prices that occurred after Hurricane Katrina. Looking for the cause of higher gas prices, the type M brain asks, "Who?" The type C brain asks "What?"
Some Senators, appealing to the type M brains among their constituents, hauled oil company executives into a hearing to ask them to explain why they raised prices so high. One might just as well imagine hauling people before a Senate hearing and holding them personally responsible for gravity or inertia.
Merely feeling the lack of an answer and possessing the hope that there should be one isn't reason enough to simply create one from past behavior and say "there it is", but it is common, and the only simple retort I have nowadays is to say "it's more complicated than that". Does anybody have time or desire to hear about it? Almost never.
The machines of our existence, the very tectonic, meteorologic, and biological forces that shaped the physical existence of our species has, until very, very recently been under the cover of complete and utter ignorance. Science has revealed the inner complexities of such things and promises even more insight in the years to come. (Relatively) new forms of social workings, such as political institutions, corporations, and other non-anomic groups that deign to hold some staying power in the social arena, are only now, in the great cycle of human events, beginning to wield world-shaping power that can be witnessed in a single generation; ignorance of their power, the very power of the distribution of resources, is only now being fundamentally expunged through economics.
Yet to the common man, these type C fundamentals are not elements the language that is spoken by our politicians, religious leaders, and corporate spokespersons. They, instead, feed on our fears, desires, and unrealistic hopes for a better future or a simpler past, pretending to relieve us of the burden of difficult decisions we must weigh, incentives we must consider, and the understanding of a system we have only just begun to put in place ourselves.
I got a report from a friend that someone they knew became offended reading my introduction. It was a turning point for me, a point that I feel hasn't come often enough in my life; a point where I was glad someone's beliefs got challenged to the point of disgust.
Good. For all the people that are asking "why", and getting mad when people around them don't provide an easy answer, I wish for a thousand more disappointments until people begin to realize that terms like "good" and "evil", "right" and "wrong", "us" and "them" mean zero in a world that has become the very epitome of numbers, where understanding the function of the gears is, ultimately, more important than identifying the hands that built them.
"...We have what the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has called a hypertrophy of social cognition. We see purpose, intention, design, even when it is not there."
