Harry Pollard: > Ed, > > Humanity gave up instincts for reason - which accounts, perhaps, for its > survival. Instinct provides the perfect biologic response to an event. > However, if things change, the instinct may kill rather than cure. > > So, imperfect reason, which is not tied to a "perfect response" has > advantages. > > Animals may flee from the fire. Man may flee - or turn toward the fire with > the intention of putting it out.
And may thus become consumed by it? Moths do the same thing, though perhaps for different reasons. In response to instincts versus reason, all I can do is refer to one of my long-ago mentors, a very wise man who taught me many things when I first arrived in Ottawa as a very young and very dumb economist, ages ago. He had several huge cats, and I recall him dumping cat-nip into one of his kitchen sinks, with the cats roiling around in it. He derived much of his wisdom about human behaviour from those cats. "See, Weick, see. Those cats are just like people, and people are like pussy-cats, 10% conscious and 90% unconscious, and it's the unconscious part you have to worry about!" > As we have not only survived but prospered, I think we may say that > humankind reasons pretty well. How many people have been killed or enslaved because a few have prospered? > One of the ways in which exciting Classical Political Economy is superior > to humdrum neo-Classical economics is that we don't make the mistake of > assuming that others behave as we do. In fact, we are wide open to > observing people's behavior - no matter what it happens to be. I disagree. Hand in hand with Classical Political Economy went exploitation of the very worst kind. Nineteenth Century empire builders didn't much care about human behaviour. What they cared most about was that the "inferior races" bow down and serve their imperialist interests. People like the Classicists "reasoned". Other people had strange practices and customs and were incapable of governing themselves. And I'm not only referring to Asia and Africa. It was during the flowering of Classical Economics that Ireland lost half its population to starvation, disease and emigration because the British authorities did not consider it rational to release food to them. > When someone does something that you perceive to be irrational, it may well > be from your point of view, but probably isn't from his. Amen! We are rational. They are not, so we have to be rational for them. > There again, if people are not very good at being rational, there chance of > surviving may not be so good - or, as the biologists say - their breeding > time is lessened. Hence the less rational among us tend to disappear. Throughout history, many people were not rational in the sense required by their imperializer or conquerors. So you made them rational and thus of service to the "common good" of the latter. Nineteenth Century Americans and Canadians exterminated the buffalo and almost exterminated the plains Indians because it was rational to convert the plains to agriculture. Previously, millions of Mexican and Peruvian Indians died because it was rational to use them as slave labour on the economiendas or in the mines. > So, I would think the this Basic Assumption of the neo-Classicals is true. Rationality? Humbug! Ed Weick Ed Weick 577 Melbourne Ave. Ottawa, ON, K2A 1W7 Canada Phone (613) 728 4630 Fax (613) 728 9382 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
