This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--part0_914300637_boundary
Response: And at the risk of being charged with "excessive teleology",
contexts and interests and contradictions shape contextual imperatives that
shape, constrain and trigger behaviors and postures. In my classes I bring in
Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" how a professor of Psychiatry and
holder of the Freud Chair in Psychiatry at University of Vienna could have his
whole life turned upside down, wind up as a laborer in three of the nazis
worst death camps, see his wife taken off to an SS brothel and enter a world
where the "unimaginable" became quite "imaginable". We then go into some
exercises such as I tell them that I have decided to grade on a curve and
therefore only 10% have any chances of an A, next 15% B, next 50% C, next 15%
D and bottom 10% are doomed to an F. After they are suitably freaked out, I
say that if I decide to maintain that system, would you be more or less likely
to cooperate with anyone but the very best and mosthelpful toward copping an
A? Am I not summarily creating--through power--a shortage of possible "A"'s?
(and F's) Would it be "rational" or "maximizing potential for A per unit of
half-effort" or "efficient" to cooperate with or help someone in need of help
with the subject? Would it be "rational" to be honest if others were cheating?
Would it be "optimizing" and maximizing to include human and non-commodified
factors in CBA parameters and calculations?
Then I ask them what would be different if I set absolute standards and would
be prepared--glad--to give all A's for all those who met those standards? Now
would it be efficient and maximizing to help somone in need of peer help? Yes,
because in teaching others often one is forced to really think about,
deconstruct, reconstruct and integrate aspects of the subject and one is
invariably hleped by helping others and further, with no curve, helping
someone up doesn't necessarily drag someone else down. Would it be efficient
and maximizing not to cheat when others are--depends on what is in your
utility function.
The point is that the system with its own internal constraints, power
structures, logic/illogic, dynamics and trajectories, institutions etc, shapes
certain contexts and contextual imperatives--and definition--of "survival" and
"success". Step outside --or smash--the system for any chance of new and more
humane forms and levels of behavior
to have any chance of taking hold except on the margins and with considerable
sacrifice.
The neoclassical paradigm is indeed the logic/illogic of profits for power and
power for profits as a concentrated--and metaphorical or
allegorical--expression/servant of those codeterminate imperatives.
Jim Craven
--part0_914300637_boundary
Return-Path: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
by relay30.mx.aol.com (8.8.8/8.8.5/AOL-4.0.0)
Mon, 21 Dec 1998 22:42:24 -0500 (EST)
Mon, 21 Dec 1998 19:42:30 -0800 (PST)
From: "Patrick Bond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 22:47:40 +0000
Subject: [PEN-L:1817] Re: Fwd: Re: Re: Reductio Ad/Absurdum/Nauseum/Inhum
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In-reply-to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Yes, how now can Summers begin to pass the buck? My own (perhaps
imperfect) information is that a) the memo was leaked to Greenpeace
by an environmental economist in the Bank, who shall go nameless, who
had lost enough debates with Summers to express her/his frustration
in such a manner; and b) this was considered such serious stuff in
Washington that on the grounds of the memo, Gore nuked Summers to be
WB prez in early 1995. Summers covering up for his ghost-writer is
not a convincing denouement. The memo was so great precisely
because it was, and is, so very plausible (so much so that it got the
Economist's blessing for impeccable argumentation).
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Response: That is exactly right. Summers later claimed it was his own kind
of
> "reductio ad absurdum/nauseum" exercise he was doing. The problem is that
that
> memo had been widely circulated and quoted internally--seriously--before it
> was released in The Economist and further, the sterile calculations (we
> economists shouldn't be raising "normative" issues) and the hubris embodied
in
> that Eichmann-like memo are quite consistent with other known memos--and
> work--of Summers. It does indeed represent "Welfare" economics--and
> libertarianism--taken reductio ad absurdum/nauseum/inhumanum.
--part0_914300637_boundary--
