The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness and the Manipulation of Numbers
By David B. Sutton, Ph.D.
In my last article I discussed how those in control name and define things, through what has come to be called ‘doublespeak,’ as they would like them to be because of their vested interests. The culture and values of the economic elite – the bourgeoisie – become indoctrinated as ‘common sense’ for all, allowing for the maintenance of the status quo through misplaced belief. (1)
The incessant, ever-present economic narrative has become the most powerful tool of this indoctrination. Here I will deal with the false accounting that goes along with the wordsmiths of economic doublespeak.
First, lets be very clear about what the field of economics really is and what it is not. It is nothing more than a BELIEF SYSTEM (in fact the most powerful secular cult in the history of human kind), not a body of science. Yes, I admit it is a nice, tidy, self-contained, very internally consistent (that’s what numbers do for it) belief system, but a belief system none-the-less. It is not based on any kind of external reality. Economics, unlike the biological science of Ecology, is NOT a science. While it pretends to describe the way things are, it does not. It prescribes the way the belief system would like it to be. It appears to be right only to the degree that it can get us all to act the way it prescribes. While, it has virtually no predictive power, it does have enormous prescriptive power— power, through the wholesale belief in free-market fundamentalism, to influence people to follow the faith and create the outcome those in control want.
I was first introduced to the deceptive use of the economist’s doublespeak and quantification by my mentor, Dr. Garrett Hardin.
He often spoke of the “word magic” of the economist and tried to rectify their deceptive misuse of language and numbers with real living world definitions. For instance, in living systems, things “grow” and “develop” to maturity where growth ends and further “development” is represented by the continued refinement of structure (making things better not just bigger) and maintenance of the system not continuous “growth.” In living systems unending growth only occurs is a terminal cancerous disease.
Environmental and social costs are real cost he continually pointed out. Naming them “externalities” in no way legitimizes them being left out of our accounting. Likewise “side-effects” are nothing more than effects (perhaps those we didn’t count on but effects nonetheless). Birth defects are as profound an effect of the drug Thalidomide as the expectant mother’s tranquil sleep. (2)
Most biological scientific concepts and terms have been co-opted to the benefit of financial interests.
The idea of “ Ecological Carrying Capacity” as another example, is not nearly as flexible as economists would have you believe. Its limits are set by biophysical reality within what the ecologist calls the living system’s “range of tolerance.” These are not conditions open to financial negotiation; they are conditions absolutely necessary for life to exist. Once you start playing the economist “word games” about changing the carrying capacity to accommodate financial concerns (defined by them as human wants and desires) you are moving from biophysical reality. You are changing what you are ‘carrying’ not the environment’s capacity to carry it. This is a perfect example of economist’s calculations taking over and controlling the language we all use.
Likewise, as I have mentioned before, the concept of “sustainability” has become so confusing. It is constantly changing to accommodate the financial concerns of each new player. To me, there is no room in the concept of ecological sustainability for the economist’s “word magic ” of “infinite substitutability” — of presuming you can just keep changing one value for another. This is just one of the many major fundamental flaws of an economic world-view that leads the world to where we are now at the brink of ecological collapse.
The kind of thinking that a distorted economic definition of sustainability leads to is reflected in these two examples that I have recently encountered. First, once while giving a talk about sustainability to a group of educators I was told by one of the private school participants that their school was totally sustainable. Oh, I said, how so? We are completely endowed she replied.
Another, even more frightful example involves a book published a number of years ago on the ‘most sustainable cities’ in the US. In the top ten of the book’s listing was Las Vegas. Unbelievable but yes, Las Vegas !
The ability to pay for the books, teachers and energy bills, to pay for the importing of virtually all necessities for living on the desert Nevada moonscape is no more sustainable than paying for the treatment of terminal cancer.
A faulty mind-set shored up by a bogus financial calculus is
no substitute for dealing with the real limits imposed upon human activity by the parameters of its ecological life-support systems.
I am reminded of a time I was contacted by the BBC. They were making a TV series on Global Warming and in Shanghai to film a segment. They were told to contact me and the producer called me.
The first question she asked was, “Can Shanghai and other major coastal cities afford the cost of reducing man-made
Global warming?” After my initial reaction of laughing out loud to the question I went on to say that we didn’t have a choice but to pay the price if we wanted to survive. (3)
But I knew where that had come from. When was the last time you have heard it asked if we could afford the costs of the next war? Decisions about wars are not made on the basis of cost, they are made to meet the desires of the controlling elite. Talk of costs only comes up when they are looking for an excuse not to act.
We need an immediate all out war on the causes of global warming (in order for civilization as we know it to survive)… whatever the cost it will be a minor fraction of the costs of not doing so. Damn the vested interests they are the ones that have brought us to the brink.
Measurement Matters
Now don’t get me wrong, Measurements Matters! Quantified verification of natural phenomena is the backbone of scientific progress and understanding. But you need to be measuring the right thing – things that matter and lead to a precise understanding of what is real.
The purposeful deceit of economics is that it only measures what it wants, what serves their flawed definitions and vested interests and purposely leaves out what is uncomfortable to their interests.
“They know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde
We attend to what we measure and we can optimize what we measure. Unfortunately, we all too often measure the wrong things and forget to attend to what matters.
Profitability, for instance is a measure of economic efficiency. Like net energy analysis, what is left over from all the input to the system is the net yield–the profit of the system. There are major differences, however. For one, in net energy analysis, the units of measure are real– inescapable manifestations of the physical world–the laws of physics. An act of Congress, the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, the FED, the World Bank, Stanford’s Business School, or even the ‘Supremacist’ Court cannot repeal the Laws of Thermodynamics.
On the other hand, the measures of these economic analyses are arbitrary–figments of social convention, value negotiated by the most powerful in society. Not only are these measures not fixed in any basis of physical reality, they are incomplete–they systematically exclude known costs (inputs). To a large extent the apparent success or profitability of decades of economic efficiency analyses, rests in the cleverness of avoiding the inclusion of many essential real costs.
These avoided costs, historically, have been called “external costs” or “externalities”– as if giving them a label justifies them being left off the books. This and other forms of the economist’s “word magic” have been challenged for decades. Suffice it here to say that the calculation of economic efficiency for decades has been based on the systematic exclusion of known costs which is purposely deceptive, if not criminal, rendering it virtually useless.
This incomplete accounting of “economic efficiency” is a prime example of what Albert North Whitehead called, “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” The famous mathematician, Norbert Weiner was even more biting in his critique, “economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus… Any pretense of applying precise formulae is a sham and a waste of time.”
We need to develop complete accounting methods that measure all the right things and in turn monitor and measure real outcomes making those involved fully accountable. Unfortunately those accountable are not always responsible, and those responsible are all too often not accountable.
Most government policy is almost exclusively based on their calculations of their benefit to GDP. What does GDP (and its predecessor GNP) measure? What does it leave out? It is not unlikely that what GDP leaves out are what are most needed when it comes to a sustainable future.
The validity of GNP and GDP as a measure of a societies progress has long been questioned and has been joined by the questioning of cost benefit analysis, assessment of risk and safety, the financial analysis of the US-led global financial crisis with its theoretical reasoning for austerity, not to mention the valuation of ecosystem services and natural life support systems.
I will do future columns on each of these examples of misplaced concreteness. Suffice it to say here, these are all problematic procedures because they come out of an ideological predisposition of a controlling elite who uses language (doublespeak) and numbers (incomplete and faulty accounting) to solidify their control and domination.
Notes:
(1)Modern scholars like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have talked about the often-overlooked structural nature of the use of this doublespeak in the United States. In their book “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” they argue that people in modern society consist of decision-makers and social participants who have to be made to agree. The mass media and public relations industry actively shape public opinion, working to present messages in line with their economic agenda for the purposes of controlling of the ‘public mind’. Contrary to the popular belief that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, Chomsky goes so far as to argue that ‘it’s the essence of democracy’ saying that in a totalitarian state, it doesn’t much matter what people think because you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can’t control people by force and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is through propaganda — by manufacturing of consent through the creation of necessary illusions.
(2) See Hardin’s Filters against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists and the Merely Eloquent.
(3) The “Counting the Costs” segment of the BBC series, “Hot Cities” filmed in Shanghai can be seen at: [bad link] http://www.rockhopper.tv/documentaries/detail/hot-cities-counting-the-cost