Naked without values

I read this thought-provoking essay by Kaushik Basu, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It puts its finger on many of the causes that have led to our age of degeneration—an era where things aren’t imploding but slowly decaying, thanks to our collective ignorance, apathy, and, perhaps most importantly, a kind of narrow smartness that’s incapable of thinking about the whole:

This deterioration in the practice of politics can be attributed to many causes. One of the most important may be found in the deterioration in how economics is practiced.

Economics is often described as a scientific discipline, which studies “if-then” propositions without reference to morals and values. But scientific findings do affect our values and normative judgments, and claims of “scientific objectivity” can be used to rationalize actions that offend our moral sensibilities. In fact, the logic of mainstream economics – in particular, the long-dominant neoliberal ideology, which emphasizes growth, efficiency, and market freedom – has often justified and even encouraged greed, exploitation, and extreme inequality.

This may well be built into the discipline. A 2012 study based on the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen’s “capability approach” – a framework for evaluating economic arrangements that focuses on people’s ability to live the kinds of lives they value, not simply on material wealth – found that some educational approaches can help make people more caring and cooperative. But other studies indicate that students of economics tend to behave more selfishly than others, indicating that economics, as it is taught, may well promote selfishness as a normal or even desirable ethical principle.

In the essay, he quotes the great Kenneth Arrow’s essay and here’s a fuller excerpt:

In a world of any complexity, there must necessarily be both antagonistic and cooperative elements. The model laissez-faire world of total self-interest would not survive for ten minutes; its actual working depends upon an intricate network of reciprocal obligations, even among competing firms and individuals. But the capitalist system is structured so as to minimize cooperative endeavor. The worker is a factor of production, a purchased item, not a part of a team. The attempts to handle externalities in recent years have led to interesting resistances; antipollution regulations are perceived as a threat to profits, not a social gain. Again, socialism is far from a magic cure. Each suborganization, for example industrial plants, will have its own proximate goals, which will not mesh completely with those of others. But the system should permit a greater internalization of broader goals. It should be easier for a plant to regard product safety as one of its socially valued outputs.