J20 - Thinking About Purpose

For the past month or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose. Now, until you realize how dominant that concept has been in my thinking and in my scholarly contributions over the years, you won’t realize how significant it is that this month’s thinking actually deserves comment. But it does. I suppose it started with something of an intellectual crises of faith that I went through a few weeks ago, wherein I found myself asking that age-old question: How do we know that we know what we know? This was in response to Alex’s queries into the subject of free will and his conclusion that we do not, in fact, possess choice and agency as we believe, but are, in fact, merely the outcome of chemical reactions in our brains, influenced by the chemical reactions in our environment. Of course, I’ve dealt with this revelation before, during my own queries into the subject of free will. Still, to challenge Alex’s thinking required challenging my own, and there was indeed a period of time earlier this month wherein I wasn’t sure what I really thought about the subject. I escaped this debilitating self-doubt by clinging to an epistemological principle that I have embraced and contributed to over the years: that knowledge has purpose. Truth with a capital “T” isn’t as important as many philosophers throughout history have believed; what matters is whether the truth we have discovered fulfills its purpose. Often, this purpose requires true and correct knowledge, the more complete the better. But, for questions like the ones I was facing, questions concerning the limitations of the human mind to understand certain knowledge, adherence to the idea that knowledge must be useful was liberating.

My unusually strong concern with the idea of purpose continued into deliberations on the content of a law review article that I’m currently writing about the influence judicial decisions have had on the attitude towards climate change. As law is a relatively new area for me, I’ve been tempted to incorporate a lot of outside subject matter into my paper, to bolster what I don’t know with more of what I do know. In fact, my writing does this almost automatically, often devolving into an economic analysis or philosophical critique of some legal doctrine, rather than sticking to law. To avoid this, I’ve had to employ a purpose litmus-test for the material I want to include. What is the purpose of my article? What is the purpose of this information? Does the purpose of this information contribute to the purpose of the article? If the answer is not clearly affirmative, then the information should not be included. 

More pressingly, I’ve been obsessing over the idea of purpose in the EMC2 program. First and foremost, as I’ve struggled in my relationships with a number of my students, I’ve been questioning my purpose as coordinator. But the answer to this question is necessarily wrapped up in the purpose of the EMC2 program. And, reflecting upon that question, I realized that we had probably lost sight of its original purpose. Moreover, it seemed to me that we had lost any overarching purpose. So, it was suddenly necessary to rediscover the original motivation for starting the EMC2 program, decide whether that should still be our focus, and then commit to running the program purposefully for the rest of the year. But, even once that issue was resolved, the question of my own purpose within the program still remains. And, as the year continues and many of the issues I had with my students at the beginning of the year continue, this question becomes all the more pressing. 

Finally, and most relevant to this journal, I’ve been thinking about the purpose of this project. Originally, I meant for this project to just be an example for the students this year, since we were changing the program a little bit and I wanted to have something to point to when explaining what we wanted from the students. To that end, it was supposed to be done by the end of the summer. Unfortunately, I ended up working three jobs and training for a marathon this summer, and was unable to get anywhere close to a finished product. However, I decided to continue working through the school year, and it now serves a somewhat different purpose. This project is a sign of good faith to the students, and a gauge for us coordinators. I continue to work on this project so that I can honestly tell the kids that I’m not asking them to do anything that I’m not willing to do myself. Moreover, as this program continues to evolve, it’s important for the coordinators to know whether we’re asking too much of our students, or too little, and to learn what’s useful and when it’s useful and what struggles arise in the course of a research project as we’ve conceived of it. The topic of this project was also purposeful, for two reasons. First, the environment is an issue that many libertarians continue to struggle with. It’s such a big issue, climate change; it seems like something that must be handled by a powerful entity like the government. So, I wanted this project to help set some libertarian positions on environmentalism on stronger ground. Second, this project is centered around a question, a radically original question, a question that forces one to stop and reconsider one’s once-solid views. “Is climate change really a bad thing?” This is the type of question that I want my students to discover and struggle with, because these are the questions that are actually worth asking. Year after year, the social sciences spit out study after study which are essentially just regressions of new data on a host of random topics. How many of them are actually changing the world or even just provoking real, meaningful thought? Big questions, like the purpose of school, the nature of childhood, the existence of free will, the effects of humor, the role of prices, the idea of climate change: these are questions that force the students to really think, to question everything they think they know about a topic, and motivate them to create something that will change the world. 

Of course, for this project to accomplish its purpose, I have to treat it like a real project. And one of the essential elements of a research project is its answer to the question “So What?” Now, I guess that I’ve been assuming that my so-what has been self-evident. Climate change will most likely have a tremendous impact on the lives of human beings and on all that they’ve built; it may be the most important problem facing humanity in this age. People live in a state of fear and bitterness as a result of climate change. The debate over what to do about it, and who to blame, contributes to the startling level of tension and animosity existing between members of our society. The magnitude of the issue seemingly justifies massive government involvement in addressing the problem, which brings with it its own set of serious issues. Now, this project is a creative attempt to solve this problem of climate change. The goal of this project is not to solve climate change by presenting a method of stopping or reversing climate change, but to solve climate change by changing people’s view of climate change. The goal of this project is to get people to see climate change as an economic opportunity, not an overwhelming threat. It seems like a cop-out, a non-solution. “Oh, you have a problem? Have you tried not thinking of it as a problem?” But, this project is an attempt to justify the view of climate change as an economic opportunity. And, the project seeks to show how, once our perspective has changed, many of the problems caused by climate change really can be resolved more economically and more successfully. Therefore, this project is a suggestion for the beginning of a solution to one of humanity’s biggest problems today.

Unfortunately, I don’t know that I’ve made that clear, because the other day Bott asked me what I was selling and, when I replied with “an idea for a better way of approaching the problem of climate change,” he said that he couldn’t see it. Apparently, my “so what” isn’t apparent, yet. This is a huge problem, one that must be fixed quickly. Without a “so what,” there’s no reason for my audience and stakeholders to keep reading and listen to what I have to say. I have to make it clear what this project does and how important it is. 

The theme of this month, as far as my research goes, has been the human mind. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the human mind, for my project, for Alex’s project, and during my intellectual crisis. But I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about purpose. And purpose is what this project needs, more than an elaboration on the role of the mind in economics. The purpose of my SDA this month (and every month) is to show progress, but also to embody my “so what.” As far as I’m concerned, this “so what” focus is the main focus for this upcoming SDA, and if a discussion of the human mind must be omitted or pushed aside, so be it. Hopefully, I can show what exactly it is that I’m selling, and, even better, convince my stakeholders that it’s worth buying. The purpose of this SDA, then, is to communicate the purpose of this project.

J19 - October Goal Post: Creating with the Human Mind

Because he gives me the most material to read and analyze and reflect upon, my thinking often tracks the thinking of Alex Gugie. Alex has been focusing this month on the human mind, as something more than just the sum of its parts (neurons and such). And my focus has been the same: the human mind, and its role in the real world of economics. The human mind not only determines the value of a good, but it determines whether an object is, in fact, a good at all. So much of society and civilization is dependent on what the human mind can imagine and achieve. No thing is inherently good or bad; it depends on the person’s perspective (and I think that this works for other adjectives, too, like efficiency, maybe?). And advances in technology, or entrepreneurial innovation, are both clearly products of the human mind. This power of mind has a tremendous impact and influence on the subject of my research project, as has been made clear in other journals.

The question arises, now, how I will represent this thinking and these revelations in my Self-Designed Assignment for the month of October. I could do something boring, like an essay, which I am tempted to do because I will need a section on this subjective nature of economics for a law review article that I am writing. However, I was pretty impressed with the creativity in my SDA last month, and I don’t want to regress. 

I was playing around with the idea of a poem. But I’ve been telling the kids that the SDA should be bigger and better than the journals, and I don’t know that a poem would be bigger and better than a journal, except that it might take more effort on my part to be poetic. But, also, how much information could I really convey in a poem? It might be appropriate for heady stuff like the human mind, but it also can’t get into details and stuff. Noah suggested that I do a song, with musical accompaniment, and I like that idea because then there will be two elements communicating my lesson, the music, for the heady stuff, and the lyrics for the information. Bott suggested I borrow Duncan Depew for a weekend and write a fictional story that relates to my project. Again, this is a tempting option, because it allows me to be really creative and embellish liberally on the important parts of what I’m trying to convey. And, finally, I was also thinking about a motivational speech, about the world-changing power of human beings. 

One poem is too small to be my SDA. Writing a song and the accompanying music, I think, is too much for me to do in the next 10 days, because it’s not something I do regularly. It is something I want to pursue, though, perhaps for next month. I think I’m going to start out with writing a story. Something with pretty language, too. But, I can’t guarantee that the dialogue won’t turn into a monologue, because I haven’t written fiction since high school. Whether I can still turn that monologue into a compelling fiction story is up in the air. I’m gonna try my best, though, and I think I’m gonna enjoy doing so.

Something I’ve been thinking about for the past week is purpose. I’m working on a law review article that’s somewhat related to my topic. However, I think I’m focusing too much on economics in it. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with an article being economics heavy, but the economics has to have purpose. It needs to contribute something important to the legal part of the essay. So as I write my law review article, I’ve been trying to use a purpose litmus-test to decide whether to include certain things or not. I bring this up because I’m not sure if the SDA this month will be really purposeful, at least in so far as it relates to my final product. Poems, songs, fiction stories, motivational speeches… They fit the theme of the month, but do they fit the theme of my project?

However, Bott told me today that he wasn’t sold on my project, on the idea that I’m trying to sell. And that’s a big red flag for me, that it’s nearly the end of October and my “So What?” is still not clear or compelling. I’ve been telling Alex for over a month now that human beings require no-purely-scientific reasons to believe in something, and, in a nod to new Nobel laureate Thaler, sometimes those reasons are rather silly. Perhaps a beautiful song or a captivating story will better communicate the message I’m trying to deliver than my economic analyses. Therefore, I feel comfortable moving forward with this creative experiment in my more serious project because I want to try different ways of showing people why my topic matters.

J18 - The Human Mind as the Source of Economic Classification

The Marginalist Revolution of the early 1870s was the beginning of modern economic thought. Finally, economists could explain why gold was more valuable than water, i.e., it wasn’t, the marginal unit of gold was more valuable than the marginal unit of water. However, this advancement in human understanding is more properly labelled the Subjectivist Revolution, for the real development was learning that value is subjective, that is, objects are only as valuable as human beings believe they are. The value paradox is solved not through some calculus of marginal units, but through the realization that definite people evaluate definite units of a good for definite human needs, and that this evaluation is inherently subjective and constantly in flux. It’s not so much that the marginal unit of gold is more valuable than the marginal unit of water, it’s that we value the marginal unit of gold more than the marginal unit of water.

Occasionally lost in this focus on subjective value is a more fundamental point: human beings not only determine how valuable a good is, they also determine whether a good has value, i.e., whether it’s a good at all. Chemical elements, combined in various forms to create physical objects, are not inherently valuable, and they are not inherently economic goods. That classification comes from the human mind. If people don’t know that something is useful, or don’t know how to make it useful, it is not an economic good. It does not, can not, serve any human need. It therefore has no value for human actors, and cannot be called a good.

Carl Menger, one of the fathers of the Subjectivist Revolution, wrote that four conditions must be present before an object could obtain goods-character: (i) a human need; (ii) such properties as render the thing capable of being brought into a causal connection with the satisfaction of this need; (iii) human knowledge of this causal connection; and (iv) command of the thing sufficient to direct it to the satisfaction of the need. It should be apparent that at least two of these four conditions (Mises later revised these four prerequisites down to three) are attributable to man. Therefore, the goods-character of things is determined by man. 

Land, or natural resources, is an economic good. Thus, it is not Nature that provides man with natural resources; man creates natural resources out of what Nature has provided, which is matter and energy. This has massive implications for the claim that human beings, through our economic activity, are exhausting the Earth’s natural resources. The truth is that human beings, through our economic activity, are creating natural resources to be used in the satisfaction of human needs by converting bits of nature into resources possessing goods-character. The materials provided by nature are not automatic goods; they become goods only when we become cognizant of their ability to satisfy a human need and obtain command over the material such that we can direct it to the satisfaction of that need. Petroleum comes to mind. As valuable it is today, as integral as it is to our modern economy, petroleum was not an economic good two hundred years ago. 

So clearly Menger’s theory of goods has profound implications for the natural resource exhaustion issue. But I think that it also has implications for environmental issues in my area of focus. You see, if there’s nothing inherent in things that make them economic goods, then there’s nothing inherent in things that make them economic bads. Their utility, and classification, is entirely a matter of perspective. “Waste” is an economic classification. There is nothing about waste material that makes it waste. The classification arises from the fact that we don’t know how to make use of it. And notice that the question is not whether we can make use of it, but whether we know how to make use of it. We live in a world of scarcity: there’s never enough resources to satisfy all our needs and desires. There is, therefore, every reason to convert everything into economic goods that can further satisfy human needs. And everything is merely a combination of various elements; it is theoretically possible that everything could serve a human need, even by being reduced to its chemical components and recombined to form more satisfactory materials (which, in a sense, is the process of all economic production, a transformation of our material conditions). 

There is nothing inherently good or bad about iron. The human mind has made it a good, to the benefit of mankind. There is nothing inherently good or bad about sewage. The human mind has not yet recognized it as a good, to the detriment of mankind. And there is nothing inherently good or bad about changed environmental conditions caused by man. If we can think of a way to have them satisfy our needs, and find a way to cause them to do so, then we will have turned them into economic goods of tremendous value. But, again, it’s not the climate change itself that makes it a benefit to mankind, it’s humanity’s view of it, and the steps we take to harness it. The first step, therefore, in turning climate change into an economic opportunity, is merely to recognize it as one.