Culture and economics

In response to an ecomonist saying that cultural questions aren’t relevant to economic policy.

I have to disagree that cultural and economic issues are seperable. Thomas Sowell is probably the best economist on that subject. Economics is a function of the social structure, because all productivity is a function of human production, which is dependent on and a product of actual individual humans. Cultural and social issues and values, positive and negative, are expressed in economics.

I always avoided economics as a field of study until I found Sowell, because I thought it was all about money and mechanics and ledgers. But he showed me that it’s actually all about people. All those abstractions cover up the fact that, at root, economics is about value, and that is a fundamentally human category. It is an expression of meaning, emerging out of human hopes, desires, needs, fears, strengths, weaknesses, and plans. Economics, in its deepest heart, isn’t about numbers, it’s about people.

If you have children and observe the difference in their behavior between environments, you will notice radical differences between how they act around their family in their home and how they act in every other environment. Attitudes and behavior are not at all uniform and have a very strong contextual element. Your kids will do and say things to you and to their siblings that they would never attempt anywhere but in the security of their own home.

We behave very differently toward a thing if we perceive as something we can take for granted, if we assume it as part of the fundamental structure of being. Parents and siblings are archetypal, they are mythological figures, and in part because they are part of the structure of the world itself, to our minds. They make up a large part of what the world is. That’s why it’s such a big deal when a parent dies or leaves. You’re not just losing a contingent person who you happened to meet, you’re losing one of the major structuring elements of your existence. It’s like losing your sight or your hearing, or a leg.

So when it comes to how we behave toward things, our implicit assumptions about them, as well as to what degree they are responsible for the very nature of our lives, are extremely important. To someone who has always lived within the shelter of a stable, productive relationship, or a caring community or a very active faith, it’s very easy to take everything they provide for granted. That also makes it very easy to isolate and attack the negative aspects, the tradeoffs and risks, of that system. Because the positive aspects are essentially invisible and implicit. You don’t really have the ability to imagine the world without them and their benefits, you just assume them as part of the nature of the world.

You probably can’t even conceive of the world apart from your position as a beneficiary of these structures. But you probably can conceive of the ways in which you are limited and oppressed by them and what costs they extract from you. You don’t see what they are for because you assume the resulting benefits as a given function of the nature of the world itself and what you can do in it.

All this makes it very easy to criticize and rebel, much like healthy and secure children often do, just because you’re coming from a position of fundamental power and security. This, I think, explains the strange hypocrisy of the upper classes. They constantly attack and criticize and undermine in public (and for the lower classes) the very things that grant them the security and power they enjoy. Marriage, education, stability, law-abiding, manners and etiquette, self-discipline. It’s not really anything unusual. It’s just what people are like and how they act differently under conditions when they are dealing with either people or structures that they perceive as being essential, assumed features of their psychological universe, to which they have an essential right as citizens of that universe, or with contingent, insecure elements. Like children who act one way at home and another in the world, they preach one message while assuming and benefiting from another.

The good news is that nothing helps you appreciate something like losing it. Once people have undermined these structures enough and have lost enough of their benefits, they will rediscover their contingency and effectiveness. Once people have helped to throughly dismantle marriage as an abusive condition, they will rediscover why people developed it in the first place and what problems it was helping to manage.