Professor David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 years is in our bibliography because of the extensive uses we have made of it in justifying SFEcon’s concept of money. It is therefore less-than-gracious for us to excerpt this same book in order to instantiate the social sciences’ reflexive tendency to infer the behavior of the whole from the activity of its parts:
Part of the problem is the extraordinary place that economics currently holds in the social sciences. In many ways it is treated as a kind of master discipline. Just about anyone who runs anything important in America is expected to have some training in economic theory, or at least to be familiar with its basic tenets. As a result, those tenets have come to be treated as received wisdom, as basically beyond question (one knows one is in the presence of received wisdom when, if one challenges it, the first reaction is to treat one as simply ignorant — “You obviously have never heard of the Laffer Curve”; “Clearly you need a course in Economics 101” — the theory is seen as so obviously true that no one who understands it could possibly disagree.) What’s more, those branches of social theory that make the greatest claims to “scientific status” — “rational choice theory,” for instance — start from the same assumptions about human psychology that economists do: that human beings are best viewed as self-interested actors calculating how to get the best terms possible out of any situation, the most profit or pleasure or happiness for the least sacrifice or investment — curious, considering experimental psychologists have demonstrated over and over again that these assumptions simply aren’t true.1Assuming this logic to be a sufficient falsification of our premise that maximal profit controls economic order, we should then inquire as to what are the actual bases of interpersonal relations, and what macroeconomic order would follow from an uncritical extrapolation of personal relations to the macro realm.
Professor Graeber (an anthropologist with considerable field experience) has abstracted a notion of baseline communism 2 as the elemental form of human interaction in any society one might observe. Upon consideration of his examples, it is readily concluded that the economics of our everyday lives are governed by the premise of from each as he is able, to each as he needs: would ordinary civility be possible if petty needs were not supplied by nearby abilities? if a person approaching a closed door burdened with packages could not rely on the door being opened by some passerby whose hands happen to be free?
Having agreed as to the primacy of communism in our interpersonal affairs, are we then to believe that an expression of these familiar instincts at the macroeconomic level of interaction is somehow natural or moral or sustainable? On this point we have extensive data from humanity’s many experiments with communism; and these indicate a conclusion that macroeconomic communism will not ‘deliver the goods’ with anything like the efficiency of such approximations to profit-driven free markets as mankind has been able to create.
If we accept that socialist macroeconomies are historically short-lived, while self-organizing free markets can persist over vast spans of time and space, then we must conclude that an autopoietic macroeconomics simply has no conceptual starting point in micro behavior. Whether one is right or wrong about the actualities of micro behavior, one is still obligated to imagine macroeconomics as a thing in itself.
If economics requires some sort of confirmation from the behavioral sciences, let us bring behaviorism’s pre-eminent specimen, rattus norvegicus, into the examination:
An albino Norway rat is composed of approximately the same number of living cells as there are people participating in the global economy.
Living things can be characterized by how they move, feed, and reproduce:However incontrovertible the fact that the whole must equal the sum of its parts, there is no reason to assert that the behaviors of the parts are also the behaviors of the whole. Indeed, there is every reason to expect this would not be the case. While the rat's cells certainly are the rat, psychologists must observe the whole rat in action — not its constituent cells — in order to draw generalities from the rat’s behavior.Living cells do not move outside the body of which they are a part unless it is to die. Cells are nourished by a circulatory system. Cells reproduce by mitosis. Rattus norvegicus, by contrast, is a quadruped, with a digestive system, and reproduces sexually.A person is a biped, with a digestive system, and reproduces sexually. The economy, by contrast, is a distribution of physical assets among the processes by which new assets are produced.
Similarly, if one wishes to know why certain assets exist in certain quanta in certain places at certain times, then one should observe the whole economy — not minute elements of the economy having no awareness of the economic whole, and no possibility of a humane existence outside the macroeconomic order.
The truism we oppose presumes that an explanatory idea, in order to be true, must be shown to operate at every level of application to the phenomena it is used to describe. To the contrary: as we view the world through lenses of one focal length or another, different features of reality present themselves for examination; and these require differing methods of abstraction. Finding this notion subsumed in the practice of every hard science from pure math through biology, we cannot suppose that it becomes unproductive upon extension into the social sciences.