Keywords
Drawing influences across social science disciplines, these keywords develop a framework, a context for further discussion.
Predictors
Observations used in decision-making
Scarcity
Statements about the availability of resources
Handicap
Techniques for reducing efficacy
Debt
Commitments to future interaction
Thought
Processes of communication and assumption
Predictors
Observations used in decision-making
Predictions of long term events are often based on systematic biases and cognitive illusions.
Overwhelming evidence shows that professionals from law, medicine and economics employ substandard decision-making processes. Whether based on expert judgement or statistical indicators, without a transparent and determined attention to critical theory, these predictors fail to deliver on their promises
(Image: A cartoon of a cricket player on a cricket pitch that is underneath a microscope, the cricket player is looking up anxiously at the microscope. Citation: Untitled Image. Holding Willey. Technological advancements in cricket. 17 Jun 2017 www.holdingwilley.com/article/musings/Technological-advancements-in-cricket. Accessed 23 Nov. 2017.)
Predictors are observations used in forecasts and decision-making. Variables of statistical prediction are measured, counted, and based against prior observation, those of clinical prediction are more opaque and defined by an expert through subjective judgement. When folklore or fiction we call them superstitions or prognostications, though expertise may be present.
Predictors are often used by managers to provide “essential element of control” (Smyth 2013) but that control is an illusion because “[when] a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Strathern 1997, p. 308); both the judges of predictors and those impacted are easily fooled by systemic illusions inherent in normal thought processes (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Western court systems that array retributive justice are notably corrupted by the prejudices of practitioners gut instinct (Danziger, Levav, & Avnaim-Pesso, 2011) eschewing practices of statistical decision-making (Hilton, Harris, & Rice, 2006). Evidence-based medicine, with some irony, is a rather recent innovation in terms (Guyatt et al., 1992), though modern medicine has had an empirical component (Sackett, Rosenberg, Gray, Haynes, & Richardson, 1996), its practice tends to avoid statistical thinking (Dawes, Faust, & Meehl, 1989) as well as the modes of narrative exploration (Murphy, 2018) needed for high functioning clinical judgement. When practitioners are better able to deal with complexity, such as the field of weather forecasting, the powers of modern political demagoguery serve to disrupt even evidence-based predictions (Weingart, 2000).
Thus even statistical studies are likely to reflect the situated knowledge of their authors (Haraway, 1998). Contrary to the statement that statistical prediction is devoid of “subjective judgement” (Colman, 2009, p. 10), “[a study] interprets and defines its object in a way that facilitates certain courses of action and not others... [for] the modern state”. (Rutland and Aylett, 2008, pp. 630-631). Accuracy and precision is always tempered by the instrument used for measurement, the context of observation, and associated ranges of regularity and temperament (Shewhart, 1931, p .3). Algorithms may inadvertently reproduce traces of racism, sexism and classism present in the discourse structural of their host through raw statistical exposure (Caliskan, Bryson, & Narayanan, 2017).
Where highly trained professionals hunt out clues, so as to prevent loss of life (Becker 1997; Voss 2016), clinical prediction and statistical inference are required for performance, as is teamwork and a lifetime of empirical knowledge. But most figures have little “skin in the game” (Taleb, 2017), or succumb to wishful thinking out of ignorance. With no critical eye toward “construct validity” (Schwartz, 1994) misinformed predictions are no more than fantastical predictions. Fantastical predictions about the future such as those featured in “The True Prophecies or Prognostications of Michael Nostradamus” (Nostradamus, 1555; Nostradamus trans. Garencieres, 1672), are often foreboding of disaster. Apocalypse theories that predict ecological collapse through overpopulation (e.g. Malthus, 1798) serve as a recurring form of economic naivety (Danı́elsson, 2002) about the inherent randomness makes long range prediction infeasible. Better thought-out arguments of short term impact, such as Keynes (1919) warning that “the consequences of the peace [will be the breakdown of German society]”. Notably, Keynes consternation did not change the future course of the great deal that then President Woodrow Wilson put into action with Allied powers.
As, many predictions lack scientific merit. Unfortunately the word “predict” from early 17th century Latin, “[to make] known beforehand, [declare]” (Oxford Living Dictionary) is a misnomer for our use of prediction in the social sciences, though it is the root of the predictors we use in rigorous studies. With forecasting a competency often required of managerial roles, whether portrayed as management by prediction (Wilcox, 2004) or positivist organizational methodology (Deming, 1982; Deming, 1993; Beedle, Devos, Sharon, Schwaber, & Sutherland, 1999), the work of delivering innovations in production to an unknowable future competitive landscape is a burden on the mind of any person. Fortunately, with the increasing accessibility of computing machines and quality data, scientific counter-arguments can be ever-more-ready and generated by ever-more-people, to help speed along the destruction of despotic predictions.
References
Becker, d. G. (1997). The gift of fear: Survival signals that protect us from violence. New York, NY: Dell Publishing.
Beedle, M., Devos, M., Sharon, Y., Schwaber, K., & Sutherland, J. (1999). SCRUM: An extension pattern language for hyperproductive software development. Pattern Languages of Program Design, 4, 637-651.
Caliskan, A., Bryson, J. J., & Narayanan, A. (2017). Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases. Science. 356(6334), 183-186. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4230
Colman, A. (2008). A Dictionary of Psychology (3 ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095349223
Danı́elsson, J. (2002). The emperor has no clothes: Limits to risk modelling. Journal of Banking & Finance, 26(7), 1273-1296.
Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(17), 6889-6892. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1018033108
Dawes, R. M., Faust, D., & Meehl, P. E. (1989) Clinical versus actuarial judgment. Science, 243(4889), 1668-1674. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.2648573
Deming, W. E. (1982). Quality, productivity, and competitive position. Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering.
Deming, W. E. (1994). The new economics for industry, government, education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering.
Guyatt, G., Cairns, J., Churchill, D., Cook, D., Haynes, B., Hirsh, J., … Tugwell, P. (1992). Evidence-Based Medicine: A New Approach to Teaching the Practice of Medicine. Journal of the American Medical Association, 268(17), 2420-2425. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1992.03490170092032
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Hilton, N. Z., Harris, G. T., Rice, M. E. (2006). Sixty-Six Years of Research on the Clinical
Versus Actuarial Prediction of Violence. The Counseling Psychologist, 34(3), 400-409.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000005285877
Keynes, J. M. (1920). The economic consequences of the peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, Inc.
Malthus, T. R. (1798). An essay on the principle of population as it affects the future improvement of society, with remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers. London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul's Church-yard.
Murphy, J. W. (2018). Narrative medicine in the context of community-based practice. In S. Arxer & J. Murphy (Eds.) Dimensions of Community-Based Projects in Health Care (pp. 15-23). International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61557-8_2
Nostradamus, M. (1672). The true prophecies or prognostications of Michael Nostradamus, physician to Henry II, Francis II, and Charles IX, kings of France and one of the best astronomers that ever were a work full of curiosity and learning / translated and commented by Theophilvs de Garencieres. London: Printed by Thomas Ratcliffe and Nathaniel Thompson.
Predict (n.d.) In Oxford Living Dictionaries. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/predict
Rutland, T., & Aylett, A. (2008). The work of policy: actor networks, governmentality, and local action on climate change in Portland, Oregon. Environment and Planning: Society and Space, 26, 627-646.
Sackett, D. L., Rosenberg, W. M., Gray, J. A., Haynes, R. B., & Richardson, W. S. (1996). Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn't. BMJ, 312(7023), 71-72. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.312.7023.71
Schwartz, S. (1994). The fallacy of the ecological fallacy: the potential misuse of a concept and the consequences. American Journal of Public Health, 84(5), 819-824. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.84.5.819
Shewhart, W. (1931). Economic control of quality of manufactured product. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books.
Smyth, S. (2013). Rediscovering democratic accountability: The history of an awful idea. Critical Management Studies (CMS Conference, Manchester. July 2013).
Strathern, M. (1997). ‘Improving ratings’: Audit in the British university system. European Review, 5(3), 305-21.
Taleb, N. N. (2018). Skin in the game: Hidden asymmetries in daily life. New York: Random House.
Weingart, P., Engels, A., & Pansegrau, P. (2000). Risks of communication: Discourses on climate change in science, politics, and the mass media. Public Understanding of Science, 9, 261-283. https://doi.org/10.1088/0963-6625/9/3/304
Wilcox, M. (2004). Prediction and pragmatism in Shewhart’s theory of statistical control. Management Decision, 42(1), 152-165. https://doi.org/10.1108/00251740310495090
Scarcity
Statements about the availability of resources
Perceived scarcity may lead to poor decisions about resource usage.
American resource management is largely built on the concept of scarcity. As technology has vastly improved production, the world is more frequently experiencing scarcities created through the artificial means, instead of enjoying and engaging in a world of abundance.
Scarcity is used to describe the limited availability, or unavailability to those seeking, of a particular resource. This denial of a resource may be material, such as potable water and nutritious food, or it may be non-material, such as digital entertainment or information. Resources may be made scarce through mechanisms such as enforcement of intellectual property rights, through industrial shifts, technological disruptions or artificial disasters such as outbreaks of violence (war) or market mechanisms of export or appropriation of local produce, and production caused ecological and pathogenic disasters. Technology, and markets, may be used both to create and alleviate conditions of scarcity.
Scarcity has been assumed as an axiom of economic theory (Robbins, 1931, pp. 16-17), but is a poor predictor for long-term decision-making (though short-term trade-offs are reasonable). As a policy tool, this “naive” economic thinking (Lynn, 1992) may be one of the many reasons why public and private leaders underinvest in development programs and instead succumb to corporate interests. Corporations are a social institution (Drucker, 1946/1993) and while companies have positive social aims (Bassi, 2011) the responsibility toward social good has been delegated to businesses engaging in social entrepreneurship (Montessori, 2016).
Where there is an abundance of supply, there may be an increase in demand, so termed the Jevons’ Paradox (Alcott, 2005): such drives are often managed through the exploitation of people for profits (Bailey, 1994; Piketty, 2013/2014). For example, the introduction of the cotton gin amplified the productivity of individual labor: with lowered costs, demand increased and labor-demand was used to further the ideology of slavery. (Wright, 1975; Bailey, 1994).
Market systems for resource management have exacted disastrous outcomes on those without capital. The Bengal famine of 1943 occured because impoverished folk could not access food through the market system (Sen, 1981). Policy goals rarely deliver on the promise of a right-to-food as political commitments to human rights often lack sufficient governance (Mechlem, 2004); though technology and locally aligned production lessens the fallout (Schneider et al., 2011). people who have little currency have little chance of meeting their nutritional needs, regardless of actual material scarcity.
Corporations continue to engage in “the [globalized] struggle of all against all at all levels of the hierarchy [motivated through] the structural violence of unemployment” (Bourdieu, 1998). Many suffering from impoverishment are suffering the structural violence stunting populations (Farmer, 2004) from the historic pillages of colonialism, continued exploitations of Western capitalism, the exploitation of natural resources by despots and the disastrous propping up of factional political parties (Wrong, 2009) and concessionary programmes masquerading as foreign aid programmes (Mesquita & Smith, 2016) in the name of privatization, structural readjustment and austerity. Experiments in direct cash transfer to very low income populations show promising treatment results (Haushofer & Shapiro, 2016, 2017, 2018).
The auto industry reshaped the conception of the American corporation into one of a management class and a working subclass (Drucker, 1946/1993), and in doing so, greatly underutilized the human ingenuity of frontline workers (Womack, Jones, & Roos, 2007) in their relentless drive for ever-more production. Upton Sinclair (1937/1984) wrote to auto workers: “America today has the means of producing an abundance of everything for everybody” (p. 114), with competition gradually lowering scarcity (The Council of Economic Advisors, 2018), economists continue to consider a future based on abundance (Chernomas, 1984). Gradually, we may hope to see various forms of poverty eradicated, but such efforts are stalled by the economic naivety of theorists and pundits whose understanding of scarcity is deeply flawed by their belief that demand must be regulated through the structures of pricing power and other leverages in supply-side economics.
References
Alcott, B. (2005). Jevons' paradox. Ecological Economics, 54(1), 9-21.
Bailey, R. (1994). The Other Side of Slavery: Black Labor, Cotton, and Textile Industrialization in Great Britain and the United States. Agricultural History, 68(2), 35-50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3744401
Bassi, L. (2011). Business Success in the Worthiness Era: Just What Does Worthiness Mean? In L. Bassi, E. Frauenheim, & D. McMurrer (Eds.), Good company: Business success in the worthiness era. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Bourdieu, P. (1998, Dec 8). Utopia of Endless Exploitation: The Essence of Neoliberalism. Le Monde. Retrieved from http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu
Chernomas, R. (1984). Keynes on Post-Scarcity Society. Journal of Economic Issues, 18(4), 1007-1026. https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624.1984.11504304
Drucker, P. F. (1993). Concept of the Corporation. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. (Original work published 1946).
Farmer, P. (2004). An Anthropology of Structural Violence. Current Anthropology, 45(3), 305-325. https://doi.org/10.1086/382250
Haushofer, J., & Shapiro, J. (2016). The Short-term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor: Experimental Evidence from Kenya. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131(4), 1973–2042. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjw025
Haushofer, J., & Shapiro, J. (2017). Erratum to “The Short-Term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers to the Poor: Experimental Evidence from Kenya”. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132(4), 2057–2060. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx039
Haushofer, J., & Shapiro, J. (2018). The Long-Term Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers: Experimental Evidence from Kenya. Nairobi, Kenya: Busara Center for Behavioral Economics. Retrieved from: http://jeremypshapiro.com/papers/Haushofer_Shapiro_UCT2_2018-01-30_paper_only.pdf
Lynn, M. (1992). Scarcity's Enhancement of Desirability: The Role of Naive Economic Theories. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 13(1), 67-78.
Mechlem, K. (2004). Food Security and the Right to Food in the Discourse of the United Nations. European Law Journal, 10(5), 631-648. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2004.00235.x
Mesquita, B. B. d., Smith, A. (2016). Competition and Collaboration in Aid-for-Policy Deals. International Studies Quarterly, 60(3), 413-426. https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqw011
Montessori, N. M. (2016). A theoretical and methodological approach to social entrepreneurship as world-making and emancipation: social change as a projection in space and time. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 28(7-8), 536-562. https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2016.1221229
Robbins, L. (1932). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan.
Schneider, U. A., Havlík, P., Schmid, E., Valin, H., Mosnier, A., Obersteiner, M., … Fritz, S. (2011). Impacts of population growth, economic development, and technical change on global food production and consumption. Agricultural Systems, 104(2), 204-215. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2010.11.003
Sen, A. (1981). Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
Sinclair, U. (1984). The flivver king: A story of ford-america. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publications. (Original work published 1937).
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. (Original work published 2013)
The Council of Economic Advisors. (2008). Reforming Biopharmaceutical
Pricing at Home and Abroad. Washington, DC: Whitehouse.gov. Accessed: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/CEA-Rx-White-Paper-Final2.pdf
Wright, G. (1975). Slavery and the Cotton Boom. Explorations in Economic History, 12(4), 439-451. https://doi.org/10.1016/0014-4983(75)90020-0
Womack, J., Jones, D., & Roos, D. (2007). The machine that changed the world: The story of lean production- Toyota's secret weapon in the global car wars that is now revolutionizing world industry. New York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published 1990).
Wrong, M. (2009). It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower. London: Fourth Estate.
Handicap
Techniques for reducing efficacy
Handicap occurs when there is little support or sympathy in the private or public sector.
Where the word “handicap” has been used to describe people who have physical or cognitive disabilities, it has meant relief and assistance with resources pooled from the broader population. Those who do not fit into standard, by disability, poverty or economic strains, are handicap. Organizations self-sabotage through requiring standardized behaviors, optimizing for the majority of the population while losing the opportunity of diversity and innovation.
Handicap was derived from “a game of chance called ‘hand-in-cap’ [and] implies an extra weight or burden borne by some in a competitive environment” (Arneil, 2009, p. 220) such as the sport golf. As a verb, handicap is used to refer to behaviors of self-sabotage, and relative ability to perform successfully in broad institutions such as educational systems or job and finance markets. As a learning animal, human beings are able to adapt and incorporate new skills, and thus their just freedom, through the acquisition of capabilities (Sen, 2009). Skill-building can be an emotionally and cognitively challenging process: mental fixity must be lessened for growth and learning (Dweck, 2006) and an environment of psychological safety must be developed to allow appropriate risk-taking (Edmonson and Lei, 2014).
The labels “retarded” and “disabled” have been used synonymously with “handicapped” to mark some people as Other, despite the interdependence of all members of the human family (Arneil, 2009). The burden of handicap may at times be a consequence of design (Rasmussen, 1983) and specialized designs may mark the user as being out of the “mainstream” (Shinohara & Wobbrock, 2011). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights set down a foundation for the “recognition of the inherent dignity and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” (UN General Assembly, 1948), those rights have had to be reiterated through continued expansions and explanations (UN General Assembly 1971, 1975), as a just society ought provide additional assistance to those that require assistance to help them expand their own capabilities (Sen, 2009). The benefit of technology is that it may amplify the capabilities of individuals (Toyama 2015, p. 37): through various means we may shift from blaming the individual to diagnosing the structures of institutions and make fundamental changes in their operation.
Institutions exhibit many behaviors of self-sabotage. Some examples include “non-market failure” (Wolf, 1979) and “failure demand” (Seddon, 2013) in which ill-conceived attempts at saving money, at improving efficiency, result lower qualities of service and lessened productivity. Managers invoke a slogan “the biggest bang for the buck” and define “either-or” scenarios to reduce options, instead of exploring comprehensive solutions. (Farmer cited by Igoe 2014); instead of investing, methods of austerity are promoted to a population “socialized for scarcity” (Farmer, Kleinman, Kim, & Basilico, 2013), unwilling to expend appropriate resources in the presence of overwhelming abundance. Whether an artifact of “Big Business” diffusing rigid management styles to the general population over several generations (Drucker, 1946/1993), or a tendency toward “local optimization” (Larman & Vodde, 2009) reducing the efficacy of the organization, the end result is wasted of opportunity. Though self-managing corporations exist (Valve Software, 2012; Semler, 2004), the bulk of industry, the University and the Corporation are entrenched in self-sabotage. W. Edwards Deming (1986) lamented that “the greatest waste in America is the failure to use the ability of people.” (p. 53). We can see this condition continue: the majority of modern software development efforts fail to employ proven industry practices (Forsgren, Humble and Kim, 2018), delivering well under the productive potential of their staff (Sutherland, Downey, & Granvik, 2009). This is the stunted manner in which American innovation develops.
References
Arneil, B. (2009). Disability, self image, and modern political theory. Political Theory. 37(2), 218-242. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591708329650
Drucker, P. F. (1993). Concept of the corporation. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers. (Original work published 1946).
Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: the new psychology of success. New York: Random House.
Edmondson, A. C., & Lei, Z. (2014). Psychological safety: The history, renaissance, and future of an interpersonal construct. The Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 23-43. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091305
Farmer, P., Kleinman, A. Kim, J. Y., & Basilico, M. (Eds.). (2013). Reimagining global health. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Forsgren, N., Humble, J., Kim, G. (2018). Accelerate: Building and scaling high performing technology organizations. Portland, OR: IT Revolution Press.
Hannum, H. (1998). The UDHR in national and international law. Health and Human Rights, 3(2). 144-158. https://doi.org/10.2307/4065305
Igoe, M. (2014, Dec 15). Paul Farmer: 'We've met the enemy — and he is us'. Devex. Retrieved from https://www.devex.com/news/paul-farmer-we-ve-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us-85081
Kaiser Health News (2001, June 15). USAID Director Andrew Natsios’ Views on AIDS in Africa ‘Incorrect,’ Op-Ed Says, Calls for Resignation. KHN Morning Briefing. Retrieved from https://khn.org/morning-breakout/dr00005210/
Larman, C., & Vodde, B. (2009) Scaling lean & agile development: Thinking and organizational tools for large-scale scrum. Boston, MA: Pearson Education.
Rasmussen, J. (1983). Skills, rules, and knowledge; signals, signs, and symbols, and other distinctions in human performance models. IEEE Transactions on Systems, and Cybernetics, 13(3), 257-266. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMC.1983.6313160
Seddon, J. (2013). The whitehall effect: How whitehall became the enemy of great public services - and what we can do about it. Axminster, United Kingdom: Triarchy Press
Sen, A. (2009). The idea of justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Semler, R. (2004). The seven-day weekend: Changing the way work works. United Kingdom: Penguin.
Shinohara, K. &Wobbrock, J. (2011). In the shadow of misperception: Assistive technology use and social interactions. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 11, 705-714. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979044
Sutherland, J., Downey, S., & Granvik, B. (2009). Shock therapy: A bootstrap for hyper-productive scrum. In Y. Dubinsky, T. Dybå, S. Adolph, & A. Sidky (Eds.). AGILE Conference (AGILE), 2009, 69-73. Chicago: IEEE Computer Society. https://doi.org/10.1109/AGILE.2009.28
Toyama, K. (2015). Geek heresy: Rescuing social change from the cult of technology. New York: Public Affairs.
UN General Assembly. (1948, Dec 10). Universal declaration of human rights (217 A). Paris.
UN General Assembly. (1971, Dec 20). Declaration on the rights of mentally retarded persons. (2856 XXVI).
UN General Assembly. (1975, Dec 9). Declaration on the rights of disabled persons (3447 XXX).
Valve Software. (2012). Valve handbook for new employees. Retrieved from: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf
Wolf, C. (1979). A theory of nonmarket failure: framework for implementation analysis. The Journal of Law and Economics, 22(1), 107-139.
Debt
Commitments to future interaction
People may tend to destructive behavior when social ties are overburdened.
Often considered as a bad condition, debt has a long history in human societies as an artifact of binding community members and encouraging further interactions or may break them apart when exploited.
Debt is a term of obligation and a commitment to a relationship between two parties -- the debtor must service a debt which is typically done by paying money to the creditor. When we speak of creditors and financial institutions, we speak of interest rates and worthiness, risk profiles and loan portfolios. The term expands to entire countries, as talk of the national debt (of any given nation) and is bandied in politics and economic discourse (e.g., Davies, 2017). Yet, debt itself predates the concept of currency, as a form of social artifact; though its use by nation-states as a measure of honor can be used to motivate inhumane levels of exploitation (Graeber, 2011). Despite the moralistic and militaristic undertones of current debt debates, the concept of debt has been an instrument of social cohesion for millennia, predating states and predating proto-state currency, such as those exchanged in feudal systems. Where moral definitions of debt liken it to sinfulness, traditional rings of exchange see it as one of belonging and care, to intentionally and fully exit from debt would be to end social relations (Mauss, 1990). The tension of debt, between the risk of exploitation or default, and the creation of social value is inherent in its utility.
Debt takes forms in American social life in ranges from obligation to marks of civic participation and economic success. These facets may be credit card debt (bad) to mortgage debt (good) to student debt (participatory); with an understanding that some of these obligations mean participation in government sanctioned activities, such as with mortgage and student debt. The debt metaphor has recently been extended to technical debt (bad), a term used by software development groups to suggest that quality is lacking in the software they have produced, and such substandard quality will have to be repaid in the form of quality improvement work in the future, as well as current interest payments in the form of decreased productivity. Largely, debt is seen as a handicap unless that debt is taken on by corporations, in which case it is viewed as investment.
Modern politics has realized the ability to reassign debt onto corporate structures; the modern corporation or limited liability company is by legal measures an instrument of avoiding debt: the company may engage in business, enrich is proprietor and then fold, with the proprietor absolved of obligation. The absolution of obligations in non-state forms, known as jubilee, and the intentional releveling of both debt and surplus, potlatch (Mauss, 1990) are largely unavailable to the majority of denizens of modern industrial societies: bankruptcy carries significant long term burdens, and is taken on an individual juridical basis, instead of being available as a community concept. Inflation and associated dynamics, as with corporate insolvency, are exploited mainly by those in positions of wealth; their relationship to debt is fundamentally distinct from other classes, and so the current presence of financialization continues to drive inequality (Bourdieu, 1998). Present economics presents a persistent rentier solution, a global economy in which an aristocratic class holds significant advantage, collecting the surplus social capital of the instrument of debt. (Piketty, 2014). Thus obligation, once within the tribe, then in the form of taxes to the state and tithes to the church, has become a part of citizenship, in service to the global upper class.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1998, Dec 8). Utopia of Endless Exploitation: The Essence of Neoliberalism. Le Monde. Retrieved from http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu
Davies, A. (2017). Ten myths about government debt. Learn Liberty. Retrieved from: http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/10-myths-about-government-debt/
Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The first 5000 years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
Mauss, M. (1990). The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. (Original work published 2013)
Thought
Processes of communication and assumption
People may tend to destructive behavior when social ties are overburdened.
Often considered as a bad condition, debt has a long history in human societies as an artifact of binding community members and encouraging further interactions or may break them apart when exploited.
René Descartes (1637) posited "I think, therefore I am”, and so set philosophy to consider the act of thought as of cognition, that most critical part of human being. Since that time psychologists and neuroscientists have expanded the vocabulary of thought, from artificial cognition and machine learning to harmful diseases of the mind. Intrusive thoughts, the “call of the void” and the “imp of the obscene” are common and rather harmless, until they continue into obsession and action; suicidal thoughts are of special concern to health professionals. On the other hand, we have “thought leadership” encouraging that an audience follow a “mindset” with the purpose of improvement; the “growth mindset” vs. “fixed mindset” concept (Dweck 2006), for example, suggests thoughts that are expensive in their linguistic framing help people tolerate ambiguity and improve their ability to learn -- those with a “fixed mindset” are essentially handicap. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explored a model in which language impacts thought to a high degree, or low degree of impact. This model is explored by psychologists and linguists through the analysis through vocabulary and syntax and their impact on non-linguistic cognition (Laws, Davies & Andrews, 1995). Studies by Kahneman and Tversky (2011) have shown how framing of language problems can lead to systemic biases (“cognitive bias”) that are visibly irrational, Gigerenzer (1991) has shown how such biases can be made to disappear with different framing.
When people speak of doing something “without thinking” we talk of consideration, of consciousness, Tversky and Kahneman (2011) divide thought into “fast” and “slow” systems (respectively, System 1 and System 2) - those fast processes are quite like the basic thinking of a machine - they are non-linguistic, automatic. Machine simulations of thought in the digital age have brought about startling simulacra of human intelligence, using vast amounts of data (from newspapers, books) to reproduce stereotypes similar to those seen in fast, System 1 thinking. Computers now have primitives of artificial cognition named “thought vectors” (Geoffrey Hinton’s suggestion of “skip-thoughts”); which build upon a technique of counting character or word proximity (introduced by Mikolov et al, 2013). Some simple patterns resembling intelligence emerge (though are simply statistical products) such as the computation of of King+Woman=Queen, and more complex generations of translations of text between one language to another (Johnson, et al., 2016). These advances in machine learning, also known as “artificial intelligence” go beyond the simple statistical predictors of the last century and have appealing characteristics in the continuing field of improving human performance through the augmentation of machine computation.
To think, it seems, is to engage in a linguistic process. Creativity, or thinking in shapes, colors or other modalities is by all means a process of the brain, and one of intelligence, yet it is often more analogous than strictly considered as “thought”. So we see “slow” thought, consciousness of such; yet that too is uncontrollable. We see the measurement of “thoughts”, estimable throughout a day. And so we may even see a quality to thought, and its place in a neuro-physical feedback loop, leading to psychotic and neurotic conditions - rumination and other dysfunctions.
References
Descartes, R. (1637). Discourse on the method of rightly conducting one's reason and of seeking truth in the sciences. (Translated from French: Discours de la Méthode Pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences)
Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: the new psychology of success. New York: Random House.
Gigerenzer, G. (1991). How to make cognitive illusions disappear: Beyond “heuristics and biases”. European Review of Social Psychology, 2, 83-115. https://doi.org/10.1080/14792779143000033
Johnson, M., Schuster, M., Le, Q. V., Krikun, M., Wu, Y., Dean, J., et al. (2016). Google's Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System: Enabling Zero-Shot Translation. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04558
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
Laws, G., Davies, I., & Andrews, C. (1995). Linguistic structure and non-linguistic cognition: English and Russian blues compared. Language and Cognitive Processes, 10(1), 59-94. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690969508407088
Mikolov, T., Chen, K., Corrado, G., Dean, J. (2013). Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781
Copyright © 2018 Charles Pritchard. All rights reserved.