.......................snip...........................: CONSTRUALS AND REALITY
: The basic lesson of Kelly’s theory is that any pattern of experience can lead to numerous construals- perhaps an infinite number. That means the construal you have is the one you chose, not one that was forced upon you, because others were equally possible. Kelly called this view constructive alternativism, which means that your personal reality does not simply exist; it is constructed in your mind. Furthermore, there are always alternative ways you could choose to construct reality, besides the way youhappen to be using at this moment.
: This lesson has far-reaching implications. Kelly’s theory draws on a part of the philosophy of science that scientists themselves forget. Scientific paradigms are different frameworks for construing the meaning the meaning of data. The basic approaches to personality considered in this book- trait, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and so on- are paradigms in that sense. Each is perfectly sensible, I believe, and each is consistent with the data it regards as important, but also represents a choice: to focus on some aspects of human psychology and to ignore others. This implies two things about scientific paradigms: (1) The between them is not between which is right and which wrong, but rather of which one addresses the topic you are interested in understanding; and (2) you need all of them, because any one of them always leaves out something important.*
: There are many other systems of constructs, or paradigms, to which the same two lessons apply. Most of us have developed systems of belief that affect how we interpret and understand politics, and morality, and economics, and many other important matters. These belief systems are useful and even necessary, but a myopic devotion to just one paradigm can make us forget (or worse, deny) that other construals of reality- other belief systems- are equally plausible. (Note: My italics.)
: My personal favorite example concerns the economic concept of "opportunity costs," which in my opinion (according to my personal belief system) is one of the most dangerous ideas ever invented.
.........................snip............................
Snipping here just to snatch out this section of your fine post…
I was reminded of that perceptual trick of the mind when viewing a stick drawing of a cube, and how the cube's orientation will suddenly flip first this way and then that...
Marilyn Waring offers such a 'flip' in addition to your example.
I'd like to quote here a few paragraphs from one of her latest speeches:
[FIRST FLIP]There's a method for measuring growth and productivity throughout the world called the United Nations System of National Accounts. The rules of this system state that there are areas of human activity which lie outside a production boundary, generally outside the market established for the purposes of the account. Inside the production boundary is every market transaction. It doesn't matter whether it's a legitimate or illegitimate transaction, provided money changes hands, it counts. So corruption, illegal trafficking in drugs, trade in children, prostitution, illegal armaments transactions, it's all in there. Also
inside the system of national accounts, it's important to get on board straightaway, there's no debit side. Every transaction is treated as a goods. So that's a little different from what you might think of in terms of cost accounting. Every transaction's in, and all of them have the same value as a good.
Any economic report of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, United Nations agencies or national governments is based on national accounts statistics. The U.N. uses these figures to assess annual contributions of those that pay them and to appraise the success of regional development programs. Aid donors use the system of national accounts to identify deserving cases, need being determined by per
capita gross domestic or per capita gross national product. The most in need would tend to register low-growth figures. Donors prefer to invest with countries showing high rates of growth, paving the way for their own exports and investment opportunities. In the same way, the World Bank uses these figures to identify nations that most urgently need
economic assistance, but prefers those with high rates of growth, making it easier for multinational corporations to use the same figures to locate new areas for overseas investment.
The availability of IMF loans and loan rollovers comes with contingencies to force changes in government economic policies, to increase growth rates based on these figures. Companies in turn use the national account projections to project the markets for their goods and plan their investments, personnel and other internal policies. For
individual countries, the uses made by national accounts and their supporting statistics are manifold and have far-reaching effects. They're used as the basis to create all the frameworks or models for the integration of economic statistics generally. They're used to analyze past and current developments in the national economy. They're used to project the possible effects of changes in policy or other economic changes. They're used to quantify all areas of what is considered to be the national economy, so that resource allocation decisions can be made accordingly....
... The authors of the system of national accounts boast that per capita GNP in any country is a measure of the well-being of its citizens. But a major reason that only cash-generating activities are taken into account is to ensure that countries that determine balance of payments and loan requirements not as a comparative exercise, but as a controlling exercise. Those to whom money is owed are interested in gauging the cash-generating capacity of an economy, not its productive capacity, and there's a phenomenal difference between the two.
[ANTI-FLIP]
("... the treatment of the environment in national accounts and in public policy reproduces the arrogant ideology that only money and commodities are of value and that the market is the only source of knowledge. It suggests that all of life can be condensed to this view." )
If your interest is in the well-being of a community, the cash-generating capacity of a nation-state is not a measure of the well-being of its community. Its productive capacity may be, but systems of national account are interested only in the generation of market and commodities...Activities that lie outside the production boundaries, that is, in every nation, the great bulk of labor performed by women in an unpaid capacity and by children and increasingly by the elderly and all the non-marketed goods and services provided by nature are left out of the GNP. It's not a large step from that point to leaving them out of policy considerations altogether....
Modern economics and its pathological concepts of development cover a negligible portion of the history of human interaction with nature. Principles of sustenance have given human societies the material basis of survival over centuries by deriving livelihoods direct from nature with self-provisioning mechanisms. It's vital to remember how young, what an infant, market valuation imposed on the world is. 1953 is its international birth date. We lived well without it before. We can do it again. As Vandana Shiva explains, "When sustenance is the organizing principle for society's relationship with nature, nature exists as commons. It becomes a resource when profits and capital accumulation become the organizing principles and create an imperative for the exploitation of resources for the market." ...The real meaning of sustainability would make it clear that nature's economy is primary and the money economic is parasitic on it.
[COUNTER- ANTI-FLIP]
Having caused the erosion of nature's nature and people's nature, the market is now being proposed as the mechanism for ecological renewal....
On an international stage, the market possibilities of such modeling
have reached lunatic proportions. Witnessed at the Eighth Summit Review
Conference in Kyoto in December 1997. The summit was shambles, with no
clear agreements on its main goals. The supposed high point was a
legally binding target for significant reductions in carbon dioxide. Butfar from setting physical emissions standards, the world leaders decided to market pollution and call it carbon trading. If you just get your head around this one, fresh air is public goods and is worth nothing. Shitty air is marketable and is called carbon trading and is now an intangible asset. It's quite amazing. So hot air or not having any hot air became the new intangible assets to trade. The U.S., Russia and Ukraine began pressing ahead on talks on starting this trade. The U.S., the world's biggest polluter, which spews more than five tons of pure carbon into the air from each of its 260 million inhabitants each year, would be able to buy the surplus rights to pollute from the collapsed economies of Eastern Europe and from the many, oft-times corrupt, small island economies where there are no resources and very little pollution. Carbon trading is based on each country having a quota for each year for an amount of carbon dioxide it's allowed to release into the atmosphere. If you don't release that much, you can sell your surplus capacity to a heavy polluter. It's amazing, isn't it? It's like time around the planet for a class action from asthmatics and those with bronchial disorders. Obviously nobody gives a damn as long as they can buy the capacity to stick more in the air.
Not surprising, in my part of the world, the smaller island
nation-states with few resources in the Pacific say this is a
serendipitous windfall. They never even knew they had this intangible
asset for sale.
[NEGATION OF THE COUNTER-ANTI-FLIP]
But in San Diego, in Chile, in Mexico City, in Sao Paulo, in Brazil, hundreds of people arrive at hospitals every day in the bad pollution seasons unable to breathe. It is said that economic success and population growth have led to the number of heavy pollution days. Laws and regulations simply have not been able to keep up with the need for people to breathe compared with the desire for economic growth.
In Bangkok, Kathmandu, Seoul, Tokyo, people wear face masks to work through the traffic in the morning to be able to breathe. I'm sure they'll be overjoyed that their rights to fresh air will be delivered by carbon trading...."*
Well this is all to describe two "organizing principles". The Chicago School wherein the world may be organized around the fractional tinkering of a prime interest rate, versus an ecological economist's view of the rest of the world.
bill
: * My apologies to Marilyn Waring for re-arranging and somewhat butchering a speech of hers given 10-30-98 at Michigan State University
None.
