It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Bertrand Russell

 

Physics is all about understanding how the world, the solar system, and the universe that contains them work. And the physics of physics is a lot of thinking about things that often are beyond sight, far beyond reach, and beyond what most of us might think of as common sense. One of the founders of modern quantum physics, Niels Bohr, once remarked that anyone who was not completely outraged when first hearing about the quantum hypothesis hadn’t understood what was said.

 

Physicists study the smallest things imaginable (the particles that make up the particles that make up … well, you get it) and the very largest – our universe and existence itself. It’s their thinking that puts satellites around the Earth, or rockets to the moon and beyond; it’s their work that eventually led to what we understand about much of our own lives, including DNA. Physicists delve into the mysteries of the universe around us (and even guess that there may be more than one universe); but they also do the practical work that gives us the knowledge to build skyscrapers and suspension bridges, to make iPods and Lava lamps, to predict with some accuracy what might be happening in the physical world around us. It’s a shame they haven’t helped us to avoid earthquakes and volcanoes and Fox News, but they’re working on it.

 

These are the Albert Einsteins, the Carl Sagans, the Max Plancks, and the Isaac Newtons of the world. Newton wrote that if he was blessed with the ability to see further than others, it was only because he could stand on the shoulders of giants. He believed he owed a tremendous debt to the ancients – Aristotle, Archimedes, Pythagoras, and many others.

 

Beyond letting their minds soar incredible distances and through multiple dimensions, the guts of physics is a lot of really tough math – again, of the sort that is far beyond most of us. Although few of us understand much about how the universe works, these scientists have got a pretty decent handle on it. They’d be the first to admit, of course, that they know almost nothing and everything they learn just raises more questions. But despite occasionally sounding like a bunch of loonies, these folks can actually point to the results of their theorizing and to concrete proof that they weren’t all drinking just a little too much when these thoughts crossed their minds.

 

Nobel Prizes are awarded for physics, and for good reason. Sadly, there is also a Nobel Prize for economics. And for that, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who actually awards the prize for economics, needs to apologize to the world.

 

Economics is treated as a ‘science’ – but only with the loosest of definitions could anyone consider this to be science. Science involves theorizing and testing theories in order to arrive at hard truths. Economics is about, at best, trying to guess what went wrong with all our money. Writer and economist Paul Krugman, himself a Nobel Laureate, theorizes a lot. A loose paraphrase of some of his commentary suggests that he thinks economists suffer from ‘physics envy’, which is a lot like penis envy but stupider.

 

At best, economics is a ‘social’ science, which is soft and ephemeral. But economists look at physics and see all sorts of formulas and math and think, ‘hey we’ve got that too, so we must be real scientists.’ So, they take their numbers wizardry and create mathematical models that try to sort out the complexity of human activity. They assume the market place is perfect; and so long as the economy is stable, their models frequently work out, or at least come close. The problem arises when faith in that perfect market promotes deregulation, and tax cuts, and a raft of financial schemes that are usually nothing more than gambling. But the deregulation, and the tax cuts, and the gambling destabilize the economy and this leads to the economists essentially creating the disasters that don’t exist in the mathematical models, disasters that would never have occurred without economists to create them.

 

The more cynical among us believe that economists are all on the take. They and their government partners have convinced the rest of us that they know what’s best, and they each pad the other’s pocket. How else to explain that a mere 1% of us is winning a class war against the other 99% of us? Well, they have had the assistance of the media. Despite constant wailing by the conservatives that the media has a left-wing bias, nothing could be further from the truth. The media clings to every pronouncement of whatever economic expert they can find, whether the news is good, bad, or indifferent. And even though it is obvious we are living in a world of casino economics, we are still exhorted to follow every pronouncement of these turkeys.

 

We have finally reached the point where mankind has only one topic of conversation – economics. Which, of course, feeds into Bertrand Russell’s comment above.

 

One of the most simple-minded people ever to become president of the United States – Ronald Reagan – propounded the theory of ‘trickle down’ economics. Despite his feeble intelligence, he was able to persuade an even more feeble American population that he was really on to something with ‘trickle down’. And it spread to other countries as well, where the people are seemingly every bit as dumb as Americans.

 

We have essentially abandoned all reason and given ourselves over to the worship of economists and economics. Every time there is some monumental disaster – floods, earthquakes, fires, wars, you-name-it – the news is barely out of the mouths of the talking heads before someone has put a price tag on it. Because that’s the only thing that matters.

 

But what we should all have learned by now is that wealth doesn’t trickle down; poverty trickles up.

 

There isn’t much merit to any economist or economic school of thought. But the twentieth century did produce two economists whose ideas we would have been well advised to consider. The first, John Maynard Keynes, actually did have an impact. Mostly, his views resulted in positive benefits for society. His ideas still allowed the filthy rich to stay filthy rich and get even filthier and richer; but a little portion of those riches found their way back down the ladder where the lives of the common people were actually improving. However that required government interference in the economy, so it was clearly bad, we were told, and must be stopped at all cost. Well, government interferes in every economy – the only choice to be made is whether society as a whole does better, or the filthy rich do better.

 

Eventually, those opposed to the common man being able to feed his family won the day, and Keynes was widely discredited.

 

The second of these bright lights was Karl Polanyi. He was the anti-economist economist. He insisted that economics was a secondary human activity, not the reason for our very existence. That is, economies should be designed and managed to serve mankind, not the other way around. He was fond of pointing out to other economists that they were living in a fictitious world of ‘commodities’ that are not really commodities at all:

 

"...labor, land and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them...Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself...nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life... land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance."

 

The Great Transformation

Karl Polanyi

 

So, what would happen if the ‘unseen hand’ of the market mechanism were the sole director of these fictitious commodities?

 

“In disposing of a man's labor power the system would...dispose of the physical, psychological and moral entity 'man' attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprises, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society.”

 

Polanyi

 

Well, son of a gun. Look around – isn’t that where we find ourselves now?

 

Traditional societies discouraged greed. They saw voracious economic acquisition as destructive to the social bonds of the community. Capitalism turned this upside down, and greed was trumpeted as the engine of growth that would lead to prosperity for all. We still hear this contention almost every day, despite plenty of evidence around the world to contradict it. [See ‘trickle up poverty’ above] The emergence over the past few decades of a particularly mean-spirited form of capitalism has led to a glorious celebration of greed.

 

Consumerism has such a solid foothold in our culture that it is easy to conclude acquisitiveness is the natural state of humans. Polanyi would politely disagree. He wrote every society is designed to meet the basic material needs of its members; but the intense focus on greed and material acquisitiveness is unique to modern capitalist societies. Pre-capitalist societies typically focused more on family, clan, religion, honour, and so on.

 

Polanyi argued the most basic human characteristic is found universally in every human society, in every age. And it isn't material acquisitiveness - it is our need to relate to other humans, to feel part of a community. Above all, we're social animals, Polanyi insisted, echoing Aristotle’s thoughts from centuries earlier.

 

It should be obvious this suggests preserving our communities and the natural environments that sustain them is essential for human well-being. But you'd never guess this from the way our governments act. Under intense pressure from the elites, they've focused on helping corporations maximize profits, at the expense of everyone else. Meanwhile, governments have reduced their role in protecting what used to be called the ‘common good’. We no longer have a common good; we are all on our own.

 

It isn’t too late for us to stop counting the beans, and start trying to figure out how to grow beans and share them out – while we still have arable land to grow them on. And if the revolution does ever come, let’s hope that the economists are the first to be stood up with their balls against the walls.

 

 

** This article is brought to you by unregulated Capitalism – destroying the world, one country at a time. Please don’t read the fine print, or look at the man behind the curtain.

 

 

 

Paul Richard Harris is an Axis of Logic editor and columnist, based in Canada. He can be reached at paul@axisoflogic.com.



Read the Biography and additional articles by Axis Columnist, Paul Richard Harris