To explain where I am coming from: My primary goal was to make sense of a somewhat fragmented field by developing my own philosophy behind it and turning it into concepts that I can use as thinking tools to better understand the world. My goal is not to make academic progress in that field, but to extract the viewpoint it (in my opinion) offers and use it for my own purposes.
In particular, I noticed that we are prone to treat finite (and even scarce) resources as infinite, such as making overly long book lists that would take 2-3 lifetimes to complete reading. This is non-sense of course and developing a sensibility for this bias (?) can have personal utility. I can imagine plenty of scenarios where this may be helpful, such as a boss overburden his workers with work, ignoring the fact that his workers’ energy is scarce.
Regarding the groceries shopping scenario: The mere fact that you did the analysis, i.e. used deliberate thinking to come up with options and weigh them against each other, implies some degree of finite thinking. Infinite thinking does not refer to explicit assumptions of infinity in your thinking, but rather to the fact that (to put it crudely) no thinking was done at all.
Finite and infinite thinking don’t have to be binary categories. Continuing with the groceries shopping example, consider three agents A, B and C. A is on vacation and does not care about neither time nor price, thus entering the first available shop that satisfies his needs. B is only concerned with price, so he drives to a supermarket that is far away (but offers the most competitive prices). C considers both price and money and decides that the time saved is worth the increase in price. You could formalize this as: What are the parameters of the utility function that I am currently considering? (For C, the utility function u(a,b,c) would be a function of “does the shop contain what I need?”, “what is the expected price?”, “how long will it take me?”). This would make it part of decision theory.
You are right in saying that, technically, what I mean by “infinite thinking” is really “not finite-thinking”, but as you may agree, the first term sounds a lot more catchy. It’s a trade-off that hopefully is not too obstructive.
You touched on the difference between finite and scarce with the Eskimos example. I want to note that what I mean by “switching from infinite to finite thinking” is equivalent to “treating a resource that is factually finite as being scarce”. So, you could say that “finite thinking” is really “scarce thinking”.
Concerning your hypothetical world, you already acknowledge that, in this case, mental resources (speed of thought, concentration, energy) become the bottleneck and thus the scarce resources to be allocated. I don’t think that we will ever attain a state in which we can completely abolish scarcity. When “real” economists talk about post-scarcity, they mean an abundance of elementary goods and services so that people don’t have to fight over water and food. If you take it by the letter, the only post-(formal scarcity) scenario I can imagine is us becoming floating bubbles of consciousness in space, eternally content and peaceful. But that would not be any fun.
I think that math, in its essence, is easy. If it weren’t for our faulty thinking apparatus, we would see that immediately. But the problem is that a lot of things that matter can only be accessed through vague notions without a technical definition at its heart.
I might be a little harsh on the details as I percieve economics having a needlessly ideological component. I might also be reacting because I percieve this line of thinking to be potentially dangerous and I don’t like that I can’t formulate the link between the starting steps and the danger.
Game of Thrones SPOILERS
After the conflict in Westeroos in the meeting of important people Sam suggests that they should do democracy. People do not argue that it would be a bad idea but laugh it off. The feudal way of life is so ingrained in the world that other ways of life are unthinkable.
END OF SPOILERS
In the same way I think in the real world there are parties that try to get people to entrench scarse mindset as a natural way how things are and use propagandist means to do so. Fossil resource energy companies might try to hinder the invention of cleaner forms of energy or make their adoption later so that their business sector lasts longer. They have a vested interest in keeping people minds that energy scarcity is at the current level and not be too inquisitive about how it might change in the future.
In the robot ubiquitus scenario I don’t think the scarse resources that are lest are elementary resources so that would fit the bill of a postscarcity scenario. “Even if we reach a very high level of development, there will still be scare resources left to distribute, such as time.” presents time as an example of a resource whose scarcity is unassailable and the robot scenario assails that. Retreating to a position where any individual resource need not be scarce in all worlds is a motte-and-bailey and I would feel would that be challenged the goal posts would keep on moving. This speaks to the manner in which the original belief was held which is unlikely to weight literal technical truth that much. And my experience has been that I do not have to fight over water in the part of the world I am in. There are also microenviroments such as families where food is not scarse to children, there is no children buying food from their parents. There are other factors (parents might not want to have a fat kid and might deny food requests based on that goal) but those are not usually approached from an economy theory standpoint. To my understanding economists should be interested in those but I understand that as their tools assume scarcity they like applying their tools where they work (and as families might compete for food to share between them they focus on that bit). But just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean that the world is made out of nails.
Thus I would be interested to UNDERSTAND why getting rid of scarcity might be hard, but having an opinion that it is so is not of that much great interest to me. It might be fine if it is too complex to unravel in short conversation. But my experience has been that it’s not a matter of making things understandble enough but that I am not indoctrinated enough, that such discussion grinds to a halt because of believability/interestingness of the assumptions needed to be made. A religious person migth show how their belief system leads to great fun acts of compassion but if they ask me to copy their belief system because of these attractive properties there is going be a problem about existence of certain metaphysical actors. And if someone would claim that if I am compassionate I must have implicitly assumed the existence of god I would be highly skeptical. Uncritical copying would run the risk of corrupting my thinking outside of the field of compassion. In certain sense adopting economics as a wide dominant thought force could make me assume everybody is a psychopath and that families should be impossible.
I feel that we are getting off-topic and I also think that I don’t follow some of your thoughts.
The danger that you refer to may be laissez-faire capitalism and its effects on governments, societies and the environment. But this has nothing to do with the original post.
I think that you may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The fact that there are problems with the current implementation of economics (aka globalization, multi-national cooperations, inequality etc.) does not preclude economic ideas, or ideas inspired by economics, having merit.
If you interpret scarcity as scarcity of basic resources, then the robot agent scenario does fit the post-scarcity idea. But to get there, we need technological advancement and higher productivity. And for that, economic thinking may be useful.
I have never suggested to adopt the whole field of economics as one’s dominant way of thinking. I am strictly against taking ideas, from any field, at face value without critical thinking.
If you would only use the concept of epicycles in a particular theory of gravitation then the relevance of epicycles would seem to be tied to the relevance of that gravitational theory.
If somebody says that they believe in god I am tempted to lump them into the category of a religiouos nut. Similarly there are economic concepts which seem to be part of a coherent/connected memecomplex and I get a memetic allergy reaction or strong expecation what those other things would be. One of the properties of this memecomplex is that it can tell a plausible story for long time before places to to doubt it are apparent. Atleast religion makes claims in metaphysical language where you can recognise the claims as wild, but economical ideology dresses itself as very tame. I might be wrong to generalise this to big populations and I would love to see the subject-field be treated without shady epistemology and I think careful concept analysis is likely to provided that. But I think it’s hard mode and it can easily become resistant to scrutiny.
In the same way I think in the real world there are parties that try to get people to entrench scarse mindset as a natural way how things are and use propagandist means to do so. Fossil resource energy companies might try to hinder the invention of cleaner forms of energy or make their adoption later so that their business sector lasts longer. They have a vested interest in keeping people minds that energy scarcity is at the current level and not be too inquisitive about how it might change in the future.
This is a good model of scarcity (as a way of thinking) - in which something is not viewed as a constraint to be eliminated, but as inescapable/unchangeable.
In certain sense adopting economics as a wide dominant thought force could make me assume everybody is a psychopath and that families should be impossible.
Evo-psych might be more useful here. If this economic frame makes bad predictions concerning measurable testable things (like the literal prisoner’s dilemma, which there might be real world data on) concerning how people actually work then either the model is missing something* or it’s not very predictive in that domain**.
*Altruism, a desire to appear altruistic, if your family is related to you then “genetic” fitness isn’t just served by pursuing your own wellbeing, perhaps having friends/not “being a psychopath” is “rational”, etc.
**If it describes the behavior of companies, then it is a useful tool to have. Especially if it tells you how to avoid being screwed over.
To explain where I am coming from: My primary goal was to make sense of a somewhat fragmented field by developing my own philosophy behind it and turning it into concepts that I can use as thinking tools to better understand the world. My goal is not to make academic progress in that field, but to extract the viewpoint it (in my opinion) offers and use it for my own purposes.
In particular, I noticed that we are prone to treat finite (and even scarce) resources as infinite, such as making overly long book lists that would take 2-3 lifetimes to complete reading. This is non-sense of course and developing a sensibility for this bias (?) can have personal utility. I can imagine plenty of scenarios where this may be helpful, such as a boss overburden his workers with work, ignoring the fact that his workers’ energy is scarce.
Regarding the groceries shopping scenario: The mere fact that you did the analysis, i.e. used deliberate thinking to come up with options and weigh them against each other, implies some degree of finite thinking. Infinite thinking does not refer to explicit assumptions of infinity in your thinking, but rather to the fact that (to put it crudely) no thinking was done at all.
Finite and infinite thinking don’t have to be binary categories. Continuing with the groceries shopping example, consider three agents A, B and C. A is on vacation and does not care about neither time nor price, thus entering the first available shop that satisfies his needs. B is only concerned with price, so he drives to a supermarket that is far away (but offers the most competitive prices). C considers both price and money and decides that the time saved is worth the increase in price. You could formalize this as: What are the parameters of the utility function that I am currently considering? (For C, the utility function u(a,b,c) would be a function of “does the shop contain what I need?”, “what is the expected price?”, “how long will it take me?”). This would make it part of decision theory.
You are right in saying that, technically, what I mean by “infinite thinking” is really “not finite-thinking”, but as you may agree, the first term sounds a lot more catchy. It’s a trade-off that hopefully is not too obstructive.
You touched on the difference between finite and scarce with the Eskimos example. I want to note that what I mean by “switching from infinite to finite thinking” is equivalent to “treating a resource that is factually finite as being scarce”. So, you could say that “finite thinking” is really “scarce thinking”.
Concerning your hypothetical world, you already acknowledge that, in this case, mental resources (speed of thought, concentration, energy) become the bottleneck and thus the scarce resources to be allocated. I don’t think that we will ever attain a state in which we can completely abolish scarcity. When “real” economists talk about post-scarcity, they mean an abundance of elementary goods and services so that people don’t have to fight over water and food. If you take it by the letter, the only post-(formal scarcity) scenario I can imagine is us becoming floating bubbles of consciousness in space, eternally content and peaceful. But that would not be any fun.
I think that math, in its essence, is easy. If it weren’t for our faulty thinking apparatus, we would see that immediately. But the problem is that a lot of things that matter can only be accessed through vague notions without a technical definition at its heart.
I might be a little harsh on the details as I percieve economics having a needlessly ideological component. I might also be reacting because I percieve this line of thinking to be potentially dangerous and I don’t like that I can’t formulate the link between the starting steps and the danger.
Game of Thrones SPOILERS
After the conflict in Westeroos in the meeting of important people Sam suggests that they should do democracy. People do not argue that it would be a bad idea but laugh it off. The feudal way of life is so ingrained in the world that other ways of life are unthinkable.
END OF SPOILERS
In the same way I think in the real world there are parties that try to get people to entrench scarse mindset as a natural way how things are and use propagandist means to do so. Fossil resource energy companies might try to hinder the invention of cleaner forms of energy or make their adoption later so that their business sector lasts longer. They have a vested interest in keeping people minds that energy scarcity is at the current level and not be too inquisitive about how it might change in the future.
In the robot ubiquitus scenario I don’t think the scarse resources that are lest are elementary resources so that would fit the bill of a postscarcity scenario. “Even if we reach a very high level of development, there will still be scare resources left to distribute, such as time.” presents time as an example of a resource whose scarcity is unassailable and the robot scenario assails that. Retreating to a position where any individual resource need not be scarce in all worlds is a motte-and-bailey and I would feel would that be challenged the goal posts would keep on moving. This speaks to the manner in which the original belief was held which is unlikely to weight literal technical truth that much. And my experience has been that I do not have to fight over water in the part of the world I am in. There are also microenviroments such as families where food is not scarse to children, there is no children buying food from their parents. There are other factors (parents might not want to have a fat kid and might deny food requests based on that goal) but those are not usually approached from an economy theory standpoint. To my understanding economists should be interested in those but I understand that as their tools assume scarcity they like applying their tools where they work (and as families might compete for food to share between them they focus on that bit). But just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean that the world is made out of nails.
Thus I would be interested to UNDERSTAND why getting rid of scarcity might be hard, but having an opinion that it is so is not of that much great interest to me. It might be fine if it is too complex to unravel in short conversation. But my experience has been that it’s not a matter of making things understandble enough but that I am not indoctrinated enough, that such discussion grinds to a halt because of believability/interestingness of the assumptions needed to be made. A religious person migth show how their belief system leads to great fun acts of compassion but if they ask me to copy their belief system because of these attractive properties there is going be a problem about existence of certain metaphysical actors. And if someone would claim that if I am compassionate I must have implicitly assumed the existence of god I would be highly skeptical. Uncritical copying would run the risk of corrupting my thinking outside of the field of compassion. In certain sense adopting economics as a wide dominant thought force could make me assume everybody is a psychopath and that families should be impossible.
I feel that we are getting off-topic and I also think that I don’t follow some of your thoughts.
The danger that you refer to may be laissez-faire capitalism and its effects on governments, societies and the environment. But this has nothing to do with the original post.
I think that you may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The fact that there are problems with the current implementation of economics (aka globalization, multi-national cooperations, inequality etc.) does not preclude economic ideas, or ideas inspired by economics, having merit.
If you interpret scarcity as scarcity of basic resources, then the robot agent scenario does fit the post-scarcity idea. But to get there, we need technological advancement and higher productivity. And for that, economic thinking may be useful.
I have never suggested to adopt the whole field of economics as one’s dominant way of thinking. I am strictly against taking ideas, from any field, at face value without critical thinking.
If you would only use the concept of epicycles in a particular theory of gravitation then the relevance of epicycles would seem to be tied to the relevance of that gravitational theory.
If somebody says that they believe in god I am tempted to lump them into the category of a religiouos nut. Similarly there are economic concepts which seem to be part of a coherent/connected memecomplex and I get a memetic allergy reaction or strong expecation what those other things would be. One of the properties of this memecomplex is that it can tell a plausible story for long time before places to to doubt it are apparent. Atleast religion makes claims in metaphysical language where you can recognise the claims as wild, but economical ideology dresses itself as very tame. I might be wrong to generalise this to big populations and I would love to see the subject-field be treated without shady epistemology and I think careful concept analysis is likely to provided that. But I think it’s hard mode and it can easily become resistant to scrutiny.
This is a good model of scarcity (as a way of thinking) - in which something is not viewed as a constraint to be eliminated, but as inescapable/unchangeable.
Evo-psych might be more useful here. If this economic frame makes bad predictions concerning measurable testable things (like the literal prisoner’s dilemma, which there might be real world data on) concerning how people actually work then either the model is missing something* or it’s not very predictive in that domain**.
*Altruism, a desire to appear altruistic, if your family is related to you then “genetic” fitness isn’t just served by pursuing your own wellbeing, perhaps having friends/not “being a psychopath” is “rational”, etc.
**If it describes the behavior of companies, then it is a useful tool to have. Especially if it tells you how to avoid being screwed over.