Since humans, scientists especially, have a drive to understand things, you probably wouldn’t just sit there with a giant table of preconditions and outcome probabilities with no attempt to systematize them, but you could get workable weather forecasts out of such a system, to the extent that weather obeys any patterns at all.

You would probably end up discovering Boyle’s Law or something like it even if you hadn’t known it in advance.

Or perhaps that if you try and create a workable weather forecast without both understanding and incorporating Boyle’s Law (the relationship between pressure and volume is fairly important for the different layers of the atmosphere) you’re not going to get all that workable a weather forecast.

I seem to remember that some people had a go at coining “mesoeconomics” to describe Chicago-style price theory once, but it didn’t take off.

Why are economists so startled that their idealized contexts fall shott of actual predictions?

Why do they use the prefix “micro-”, as if the ideal theories are good predictors of what actually takes place on a small scale?

more like saying that Boyle’s Law is important for understanding the behaviour of gases, but won’t really give you a workable weather forecast.

I can’t get very excited about this distinction (I am not sure that it is a menaingful distinction), but I guess it may be important to some.

My formula is similar to one of those “you are what you eat” formulas. It’s no more than a rule of thumb. If it’s a false dichotomy or not remains to be proved. Let me flesh my formula out some more so you can tell me why. I worry about the ego thing. But let me start from the beginning.

I’m thinking of Durkheim’s idea that the catagories of the human mind are social constructs and arbitrary ones at that.

My problem with classical economists is that they posit human nature as a given and proceed from there. Anthropology would indicate that such assumptions are arbitrary.

Where is this given from which economists assume economic man will act?

Think of organic man as the id and society as the superego. From where comes the ego? Without the id and the superego it doesn’t develope in ways most of us can relate to. The superego is part of our socialization. It’s the moral and intellectual scoll that says this way and not that.

Break the law and you face the guys in the blue suits. Talk crazy and you face the the guys in the white suits. But they are not the final arbiters for an autonomous individual. One can practice civil disobedience, one can hold eccentric views, one can say enough to the superego.

So how self awareness? Does our self awareness naturally grow into maturity from some metaphysical seed or is it the end of a natural process. As fond as I am of metaphysical explanations I feel on firmer grounds with the empirical. There are problems with Durkheim’s social catagories concept but it doesn’t put and end to enquiry in the here and now as the metaphysical seed concept does. The ego would seem to be dependent on the id and the superego.

For instance, the feral child deprived of the stimilus of language for a number of years is incapable of learning any language. The language learning part of the brain shuts down unless there is stimilus, social stimilus, saying this and not that. However, not every tribe speaks the same language.

Isn’t this, not being subjected to the same stimilus and not speaking the same language, a stumbling block for the economic man of Adam Smith. His man was local and temporal. He couldn’t have functioned in the Roman Empire. He would have had too many scruples. His sociology of morals even his sociology of knowledge would have been different.

Today one could argue that both these sociologies are becoming more and more universal. That’s an empirical statement about social constructs and not a metaphysical statement about the nature of man, otherwise, universality would be a given.

Macroeconomists are free to model the most efficient way for an economy to return to equalibrium. They are not free to assume the same economic man for every model.

It’s not enough to say that we are more alike than different when it comes to human nature without showing why.

Personally every time I’m exposed to the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal I’m left wondering from what planet these people came. And we know that instinctally dogs won’t soil the areas around where they eat. Greenspan assumed the same about economic man and was badly mistaken.

There is no thread in a capitalistic society that ensures that social interests will be served by individual interests. Nor is there one in a communistic or socialistic society. The best we can do to ensure a “just right moment” is to get the incentives–which includes sanctions–right for a human nature, here and now, as it does exist in a particular society so social interests won’t go begging.

It’s my contention that in dealing with the problem of “Who is economic man?” there is no one ideal or empirical “human nature” that can be fitted for all people at all times.

Throughout the entire fresh’n’salty micro-marco of recent weeks, it took me until this sentence to realize just what these guys were selling. I have never had Econ 101 or any exposure whatsoever, but I did physics for quite a few years.

Let me rephrase: “The appealing idea that cognitive science should develop naturally from standard quantum physics foundations must be recognized as an incredibly stupid way to obtain irrelevant results in the most arduous way possible.” (*)

Where are these guys going, and why are they in that handbasket?

(*) No, Hopfield, MFA etc. does not count. Think again.

Looking at macro on its own terms might tell us something about micro that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise, or point out a useful place to look, just as easily as the reverse.

From what little I understand, neither neoclassical nor Keynesian theories have much to say about groups. Failure to address the most fundamental aspect of human nature does not bode well for this enterprise.

And this thing that humans are often claimed to be by economists, “rational” (and individualistically selfish), seems to be more notably absent than present. People seem more likely to follow others in some way or another than anything else, and to promote the values they feel are best for everyone, or at least everyone in some group.

So the goal should not be to introduce less uncertainty in our system, but MORE.