Wicked Valuations

People and Landed Property

Michael McDermott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429013218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Valoración

Traditional valuation approaches are increasingly recognised as being insufficient to address the wicked valuation problems of the diverse peoples and groups that inhabit the globe from north, south, east to west. This book demonstrates the limitations of science and, in particular economics, as the foundation on which valuations are traditionally based. It demonstrates the importance of and provides justification for the personal, cultural values and norms which underpin our assessment of "value", and the fact that these vary across the world. In Wicked Valuations Michael McDermott develops a means of engaging with highly complex valuation problems. His autoethnography provides a lens to draw on knowledge and experience from his 40 years in land valuation in Africa and the Asia-Pacific, while documentary analysis is used to draw in the views of other valuation practitioners and scholars who are becoming increasingly aware of the need to develop ways to adapt land valuation processes to the complexity of our contemporary landscapes.

1 Framing the thesis of this book

Introduction

The primary purpose of this book is to be a knowledge-building document which includes the knowledge that knowledge itself can never be enough to address its subject.

That subject is policy development at all scales from personal to global, and in particular our land-related policies, laws, institutions and valuations.

Furthermore, I here argue that what I term “The Machine” is not only insufficient to address the performance of the International Valuation Standard’s definition market value. That definition is fundamental to this book, particularly in its emphasis on willing buyers and willing sellers, because machines do not have wills:

Market value is the estimated amount for which an asset or liability would exchange on the valuation date between a willing buyer and a willing seller in an arm’s-length transaction after proper marketing wherein the parties had each acted knowledgeably, prudently and without compulsion.

(IVSC 2016)

As explained later, we require organisms to find “willing” existents – holons, not artefacts, complex, not merely simple or complicated. They have to be so in order to value in the first place, and to address wicked problems. But they also create wicked valuation problems, particularly in the contexts of the North meeting the South, and the East meeting the West, because they employ heuristics called ideologies, and “ideologies exist spatially” (Emerson 2005), as tracked by Arredondo (2013) via his focus on the history of the USA.

As an example of ideologies existing spatially from the area of particular focus in this book, that of land policy, I note that “Land surveys in the 19th century began to help divide the country for settlement and political division by drawing patterns on the land. The notion of ‘land ownership’ invades the West with devastating effects on Native Americans” (Rumsey 2005, 10:19–10:26): “This is sort of the American experience: everything is rationalized, surveyed, contained” (ibid., 10:55–10:57). The process Rumsey described in the North American context was repeated globally, and goes for out mental maps as well as our paper and digital ones. Yet there is a difference between them. As Lewis Mumford stated in The Myth of the Machine:

Unlike an organism, which is an open system, subject to chance mutations and to many external forces and circumstances over which it has no control, mechanisms are closed systems, strictly contrived by the inventor to achieve clearly foreseen and limited ends. . . . By contrast, even the lowest species of organism . . . has remarkable potentialities that no machine can boast: it can alter its species’ character and re-program itself, so to say, in order to seize new opportunities or resist unwanted external pressures. That margin of freedom no machine possesses in its own right.

(Mumford 1970, p. 97)

I am asserting that ignoring or undervaluing how crucially important this difference is, and thinking exclusively inside the framing of “the mechanics of this” and the “mechanics of that”, is a requisite gullibility for one to be confined within the myth of the machine. With Arredondo (2013), I contend that it was preconditional to man-induced climate change and the potential extinction of our species by that and other means (including nuclear war), and similarly the past and ongoing extinctions of thousands of other species on our planet.

That is because markets involve not only fact perceptions, but also value judgements, with value judgements actually directing the search for facts through framing what one seeks and finds in the first place (McGilchrist 2009, pp. 9 and 29, Lakoff 2004): “Values come first, facts and policies follow in the service of values. They matter, but they always support values” (Lakoff 2016). Once the basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy have been met (see Box 5.2, p. 202) there may be great differences in such value judgements between cultures, and therefore great differences in what constitutes a market value agreement within and between them (Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan 2010).

For that reason, in the context of framing our searches for facts and values and their inter-relationships it is necessary to include references to philosophers and scientists, including physicists. Philosophers are of central concern, but we are not to limit ourselves to philosophy: the central quest here is that of addressing wicked valuation problems. However, many philosophers provide useful guidance in that quest. One such, Charles Taylor, made a core perception in the context, that of a social imaginary (Taylor 2001, 2002, 2004). Using reductionism in what I consider to be its legitimate function as a highlighting device, rather than its illegitimate function as a cutting-off device, the “truth about stories is that’s all we are” (King 2003), meaning that the “we” thus defined is a social imaginary.

Physicists are important not only because they have been the most influential in framing machine thinking, but also because many of them are at the forefront of revealing its limitations. Poets, politicians and activists are also important to reveal framings and value judgements. However, it is not only philosophers, physicists, poets, politicians and activists who are important to reveal framings and value judgements. In fact, everyone is, starting with oneself, particularly in relationships. Hence my emphasis on identity here, and the provision of my own identity construction as my best-known example of that process.

While McGilchrist and other recent researchers (for example, Nielsen et al. 2013) dismiss several popular hemispheric/personality lateralisations dating from the 1970’s, they equally confirm that genuine lateralisations remain. McGilchrist’s work still results in framing the right hemisphere’s domain being that of all value judgements but the extrinsic/utilitarian ones (McGilchrist 2009, pp. 72 and 93). In turn, value judgements frame and power the philosophical, propositional and analytical choices of all peoples everywhere, whether they realise it or not. In this work, I am not mainly concerned with which hemispheres or neurons do what, but with McGilchrist’s and Lakoff’s insights into the relationships between fact perceptions and value judgements as they may apply in arriving at market agreements, particularly inter-cultural ones.

Many such culture-shaping value judgements are expressed through myths. As Diamond points out:

A myth is one way we give meaning to our existence – no myth, no meaning. What we have come today scientifically to call models or paradigms are actually myths: cognitive constructs we create in an effort to better comprehend our universe and ourselves.

(Diamond 2006, p. 186)

As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology” (2002, p. xviii).What I term The Machine is born through the myth of mechanism, and comes into reality via the Thomas Theorem – “if one defines situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928; Merton 1995).

Those two terms, “myth” and “machine” were brought together decades ago by Lewis Mumford, on his above-quoted two-volume work, “The Myth of the Machine” (1967, 1970). The implementation of this myth – via the Thomas Theorem – has been and is still prompted by “a series of intentional choices made in the pursuit of power, power over nature and power over other humans”. These engender “an increasing tendency towards mechanization that often [comes at] at the expense of humaneness” and leads to the machine becoming “an end in itself” and being “treated as if it were the creative principle instead of just one possible creation” (Carlo 2013). The myth enacts “the social consequences of increasing physical power” without necessarily having any “commensurate increase in intellectual insight, moral discipline, social awareness, and responsible political direction” (Mumford 1970, p. 232).

This myth, a philosophical expression of which is machinism (Merleau-Ponty and Séglard 2003, p. 162) developed what Mumford termed the megamachine, driven by what he termed “The Pentagon of Power”, that pentagon being power, profit, productivity, property, and prestige (Mumford 1970). Via that pentagon, machinism provides an enboxing of complexity which provides a comforting closure and power-rush for its employers. That emotion of dominance is gained irrespective of its truth value. As such, is a facilitator of left-hemisphere dominance for some of the processually less aware. While this book concentrates on property, the other four ends of the pentagon remain inseparable throughout.

I also argue that the Myth of the Enlightenment (a sub-myth of the myth of the machine for knowledge, too, is power) – in particular, its deliberate disregard of intrinsic valuation – highlights weaknesses of The Machine in both its sources and its drivers.

While of vast extrinsic value in a myriad of contexts, the megamachine, which I shall hereinafter term “The Machine”, is of no more intrinsic value than any other machine, such as a stapler, because as explained below machines are never complex, only simple to highly complicated. McGilchrist claims that “Not only does the right hemisphere have an affinity with whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical” (McGilchrist 2009, p. 55). While not referring to brain geography but to the mental phenomena McGilchrist addressed over 60 years later, Lewis Mumford noted of mechanist mindsets that “their failure is due to the fact that they are seeking to discover, by abstraction and definition, something that is a complex product of varied, never-ending natural and human processes” (Mumford 1946, p. 161). Living holons are wickedly complex; inanimate machines are simple to complicated: “Biological and social systems are open, therefore understanding them in mechanical terms will not work” (Sardar and Abrams 2004, p. 69). As stated by Cobb:

The entire issue serves to illustrate what I believe to be the central intellectual challenge of our age: We live in complex systems, but we do not understand them. Just admitting this might help us find our way forward on so many problems that now plague us.

(Cobb 2011)

As distinct from just an intellectual problem, Arredondo (2013) considers what Mumford described as Myth of the Machine’s “totalitarian triumph of scientific megatechnics” (Mumford 1970, p. 312) to be “the greatest problem that we face”, with its “regression toward primitive forms of total domination and the nihilism that underlies it”.

I contend that these problems are intimately enmeshed, and that attention to this interplay of value judgements and fact perceptions is core to addressing wicked valuation problems. I have developed HVN↔HBA to facilitate wise action in addressing that interplay. That is, I am introducing HVN↔HBA as a candidate for being a due diligence protocol in addressing wicked valuation problems.

This book, then, is by a practitioner of real property valuation who believes that the current valuation processes (strongly influenced as they are by mere rationalist economic theory which is, insofar as it is merely rationalist, unreasonable) are inadequate in addressing the complex landscape of property valuation. While my professional field is about reducing all relevant complexities to a market value of real property rights, this work is about addressing wicked valuation problems by respecting their complexities and irreducibilities. As Vandana Shiva puts it, “for anyone who says it’s too big or too deep, unless we go there even smaller problems won’t be solved” (ABC RN 2015a, 53:16).

Therefore I look outwards and upwards from my real property valuation base towards emerging disciplines such as Valuation Studies (Helgesson and Muniesa 2013), environmental psychology (Proshansky, Fabian and Kaminoff 1983), Complexics (Bastardas-Boada 2015), Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S) (Bammer 2013), Clumsy Theory (Taylor 2015; Thompson 2013), Critical Systems Thinking (Pollack 2013), Post-Normal Science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1990, 1991; Tognetti 2013) and others such as social identity and self-categorisation theories (Sindic and Condor 2014).

As obliquity is a recommended approach towards addressing complexities (Kay 2011), in so doing I shall introduce the subject with a story about the sea, a machine on it called the Endeavour, and the encounter of the machinism-focussed minds the Endeavour housed with a very different mind. I do so as an illustrative dichotomy towards the idea that there are many approaches to addressing the topic of this book in addition to those of the currently dominant machinist economic paradigm, and that to acknowledge their existence is not to recommend any dominance by any of them, but rather to employ them when optimal in the context.

In 1769, in the Society Islands, Joseph Banks encountered a man called Tupaia. Banks brought him aboard Endeavour, a ship captained by James Cook that was there to observe the transit of Venus as part of an expedition to discover Terra Australis. Later, the Endeavour discovered Australia’s east coast for the British Crown, which led to the kinds of problems addressed in this work.

A major reason for observing the transit of Venus was that it would help British navigators accurately calculate their longitude: a vital cog for their ships to find their way around the globe. Their reasons for their voyages were centred around trade. Empire was about what Moore terms “the Law of Value” (Moore 2015), which he regards as fundamental to capitalism: to commonalise or otherwise externalise the costs, and privatise the profits – a process of exploitation via capitalisation, and appropriation of that value to themselves. The context of Cook’s endeavour was to find in order to exploit more of a major requirement of that process, Cheap Nature.

By “Cheap Nature” Moore means “the ongoing, radically expansive, and relentlessly innovative quest to turn the work/energy of the biosphere into capital (value-in-motion)” (ibid., Kindle location 368). It asserts that “the web of life can be fragmented, that its moments can be valued through calculations of price and value” (ibid., Kindle location 1269), the “genius of capitalism’s cheap nature strategy [being] to represent time as linear, space as flat, as nature as external” (Moore 2014, p. 286). Moore sees that approach as the West’s inflection of what Haraway termed “the God Trick” – “seeing everything from nowhere” (Haraway 1988, p. 581), but which Blake would have seen as the Urizen Trick, passed from Urizen to Newton.

Tupaia was of particular interest to Banks because he could navigate without nailing down longitude. For him, as for other Polynesians, the planet was “a living force” (Strongman 2008, p. 72), a view more compatible with that of some modern scientists than that of eighteenth century mechanists: “The universe . . . is organic . . . a process, not a thing” (Cole 2001, p. 185). In contrast, the educated gentlemen on the Endeavour, facilitating what their contemporary William Blake described as Single Vision and Newton’s sleep, navigated by a combination of a (then merely clockwork) astronomy and “Mr. Kendall’s watch” (Sobel 1998, p.150).

One interpretation of Blake’s “single vision” is seeing merely materially. Twofold vision means seeing not only materially but also the “perception of the human values in all things”, threefold “the creative state”, and fourfold “mystical ecstasy” (Damon 2013, pp. 469–470). Another interpretation is that they are a “loose hierarchy of psychical conditi...