Full-Spectrum Economics

Toward an Inclusive and Emancipatory Social Science

Christian Arnsperger

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415632591
• eBook ISBN: 9781135169763
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Economics is essential in today's world, and yet mainstream economists are increasingly under criticism for not taking into account sufficiently many dimensions of real life, such as political and moral values, human development, spirituality, and people's widely shared aspiration to live more liberated lives. This book offers a critical assessment of contemporary mainstream economics by showing that the discipline has become much too narrow and misses out on the full spectrum of human existence.

The book presents a careful, detailed analysis of the limitations of neoclassical economics and of its post-neoclassical successors: behavioral economics, neuroeconomics, and experimental economics. It offers a deconstruction rooted in the "Integral" philosophy developed over the past three decades by the contemporary American thinker Ken Wilber. Distinguishing between exterior and interior dimensions of human existence, it suggests that economics could be made into a more inclusive and more emancipatory science if it started to truly honor the genuinely interior aspects of individuals and communities. Instead of remaining stuck in the limitations of post-neoclassical theory, we should make the move toward a new paradigm that, in the name of science, promotes objectivity as well as subjectivity, and material causality as well as existential awareness.

The result is a highly expanded sense of relevance for economists, sociologists, and social scientists in general. Combining methodologies from systems science, brain science, ethno-methodology, and existentialism as well as from the great spiritual traditions of humanity, Christian Arnsperger delineates the requirements of a genuinely integral economics beyond today's crippling reductionism.

1
Introduction

Why economics should go “full spectrum”

In recent years, economists seem to have become one of the favorite targets of jokes about the irrelevance of formalism, abstraction, and oversimplification. They are even increasingly being accused of irresponsible aloofness and, worse still, of tacit ideological collusion with the—conservative—powers that be (Bourdieu 1998, 2000; Amadae 2003). Such accusations, alas, are not just completely false and misguided; at the same time, they are schematic and…oversimplified—which does not imply that the overzealous defenders are on the right track, either (Landsburg 1993; Coleman 2002). Economics today needs to be defended against its own weaknesses, using its own in-built strengths. It is in dire need of deconstruction through constructive criticism. And it is just as direly awaiting re-construction. This book aims to be a companion in the quest for the fundamental renewal of this crucial, prestigious, and also battered subdiscipline of social science. Written in an accessible and occasionally conversational style, but with as little compromise on rigor as can possibly be, these pages are offered as a detailed guide through the maze of today’s mainstream economics, toward a renewed and reinvigorated science of the economy.

Recent mainstream advances beyond neoclassical theorizing do not appear to have shed the mains feature that makes the dominant paradigm vulnerable: its powerful but debilitating reductionism. It is time, or so I want to argue, to tackle reductionism head on, without necessarily throwing overboard its useful—albeit partial—acquisitions and insights. Accordingly, in Parts I, II, and III this book builds a detailed philosophical critique both of neoclassical economics and post-neoclassical (complexity, neuro- and behavioral) economics. Then, in Part IV, it offers a forward-looking, constructive alternative, called “Full-Spectrum” Economics—an expression to be explained in a moment. The distinctive feature of this alternative is that it transcends the current mainstream while including some of its most promising building blocks.

Thus, my critical endeavor is not purely destructive; nor is it “heterodox” in the extreme sense of the word. It certainly sees the current orthodoxy as faulty and justifies this position at great length, informed by detailed readings from the current cutting-edge literature. At the same time, it seeks to convince mainstream economists that they could quite easily embrace a broader, richer, more integrative perspective if they accepted to adopt a less positivist and less reductionist stance. My aim is to convince them that this is not, as they tend to believe, intellectually perilous or academically crippling. In addition, those of us who are already convinced that reductionism is catastrophic and who want to move ahead will find here some significant avenues in support of their endeavors.

This book can be read with two distinct aims in mind. Those who first and foremost seek to understand what is wrong with today’s mainstream economics can initially focus on Parts I, II, and III as well as on Chapter 9, which offer a careful, detailed critical discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of neoclassical and post-neoclassical economics. Those who already understand those strengths and weaknesses and are eager to see what alternative paradigm is called for can start out by reading Part IV, and more specifically Chapters 10 and 12, along with Chapters 3 and 11, which contain the “toolbox” of the alternative approach.

What is a “full spectrum?”

The word “Integral” (with a capital “I”) will be used frequently here. It is taken from the increasingly popular work of the American philosopher Ken Wilber. His “Integral approach,” which he developed over the past three decades, is being read more and more widely. It has caused quite a buzz in philosophy but also in physics and biology, as well as evolutionary science. Wilber has become, in the Anglo-Saxon area at least, one of the most frequently quoted philosophers. (In this introductory chapter, I will abstain from citing any references to Wilber’s work; there will be plenty of them in the rest of the text.) In essence, and on the basis of a deep and broad synthesis of past and present philosophical currents from the West and the East, Wilber argues that knowledge is always a matter of the awareness of an evolving individual and that any individual’s knowledge— hence also any scientist’s knowledge—always mobilizes a full spectrum of first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives. These perspectives are distributed into four “quadrants” resulting from two foundational dichotomies: individual versus collective and interior versus exterior. Thus, the four dimensions inevitably permeating our ongoing awareness at any moment, Wilber argues, are interior-collective (cultural), interior-individual (consciousness-related), exterior-individual (behavioral and cerebral), and exterior-collective (systemic). Moreover, each of us mobilizes these various perspectives while evolving “vertically”—so to speak—along various lines of development, so that every human being’s way of knowing and engaging with reality is dependent on that human being’s evolutionary location. Thus, the full spectrum of knowledge construction is both horizontal and vertical—both quadri-dimensional and upward moving.

My aim is not to mechanically juxtapose Wilber’s thought (which, after all, most of today’s economists are not yet aware of) and current economics, implicitly aiming to convey how wonderful or impressive Wilber’s philosophy is. I happen to think it is, but apologetics is not my job here; neither is it to draw up an exhaustive survey of the many areas to which Integral thought has been, or might yet be, applied with more or less success. This is a book on economics, not on Integral philosophy per se. I want to acknowledge Integral philosophy as a living and highly promising area of thought and to offer a thoroughly argued and constructive articulation of Wilber’s tools and cutting-edge economics. As a philosophically inclined and critical economist, I would very much like the latter to transcend itself with the help of the former. I am convinced economics will be a much better discipline if Integral thought informs—not replaces—it. Here are, then, the main arguments I will develop in this book.

The now largely outdated but still influential neoclassical paradigm, which includes most of noncooperative game theory, is a complete failure when it comes to understanding one very basic feature of complex systems: namely, the fact that economic agents actually interact. Neoclassical economics used to be fine and useful but has outgrown its role even within reductionist/positivist approaches. I will substantiate this point with an extensive textual as well as conceptual analysis of the top mainstream literature.

The up-and-coming and increasingly influential post-neoclassical paradigm, composed of evolutionary game theory, complexity economics, neuroeconomics, and behavioral/experimental economics, is a major advance within the positivist domain, successfully merging insights from brain/organism science and systems science. However, it remains fundamentally flawed when it comes to saying anything about interior notions such as personal affectivity or collective culture. This is so even though many post-neoclassical economists impatiently (but mistakenly) claim that they have indeed become capable of fully embracing such issues. Post-neoclassical economics is able to fool its students by building models of what I will call pseudo-consciousness and pseudo-culture. It does so using positivist concepts taken from neuroscience and systems science. Again, I will base my claims on a detailed textual and conceptual analysis of the top mainstream literature.

To build a genuinely Full-Spectrum paradigm, both real consciousness and real culture, as well as the idea of evolutionary development, need to be introduced in a non-reductionist way. The current cutting edge of the discipline fails to do this. Doing so implies some fascinating new questions that economists need to ask themselves from within their scientific activity, such as for instance: Is my life as an economist meaningful? Am I an emotionally balanced scientist? Has my culture led me to adopt prejudices and call them “scientific?” What are my physical and mental states when I do economics? How do my brain states reflect certain patterns of behavior that I have with respect to colleagues, students, or other members of the economy? How do I personally perceive and understand the functioning and dynamics of the economy at large, and of the economics profession in particular? What incentives do I react—or refuse to react—to? In short, part of Full-Spectrum Economics is the economist’s “introspective” study of herself as an actor within the economic reality she is studying. This is very important because studying the economy as a scientist who advises governments and speaks out in public about policy issues tends to reinforce the reality one is studying.

Underlying such questions is Wilber’s insight that we constantly need to combine at least eight methodologies: structuralism and phenomenology for the study of consciousness, ethnomethodology and hermeneutics for the study of culture, brain science and autopoiesis for the study of organism and brain, and systems theory and social autopoiesis for the study of social systems. In each of these couples, the first methodology is adequate for the study of external aspects while the second one is adequate for the study of internal aspects. This is the most immediate meaning of a “full spectrum” of knowledge. These eight ways of approaching knowledge need to be mobilized creatively, and without mutual exclusion or anathema, by (i) the epistemologist who studies economists, (ii) the economist who studies economic agents, and (iii) the economic agents who interact within economic reality. To put it in a nutshell, I will argue on the basis of Wilber’s approach that a Full-Spectrum economist should adopt all eight methodologies within a context of both introspective and “extrospective” study. Epistemologists should study economists using the methodologies of structuralism, ethnomethodology, brain science, and systems theory. Economists should study themselves using the methodologies of phenomenology, hermeneutics, autopoiesis, and social autopoiesis, and they should study agents through structuralism, ethnomethodology, brain science, and systems theory.

How emancipatory will Full-Spectrum Economics be? This will depend on its ability to transmit to economic agents at the “shop floor” the intellectual and spiritual resources they need so as to make the reality they create evolve “upward” in terms of levels of consciousness, levels of cultural/moral development, and levels of system complexity. This idea of a many-dimensional, evolving reality that has untapped potentials waiting to be unraveled is central to Full-Spectrum Economics. To understand the issues involved, we will make use of a notion I call the “Integral field” of economic reality. This is an evolutionary notion (which I construct on the basis of Wilber’s work) based on the fact that, at any given time, the key dimensions of our experience are “held together” through various stabilizing “bridges” that generate, and are reinforced by, foundational “axioms” that give structure and meaning to our economic lives. Such axioms correspond to the altitude of our Integral field. Thus, reasoning in terms of an upward-sliding Integral field may offer significant clarifications as to how Full-Spectrum Economics and Full-Spectrum economists can assist citizens in creating a better economic reality. The goal is to build a type of economics that significantly enhances economic agents’ capacities for awareness of untapped potentials, and for critical reasoning as well as emancipatory action.

Consequently, although it is written to stand completely on its own, this book could be seen as a follow-up to, and a deepening of, my previous one, entitled Critical Political Economy (see Arnsperger 2008). There, I argued that economics as it is being constructed and taught nowadays is not pluralistic enough. I based myself on insights taken from the cutting edge of the discipline, and mostly from complexity economics. In this new book, I go further (a) by making my critique of mainstream monism more detailed and offering much more dialog with the existing literature, and (b) by suggesting an alternative approach that flows from this critique.

That alternative, “Full-Spectrum Economics,” undoes some of the most persistent blockages found in the current mainstream. It opens up the possibility of an economics that is much more sensitive to both economists’ and “their” agents’ own existential and critical views on economic life. Thus, I hope to contribute to liberating mainstream economics from its self-imposed restrictions. The result is an alternative that is naturally more comprehensive, without having to make shrill claims to being “heterodox.” It is, or so I want to see it, a “post-orthodox” endeavor, based on one of Wilber’s key epistemological axioms: in the realm of serious philosophical and scientific investigation, no one is ever 100 percent wrong. Which does not mean, obviously, that mainstream reductionists can claim they are 100 percent right…

Readers may well ask whether all this could not be conveyed without reaching for Wilber and his specific Integral approach. Could we not just go ahead and say what we have to say, without explicitly resorting to the apparatus of a philosopher who is still rather obscure to the vast majority of economists? The answer is, predictably perhaps, “yes and no.” More precisely, a grudging “yes” and an emphatic “no.” Yes, because as I have already emphasized, my aim is not to write a book on Wilber (hence the fact that his name is not mentioned in the title). But no, in the sense that his own work is so densely structured and systematic that I would, in any case, have to paraphrase his concepts in order to develop the sort of “inclusive”—or “Integral”—approach I intend to offer. Therefore, it is more straightforward and intellectually honest to explicitly use Wilber’s model and vision throughout.

A personal journey

What can economists hope to reap from this book? It might perhaps be helpful to the reader if, at this preliminary stage, I engage in a short biographical excursus. I would like to offer up my conviction that, to the extent one is truly interested in a constructive critique of the current mainstream of economics, something like Integral philosophy is unavoidable. Why? Simply because a truly emancipatory economics cannot get around the need to integrate external and internal perspectives, as well as evolutionary ones, within a framework where first-, second-, and third-person utterances about reality are distinguished as carefully as possible. The future of our discipline does not lie in a confrontation of reductionisms, such as might arise for instance if we keep wanting to pin hermeneutic or spiritual perspectives against systemic or materialist ones, or if we keep arguing about whether brain science should take precedence over psychoanalysis or religion. Integral philosophy is an earnest, honest attempt to carefully bridge these sorts of gaps and mend the injuries they inflict on us all, without resorting to some new-age “mush” where all distinctions vanish.

Again, this does not imply that Wilber’s specific analytical framework— which I indeed deem to be powerful and first rate—has to be accepted wholesale or swallowed as dogma. There are many within the so-called “Integral community” who, rightly or wrongly, would like to oppose his views about the nature (or “Spirit!”) of evolution, or to question his insistence that human consciousness not be reduced to brain waves, or to criticize his acceptance of “hard science” and his often scathing rebuttals against new-age cosmologists or anti-scientific pseudo-mystics. Through his successful attempt at uniting perspectives from various ends of the full spectrum of methodology, Wilber has inevitably attracted multifaceted criticism, and sometimes even resentment. He is not entirely innocent when it comes to being outspoken and assertive—too much so, according to some. Within an academic framework where ideas count, and not one’s haircut or physical demeanor or tone of voice, such anecdotic details should be dismissed. Thus, I dismiss them outright, never to allude to them again. Whether my readers start out, and end up, agreeing with Wilber’s theoretical philosophy is an entirely valid issue. It cannot, however, be settled at the outset. Let us just be relaxed and creative about our main objective, which is not a defense of or an attack on “Wilberianism” but a proposal for a better, more meaningful economic science.

My ...

Table of contents

• Routledge frontiers of political economy
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The broadness of knowledge
• Part II Neoclassical reductionism
• Part III Post-neoclassical reductionism
• Part IV Beyond reductionism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index