Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 05:30:16 -0400
Subject: BHA: updates- an suggestion?


Economics is bound to politics and said to be a surrogate for the other. How far true is this assumption? Methodology should be self critical in qualitative and quantitative economics , as a parent to politics and question it too. Economic methods are basically econometrics, a sub-division of probabilistic and mechanical statistics.

Societies and social agents are not probabilistic or mechanistic in their actions. Actions, social agents and societies have a historical mirror under which they?ve got a reflection of the intrinsic properties as matter of facts in their practical, natural and social life. Nevertheless, facts besides natural and some practical one, are not figuratively quantitative, but they?re rather aggregation of time-space; idiosyncratic behaviours, arrays of events which are at sometimes times  random and /or may not generate a web of social and agents meaning, the economic methods will put forward.

What I want to argue is the fact that economic methodology is a physicalist discourse immersed in re-describing historical facts to generate new facts hence also a sub-division of the hermeneutic circle a form, of poetic linguistic turn or to be precise logic.  

If we were to suppose that economic methods was a reflection of the facts of social and natural order as its claimed, then human needs and wants wouldn?t  basically and always be the same as reflected in desires, needs and wants. It implies too that economics delving in econometric fictions, would not be re-conceptualising and re-contextualising from empirical data but rather the new state (s) of society generated thereupon from new desires, wants and needs. Society most probably will be generating the means and ways by which economics will re-describe the intersection of natural, social and practical order to generate a new science i.e. a paradigmatic shift in economics and subsequently political processes.   
 
Its evident therefore that economics method is in a state of statis,  when we take space-time arrays in place and distance in regard to social being and nature. There is certainly and undoubtedly a yearning for social transformation - accrued from human encounters yet social science for example does not provide a nameable causation and substantial pattern which allows its possibility to happen. Moreover the changes within society, social agents and their action does not imply, the intrinsic nature of being and social life does fundamentally change but rather the appearance which is an extrinsic property of what economics is actually about1. As a matter of fact, economics simplistically ground facts of society, social agents and their actions, as ethnographic hence an elaboration of sound re-definition of the two separate instance (structures and appearance) as necessitated to validate the econometrics difference in the two communities e.g. one fishing village on the polar circle and another on the equator as extrinsically different but economically roundly the same.

I have elaborated on structures, but change in structure as in the three forms of water doesn?t readily imply that implicitly the nature of water molecules have changed. So is society, social agents and their actions; change in language (redefinition); conceptually and contextually might generate transformation in the appearance of structures and social systems but not their basic algorithms and constituents. It?s therefore my feeling that economic methodology is transformative laden but hides the other patterns, meanings and mechanism antecedent to the constitution of natural kinds and the ways things of nature behave.
 
E.g. in the so called advanced societies, urban misery transposed to less advanced society suffering and inadequacy crosses out the scientificity of economics methodology as being a quasi social action shrouded in mundane political methods they generate thereof.   

It is within the same vein, I wish to state that the economic paradigm based on econometric methodologies are ethnographic in and by nature hence evolving around ?blitzkrieg? in order to validate what it is, it is about.  I need to elaborate on this further: say a fishing community on the edges of the polar circle will be assumed to slightly behave based on past experience of economic method in the same manner as the one found in the oasis of the desert. Since data and basic material observable is the relation between the fishermen and their trade fishing, it might be assumed the same characteristic rules under similar economic conditions yet for matter of evaluation have dismissal data content. The sort of variation sorts and configures the economic action in response to observed patterns, hence the econometric narrative account for interpretative work to be acted upon depicted as a social fact. 

Economic method makes it possible to ethnolograhicies its methodologies in that to this science or art, structure is equivalent to intrinsicality- i.e. there is no difference between appearance and content, therefore causation is the same or equivalent as /to transformation as an applied science (or social practice), irrespective of dispositional properties intrinsically or extrinsically i.e. cognitive material resources, historicity, social practice or scientificity, natural order etc,. Such problems are not limited to economics but rather to the entire social sciences and speculative sociology too, which discovered solace in class sociology as an inoculation against such social ills, as if societies and social agents are incapable of an upward and downward movements in their social parameters. 

It should be noted hence that context in which research is by an type or status a researcher might have, has socially practical and natural affects on the production of research knowledge in the way such projects have to be viewed in the public eye.  Because of the social impact research should not be taken as interpersonal difference, disciplinary antagonism or methodological bias. In fact politicians, journalist and the general public the consumers of economic products should be wary of the accomplishments of logical empiricism (econometrics) in their attempt to locate social ideologies. The question in his respect is not to divorce moral and ethical discourse from the factuality of society properties and the nature of being which, by the way is fundamental and has got a historical trajectory. Economic logic has a propensity to linguify reality in a stochastic manner (cinematic society), in pretension of creating new meanings which actually do not exist. It is by way of making facts represented as symbolic, to interpret what economics might term as a new order without grounded incredulity about the very origins of human behaviours. 


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