Most economists will tell us that human welfare is best served by multiplying the number of jet skis. If there are two in the estuary today, there should be four there by this time next year and eight the year after. Because the estuary's beauty and tranquillity don't figure in the national accounts (no one pays to watch the sunset) and because the sale and use of jet skis does, this is deemed an improvement in human welfare.

... is that they will say, no, that is a simply and straightforward lie, economic theory says that what people value, whether it be beauty and tranquility or jet skis, is what is valuable, and if more value the beauty and tranquility more, it is a failure of ownership that results in those damn jet skis.

Because its not in the value theory that the flaw lies, but in the unit of analysis ... individuals making evaluations then choices then acting upon them, over and over and over and over and over and ... etc. ... and over again (repeat ad infinitum).

When the problem is that we have the wrong set of choices available to us, the unit of analysis leaves the traditional marginalist economist completely incapable of rigourously stating the problem, and without a rigourous statement of the problem, there is no way to address the question with the standard theoretical toolkit.

After all, complex systems cannot be designed at the margin, and viability of complex systems cannot be maintained by purely marginal comparisons and decisions ... and since the design of complex man-made systems, and even more complex man-cultivated systems, and the maintenance of complex man-cultivated systems, and even more complex inherited natural systems, is all of a higher order of priority than the pursuit of marginal increments in individual pleasure ... that implies that the sole problem that the traditional marginalist economics can solve is subsidiary to the highest priority problems that we must solve.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.