Answering the Question: What is Economic Growth?

Economic growth is the buzzword of all political leaders and officials. The outcome of the recent G8 meeting is all too familiar:

The eight leaders meeting at the US presidential retreat in Maryland issued a communique declaring in its opening paragraph: “Our imperative is to promote growth and jobs.”

It added: “The global economic recovery shows signs of promise, but significant headwinds persist. Against this background, we commit to take all necessary steps to strengthen and reinvigorate our economies and combat financial stresses, recognising that the right measures are not the same for each of us.”

This begs the question: What is economic growth? Where does it come from and how can it be promoted?

The economy is a dynamic and complex system (like the society itself) so system dynamics is the proper paradigm to approach it. Promoting something also requires comprehensive understanding and modelling in order to get the desired results. Here is the model:

The model has three core concepts: culture, institutions and economy, each of which form a framework for the other two:

• Culture creates the behavioral framework through creating and transforming identities, attitudes and values.
• Institutions create the social framework through creating and supporting rules, laws and organizations.
• Economy creates the material framework through resources, goods and services, and distribution.

Based on this model it is evident what the most effective way to promote social and economic development is: transformation in identities, attitudes and values. They affect economic activity both directly and through institutions, so we are better to start the discussion right away!

Who are you?

What do you do?

What can you do?

What is your passion?

What do you hope?

What are you afraid of?

The Problem and the Paradox

At present, mankind is faced with an almost explosive rate of increase of the sort of difficulties that arise out of the attempt to treat the disorder in his own thinking and feeling as if this were a problem. Thus, it is now more urgent than ever that we give attention not only to this outward state of affairs, but also to the inward dullness and non-perceptiveness which allows us to go on failing to notice the paradox in thinking and feeling in which the outward confusion has its deep origin. Each human being has to see that the very feelings and ideas which he is inclined to identify with his “innermost self” are involved in paradox, through and through. A mind caught in such paradox will inevitably fall into self-deception, aimed at the creation of illusions that appear to relieve the pain resulting from the attempt to go on with self-contradiction. Such a mind cannot possibly see the relationships of the individual and of society as they really are. And thus, the attempt to “solve one’s own problems” and “to solve the problems of society” will in fact be found to propagate the existing confusion, rather than to help bring it to an end.

Of course, this does not mean that all working toward the establishment of order in the life of the individual and of society should now be dropped, in favor on concentration on the disorder in the mind that prevents the ending of our general difficulties. Rather, the inward work and the outward work go hand in hand. But it has to be kept in mind that through centuries of habit and conditioning, our prevailing tendency is now to suppose that “basically we ourselves are all right” and that our difficulties generally have outward causes, which can be treated as problems. And even when we do see that we are not in order inwardly, our habit is to suppose that we can point fairly definitely to what is wrong or lacking in ourselves, as if this were something different from or independent of the activity of thinking in which we formulate the “problem” of correcting what is in error.

As has been seen, however, the very process of thought with which we consider our personal and social “problems” is conditioned and controlled by the content which it seems to be considering so that, generally speaking, this thought can neither be free nor even really honest. What is called for, then, is a deep and intense awareness, going beyond the imagery and intellectual analysis of our confused process of thought, and capable of penetrating to the contradictory presuppositions and states of feeling in which the confusion originates. Such awareness implies that we be ready to apprehend the many paradoxes that reveal themselves in our daily lives, in our larger-scale social relationships, and ultimately in the thinking and feeling that appear to constitute the “innermost self” in each one of us.

In essence, therefore, what is needed is to go on with life in its wholeness and entirety, but with sustained, serious, careful attention to the fact that the mind, through centuries of conditioning, tends, for the most part, to be caught in paradoxes, and to mistake the resulting difficulties for problems.

David Bohm: The Problem and the Paradox.

On Social Casting

The society can be thought as a stream which constantly offers different roles which individuals then fulfill. Hofstede et al. (2010) present the idea like this:

We can approach this role-selection process through the concept of social casting. Casting itself can be defined like this:

Casting
1. The act or process of selecting actors, singers, dancers, models, etc. to a production.
2. A manufacturing process by which a liquid material is poured into a mold, which contains a hollow cavity of the desired shape, and then allowed to solidify.

Thus, social casting can be defined as follows:

Social casting is the process of a social system in which individuals are offered roles that they seek to fulfill, into which they are put or collectively selected.

The concept is a key in understanding many different social phenomena, such as social exclusion, deviance and awkwardness. Social exclusion can be thought to occur when an individual refuses or is prohibited from fulfilling the offered roles (such as that of a settled spouse or an employee) for one reason or another. Deviance describes this phenomenon from a viewpoint that presupposes more active efforts from the individual. Awkwardness can be understood as the feeling of confusion before social casting takes place. Imagine a rebellious teenager in a family party. E.g. when s/he says: “Celebrating birthdays is stupid.” this is followed by the feeling of awkwardness, which results in casting the teenager a role of “a teenage rebel” – this is necessary to release the social tension in the situation.

Relationships are built and roles cast continuously in the communication, so individuals are also able to actively transform their roles through conscious effort.

While social casting takes place in small-scale situations like that mentioned above, it also happens in big transitions such as finishing primary school, graduating from a university and getting employed. In addition, social casting occurs in elections where individuals are selected to fulfill the roles as heads of social bureaucracies (parties, local governments, national governments and organizations).

In each of these occasions the role of the individual changes: from child to teenager, from young person to adult, from student to employer, from citizen to leader. The shift from one role to another is constructed in language in many ways:

“You are not a child anymore, you shouldn’t need me to support you financially.” (child-adult)
“As a student, you must take responsibility of your own studies.” (pupil-student)
“You should know, you’re the one who just got his Ph.D.” (undergraduate-employee)
“I have a family now, I can’t just go travelling around the world.” (single-settled)
“I don’t want to be at home with the kids all day long, I want to build a career of my own.” (housewife-career wife)
“A party leader cannot have a personal blog.” (citizen-leader)

All of these notions are followed by a feeling of confusion/disappointment, which results in the individual either accepting the proposed role or one seeking to redefine the role/relationship. Social casting is never a permanent verdict. Relationships are built and roles cast continuously in the communication, so individuals are also able to actively transform their roles through conscious effort.

Public Deliberation Model

This model approaches all public deliberation as a process between the individual and the collective. Both of them affect each other through language, and also reality affects them when information from observation and research reaches them.

When the deliberation has continued long enough, the collective reaches common understanding (“truth”) on “what should be done”, acts and alters reality.

While Habermas approaches this as some kind of “ideal situation”, it actually is how politics has always worked. The difference is that the relationship and emphasis between individual and collective has fluctuated, and today there is lots of information, research and communication. Also social structures (such as the economy) have gotten bigger and more complex.

A dynamic model based on AGIL

Let’s consider the different ways things can “go wrong” in this framework of thought:

• Failure of education: individual doesn’t learn the essential skills needed to get along, such as social skills (home), or understanding of society (school).
• Failure of integration: social exclusion or marginalization takes place in new generations (difficulties in employment) and through justice system (difficulties of criminals to get back to normal life).
• Failure of adaptation: the social system faces increasingly more economic and environmental crises, as practices are not effectively changed.
• Failure of goal attainment: setting common goals through politics becomes more and more difficult when common belief systems are breaking up (the US political crisis).

It seems all these failures are actually intertwined: failure in education can result in failure in integration (e.g. choosing an industrial career in a post-industrial era), and failure in politics results in the failure of all three, education, integration and adaptation. This means improving the state of politics is crucial. Since effective decision making is based on a common belief system, promoting such a system is the starting point in solving the crises of the society. Dialogue is the tool for this.

AGIL Paradigm and Syria

Extensive quoting from Wikipedia:

Structural functionalism is a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. This approach looks at society through a macro-level orientation, which is a broad focus on the social structures that shape society as a whole.

And:

The AGIL paradigm is a sociological scheme created by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in the 1950s. It is a systematic depiction of certain societal functions, which every society must meet to be able to maintain stable social life. AGIL is an acronym from the initials of each of the four systemic necessities:

• Adaptation, or the capacity of society to interact with the environment. This includes, among other things, gathering resources and producing commodities to social redistribution.
• Goal Attainment, or the capability to set goals for future and make decisions accordingly. Political resolutions and societal objectives are part of this necessity.
• Integration, or the harmonization of the entire society is a demand that the values and norms of society are solid and sufficiently convergent. This requires, for example, the religious system to be fairly consistent, and even in a more basic level, a common language.
• Latency, or latent pattern maintenance, challenges society to maintain the integrative elements of the integration requirement above. This means institutions like family and school, which mediate belief systems and values between an older generation and its successor.

I’m especially interested in this paradigm in the context of the Syrian uprising. In the uprising the conflict (which I thought was the starting point for power use) is apparent. Parsons, however, doesn’t handle conflict in his work; in the Wikipedia article it is only mentioned that “Parsons never spoke about a society where there was no conflict or some kind of ‘perfect’ equilibrium”. This lack of dealing with conflict is also present in the wider criticism of structural functionalism: it is seen as “ahistorical, conservative, and unable to deal effectively with the process of change or conflict”.

Perhaps we should consider Parsons’ work as describing the steady state of the system. It is “conservative”, because it is, by definition, describing stable social life. This does not mean it is useless since societies are full of conflict, but that it describes the structural necessities for a balanced society.

Let’s consider Syria here: the system is taken out of balance when information about the Arab Spring spreads wider and also reaches the unsatisfied Syrian citizens (inducing cognitive dissonance in them). This cognitive conflict calls into question the legitimacy of the prevailing social structure, as the view spreads that the society is not what it could be (introduce examples from other Arab revolutions here); before this understanding spread, everyone was relatively happy with the system, or at least not resorting to excessive violence.

Violence by rebels is their way of balancing their cognition, while violence by state aims to stabilize the cognition of those supporting (and benefiting from) the status quo. The conflict is the end result of this internal ambivalence in the system.

***

Another good question is why states are generally so unstable in the Middle East. I believe it’s partly because the religious and secular symbolism (manifesting through leaders, flags and institutions) are in a constant conflict; this means the secular state struggles to establish itself. In protestant countries this process was much easier, as even Martin Luther emphasized the separation of law and gospel:

According to Luther, God has established two kingdoms: one under the law, and the other under the gospel. The state must operate under the law, and its main purpose is to set limits to human sin and consequences. Without the state, sin would lead to chaos and destruction. Believers, on the other hand, belong to the other kingdom, which is under the gospel. This means that Christians ought not to expect the state to be ruled by the gospel, nor to support orthodoxy by persecuting heretics. Furthermore, there is no reason why Christians should require that the state be ruled by fellow believers in order to obey them. Rulers, as such, must follow the law, and not the gospel. In the kingdom of the gospel, civil authorities have no power. In that which refers to this second kingdom, Christians are not subject to the state, and owe it no allegiance. But one must always remember that believers are at once justified and sinners; therefore, as people who are still sinners, we are under the authority of the state.

From The Story of Christianity, Volume 2 by Justo L. Gonzalez (source)

The Implicate Order in Modern Warfare 3

I’m an active player of Modern Warfare 3. Besides being great entertainment, the multiplayer teaches team player skills and encourages active agency in the process of the game.

The game works so that teams are formed randomly based on the players’ geographical proximity (this is to reduce the network lag to a minimum). So practically a somewhat random community emerges in each game that fights for the objectives of the game type.

It’s interesting to observe what makes a team in MW3 successful, because this has implications for team work in general. It is necessary to think this through the concept of implicate order. David Bohm described it like this:

Bohm believes that the bizarre behavior of the subatomic particles might be caused by unobserved subquantum forces and particles. Indeed, the apparent weirdness might be produced by hidden means that pose no conflict with ordinary ideas of causality and reality.

Bohm believes that this “hiddeness” may be reflective of a deeper dimension of reality. He maintains that space and time might actually be derived from an even deeper level of objective reality. This reality he calls the Implicate Order. Within the Implicate Order everything is connected; and, in theory, any individual element could reveal information about every other element in the universe.

According to Bohm, the manifest world is part of the “explicate order.” It is secondary, derivative, that “flows out of the law of the Implicate Order”.

In each game of Modern Warfare 3 this flow out of the hidden world is quite obvious, as the players use their consciousness to control their virtual characters to influence the process of the game. Each game is the result of the actions and decisions made by the players in the middle of fast-paced action.

What causes a game to be a success or a failure for a team?

The game is really about adaptation, so success is linked to quick realization of dysfunctional strategies; running towards the same wall of enemies many times in a row teaches the player to constantly seek alternative tactics if the team is to win. This means the players learn to quickly interpret feelings such as frustration and anger as signals to change their approach.

Adaptation can also be seen in more basic tactics; players learn from other players as well as from YouTube videos. For example, jumping around a corner is good way to get valuable fractions of a second when the player expects to face an enemy behind the corner. When you have been killed ten or twenty times by a jumping enemy, you start to wonder if you too can learn this trick. At some point it becomes so deeply integrated in your consciousness that you don’t even have to think about it.

The motivation of the players affect all other players in the team. If one is actively capturing flags or shooting down enemy helicopters, it also boosts other players to play better. In other words, high morality tends to spread. On the other hand, if the beginning of the game seems difficult and most of the team players refuse or are unable to advance in the map or quit the game (which is called rage quit), this creates confusion and breakup of motivation. Nothing is more demotivating than to notice at some point that you are playing with one other teammate against six enemies. You can actually feel that something is wrong; your team is not advancing and you are being spawn trapped (killed constantly soon after being reborn in the game, before you get to move in the map), which makes you check the stats and notice that your team is outnumbered.

In a way the game community is constantly shaped by the forces of implicate order. Perhaps proactivity and reactivity can be added to the functioning invisible forces, as they are evident in all games. Proactivity tends to lead to success more often than reactivity.

This means players also learn courage in the game, as successful attempts are rewarded and being killed doesn’t really matter; instead of rolling in self-pity after failure, a good player uses the frustration as a learning tool.

Understanding Companies as Organisms

This model is to understand the actual dynamics in companies. Two definitions should be mentioned:

• Interests are what the actors think is good for them on a deeper level. Interests can be real, perceived or imaginary, but it cannot be said if a particular interest is “real interest” or “imagined interest” because such statements inevitably include value judgments. That is to say, “real” and “imagined” are loaded words.

  Interests depend on the point of view: for example, shareholders view of the management’s interests (“what management thinks is good for them”) may be different from their own views, as well as differ from the employees’ point of view. These points of view are also constantly fluctuating, depending on recent events, cultural discourses and personal experiences.

• Goals are the practical aspirations of the actors. A goal might be to increase sales by 20 % or to increase health of the employees. Goals spring from interests.

On Morality and Moral Sociology

Here is a model I drew to clarify the relationship of morality between individual consciousness and the environment. The idea of the model is to study how morality actually works:

Action and feedback are considered as input and output depending on the point of view, that is, whether the focus is on the individual or the environment.

Just to make sure we are speaking clearly here I will shortly define morality and ethics:

• Morality is a phenomenon of human systems that deals with what kind of actions are right or wrong (on the practical and everyday level of life).
• Ethics is the philosophical study of these systems that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior.

Another level, that of sociological, can be added here. We can call this moral sociology, and it is concerned with studying human systems with the intent of finding out how the multiple “orders of worth” (as described by Boltanski and Thévenot) have formed historically and how they are present in the various discourses.

I can already think of a couple of research questions:

• Are there some specific (or niche) economies of worth inside some discourses that are not covered by Boltanski and Thévenot? (Religious authority comes to mind.)
• When did economic thinking start to dominate in political discourses (on various levels)? Did it replace something else?
• How have these “economies of worth” developed historically? Has there been shifting of balance in them? Does importing/exporting them to cultural discourses occur?
• Have major events influenced the shifts in them? If so, how?
• What about smaller spheres of publicity than the cultural: for example, how did justification of decisions change in local governments or corporations?

Power is Knowledge and Knowledge is Power: Exploring the Complex Dynamics of Power in Society

Steven Lukes’ book Power: A Radical View is considered a classic in the study of power. In the book Lukes represents the three dimensions of power. An excerpt of Lukes’ book is included in Mark Haugaard’s Power – A Reader (Manchester University Press 2006). It also includes this conceptual map by Lukes:

Based on this terminology the following model emerged. If it seems messy and complicated, that’s because it is. That’s life.

Central in the model is the Foucauldian understanding: “Power is knowledge”. It is information that flows in the society and forms the basis of power.
Examples of this information are:

• “You will get grounded for two weeks for what you did.” (force)
• “Committing tax fraud can get you into prison for five years.” (coercion: threat)
• “I have trouble understanding people who will do anything to become successful. What is wrong with those people?” (manipulation)
• “You’re doing a great job! Continue what you are doing, and we will reward you.” (encouragement, inducement)
• “Wouldn’t you come with us? It will be really fun there!” (persuasion)

Information becomes knowledge when it is integrated into the individual consciousness. Then it transforms into “Knowledge is power” – into capacity to act, or more specifically, to manipulate, deny, criticize, encourage and persuade.

What is essential is that we don’t speak of any “true” interests; interests “are what they are” – the individual “thinks whatever he thinks” about what is good and desirable for him -, and the interests affect individual actions together with the identity and goals of Self. However, the new information that is received from the environment constantly transforms the individual consciousness which also changes interests (“That’s not what I’m interested in.”), goals (“That’s not what I’m after.”) and identity (“That’s not what I’m like.”). Again, all these “are what they are”: subjective phenomena of the consciousness. Even trying to create objective descriptions of them through interviews or questionnaires creates a situation where the individual starts reflecting and reconciling, which in turn transforms the consciousness to a different state. Nor are such descriptions able to reflect the dynamism the consciousness actually has during the process of life.

Now the antiquated debate about “false consciousness” can be put to rest; consciousness is always true from the perspective of the subject. Instead we should talk about cognitive dissonance. It occurs when the individual feels that his identity, knowledge, beliefs, goals or actions are inconsistent with each other. This dissonance is constantly produced by new information flowing as power and influence, and its transformation into knowledge. It makes individuals to constantly adjust their behavior to reduce the dissonance.

It is then to be concluded that the bodily feelings emerging in the state of dissonance and their cultural and contextual interpretation as emotions (as surprise, curiosity, dread, guilt, anger, and embarrassment for something) are actually the mechanics of power in the society. They make individuals and organizations to adapt constantly. As we are pushed forward by the feeling of inconsistency, we also form new structures: explanations, beliefs and organizations.

The question arises: If power is knowledge and we’re all just surrounded by these discourses that each have their own rules and truths, what happens to morality?

The answer: there cannot be absolute morality. There is no basis for saying that any act that we typically think of as immoral is in fact immoral. Note the words: typically think of. Our thoughts of “typical thinking” spring from the discourses that surround us and from the social systems of which we are part.

Why do we think there needs to be absolute morality?

“Because otherwise…”

And there we go, reflecting the discourses, social systems and systems of truth and belief. For what?

To reduce cognitive dissonance.