Email to friends about the Luana Model

Pam and I took a philosophy class called "Personal Identity and Self-Knowledge." It was all about different philosophical constructions of the self and for me, it was one of the most important classes in my intellectual development at Harvard. My favorite author was this guy Derek Parfit, who had the view that the self is an illusion: there's no criterion by which you can establish that one discrete "soul" stays with a particular body over the course of time, or that ultimately distinguishes "me" from "you" apart from our bodies, which are completely recycled every so many years. This is also the Buddhist perspective, which I tried to convice Shawn about, and which Scott is probably already familiar with. It's part of what I meant what I wrote that nothing is certain, but unity.

Okay, so Parfit said that the whole idea of self vs. other is an illusion, which meant that the whole classical Self-Interest Theory in economics must also be an illusion. That was in the 70s. Thomas Nagel (who we read in the Pinker/Dershowitz class) made similar arguments in moral philosophy, arguing that altruism is not only good, but rational. Anyway, I think those ideas are proving themselves to be true in economics, as people realize more that (1) after a certain point, money doesn't buy happiness, (2) decision-making often comes to down to Prisoners' Dilemmas where cooperation beats pure selfishness, and (3) the pursuit of profit for its own sake leads to low quality and low expectations and is eventually unsustainable, even though it pays off in the short term.

The spirit of cooperation was the genius of the Marshall Plan and of the economic strength of the EU and it's really what's missing in American business and economics today. I don't need to tell you guys how weak the dollar is in comparison to the Euro. But also, the US isn't producing high-quality goods for the international market, and that's what's really frightening. We've got a terrible trade deficit, we rely on subsidies and protection for agriculture, and good fresh food is harder for the average American to get. My take on all this is that American companies are obsessed with Self-Interest and classical economics, which means that they're willing to lower standards of quality and raise prices as long as there's still demand, until we have these giant agro or pharma or media conglomerates producing shitty or overpriced products that only Americans are willing to buy because they don't know any better. Germany makes better cars, food, hotels, chemicals, transport systems, radio stations, beer, etc., all decently priced. And I think it's because they really understand the spirit of cooperation and shared goals, as opposed to selfish goals. My guess is that it'll take a brand new economic model or a distaster (unemployment, social security or health care system crises) in the US for us to learn this the hard way. The Self-Interest Theory -- profit for its own sake -- leads us down a one-way path to lower quality standards, worker-management hostility, and unchecked imperialism and exploitation in underdeveloped countries. I was talking to Adam the other night about how our mega multinational corporations are in many ways similar to the old charter companies from imperial Britain, since they operate solely to create profit and growth with little concern for their human impact. Sure, we've got corporate responsibility, but it's always an afterthought. It took violent uprisings in Jamaica and India for the British Empire to take responsibility for its companies, and I think it would be the right thing for our government to take responsibility for the impact our international businesses are having on the world. The disaster of the Middle East and the lost opportunities to create prosperity there are perfect examples.

I know this is kind of rambly, but it's fresh in my mind because Silpa and I were talking about it today. She's studying intro economics at LSE and it's clear that the whole notion that greed and growth and profit are desireable as ends in themselves are still part of our thinking about business and society. My point to her was that (1) self-interest theory is incomplete and leads to low standards and (2) we should appaled when businesses lower standards. Don't we all want our products and services -- food, cars, schools, healthcare, clothes -- to be better, not cheaper? There's an argument that competitors can always create better goods and charge more, such that those who want better goods can pay more for them. And of course that's the way things work. Europeans are willing to pay a little more for their cars and clothes, and it's so nice to be able to enjoy those things as part of the normal lifestyle, without feeling like I'm getting ripped off for imported designer fancy gourmet shit. But the whole climate in the US of mergers and acquisitions and growth and megacorporations obviously makes competition very hard and makes it much more convenient for people to make consumer decisions based solely on price and not on quality. The big companies in Europe and Japan -- Ikea, Nokia, Daimler, Toyota, Sony -- got big because they developed reputations for quality at a good price, not just because they delivered the cheapest shit possible, like Walmart. The computer industry in the US (Apple, Microsoft) is an exception, because quality is so self-evident and so important. The car industry is similar, and like I said earlier, that fact that American car makers are losing market shares is pretty troubling.

Okay, that's it. For you guys doing battle out there in the business world, please tell me how wrong I am. I know I didn't get to explaining much of the Luana Model, since most of it is about psychology, but I hope you guys trust that there's some intellectual meat lurking behind the stage. For you guys who did neuroscience or psychology, my whole point was that Hebbian conditioning and Skinnerian behaviorism explain basically all of human growth and learning, including language and memory. The "cognitive revolution" in psychology that supposedly defeated behaviorism was nothing more than a detour that Chomsky steered us toward, as we understood what language was all about. But I think that problem evaporates if we understand that language is learned by conditioning, grammar learned by pattern detection, and memory nothing more than connections between sensory perceptions. Time really is an illusion -- Einstein proved it.