You’ve Gittins some interesting thoughts there…

I would like to have lunch with Ross Gittins.  More than any other person than I can think of, he aims at critiquing the attitudes and presuppositions we carry in our modern consumer lives in an accessible way.  He does so because he seeks to reform the anthropology that economics bases its knowledge upon.  Economics needs an accurate idea of what humans do in order to be reliable.

But what this means is that he also offers his thoughts on what it means to be human in his columns.  He wants us to be happy, and to contribute to us knowing how to achieve this.  This is exceedingly interesting.  How many other public figures have consistently written about it means to be happy in recent years?  From sheer persistence and volume of output, his work is significant.  He is Australia’s public philosopher – this is more than an economic and political question, (though with obviously relevant points for these disciplines).

And this means that there should be people paying close attention to what he writes.  That’s why I’d like to have lunch with him.  Not because I think I’d offer cogent criticisms, but I’d like to find out more about what he thinks.  For example, read his latest column.  Most of it is dedicated to paraphrasing an evolutionary-biological point of view on ‘the pursuit of happiness’.  Fair enough.

But there is something disturbing about evolutionary biological explanations, it seems to me.  Evolutionary biology, as a form of explaining a state of affairs, has some risks.  I’d need to look into it some more, but it seems that there is there is the danger of simply retro-fitting biological data to a known state of affairs.  That is, it is inherently conservative, and is unable of conceiving change – today’s order of things is the way things are, and everything that has ever happened has brought us to this point.  If someone were to argue like this in history, they would be shouted out of the room.

If there are any knowledgeable people out there in evolutionary biology, I’d love to hear from you.  When Gittins writes that “Evolution has programmed us to believe we’ll be happier if we’re physically and materially secure, if we have a mate, if we have high social status, and many other things. All these are things that, in our primitive state, would have contributed to our fitness,” there are a number of questions that need to be asked – precisely because he is addressing us not just about economics, but also about the purposes with which we conduct our work, our rest, and relationships.

Filed under: economics , Australian public discourse, evolutionary biology, public intellectual, pursuit of happiness, ross gittins, teleological arguments

Sanity

Gotta love Ross Gittins.  Tells us what we need to hear:

Credit cards are a convenient way to pay for things, provided you can be sure of paying them off in full at the end of the month. I use mine prodigiously. But as a way of borrowing money, credit cards are for mugs. They offer about the most expensive form of credit you can get, short of going to a pawnbroker. It’s not easy to get on top of credit card debt once you’ve acquired the vice, and if people are using their cash bonus to try to kick the habit, so much the better. (Hint for the seriously addicted: go cold turkey and cut up the card.)

Filed under: economics , credit cards, economics, ross gittins

Trickling down

I received a letter today from Tear, an organisation that Ell and I are interested in.  It described the very real and sudden changes that the world financial situation has prompted for developing countries, and the many NGO’s that seek to work in them.

If you think times are tough here, it only gets worse as you go down the line.  Lay offs here, entire factories or markets dry up there.  Along with this, as people tighten the belts – even perhaps from the talk of hard times that is in the air rather than from any change in income – generosity dires up too.  Tear’s ‘useful catalogue’ that you may have seen around (buying water pumps for villages, and so on) suffered a considerable drop in ’sales’ over Christmas. Likewise, the pressure on Governments will probably result in a reduction of aid to foreign countries as well.

Given that the only impact so far for us of the whole situation is that we get richer at a slower rate, it makes you think differently about the $950 the government is going to be dishing out in a couple of months time.

Suffering doesnt deal in comparisons.  There is no point comparing the faring of a laid off worker here to a small plot farmer somewhere else.  But I am in neither of those positions.  Whatever the case, I wonder what it takes to think of generosity as an essential in life, rather than the cream skimmed off the top when things are going well?

Filed under: Politics, economics, ethics, experiences , global economy, poverty, TEAR