Daniel Rosenblatt offered this comment on the "sapphire ring and the cunning of James I”" post (yesterday):

The briefest of comments on the story about James I (there is much in recent posts I want to comment on at more length, but haven’’t had the time): To me the story points to the fact that markets and incentives are human inventions, tools which can serve certain purposes.  Refining their design can help them serve those purposes better, or make them serve new purposes.  They can’’t necessarily serve all purposes, nor are they necessarily the only or best way to serve some purposes.  As an anthropologist, my objection to much economic theory is not that it is interested in how markets work but in that it imagines the product of our collective agency as instead part of the natural world–imagines that there can be a difference between "intervention" and "leaving things alone."

Daniel evokes a sentiment that has currency in the field of anthropology and the ideological community from which most anthropologists come.  (I hope Daniel will forgive me as I now impute to him positions he may or may not hold.  I am now generalizing shamelessly.)  This sentiment says, in effect, that we make too much of markets and incentives.  These are after all merely "human inventions,"” and ‘tools for certain purposes."”  Economic presuppositions should not serve "all purposes” and they should not be privileged as the only or the best tools at our disposal."  From this point of view, economic assumptions and activities have usurped their place.  They belong to one part of the social world, and they are now increasingly being made the stuff of, and the surrogate for, our "collective agency."”  There is still a place for intervention.  We may not, we must not, leave things alone.

But let’’s rehearse some of the things we know about First World cultures. 

1) these societies are highly individuated.  The individual is broken out of the family, kinship group, community, ethnicity, religion that once defined him.  This individual is free to choose and forced to choose who he is and with whom he stands. 

Further to the discussion with Deighton (last post), this means, among other things, that the individual is no longer born into but must create or enter various forms of association.  It also means that the bonds of association will have less to do with trust, and more to do with incentive.  Incentive is the only "friend"” a fully individuated creature can rely on.  All other bets are off. 

At the limit, this is the "society of strangers"” miracle that Sahlins and others talk about. In traditional society, trust is "decided" by ties of kinship, community, and religion.  I know who you are and what I can expect of you because I can identity the group and the role that define you.  In a society of strangers, where individuals are individuated, this is no longer true.  I can’’t know what to expect of you.  Our relationship works (and work it must because there are no other architectures for exchange), only when I can read what incents you.  Only then may I trust you.  (This is the point of the original James I post.  The monarch finds himself in a predicament where trust is not enough to protect him.  He finds an incentive system that will.)

Something in the community of anthropologists (and other academics) recoils at this.  They yearn for a kinder, gentler world, a small town, a neighborhood bar, in which "everyone knows your name.”"  Here everyone has preexisting roles and with them come nice, clear specification of what everyone owes to, and may expect from, everyone else.  Incentive has nothing to do with it.  Trust is it. 

The problem here, I think, is that these communities demand a price our individualism is not prepared to pay.  These communities almost always presume to say who we are and how we must behave, not just in transactions, but in our claims to personhood, in the way we define ourselves.  The ugly side of the small town, where everyone knows not just our name but our business, is that it presumes through gossip and relative inclusion to police our choices.  When anthropologists yearn for the kinder, gentler community, they are always thinking, it seems to me, of a place that knows our name, but not our business, a place where we have the liberties of anonymity some of the time, and the comforts of pre-existing association when it suits us.  They want, in short, to have their cake and eat it too.  (And when forced to choose between anonymity and presumption, they usually choose the former.  This was not true in the 60s commune or the present day cult, where people appear to trade away the liberties of self definition for the comforts of a more traditional association.  And what a bad trade-off this turns out to be.)

2) Western, First world societies are broken away from cultural continuities and shared definitions.  Things change.  We are unmoored.  There is almost no domain in which change is not constantly "on the boil.”  Religion, politics, family, community, entertainment, communication, all of these rewrite themselves and unmoor us. 

Where does order come from in such a world?  The Hayekian economist has no problem here.  Order emerges from the aggregate effects of individual choices.  Family is what families do.  People will make their own choices, and in the process, new cultural forms will rise up (e.g., blended, same sex, single parent, two residence, no kids, or 2 pet families).  Now we may decide which of these forms suit us, or whether we must engage in innovations of our own.

Anthropologists, on the other hand, are stunned by this.  Emergent cultural forms are not like anything we have ever seen before.  In our world, cultural forms come from ‘time out of mind” convention.  They are passed down to the individual by tradition.  We are, I would submit, quite unprepared to think about such a world.  And the solution for many anthropologists has been resounding: let’s not think about it.  Let’s insist that this is a corruption and an inauthenticity we need not think about.  Let’s shut it out from the realm of discourse.  What we cannot shut out, we will shout down.  We will devote some of our anthropology to the recitation of the things that should be true of the world, and we will make the market place and economists the villain of the piece.

"But what about the cultural commons?” comes the cry of protest.  Why shouldn’t culture be more like language, a shared resource no commercial interest can commandeer?  I believe that a commercial culture is indeed a lot like language.  It is, at least, a lot like English.  English as a language is famously responsive to what people want to say.  We may contrast it to French which is, as a language, a good deal more particular.  When the anthropologists call for a "cultural commons” they seem to me to be thinking about something that would have to be policed by an Academie Francaise.  (And we all know how well that’s turned out.)   

The sticking point is the suspicion that cultural innovation that is "birthed” by the market place must be the slave of special interest.  Culture ruled by commerce must be the captive of the corporation.  And that’s bad, no?  No.  I have some ethnographic data here.  I work for corporations and I watch them struggle to keep up with the innovation taking place "out there.”  If they are controlling or successfully manipulated this innovation, it is very hard for me to see.  The image of the controlling corporation that bends culture to its will is a fantasy that can only be cultivated by academics who take the precaution of never leaving their studies, preferring instead the "intelligence” fed to them by the likes of Michael Moore.  Dudes, you have to get out more. 

The question here, I think is that anthropologists have to start again.  We need to take on the challenge of thinking about a culture that comes out of individual choices, made in markets, constrained not so much by trust as by interest, by highly individuated, highly innovative individuals who will no longer defer to what they must do, or to what anthropologists think they should do, but who engage in all that getting  and spending in a society of strangers that somehow, miraculously, works.  This is the miracle of "emergent order” and it seems to me that we have to turn to the people, especially the economists and complexity theorists, who are good at thinking about it.  Our reward?  Making the miraculous a little more intelligible. 

And that is the point of this blog.  It will be clear to the economics reader of the blog that I have at any given moment only a rough idea of what I am doing.  To use a too dramatic metaphor, I feel like someone who has escaped one of those prisons in the deep American south.  You know the Hollywood stereotype.  No sooner have you gone over the wall than you find yourself lost in a thicket of brambles in a boot sucking swamp.  The gators are waiting.  The dogs are coming.  Light is fading.  You have lost your bearings and your way.  No, it would be wrong to say that I am entirely comfortable, but even this is better than the prison cell of anthropology.  (Hey, I told you it was too dramatic.)

With thanks and apologies to Daniel Rosenblatt.  Clearly, I have attributed to him things he did not say and does not think.  This is the thanks he gets for contributing!  Sorry, sorry, sorry.

John Deighton, Daniel Rosenblatt, and Patrick Warren all made great comments on yesterday’s post and ideas began to flourish like an Elizabethan garden. Could I ask the reader who has not read yesterday’s post to take a look at it? I know you are smart enough to “reverse engineer”” that post from these comments. (It is what I would try to do.) But these comments are so good, they move as swiftly as Smartie Jones away from the original. You might just as well start at the beginning. So, please, page down and come back. John Deighton: The posting got me thinking about a conversation I had on a bus a couple of weeks ago. My thought went, ‘This speaks exactly to the impossibility of trust, and the need for structures of incentive. What was it the man on the bus said – trust should be banned from discourse except when talking of relations not continuously in negotiation?’ There are some relations – say the relation between a professor and his/her university, or between a board member and a corporation, or between a son and father (your posting about Father’s Day is very apt here) that admit of no give and take regarding the obligations of the role. The relation is categorical. There is a hard, bright line between performance of the duties demanded of the role and failure to perform – no room for rewriting a contract as new circumstances arise. Fiduciary and sovereign/subject relations are of this kind. You can’t say I’ll be your auditor and if I catch you cheating I’ll turn you in, and then make an exception when the auditee offers a bribe or a hard luck story. Everyone has to be able to trust an auditor not to do the decent thing or the self-interested thing, but to do the thing the role specifies and nothing else. The auditor/auditee relation is categorical. It is said that professors get tenure to remove their fiduciary relation toward the university’s best interests from taint of self-interest. A professor without tenure cannot be trusted to hire someone smarter than him- or herself. It seems to me, though, that in a world that cannot rely on universal belief in an all-seeing God with hell up his sleeve, there are no fiduciary or sovereign/subject relations, and hence no use for the work of the word trust. Grant’s reply to John: Nice one. I think the, or at least one, reason that we can trust a person defined by role has nothing to do with us, not our trust, not their incentive. It is precisely that the person is defined by role, so defined in fact, and so keen to be so defined in fact, that they cannot misbehave without sacrificing their claim to the, variously, majesty, honor, sanctity, verisimilitude, veracity of their role. What keeps them honest is their existential need to remain who they are, to keep the meanings they have. Our job, if we wish to make sure they will not misbehave, is to give them so much majesty, honor, sanctity, and acknowledgment, that they have at the end of the day, more to lose than gain from misbehavior. Or to put this in Shakespearean terms, a monarch might chose to break the faith but he/she would pay dearly for the benefit. Or to put this in anthropological language, their claim to identity, to a desired cultural definition of the self, demands the performed fulfillment of their identity. There is a “violation” clause. You can’t be king if you don’t act like one. And this is not because we will remove your role definition, but because you will. (One thinks here of Nixon, Johnson, and Clinton leaving office in disgrace.) This is perhaps why Elizabethans worked so hard to honor their monarchs. It wasn’t slavish deference. It was the need to press home the definition that would summon the right behavior. In effect, they were saying, “This is who you are. You know what to do.” The cultural meanings that define who you are the cultural meanings that protect us…because frankly we don’t trust you, and we can’t incent you. This adds a third term to the economics dyad, I think. There’s trust, there’s incentive and then there’s definition (or meaning). And we can break these out perhaps like this: trust is sociological, incentive is economic, and definition is cultural (that is, anthropological). John’’s reply: Your point about definition is very good, particularly the purpose of flattery and honor. I would not raise it as a third term though unless you can convince me that it isn’t a form of incentive. If the rewards of adhering to the role exceed the rewards from cheating, I stay in the role. I think the thing about fiduciary and sovereign roles is that they allow malfeasance with little risk of being caught. Are you saying that honoring a monarch inculcates a self-concept in the monarch that is endogenously rewarding, a sense of who I am that is so pleasing to me that I owe it to myself (me, not the flatterers) to live up to it? One of those “I couldn’t live with myself if I…” inhibitors? A transaction within myself, not between me and the courtiers? Quite interesting. If that’s your story, though, it seems to require a divided self, one that is venal (enjoys flattery) and one that isn’t. I think you like divided selves, or perhaps it is situationally engendered selves, while I regard them as vulnerable to infinite regress. If there is a venal me kept in check by a moral me, why not a tempter me to egg on the venal me and a hangman me to regulate the tempter and an absent-minded me who forgets he’s being watched and so on? That’s the great wonder of economics – so parsimonious yet explains so much. That said it should be noted that the self-interested hermit-like economic actor is under attack in economics. Particularly in finance, it is being discovered that if the actor is endowed with cognitive limitations, like limited foresight, confirmatory bias and poor memory, more can be explained. But every refinement that is made to Adam Smith’s simple homunculus of self interest seems a step away from parsimony and another crack in the foundation of the imperial social science. Grant’s reply: Thanks. First, it is true that the person who is defined as a monarch (or president) and treasures this definition of himself does have an incentive to continue in this role. But this incentive comes from the symbolic economy of kingship (or the office of the president) not the exchange of the marketplace. We give him honor, he gives us good behavior. But neither party has a alternative supplier. The value of the value exchanged is not set by the wee contracts by created constantly in the market place. The relationship comes from cultural convention with very strict “felicity” rules, as Austin would say. Or to put this another way, we are incenting the monarch, but we cannot choose the value he gives us in return. In sum, there is something like incentive at work here, but it doesn’t look very much like the “incentive” we speak of in the marketplace. I think “definition” (or culture or meaning) might well survive as a distinct third term. Second, we are creating an “I couldn’t live with myself” condition. And this works because misbehavior actually means “I wouldn’t live with myself.” I would no longer be a monarch in my own eyes. Clearly, monarchs or politicians do misbehave. The definition supplied by kingship or the presidency is sometimes obscured by the temptations of a break-in or an intern. But I don’t believe this temptation presents itself as a calculation of relative advantage. It’s a temptation, a momentary failure of calculation that occurs as a result of the siren call of an intern (and the rash assumption that no one will ever find out). I have edged into your third point: the need to posit several selves. I don’t think I am, for once, obliged to do this. All I need to do is posit temptation. I realize I am resorting to the psychological model supplied by my upbringing in the Protestant church of Canada. But I think it’s apt. Clinton’s famous dalliance did not come from a calculation of benefit vs. risk. It didn’t come for a dialogue between “moral mes” and ‘tempter mes”. It came as a sudden “shorting out” of judgment. There is no second self here. There is just brute temptation. And this is, though I hate to say it, where the “civility” argument comes in. In a civil society, everyone is much more aware of the responsibilities attached to their role, and perhaps more prizing of the definitions that come to them as a result. They know the right thing to do and they believe more completely in the right thing to do. It helps define them. It is just possible that we created Clinton’s moment by so often scorning the office and diminishing the “definitional” benefit he got therefore. Why not act in a non presidential manner if the collectivity is inclined to doubt the role from which I draw my meanings? And before you say that I have opened up a can of worms and must now account for all the meanings supplied by civility and by culture, don’t forget this is what anthropologists do. Late note: I will leave till tomorrow responses to excellent comments by Daniel and Patrick.

Let’s say you are a 17th century monarch in waiting.  You live in Scotland and you await the death of the monarch to the south, Elizabeth I.  On her death, you will be raised to the English throne.  You are, in fact, James VI of Scotland, soon to be James I of England.

You have a deep interest in the earliest possible notice of the death of Elizabeth.  The moment between monarchs is a perilous time.  Even with the best claim in the world, you can be supplanted by nimble, powerful counter-claimants.  Plus, you are sitting in Edinburgh well removed from the seat of English power.  You want to be quick about it. 

You also have a deep interest in receiving certain knowledge of Elizabeth’s death.  Elizabeth’’s health has been failing for some years now.  Someone might hear a rumor of a sudden decline, and race north to give you the "news" on the assumption that death was coming, when it was not.

Your problem is simple.  If you are too late in mobilizing to claim the throne, your chances of gaining it are put at risk.  If you are too early…well, if you are too early, God help you.  You will begin your march to the south, not as Elizabeth’’s successor, but as a rebel or a clown.  Elizabeth doesn’’t forgive people even minor slights to her majesty.  How do you think she is going to feel about the premature celebration of her death?

So what do you do?  How do you manage this risk, multiplied by this uncertainty?

Here’’s what James did. 

The first man to make it to Edinburgh with the news of Elizabeth’s death was Sir Robert Carey.  Some weeks before, he had arranged for a string of horses to be prepared for him at inns along the Great North Road.  He rode continuously, for 70 hours.  En route, he fell from his horse and was kicked in the face.  Bleeding, swollen, and exhausted, he arrived at the palace of Holyroodhouse, and seized the honor of being the first to honor the new monarch of England, Scotland, France and Ireland. 

James asked what letters Carey had brought with him from the English Council.  Carey had none.  This was a private initiative.  He had been living beyond his means for years, and he was desperate for the advancement that would surely come to the bearer of this news. 

But Carey did have something that would serve as proof.  He presented a sapphire ring which James had once sent to Carey’s sister, Philadelphia, Lady Scroope, with the express purpose that she would return it as soon as she knew that Elizabeth had died.  With this ring, James England wed. 

Clever James.  He had created a signal that would serve both his ends: earliest notice tempered by greatest certainty.  The sapphire ring was a cunning thing.  It was a kind of economic bargain with the future, one guaranteed to release its value only if and when certain conditions were satisfied, only as and when certain incentives were set in motion. 

The bargain:

1)  James began be creating (or surrendering) something of relatively exceptional value: the sapphire ring.  The ring could not be duplicated without difficulty or expense.  No counterfeit ring would be likely to deceive him.  (This is the Elizabethan age, after all.  A counter claimant might well conspire to embarrass James through counterfeit.)

2) James placed this ring with someone sufficiently well placed to be an early recipient of news of Elizabeth’’s death.

3)  The ring had three kinds of value.  It was valuable in itself.  As a token from someone in power, it was still more valuable.  But as a signal of James’ accession to the throne of England, it was most valuable. 

4) Lady Scroope was "incented” to keep the ring for values 1 and 2.  Her brother, Robert, might want to start the ride early.  But Lady Scroope would be reluctant to gamble something so valuable on his desperate whim. 

5) But on certain news of the death of Elizabeth, Lady Scroope was now incented to release the ring as soon as possible and to see to its delivery to the future king of England.  For all we know, it was she who paid for those horses on the Great North Road, and she who said to Robert, translating now for modern ears, "get your butt up there.”"   

6) In sum, James’’ bargain meant he did not have to trust Lady Scroope, her motives, or her judgment.  Her pursuit of advantage would protect his pursuit of advantage.  The ring contained two values.  One kept the ring in place.  One set it in motion.  The value to him was the value to her was the value to him. 

This is one of those little "anthropology meets economics” puzzles.  No, I don’t know what to do with it.  But perhaps you do.  Hey, you’’re James I. 

Reference:

Historical details from:

Nicolson, Adam.  2003.  God’s Secretaries: The making of the King James Bible.  New York: Perennial, pp. 4-5. 

With a tip of the hat to John Deighton for helping me think about how trust and incentive works in the marketplace, even a royal one.

Last time, I tried to show the larger implications of our fondness for Monk. This time, I want to take the argument one step further, this time right into the teeth of economic assumptions. (This is no idle metaphor. I have no illusions about the limits of my knowledge when I tread on the patch of another discipline especially one so productive of illumination as the field of economics.)

The argument so far:

1) popular culture shows a new sympathy for those afflicted with psychiatric symptoms (i.e., Monk),

2) we are inclined to suppose that a range of psychiatric conditions somehow apply to ordinary individuals,

3) this is, I think, a symptom in itself. It seems to me we are now rather frantically casting about for ways to characterize reformations and deformations of the self as these are occasioned by a newly dynamic world,

4) we would do better to start again, cast off the DSM paradigm, and look for a new model that does a better job of capturing how and why the self is changing (and just say “no” to the pathologizing),

5) complexity theory offers us one new model for the self. It says that any creature is more adaptive to a dynamic environment when it allows a new complexity, multiplicity, messiness, and changeability. The new symptoms of the self are, in this view, adaptive responses to the world. Indeed, they are the very structural characteristics we would expect the self to assume as it learns to live with a highly various, changeable and unpredictable environment. In order to live in his world, we are taking on the characteristics of the world.

6) one of the characteristics of the human CAS is, I think, the ability to entertain simultaneously a number of “preference registers” and the ability to skip back and forth between them. (I used as my example here a friend of mine who has three bosses, one coming, one going and one competing, and she must entertain all of their different points of view, when she is on the job and know when to evoke one and suppress the others, or how to finesse all three.)

I see now that this has some interesting implications for economics. Thanks to Prestopundit, I read a post by Donald Boudreaux. Donald makes the following point about ‘transitive preferences.”

Preferences are transitive when the following is true: If John prefers apples to bananas, and if he also prefers bananas to cantaloupe, then John prefers apples to cantaloupe. Despite the hoity-toity jargon, the concept is straightforward. It’s also an assumption that clearly applies to everyone.

Here’s the problem. If the newly complex consumer is entertaining multiple registers of taste and preference, it is possible that s/he will prefer, to use Don’s example, apples at one moment and cantaloupe the next. Or to use a more concrete example, let’s take Brooks’ interesting book Bobos in paradise. Brooks suggests that baby boomers are cultivating a very particular duality of self definition. Sometimes they see themselves as bourgeois. Sometimes they see themselves as bohemian. In the first instance, one set of preferences applies. In the second, a very different one does. Still more concretely: sometimes we eat out at the most sophisticated and expensive Italian restaurant, sometimes we prefer a humble coffee shop.

This is another way of saying that not only is there a variety of taste and preference across consumers, there is a variety within any given consumer. This variety doesn’t only come from the lifestyle hybridization of the kind that Brooks identifies. It can come from the archeological accumulation of preferences that build up in each of us. We have our present tastes and preferences, but because we are moving through an ever more rapid change in these tastes and preferences, it is not unheard of for us to return to recent patterns…for a moment. We could call this nostalgia, but this is a term that is now so outdated it has a certain nostalgia of its own. It posits one set of former tastes and preferences that we return to occasionally. The archaeological model says, no, actually we end up slipping back and forth between recent patterns without a passage “down memory lane.” We are not so much “going back in time” as we are skipping about in our near history. The concrete example: until I hit the cooler at my local grocery store, I am not certain whether I will reach for Becks, a long time favorite, Keiths, a new enthusiasm, or Molson’s, a favorite of the middle term.

I don’t know what to do with this. And of course I understand that it is, as my father would have said, a “mug’s game” to point out inconsistencies in the economic paradigm. In point of fact, this paradigm remains so robust as to put the rest of the social sciences to shame. (It never ceases to amaze me when my McGill students, who are anti-economic to a man and a woman, will happily and with no sense of contradiction engage in economic man behavior.)

But I think this might be a “muddle in the muddle” as the late University of Chicago anthropologist David Schneider used to say. And if I am right to think that as the world becomes more various, as choice becomes more multiple and as the consumer cultivates or endures more and more taste and preference registers within, we are looking at a problem that will not go away.

Notice that I am not saying that the consumer has ceased to be rational. Merely that he or she has several rationalities going on at any given moment. Somehow we have to take account of the many compartments of taste and preference within the consumer.

References

Boudreaux, Donald. 2004. Sound Assumptions. Tech Central Station.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/062104A.html

In his comment on yesterday’s post, Patrick helped me clarify what I was trying to get in the last few posts. Here’s my reply to him:

Patrick, I guess I wanted to get at two things: a change in the self and a change in the world. I think this is the place that anthropology and economics do not play well together.

Change in the self:

Here’s how Geertz defines our notion of the self.

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. (emphasis added)

Now I understand that most of this is “surplus to requirement” from an economics point of view. For the economist, it is enough to posit a rational actor using scarce resources in the pursuit of costly choices. But, for anthropological purposes, it’s important to see how the culture(s) in question define who and what the person is.

In our culture(s), there is an inclination to posit the person as something bounded and integrated, with a center, as a whole. We presume that the person is well organized within and well bounded without.

Change in the world:

This “person” now lives in a world of great variety and dynamism. The world changes often and unpredictably. Our basic notions of family, work, politics, entertainment and engagement are under constant reconstruction. It used to be that our grandparents could not imagine the world in which we live. Now it is the person we were 20 years ago who would find this challenging. (This is a nice anthropological experiment: imagine the things you would have to tell the person you were 20 years ago to explain where and what you are now. Usually, this is a long and relatively difficult conversation in which our younger self ends up sounding like Kevin Klein from A Fish Called Wanda a lot of the time: “What’s the middle part, again?”.)

To live in such a world is a problem. It demands of us a new capacity to see what has changed, to think about what has changed, and to respond what has changed. One thing is clear. If we use the old Western concept of person, the one specified by Geertz, we turn the problem into a crisis. If what we try to do is keep the self bounded, integrated, centered and whole, we are sure to make a hash of things. Adaptive advantage goes to people who are newly porous and multiple and messy.

The monk in nous

Most of us are still trying to deal with a newly dynamic world with the old model of the self. And it’s this, I think, that has occasioned this rash of diagnostic enthusiasm in which we attribute DSM symptoms to normal people. Time to give up the old paradigms and start again. What I like about CAS theory is that it appears to take for granted the very things the old notion of the self finds problematic: multipleness, messiness, vigilance, and the capacity for threshold change. From the old DSM point of view, these do look like symptoms. From the CAS point of view, they are ordinary adaptive responses.

Back to economics. The irony here is that economics, or at least the operation of a world predicated on an invisible hand model, is what makes the world so dynamic. When Hakek talks about a world that emerges for the actor from “a process more complex and extended than he [the actor] could comprehend,” he was talking about the world we know. All those actors, with all those intentions, fashion a world that is constantly “on the boil.” And in this world, the economic actor must change. Not least, he must learn to skip from one set of assumptions to another with extraordinary CAS agility. (I was recently talking to a woman who says that at the moment she must answer to three bosses: one coming, one going, one competing for the job. She must judge everything she does from 3 completely different sets of assumption. Yes, I thought to myself, you are learning how to be a CAS.)

This is another way of saying economics is very good at assuming (and creating) the dynamism of the world. It is not clear to me that it is so good at assuming and explaining the dynamism that now exists in the actor.

So this is my challenge to the economics reader. What, if anything, happens to the economics point of view when we posit an economic actor who is a CAS, messy, multiple, dynamic and inclined to sudden threshold changes? Or better, what can anthropology, through a better understanding of the new economic actor, bring to the party?

References

Geertz, Clifford. 1974-1984. “From the native’s point of view” On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding. Culture theory: essays on mind, self, and emotion. editors Robert Alan LeVine, and Richard A Shweder, 123-36. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hayek, Friedrich A. 1948. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 13-14.