[PEN-L:11435] Mathematics and Formalism

["James Michael Craven" <CRAVJM@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think it was Heilbroner who was quoted as saying something like
"mathematics has brought to economics rigor--and alas, also mortis."
No doubt that many of the formalistic models, analytical approaches,
epistemological foundations and gross misuses of mathematics in
"mainstream" economics serve to divert attention away from, ratify,
legitimate, mystify some of the essential and very ugly realities
and dynamics of capitalism.

The problem is not mathematics or even abstraction or even model-
building or even some formalism per se, the problem has to do with
what exactly is being modeled, on what basis, looking through what
analytical prisms and with what tests of verification/nullification.

When I taught in Kerala at a hundred-year-old Catholic University,
the Government of Kerala was Communist Party--Marxist. One of the
initiatives in which I was involved at a very minor level had to do
with re-examining and restructuring some of the approaches/data
bases/data categories etc used in the limited planning going on. I
remember once asking the class "What is the present going price of a
Kg of Rice?", "What is the present typical wage of a field worker and
how many days of the year does a typical field worker worker?", "What
is the typical wage of a local lorry driver?", "What percentage of
a typical graduating class of engineers or doctors are women?" To all
of these and other questions no answer was given. The students were
being given some "book knwledge", but most of them (20% of the class
seats are reserved for "Scheduled Caste") were urban-based, from
middle-class or wealthy families, had jobs lined up prior to
graduation (many in family businesses) and were from families with
servants who did the buying at market.

At the Center for Development Studies in Trivanndrum we had long
discussions about centralized vs de-centralized planning and the need
for not only more comprehensive and more accurate data bases (garbage
in, garbage out) but also for the need for new "categories" and new
instruments for more clearly and more concretely assessing aspects of
the realities faced by the many. I suggested also that perhaps the
curriculum could be revised with an internship/thesis requirement
such that for example, engineering students would be required to
actually participate in building something in an area of need or that
medical students be required to work in rural areas in need etc.
Further, we suggested that the data systems be revamped in terms of
who was reporting the data (imperial data collecters descending on
the villages in their clean white mundas vs the people who do the
activities being measured and quantified). The villagers also had a
distrust of the imperial data collectors and urban people in general
because every time they provided data or participated in aspects of
the planning process, their inputs were used to screw them.

Television was just being introduced in Kerala in 1983; people in the
villages had literally never seen a TV prior to that (except the few
who had worked in the Gulf or visited relatives in Bombay) and I
suggested that they had a golden opportunity to set up systems to
assess and monitor the impact of TV in terms of programming content,
voting patterns, changing tastes, study habits of the children,
family cohesion, changing structures of aggregate demand and supply,
religous expression, exacerbating/decreasing tribalism and
inter/intra religious feuds, attitudes/violence toward women,
changing attitudes on sexuality, rural to urban demographic movements,
etc. I noted with respect to the introduction of Western programming
"Be Careful of what you wish for, you just might get it." I also
noted that they might want to monitor the specific content of foreign
programming for examples of attempting "social systems engineering"
from the outside.

The point is that it is not enough to decry the categories and
analytical approaches and formalism that
obscure/ratify/legitimate/reproduce some ugly realities, we have to
ask why, in addition to the usual reasons, the "mainstream
approaches" continue even when their bankruptcy is clear. Part of the
problem has to do with imperial academia, removed from the realities
that are offen modeled and written about (even sympathetically) using
"official data" because that is easier to find and use. Another part
of the problem as to do with the "publish-or-perish" imperatives of
"success" in academia leading to the rush to get anything out even if
it is crap--albeit "elegantly quantified" crap. Another part of the
problem is the backgrounds of those who do the research (often they
went from high-school to college to grad school to teaching with no
real experience with the realities they are purporting to "study" and
"research". Another part of the problem is careerism in academia and
this notion: "we'll I'll play the game, get into the system, get
tenure and then the real me will come out and I will finally resist
the establishment in the profession; the problem is, by the time all
the compromises have been made, often the "real me" has been lost
assuming the "real me" was ever there. Of course there is the problem
of the powers-that-be in the profession as well as in the State who
will severely sanction those who step outside the "permissible"
paradigms, media, subjects of research, conclusions etc. Then there
is the problem of the motives of the research and what is to be or
can be done with the research (how many researcher have come into
peoples lives studying rape victims or displaced workers or poor
women or whatever and after having invaded their lives and used them
to rack up knotches on the old CV, have ever come back or used the
results of their research to work with those people to help improve
their lives?).

Just some thoughts to provoke thought.

                                 Jim Craven

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