Integral economics

Updated below the second paragraph and below the fold.

The following is from Lessem and Shieffer's prologue to their book "Integral Economics:" Therein a group of UK economists wrote a letter to the Queen on the causes of the financial meltdown. It sounds a lot like the difference between restricted and general complexity discussed elsewhere. The delicious irony is that the likes of Morin, and presumably integral economics, are 'horizontal' when in fact it is those domineering scientific and mathematical reductionists that enact flatland.

"We believe that the narrow training of economists – which concentrates on mathematical techniques and the building of empirically uncontrolled formal models – has been a major reason for this failure in our profession. This defect is enhanced by the pursuit of mathematical technique for its own sake in many leading academic journals and departments of economics. There is a species of judgment, attainable through immersion in a literature or a history that cannot be adequately expressed in formal mathematical models. It’s an essential part of a serious education in economics, but has been stripped out of most leading graduate programs in economics in the world, including in the leading economics departments in the United Kingdom. Models and techniques are important. But given the complexity of the global economy, what is needed is a broader range of models and techniques governed by a far greater respect for substance, and much more attention to historical, institutional, psychological and other highly relevant factors ... As trained economists and United Kingdom citizens we have warned of these problems that beset our profession. Unfortunately, at present, we find ourselves in a minority."

The delicious irony is that the likes of Morin, and presumably integral economics, are 'horizontal' when in fact it is those domineering scientific and mathematical reductionists that enact flatland.


Speaking of flatland, in the last post it references the Lingam's notion that scientific materialism reduced the value spheres to its domain. And that that domain was ruled by the modernist tendency to posit some kind of pure objectivism distinct from the subjective. Whereas recall this post earlier in the real/false reason thread, where some of the OOOers admit to a flat instead of hierarchical ontology. This is not the same as the flat epistemology of the mathematical objectivists, still caught in the notion that we can model and know directly the objective via mathematics, the latter itself from that purely objective plane. The OOOers, while acknowledging the objective beyond our epistemology, do not find solace or grace that we can know it directly via this mathematical means, or that the means itself is that objective plane. And that ontologically it is not hierarchical, at least in the mathematical sense, while still mereological but in the democratic sense.