Market as Metric

Re: Market as Metric


IMO, your definition of "market" creates the conflict here. A market is more than just a place. It is the sum total of those who want something and those who have the ability to provide that item or service.

If there is no one that wants a particular bit of knowledge and more people that can provide it than the number that want it then it's value is diminshed. If that same bit of knwledge is in high demand and few with the ability to provide it than it's value (in the overall market place) tends to be higher.

Like it or not the market does set the value of higher education. Why should we contiune to dump tax dollars into supporting a college that no one wants to attend?

Fishin

I think that we are too inclined to accept without question the manner in which our values are selected . We are too complacent and ready to accept without examination all manner of ideologies we are controlled by. Like children we accept what our community or family have given us. An uncritical mind is a serious mistake and a failure to accept our responsiblity in a democracy.

Re: Market as Metric

Yes it is another way of saying it is wise to let people make their own decisions. The relevant test of higher education is not whether it complies with your values, or the president's values, or your governor's. The test is whether professors want to teach it, students want to acquire it, and businesses want to hire the students once they graduate. The wisdom of using facile purchasing decisions to determine an education's worth is that everybody involved can act on their own values. You don't need to decide on one, deep, one-size-fits-all value system. I appreciate this.


If that is true, what's the problem with the market system? The market doesn't judge, people do -- and the students, professors, and business do make their decisions by knowledge and understanding.


The usual alternative is "the governor promised a tax cut, so he'll push through a cut in the university's endowment". Or, "the majority leader goes golfing with the university's president", so the university gets endowed generously." Or, "swing voters believe the government needs to invest more in science and technology, so both parties compete to raise the budget of the computer science faculty."

This alternative is called "the political process". I prefer the market.

Re: Market as Metric


Very nicely said. This is (to beat my favorite dead horse) the danger in vilifying abstract concepts. "The market" is a generalizing term for something way too complicated to be generalized into a single term. It is, for one thing, a conglomerate of competing values among people, and once you turn your attention away from the generalizing term and examine the motives of the people behind it, you find that it is impossible to characterize "the market" as representing one consistent value. At most you can keep track of trends.




Certainly. But many alternatives to "the market" don't even allow us to accept the responsibility.

Archimedes' platform is a means for comprehending the society in which we reside. We are splashing about within the belly of our society and the only means for understanding this society is for us to find a platform outside of the monster.

I claim that we are all ideologues within our society and as such our view is seriously compromised. To understand our reality we must first discover how to stand outside of our personal ideologies. Ideology prejudices our view and blinds us to reality and only after recognizing this fact can we begin to analyze our situation.

If we continue to follow our bovine characteristics of either running with the herd or standing blankly staring into the distance we cannot "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative".

We display an attitude toward most any subject. An attitude cannot be described explicitly but is a notion, which is an inference, based upon behavior. We are all inclined to behave consistently to a situation and this behavior is attributed to our attitude. Our attitudes and the quality of such attitudes are judged based on observed behavior.

Britannica specifies that attitude is "a predisposition to classify objects and events and to react to them with some degree of evaluative consistency." This predisposition I am inclined to label as an ideology.

If I wish to become conscious of my ideological bias I can through observation of behavior describe the attitude, which, in turn, allows me to ascertain the nature of my intuition or ideology.

When a mother tells her son "you must change your attitude". The son cannot change the attitude but the son must change his intuition from which the inferred attitude emanates. This does become a bit convoluted but in essence when we wish to change an attitude we are saying that our intuition must be modified.

The point of all of this is that it is the intuition we wish to understand and our attitudes are a means to discover the profile of our intuition. Within our intuition are our ideological views.

The attitude directs the behavior. The public and I can observe the behavior and from that gain insight as to the attitude. Under attitudes one might create the categories of values, interests, sentiments, beliefs, predisposition's, irrational tendencies, taste, knowledge, certainties etc.

The public from my behavior can infer ideology. The question is how do I use the attitudes as a vehicle for making conscious to me the nature of my intuition? The answer is that through solitude and concentration I can focus my conscious intellect and develop inferences as the structure of my ideological bias.

Solitude becomes the catalysis for developing insight into the nature of intuition. This insight may provide a pattern from which further inferences can be drawn thereby making other aspects of the intuition accessible to the conscious intellect.

Solitude is not meant to be sensor deprivation, which can lead to hallucinations. Solitude and perhaps a modification of normal environment can facilitate the faculty of imagination.

Solitude creates a mood that enhances the faculty of imagination, which becomes the driving force for conscious action. The faculties of imagination and reason are what sets the human species off from our non-human ancestors. Imagination as a force for human discontent is therefore the force for human advancement. Human flexibility motivated by the discontent of imagination has provided the impetuous for human material advancement.

Goya said that fantasy united with reason "is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels." Fantasy the child of imagination plus reason has produced all the scientific and humanistic and artistic accomplishments.

Colbert,

your last post appears to me like a random string of assertions, definitions, and commonplaces. If you intended to make any particular point in this post, I must confess it eluded me. Could you please first tell us, preferrably in plain English, what your thesis is and how it relates to what the others said in this thread? You can worry about backing it up with authorities later.

What we are asking for are specific data, not platitudes. You cannot make claims about the way society operates without mentioning data about human interaction, what people are doing, to whom they are doing it to what effect. As intellectuals are apt to do, you're hoping fancy platitudes can substitute for evidence. They can't.

The OP asks the question: How to determine social values?

The Market is the present answer for determining social values.

The Market is the object that our capitalism ideology promotes as the answer to all social values.

We are all ideologues and to gain a critical self-consciousness we must be able to critique our own ideological bias as well as our neighbor's.

We are in the belly of the whale that we are trying to comprehend. We need an Archimedean platform to gain the necessary isolation for social critique.

A person's attitude is a clue as to her ideology likewise my attitude is a clue to me about my ideological bias.

Solitude is a means for critical self-consciousness. We must find a means to become critical of the ideology moving our self and others in order to correct such concepts as the Market is the means for determining social values.

No it doesn't. It says nothing about `social'. This distinction matters because the market is best understood as a mechanism through wich people fulfill their own, individual values.


I suppose you could put it this way, but then the market's answer would always be that society defers to each individual's values in determining each individual's actions. What, if anything, do you think is wrong with that answer?


Please speak for yourself. If you would like to critique your own ideological bias, be my guest, go right ahead. But unlike you, I have no desire do this, so I'm unwilling to let you command that I "must be able to".


Here's that "must" again. Freely after Shakespeare: On what compulsion must we?

People, Coberst. We need people. There are no people in your "social critique." You've got conceptual placeholders doing all the work ("the market" is determining "all" [!] social values; "capitalism ideology" is promoting the market). As long as you avoid naming people, you are not describing anything social at all.

You need to name a specific value and show that it is embedded enough in human interaction to qualify as a "social value"; you need to name people who you think are promoting it, describe what they are doing in order to promote it, and describe how this promotion is being received by others. Only then can you even begin to speculate about (let along critique) why these values are promoted and received in the way that they are; and it is only after you ask why that you can begin to speculate about ideology.

To put it another way: if you're wondering why these problems you're diagnosing persist, it may be because you're indicting abstract concepts rather than people; by allowing concepts to shoulder the blame, you are allowing the people behind them to remain safe from critique.

I think that our first propblem is to recognize where we are now. We are in the belly of the beast and we must learn how to analyze it from that position.

We are in the belly of an ideological driven existence. In this case under consideration our capitalistic ideology has presented the Market as the altar for worship. Some how we must awaken from our trance and discover this fact before we can improve the matter.

coderst,

It seems you are proposing that we seek an answer to a problem ......a problem you are yet to clearly define, let alone prove it's existence.

Eorl

I can cut your meat into bite size portions but I am not your mother you will have to spoon them into your mouth yourself.

You must awaken intellectually to "see" the world around you. You are in the belly of an ideology and must begin to become conscious of that matter. After consciousness comes knowledge if some effort is forthcoming.

Eorl

I apologize for that outburst. I was just venting my frustrations. I will prepare a better response shortly.

Eorl and Shapless

Ideology is the reason things are as they are. Truth for the relationship between subject and object is generally stable and consistent. Truth in matters of subject to subject relationships is not stable or generally consistent except for truths generated by an ideology.

To understand our world we must understand the nature of ideology.

Religion, Capitalism, Communism, Nationalism, are examples of major ideologies. Ideologies consist of a matrix of ideas that function under a primary idea that gives coherence to the whole. Ideologies are much like creatures in that they have a will to live and to propogate. They do what is necessary for the survival.

In the US our dominant ideology includes elements of Capitalism, Christianity, and Nationalism. Our Capitalism aspect focuses all of us upon our major value of maximizing production and consumption. Everything we see and hear 24/7 is designed to propagate the feeling that uppermost we are consumers. We exist to produce and consume; the ideology propagates commercial and societal propaganda to constantly reinforce this view.

We are all ideologies in one degree or another. I think that the healthy response to this reality is to understand ideology and how our ideology affects our judgment. As we become critically self-conscious we can become better at making good judgments. It is my opinion that a good citizen in a democracy such as ours must become a critically self-conscious negotiator of reality as it is so that we can change it as required.

Anti-intellectualism is a major component of our dominant ideology because critical thinking by the citizens will upset the present ideology and thus upset the status of those who wish the maintain the status quo. The Matador wiggles the cape so that the bull does not focus attention on the Matador. The bull is big and strong but easily fooled and thereby manipulated to dance at the will of the Matador.

coberst,

You seem to think that being told you have not clearly defined what you see as a problem means that I don't understand what you're saying.

I do.

As I think shapeless was pointing out, you are seeing the world in a very black and white way. What makes you think ALL people who live within a particular ideology cannot see it as such? It sounds as though you think you are the only one, and the rest of the world is in blissful ignorance.

For myself, I abhor religion. Capitalism I see as a system that works for the most part due it's close link with human nature and "survival-of-the-fittest" driven largely by supply and demand. Advertising helps drive demand but has it's limitations too.
Nationalism I see as a culturally acceptable version of xenophobia that we'd be better off without.

I don't think I'm an exception, I think people's understanding and acceptance of ideologies varies from individual to individual and frankly I think your Anti-Anti-intellectual stance looks a lot like intellectual snobbery from someone quite out of touch with real people.

You sound like you just found out that Soylent Green is people.

Actually it reminds me more of the muppet "Sam the Eagle" declaring in outrage that every American, beneath their clothes, was walking around STARK NAKED !!!

Eorl

For two individuals to reason together it is necessary that they share in common a pool of knowledge. I suspect we do not have such a pool and probably the best we can do is agree to disagree.

Eorl

For two individuals to reason together it is necessary that they share in common a pool of knowledge. I suspect we do not have such a pool and probably the best we can do is agree to disagree.

I will refer you to your quote by Sagan. Our beliefs--ideologies- will not allow us to reason together at this time.