Reach exceeding grasp…

(Still not dead. Yesterday was pretty straightforward and the hunger of today seems very minimal as well.)

At the end of Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist“, Kafka and the artist reverse positions on the motivations of the character. Throughout the piece, the artist had viewed his starvation as a symbol of his stoic commitment to art and perhaps even grander elements of existence. And then, the artist toils in total obscurity (hidden under a bed of rotting straw) and is forced to reconsider his perception. In the absence of a public, he now sees the meals he might have eaten differently. He imagines that there might have been a food that would have voided the logic of his fasts; a food so good that he would have been willing to eschew his whole existence within the story. The thought is so shocking and essential to him that he releases it as one would a confession to a priest.

I’m not thinking about food yet. I’m thinking about choice. In economics, we study the nature of utility of a good or of an act. A bosc pear might be worth two bananas to me or one Granny Smith. And financial currency allows us a way to convert the subjective valuations into objective ones. Economists are so crazy about the idea of utility that they think we can use it for almost anything. Modern environmental economics is very interested in this topic. Let’s say a given heavy chemical processing plant is damaging a river’s fisheries and the potability of the water supply. We believe the company can properly assess this damage and calculate the cost to remediate it along with perhaps some administrative and punitive costs. If these net costs are less than the cost to alter the plant’s underlying operations (to prevent pollution), the plant can use the differential to negotiate with a community or government. This is interesting, but flawed.

A critical question that is poorly addressed is this: do any of us properly understand the utility of anything? Utility is highly mutable. This seems true of the utility of any product. On a given day, I might prefer the tart of a Granny Smith apple, but quickly move to preferring a kiwi. That’s just fruit. Let me ask a different question: how valuable are the lives of other people to you? What is the specific economic utility of biodiversity?

We don’t have answers to these questions, but more importantly we don’t ask them. This seems to lead us to terrible conclusions. Consider this: the operating theory of the Iraq war was to ensure the peace and welfare of US citizenry. Let’s take at face value that this was indeed the mission of the war. A question that seems to never be answered is: at what cost? Certainly nobody wants terrorism. But, is there even a rough calculation that trades off what we are willing to do to achieve the objective of combating terror? The US government and public seem to sidestep the issue by putting the declining fortunes of the Iraqi people in the hands of the Iraqis: it is their fortune that they made by not accepting democracy. But this even misses the point. What if we had successfully brought democracy. Even then, it seems worth knowing what we might be willing to do to achieve that end.

Some would shudder to make such calculations. Is it reasonable to determine the value of a human life? I’d only argue that if we are willing to destroy or compromise life, we probably do need to know these values. And I haven’t even talked about the value of the environment or the welfare of future generations.

This topic has obviously been on the minds of many over human history. And we still don’t get the point.

Matthew 16:26 – “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”

We’ve accepted capitalism and it is probably useful to have some clarity on objective values. But, it seems worth knowing what our personal trade offs are. I’ll come back to this topic throughout the week.