※ [本文轉錄自 Marxism 看板]
作者: poe (反對台鐵私有化！) 看板: Marxism
標題: Re: [問題] 很笨的問題.....
時間: Wed Mar 26 13:42:15 2003
※ 引述《Schumpeter (Don't hesitate)》之銘言：
: I can not agree with you more. Those venture capitalists
: you take for example, the operation of investment
: decision and the excellent analyses of risk are always
: attractive.
: I also believe that kind of operation could improve
: Pareto efficiency, in which exchange efficiency and
: production efficiecy are included.
: People are willing to exchange, interact and transact
: because those operation bring them welfare.
”Efficiency”: Whose Efficiency?
Richard Wolff (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA)
I. The concept of “efficiency”common to most contemporary
economic theories holds that analysis can and should determine
the net balance between positive and negative effects of any
economic act, event, or institution. Sometimes, in practical
economic applications, this same notion of efficiency refers
to “cost-benefit” analysis. A quantitative measure of all
the positive and negative effects of an economic act, event,
or institution is undertaken to determine whether, on balance,
the positives (benefits added up) outweigh the negatives (costs
added up). If so, it is judged to be “efficient” and should
be undertaken; if not, the reverse holds.
Such a definition and use of the term“efficiency”prevails
at both the micro and macro levels of social and economic analysis.
The building of a factory extension may or may not be micro-efficient.
An interest rate increase may or may not be macro-efficient. At
the level of society as a whole, the institution of a "free market"
may or may not be efficient. This same efficiency concept serves
in comparative economics. Two or more alternative acts, events or
institutions are compared as to their efficiencies. Then, the one
that has the greatest quantitative net balance of positive over
negative aspects is designated the “more/most efficient.”
II. Such a concept of efficiency requires and presupposes, in
all its usages, a rigidly and simplistically determinist view
of the world. That is, it presumes that analysis can and does
regularly (1) identify all the effects of an economic act, event,
or institution, and (2) measure the positivity/negativity of each
effect.1 In sharp contrast, an overdeterminist view of the world
renders that concept of efficiency absurd.2 In this view, any one
act, event, or institution has an infinity of effects now and into
the future. There is no way to identify, let alone to measure, all
these consequences. No efficiency measure – in any comprehensive,
total, or absolute sense – is possible. Thus, none of the efficiency
“results”ever announced, however fervently believed and relied
upon for policy decisions, possessed any comprehensive, total, or
absolute validity.
Overdeterminism undermines the efficiency calculus and the
absolutist claims made in its name in yet another way. When
considering the “effects” of any particular economic act, event,
or institution,” an overdeterminist standpoint presumes that each
of such effects actually had an infinity of causative influences.
The “effects” can thus never be conceived as resulting from only
the one act, event, or institution chosen for the efficiency analysis.
What efficiency analyses deem to be “effects”of a particular act,
event, or institution are never reducible to being solely its
effects. Hence, such “effects” can not and do not measure the
“efficiency” of any particular act, event, or institution. This
too renders the usual efficiency calculus and the efficiency concept
null and void.3
III. It follows logically that all efficiency analyses and results
are relative, not absolute. They are relative to (dependent upon) a
determinist view of the world, a determinist ontology that presumes
unique causes and “their” effects. Efficiency as a comprehensive,
total, and absolute concept-cum- policy standard has no validity in
and for analysis that presumes an overdeterminist rather than a
determinist ontology.
IV. To say that all efficiency analyses are relative to a determinist
ontology opens the way to a further critique of them. Given their
notion of cause and effects, they all necessarily select a few among
the many effects they attach to any particular act, event, or
institution whose efficiency they choose to determine. No efficiency
calculus could ever identify and measure all such effects. What
distinguishes one efficiency analysis from another are the different
principles of selectivity informing each.4 Usually, one principle of
selectivity reigns hegemonic: one set of selected effects is deemed
“important” and worth counting while others are marginalized or
ignored altogether. These days, economics textbooks teach their
readers which effects are to be considered in “applied economic
analysis.”
This has often provoked criticism. Feminist economists have shown
how the hegemonic efficiency calculus has usually ignored the effects
that pertain to women, households, reproduction, children, and so on.
Likewise, environmentalist economists have shown how the hegemonic
efficiency calculus has ignored ecological effects, and so on. All
too rarely have such critical economists gone beyond the demand that
formerly ignored effects be henceforth added to those selected for
inclusion in the hegemonic efficiency calculus. That is, their
critique of the hegemonic principle of selectivity has focused
chiefly on getting their preferred effects included within the
hegemonic set. The same applies to much Marxist work. It seeks
to challenge the hegemonic efficiency calculus by showing especially
how it ignores all sorts of class effects of economic acts, events,
and institutions.
Yet all such critics could deepen and strengthen their arguments
if they took the next step to challenge the hegemonic efficiency
calculus per se on conceptual grounds. The relativism of all
efficiency arguments and claims creates vulnerability for them
and critical opportunity for those who challenge them. From an
overdeterminist perspective, the economy is an object of struggle
among historically conditioned social groups. As such groups emerge
within the circumstances of their time and place, they develop
particular understandings of their problems and devise different
programs for their solution. In so doing, they inevitably concentrate
on some problems rather than others (and the causes associated with
them), conceive and decide among some solutions rather than others,
attribute some (rather than others) effects to such solutions, and
so on.
When formalized into “efficiency calculi,” the different
social groups perform them differently: they operate different
principles of selectivity in identifying their problems and
solutions, their causes and their effects.
These groups often clash. Struggles emerge that usually include
conflicts over which principles of selectivity will govern the
analysis of problems and solutions, which principles of selectivity
will be hegemonic in their society and hence in their efficiency
calculi. Each group tries to impose its particular principles of
selectivity, its particular efficiency calculus, by transforming
it into the absolute set of principles of selectivity for all
efficiency calculi for all members of the society. In place of
contending efficiency calculi there is to be one calculus to
which all social conflict is to be subordinated: social conflict
is to be resolved by determining what is the efficient policy or
program to follow. Advancing their own particular efficiency
calculus as if it were the absolute notion of efficiency is
thus one form taken by the social struggle for hegemony among
contending groups. In today's world, the hegemony of social
groups favoring capitalism is expressed and sustained by their
heavily promoted presumption of an absolutist concept of efficiency
and by policy decisions legitimated thereby. Not surprisingly,
that absolute concept turns out to be their particular principle
of selectivity.
V. An overdeterminist critique of efficiency focuses on
deconstructing the claim that any one efficiency calculus –
one subset of the countless effects attributed to any act,
event, or institution – has some absolute or socially neutral
validity. There is no single standard of efficiency. Society
always displays different, alternative understandings of and
solutions for society’s problems. Different social groups
struggle for their alternative social programs utilizing an
arsenal of weapons that includes, for many, their respective
efficiency calculi. When and where an absolute efficiency
calculus is believed to exist, there one particular efficiency
calculus and one particular group (or set of groups) has
established its hegemony over others. Success in the struggle
by those others to undo that hegemony requires undermining its
absolutism as a key component of that struggle. An absolutized
efficiency calculus will be used by the social groups that
support it as a weapon to suppress contending social groups,
their social analyses, and their programs for social change.
Notes
1. The discursive ploy of retreating to the notion that
efficiency analysis identifies and counts only the “most
important” or “relevant” effects does not escape the
problem. This ploy presumes, once again, that an analyst
can know which of the effects are “the most important”
or “relevant.” To know that requires knowing all the
effects, i.e. knowing that all the other effects are
unimportant or irrelevant.
2. For a definition and discussion of overdetermination as
used here, see S. Resnick and R. Wolff, Knowledge and Class:
A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1987.
3. This applies to Pareto “optimality” as well. One can never
know all the consequences of an economic situation so as to
determine whether one person is better off and no-one is
worse off. Likewise, one cannot know, let alone measure,
all the utility losses to determine whether they might even
hypothetically be compensated by all the gains.
4. Thus, efficiency calculi are relative also in a second
way: they are relative to the particular subset of attributed
effects that they select to consider.
_____________________________
SUGGESTED CITATION:
Richard Wolff, “’Efficiency’: Whose Efficiency”, post-autistic
economics review, issue no. 16, September 16, 2002, article 3.
http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review/issue16.htm
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