Experimentelle Studien: VWL-Studium produziert aggressive Soziopathen

politicaleconomy , Montag, 16.02.2015, 12:24 (vor 3972 Tagen)

Aus einem Interview von Phil Pilkington (PP) mit Yanis Varoufakis (YV):

YV : There have been some interesting studies that reveal how common decency and ‘other’-regarding norms are weeded out of students of economics very early in their undergraduate career. Take the example of the generalised prisoner’s dilemma below:

Young men and women are given some money (e.g. $10) and asked to contribute (each one separately from the rest, and in perfect anonymity) all or part of it to a common purse. Then, the contents of the purse are multiplied by the factor of, say, three and the contents redistributed among all of them independently of their contribution. Clearly, the best outcome for the group is that each contributes all of his or her windfall to the common purse and, that way, each gets a return three times as large. The problem here is that there is a temptation to let others contribute while you do not (since that way you get your share of three times of their contributions and, to boot, you have also kept your own money).

What we find in experimental studies involving real students, who play the above game with real money, is something quite startling: students of economics were significantly less willing to contribute to the common purse. Moreover they were more pessimistic about the prospects that others would contribute! So the question arose: Is it that economics attracts the less cooperative, more ruthless young persons? Or is it that exposure to economics makes them relatively more ruthless, pessimistic and aggressive?

To find out, the experiments were repeated separately for first semester first year undergraduates (before they were ‘contaminated’ with economics or other subjects) and for students who had just graduated. Guess what: Amongst the fresh(wo)men who played the game, the ones that had chosen to major in economics did not behave differently to the rest. They were equally willing to contribute. Therefore no evidence was found supporting the hypothesis that economics attracts misanthropes. On the other hand, amongst graduates those with an economics training stood out from the rest: they were much less likely to contribute, and more pessimistic about the others. The conclusion is inescapable: a training in economics significantly increases the probability that a person becomes less sociable, more aggressive, less cooperative; in short, miserable.

Why and how is this indoctrination taking place? The answer is simple: Economists are all about creating determinate models; ‘closed’ models that predict behaviour. To do this, they need to assume a particularly narrow minded form of rationality (which I call ‘instrumental rationality’): you are rational to the extent that you deploy your means efficiently in the pursuit of given objectives. When a young person is told repeatedly that to be rational means to be ruthlessly instrumental (i.e. to treat others as a means to one’s own ends), and that contributing in this game is for sissies (or, more ‘scientifically’, irrational), is it any wonder that a training in economics makes young persons more brutish and nastier?

The end result is that youngsters with a heightened sense of civic responsibility either drop out of economics, in a bid to retain it, or manage gradually to shed it; to adopt ‘instrumental rationality’ in their own daily life and mindset. Suddenly, the models begin to shape the modellers, rather than the other way round. It is a subtle process of change that turns economists into simulacra of themselves in a hopeless pursuit of ‘closed’ models that validate their own sad ‘conversion’. Seen from a different perspective, what we have here is a remarkable Darwinian process that guarantees the survival and dominance, within economics departments, of the anti-social, aka instrumentally rational, fools.

As for the Crisis and its effects on economics students and departments, I am afraid it has done nothing to ameliorate this Darwinian mechanism within existing economic departments. The norms of instrumental reasoning are so powerful that not even the earthquake of the Crisis has had the power to unsettle them. I have a hunch, however, that what the Crisis will do is speed up further the rate of decline in the number of youngsters interested in studying economics. This is the good news. The bad news is that they will not turn to other social studies but to pseudo-disciplines like marketing, business, advertising etc.

PP: That’s fascinating, let’s continue to run with this for a moment. If what you say is true – and I believe the evidence is unquestionable in this regard – then economics is not a science whatsoever. It more so resembles a school of morality or even a philosophical cult. The old Greek Stoics spring to mind. They were a school of philosophy that not only taught certain ideas but demanded that their followers live these ideas in their day-to-day lives. But in economics the students aren’t even told that they’re signing up for a moral vision, a sort of religion or belief system, they’re told that they’re being initiated into an objective science. Perhaps you could reflect a little in that direction and its implications?

YV: Quite so. It is a priesthood that truly believes it is not a priesthood but, rather, a community of scientists. (Quelle: Interview mit Yanis Varoufakis)