Many years ago — don’t ask how many, because I will lie — I had to write a cost-benefit analysis of keeping an 82-year-old person alive on life support. An attempt had been made in an economics class to convince us that the person, let’s call her Siza, “made no contribution to the economy”, and keeping her on life support was, in fact, a waste of money that could have been “better spent”.
I honestly do not recall what I wrote then. As it goes, I am also embarrassed that I used mathematics to solve what was essentially an ethical question about a human life. Please don’t tell anyone. We had all being indoctrinated about the usefulness of applying mathematics, more correctly “formalism”, to solve social problems. I’m pleased to say I moved along from all that many years ago. I now consider formalist modelling, the way it is used by mainstream economists, as ends in themselves and quite detached from ethics or social relations.
This does not negate the beauty of abstract thinking and the way you are able to articulate visible regularities in the physical and mental worlds, how mathematics can help you identify new structural patterns that direct intuition and common sense tend to miss. This does not prevent economists (here I am putting a spin on Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) from searching for answers with little consideration for actually finding them.
Undoubtedly there are copper-bottomed economists who remain loyal to Gary Becker’s Nobel-winning claims that economics is the best method to explain and understand human behaviour. But let me get to the point.
Human life
If a meteor hit the earth and vaporised the built environment, killing half the population on Earth, a group of people would go into a panic about “the economy”. To them, the meteor did not destroy half the world, it destroyed “the economy”. And so we get to the difficult decision political leaders have to make about the Covid-19 pandemic, in which people who lay claim to be defenders of “the economy”, rightfully within their frames of reference, make cost-benefit analyses about the amounts of money to be lost if the country went back into lockdown.
Not to draw too crude a binary, it is a bit like that decision I had to make in the essay. Either take Siza off life support because she “adds no value” to the economy, or spend R1m a year to keep her alive because she is, after all, human and no price can be placed on a human’s life. The question the president (any president) faces during this pandemic is not as straightforward as saving the economy or saving people. By sleight of hand people who never did care about the poor (I’m thinking of one of those purple cows) are suddenly concerned about “the livelihoods” of the poor. Never mind.
In making their decision during a merciless pandemic presidents have to consider the health of society, of economic activity and of the scientists, and resolve the likely conflicts that may emerge among any of these groups. They also have to consider legal, ethical and moral issues. Surely removing life support from an ill person is simultaneously a moral and an “economic” issue — with serious legal and moral implications.
It is always problematic to generalise from a single case (such as taking Siza off life support), but when we consider everything that feeds into decision-making by the president about the pandemic, it is usually a good idea to break with crude economism as the prime desideratum.
Highest forms
Economism, considered here to be an ideological position, places too heavy a set of restrictions on democracy. The politics of economism has as one of its main objectives to place its own (ersatz unique) set of methods on social or institutional issues as a matter of principle and of course. With this application, economics becomes separated from politics and society.
This goes back to physics envy, in which economics is considered to be a science “like physics”. Let me borrow a line from one of my heroes, the late Richard Feynman, who said something along the lines of, “Physics isn’t the most important thing… The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.”
Allow me to appropriate that statement and say economics is not the most important thing; the highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and compassion. I don’t remember exactly what I concluded in that essay many years ago, but I am sure, now, that I probably came out on the side of compassion and humanity. Sure, Siza was 82 years old and it cost the state a lot of money to keep her on life support.
As it goes, the longer I delved into economics the further I drifted from orthodoxy. If called upon to do a cost-benefit analysis now, I don’t want to be the one to pull the plug on Siza.
• Lagardien, a visiting professor at the Wits University School of Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank, as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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