Economics is the study of good 'housekeeping' or 'management' or a systematic manner of running things such that people spontaneously feel that the dispensation is just, merciful, prudent and not wasteful or arbitrary in any way.
If all that 'really is' is stuff we can buy and sell or which is otherwise measurable or appropriable then, in a sense, Ontology is a branch of Econ. This is the 'Charvaka' (materialist) view in Ancient India. However, it faces a problem even on its own materialist terms. In the words of Moh Tzu- the great Chinese thinker- 'ghosts, keeps peasants honest'. In other words, a materialist Economics most cheaply maximises 'Utility' by featuring an ontology which has ghosts and demons and Gods and Buddhas and Prophets and Messiahs and 'Great Helmsmen' like Chairman Mao who possess some alethic or ideological insight denied lesser mortals.
Currently, the Chinese Communist Party is the most successful political entity History has ever known. It changed a poor country beset by warlordism and subject to Imperialist aggression into a Super Power which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty more rapidly than has ever happened before. What could be more rational, yet humanistic, than Chinese politico-literary thinking which spans three thousand years? Yet, it too, for a purely economic reason, has to subscribe to a bizarre ontology because 'ghosts keep peasants honest' while crazy Emperors questing the elixir nevertheless solve concurrency problems and build State Capacity along with 'Social' Capital.
More recently, thanks to the silicon chip, the word 'ontology' has acquired a novel meaning which, however, elucidates the relationship between Economics and bizarre beliefs or crazy Values.
An ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them.
Why would someone want to develop an ontology? Some of the reasons are:
� To share common understanding of the structure of information among people or software agents
� To enable reuse of domain knowledge
� To make domain assumptions explicit
� To separate domain knowledge from the operational knowledge
� To analyze domain knowledge
Value ontology is the project of enriching a given data structure by associating each element in it with a 'shadow price' reflective of constraints and instrumentalities for an optimisation problem on that same data set.
The intuitive notion here is that elements of the data structure have 'conjugacy' type relations- i.e. there is an interdependence, or 'dual' relationship arising out of the topology of the field from which the data is drawn- and thus more can be predicated of each element than might naively appear.
A more mathematically sophisticated account could be given. The one given above corresponds with something current in the Seventies more especially in Marxist Mathematical Economics- still an important subject at at time when Communist countries were growing more rapidly both economically and in military strength than 'Western' Democracies. Clearly, my generation's contempt for this type of Economics is reflected in my next assertion-
Value Ontology is a wank.
The problem here is that wanking is important for reproduction. It gets rid of dead sperm or improves the vaginal environment.
Still, it's a fucking wank, dude. Everybody wants to see your new baby. Nobody wants to see your jizz.
Is there a way of rescuing Value Ontology from the shameful pages of predatory academic Journals targeting the sort of back-office nerd that Business Schools and Consultancies and Hedge Funds and Think Tanks consign to a subaltern status?
After all, when Aristotle started gassing on about Ontology, an elderly 'celebrity tutor'- Isocrates- wrote a letter to Alexander (the not yet great) pointing out that the Aristotle's shtick was a nerdy wank. Leave it to the pedants and professional pedagogues. Just concentrate on rhetoric and the mimetics of greatness.
We have long known Isocrates was wrong. The nerdy back office aspect of Plato/Aristotle's pedagogy was so successful in 'differentiating' their product, and rendering its domain independent of operational knowledge- that the Church and Islam and even Maimonides's Judaism incorporated it as did, many years later, Western 'Classical' Economics- including Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx. In other words, even after the Catholic Church gave up on Aristotle at the Second Vatican Council, still in the year 1976, America was celebrating Adam Smith as much as its own bicentennial while, of course, Marx was still the great prophet of the Soviet Union and China and Euro-communism and most 'post colonial' intellectuals and even the sublimely hot Angela Davis and Vanessa Redgrave and so forth. Indeed, it was a convention of Eighties BBC sitcom writing that Leftist women had big breasts. Rightists had small tits. I recall an American stand up comic saying 'your Queen has small tits'. I was outraged. She has great tits. Not Stalinist tits it is true. But very very good tits. The reason so many bleck people like me have taken British citizenship is that we were focused on her blouse and didn't notice, till too late, that we'd taken an oath of obedience to a White person.
I'm sorry, I allowed myself to be sidetracked by the Queen's tits. What I wanted to offer, in this blog post, was a way of rescuing Value ontology from a too nakedly nerdy fate such that, like Aristotle keeping his tutorship despite Isocrates's demand for 'antidosis', its pedagogues too can rise from that wank which flushes out dead or low motility sperm, to the silly Word which gives life.
What is my method of rescue? In brief- it is the notion that ontological dysphoria is ubiquitous, self generated, and the source of Value ontology which thus does not arise by means of any fake conjugacy or duality which structures the data by reason of historic best wonkish practice.
What is 'ontological dysphoria'? It is the notion that we are not at home in this world. There is another world- it may be, one entirely private to ourselves or one not compossible with the laws of physics- which endows value on things or people or events discernible in Historic, or Economic, or other such inter-subjective Data sets. It may be that swarm ontologies, scalable murmurations, are what both motivate and facilitate our solitary flights out of this world. For a while we flock together, but only because we are birds of a feather each utterly alien to every other, and the faster we wheel and swoop and soar the more we long for those nests under unborn stars where no flight is save solitude as night spreads its wings.
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