Akerlof on Procrastination

 

Akerlof's 'Procrastination & Obedience' paper was, he says, prompted by an occasion when he was working in India and had promised to send a colleague in the US some clothes he had left behind. Akerlof knew that getting anything done in India would take an inordinate amount of time and thus kept putting off the task till he bumped into a man who was returning to America and was prepared to take the clothes with him. In the US, it would only take five or ten minutes to mail a parcel of clothes and, what's more, you could be sure the parcel would actually be delivered. The high and uncertain cost of mailing things to a foreign country in India caused both Indians and Americans to put off chores which brought them into contact with a Byzantine bureaucracy. Procrastination is about high cost relative to benefit. It is rational because it is regret minimizing. You'd feel a fool if you spent a day or two running around filling in forms to send a parcel of clothes if, at the end of the day, the parcel is never delivered. 

Akerlof writes-

In this lecture I shall focus on situations involving repeated decisions with time in-consistent behavior.

All decisions have this feature because we live in a world of Knightian Uncertainty.  

Although each choice may be close to maximizing and therefore result in only small losses, the cumulative effect of a series of repeated errors may be quite large.

Or it may not. In any case, 'many a mickle makes a muckle'. Small numbers add up to large numbers as time goes by.  

Thus, in my examples, decision makers are quite close to the intelligent, well-informed individuals usually assumed in economic analysis, but cumulatively they make seriously wrong decisions that do not occur in standard textbook economics.

It is rational to procrastinate where cost is uncertain. Indeed, Uncertainty reduces economic activity as well as interactions of a purely personal kind.  

This lecture discusses and illustrates several "pathological" modes of individual and group behavior: procrastination in decision making,

which isn't pathological. It is regret minimizing because of uncertainty.  

undue obedience to authority,

a habit of obedience has survival value. We are a self-domesticated species.  

membership of seemingly normal individuals in deviant cult groups,

like Christianity? Yet such membership has had survival value. In any case, it heps pass the time.  

and escalation of commitment to courses of action that are clearly unwise.

with hindsight after a state of the world, which was not conceived of previously, has prevailed. If I had known Beyonce would become a global superstar, I wouldn't have snubbed him when he was still known as Bakul Joshi and wanted to attend my lecture-demonstrations of twerking at the London School of Economics. Admittedly, I was drinking quite heavily at the time and my memory is unreliable.  

In each case, individuals choose a series of current actions

unless they aren't 'choosing' at all. Choice is cognitively costly.  

without fully appreciating how those actions will affect future perceptions and behavior.

Sadly, nobody knows how present actions will affect them in the future.  The best you can do is make a guess or do what smart people have done or are doing. 

The standard assumption of rational, forward-looking, utility maximizing is violated.

Because of Knightian Uncertainty (i.e. we don't know all possible future states of the world or what their probability is) Utility maximization has to yield to something like Regret Minimization.  

The nonindependence of errors in decision making

arises because of multiple realizability and the fact that, for coevolved processes, we only have access to correlation, not causation.  

in the series of decisions can be explained with the concept from cognitive psychology of undue salience or vividness.

Or laziness 

For example, present benefits and costs may have undue salience relative to future costs and benefits.

Present benefits and costs are less uncertain than those in the future. Akerlof behaved differently in India- a poor country where public services where unreliable- than he would have back in America where things were much more predictable.  

Procrastination occurs when present costs are unduly salient in comparison with future costs, leading individuals to postpone tasks until tomorrow without foreseeing that when tomorrow comes, the required action will be delayed yet again.

No. We can foresee that. But we can also foresee that all sorts of unforeseen things may occur albeit this is less true of highly developed countries with very dependable enterprises.  

Irrational obedience to authority or escalation of commitment occurs when the salience of an action today depends upon its deviation from previous actions.

i.e. if something irrational is 'salient', then irrationality occurs.  

When individuals have some disutility for disobedience and a leader chooses the step sizes appropriately, individuals can be induced to escalate their actions to extraordinary levels;

We may pretend this is the case but history tells us that any evil shit people did while 'following orders' was also done by similar people when there were no fucking orders.  

the social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1975) led subjects to administer high levels of electrical shock to others in fictitious learning experiments.

Those same subjects had grown up reading comic-books in which 'joy-buzzers' were advertised.  

The subjects were induced into actions that were contrary to their true moral values.

I suppose pedagogues need to pretend that young people have truly lovely moral values. The truth, sadly, is that they are little devils. 

In the latter half of the lecture I will give examples to illustrate how sequences of errors, each error small at the time of the decision, cumulate into serious mistakes; these decisions also illustrate how laboratory conditions of isolation, carefully engineered in the Milgram experiment and necessary for the type of behavior he induced, in fact commonly occur in nonexperimental situations.

The reason kids stop punching each other is because they become aware of the possibility of revenge,  draconian punishment, or ostracism. 

Thus the sequences of errors that are the subject of this lecture are not rare and unusual, only obtainable in the laboratory of the social psychologist, but instead are common causes of social and economic pathology.

Pathology is about reduced survival value. Sadly, both procrastination- e.g. putting off murdering your boss- and obedience- e.g. doing your fucking job- have survival value. 

Although an analysis of behavioral pathology might initially appear to be out-side the appropriate scope of economics, I shall argue that, in important instances, such pathology affects the performance of individuals and institutions in the economic and social domain.

Incentive matter. One could say that bad mechanism design is 'pathological'. But, chances are, bad mechanisms get weeded out as good mechanisms have a competitive advantage.  

Examples include the poverty  of the elderly due to inadequate savings for retirement,

caused by inadequate earnings before retirement.  

addiction to alcohol and drugs,

which is still better than topping yourself.  

criminal and gang activity,

you join a gang to get protection from other gangs. Crime does pay- for some.  

and the impact of corporate "culture" on firm performance.

A culture of doing stupid shit can tank the company.  

Economic theories of crime, savings, and organizations are deficient and yield misleading conclusions when such behavior is ignored.

No. What is deficient is provision of negative incentives- i.e. penalties. If you keep killing bad actors or inefficient cunts, the proportion of such people in the economy falls.  

The behavioral pathologies that I will describe also have consequences for policies toward, for example, savings, sub-stance abuse, and management.

A National Insurance scheme represents compulsory saving. Negative real interest rates discourage saving. Substance abuse declines if addicts are beaten or killed.  

Individuals whose behavior reveals the various pathologies I shall model are not maximizing their "true" utility.

They aren't doing what Akerlof thinks they should be doing. The only reason I am not a bigger super-star than Beyonce is that people don't know that 'true utility' can only be derived by watching my booty-shake.  

The principle of revealed preference cannot therefore be used to assert that the options that are chosen must be preferred to the options that are not chosen.

Very true. The fact that girls reveal a preference to run the fuck away from me doesn't meant they don't prefer to use me as a sex-object.  

Individuals may be made better off if their options are limited and their choices constrained.

Some young gang-bangers may be better off if they are put in prison between the ages of 15 and 45.  

Forced pension plans may be superior to voluntary savings schemes;

Both may be mismanaged.  

outright prohibitions on alcohol or drugs may be preferable to taxes on their use reflecting their nuisance costs

The cost of enforcing Prohibition may be too high.  

to others; and an important function of management may be to set schedules and deadlines and not simply to establish "appropriate" price-theoretic incentive schemes to motivate employees.

Akerlof doesn't understand that not meeting deadlines leads to getting fired. That's price theoretic. The wage is the price of labour. Still, it must be said, shooting slackers works even better than firing them.  

I. Salience and Decisions

A central principle of modern cognitive psychology is that individuals attach too much weight to salient or vivid events

i.e. information conveyed in that manner. But that costs money.  

and too little weight to nonsalient events.

This can change quite rapidly. 

Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross (1980) de-scribe the following thought experiment, that they consider the "touchstone" of cog-nitive psychology, just as the shifting of a supply or a demand curve is the central thought experiment of economics.

'Let us suppose that you wish to buy a new car and have decided that on grounds of economy and longevity you want to purchase one of those stalwart, middle-class Swedish cars-either a Volvo or a Saab. As a prudent and sensible buyer, you go to Consumer Reports, which informs you that the consensus of their experts is that the Volvo is mechanically superior, and the consensus of the readership is that the Volvo has the better repair record. Armed with this information, you decide to go and strike a bargain with the Volvo dealer before the week is out. In the interim, however, you go to a cocktail party where you an-nounce your intention to an acquain-tance. He reacts with disbelief and alarm; "A Volvo! You've got to be kidding. My brother-in-law had a Volvo. First, that fancy fuel injection computer thing went out. 250 bucks. Next he started having trouble with the rear end. Had to replace it. Then the transmission and the clutch. Fi-nally sold it in three years for junk."

[quoted in Nisbett and Ross, p. 15; from Nisbett, et al., 1976, p. 129]

You understand that this guy you met may be reporting a highly untypical outcome. Still, you change your behaviour for 'regret minimizing' reasons. Having ignored a warning and then having got stuck with a 'lemon' will make you feel worse about yourself than just having been unlucky.  

The status of this additional information is only to increase the Consumer Reports sample by one. Mean repair records are likely to remain almost unchanged. Yet Nisbett and Ross argue that most prospective car buyers would not view the new information so complacently.

Why? It is because, in an uncertain world, regret minimization is second nature.  

An experiment by Eugene Borgida and Nisbett (1977) confirms the intuition that salient information exerts undue influence on decisions. Freshmen at the University of Michigan with a declared psychology major were chosen as subjects. Students were asked to express preferences concerning psychology electives. Before making this decision, a control group was given only mean psychology course evaluations; others were, in addition, exposed to a panel discussion by advanced psychology majors selected so that their course evaluations corresponded to the mean.

One group got less information than the other. No surprise that the more favoured group performed better.  

As in the Volvo thought experiment, vivid information played a greater role than pallid information; compared to the control group, those exposed to the panel chose a higher fraction of courses rated above average.

The more costly type of information presentation proved superior. Big surprise. 

I. Procrastination

may be pathological. You may be suffering a mental illness. Consult a Doctor.  Alternatively, you may simply be a lazy sack of shit. 

Procrastination provides the simplest example of a situation in which there are repeated errors of judgment due to unwarranted salience of some costs and benefits relative to others.

There is uncertainty regarding those costs and benefits. Something like the maximum uncertainty principle applies. Do nothing today because you may be hit by a bus tomorrow.  

In this case each error of judgment causes a small loss, but these errors cumulatively result in large losses over time and ultimately cause considerable regret on the part of the decision maker.

If you put off completing the work you have been assigned, you ma

Let me illustrate with a personal story and then show how such behavior can be modeled. Some years back, when I was living in India for a year, a good friend of mine, Joseph Stiglitz, visited me; because of unexpected limitations on carry-on luggage at the time of his departure, he left with me a box of clothes to be sent to him in the United States.

This was in the late Sixties. Akerlof would need to firstly get the parcel properly packed- i.e. sewn into white canvas with red lacquer seals on the seams. The seals were required to be 'forgery proof'. Then, there was the matter of the Customs Declaration form which, for old clothes, would not have been much of a problem. Still, the fact is the package could take six months to arrive by sea-mail- if it arrived. The sensible thing to do was hang on to the clothes till some colleague or friend was flying back to the States. The clothes would get to their owner faster. 

Both because of the slowness of transactions in India and my own ineptitude in such matters, I estimated that sending this parcel would take a full day's work.

It would have been better to get an Indian colleague to send the parcel because foreigners sending parcels were under more scrutiny. The colleague could send a peon. But the Indian would tell Akerlof that sea-mail was slow and uncertain. Just wait till one of your USAID people turns up for a conference. He will be happy to do a favour for two distinguished colleagues.  

Each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box. This occurred until a few months before my de-parture when I decided to include it in the large shipment of another friend who was returning to the United States at the same time as myself.

There are economies of scope and scale in such transactions. Come to think of it, the correct solution would have been to send the clothes by diplomatic bag. The US mission in India had great respect for economists. Galbraith had been a very successful Ambassador. Guys like Akerlof or Stiglitz might hold senior positions in the Administration within a few years.  

The preceding story can be represented mathematically in the following way.

It can't be represented mathematically because the probability of a successful outcome (e.g. the parcel reaching Stiglitz within a month) was unknown. Nor was the probability of bumping into a guy at an Embassy party who's be leaving for home in a couple of days and who had space in his suitcase for a parcel of clothes. 

Moreover, Akerlof was doing his own work conscientiously. He wasn't really a 'procrastinator' putting off mission critical tasks. 

The box was left with me on day 0. At the end of the year, at date T, the box could be costlessly transported.

More importantly, it would be transported with high certainty of success. What was unknown was when the parcel would reach Stiglitz if sent by sea-mail.  

The cost of sending the box on any day prior to T was estimated at c, the value of a day's work.

This is silly. Akerlof was a foreigner. An Indian colleague would have been happy to take on the task though, as I said, he would have advised Akerlof to ask at the Embassy if they could send the parcel by bag. After all, Indian Professors sent abroad by the Indian Government often availed of this facility to save money on postage.  

I estimated Joe's valuation of the use of the contents of the box (which was the same as my value of his use of the contents) at a rate of x dollars per day. I saw no reason to attach any discount rate to his use of the box. However, each day when I awoke, the activities I would perform if I did not mail off the Stiglitz box seemed important and pressing, whereas those I would undertake several days hence remained vague and seemed less vivid. I thus overvalued the cost of sending the box on the current day relative to any future day by a factor of 8. This caused me to procrastinate.

It is obvious to me that Akerlof was operating under conditions of 'brain fog' or 'culture shock'. When you live in America and need to send a parcel, you just pop into the post office. You don't go to see your Senator or Congressman. But, if you are an American Professor in Delhi in 1968, you get stuff sent home by diplomatic bag- which always goes by air, not sea. 

Akerlof had come into possession of Stiglitz's clothes by chance. Chance might offer him a way to get them to Stiglitz with high certainty. After all, in Delhi, there were always plenty of Americans coming and going. There were also plenty of young Indian students going to the US on scholarship. They would be delighted to do a favour for a pair of rising young Professors. 

On each day t, until date T-c/x, I made the dynamically inconsistent decision that I would not send the box on that day, but would instead send it the very next day.

This is not dynamically inconsistent. It is like 'Kafka's toxin'. Akerlof had the wrong econ theory- viz one which neglected Knightian Uncertainty. So, he found a work-around- viz. affirming that tomorrow he would be a different man from the one he is today. But we all do this all the time.  

Ultimately, I decided to simply wait and send it costlessly at my departure.

No. If he bumped into a guy who was heading home, he'd have asked him to take the clothes. It may be that Akerlof didn't want to take favours from the Embassy. Back then, academics wanted to keep CIA types at arms length. 

Consider my decision process. On each day t, I awoke and

forgot that the American Embassy was at his disposal. Economists like him were important. Don't just get your parcels sent by diplomatic bag. Insist on getting Bourbon whiskey on a regular basis.  

made a plan to send the box on date t*. I chose t* to minimize V, the costs net of the benefits of sending the box.

Had there been any 'benefit' in sending the box, Stiglitz would have reminded him to drop off the parcel with the Embassy.  

My procrastination was costly.

It really wasn't. Stiglitz wasn't upset with him. It was obvious that sending stuff by sea-mail from a Turd World shithole country was sub-optimal.  

Procrastination with Deadlines.

Genuine procrastination. The other thing is 'preference falsification' or simply hypocrisy. Tomorrow I will give up smoking. But tomorrow never comes.  

The preceding model of procrastination has the special feature that if the task is not done in a timely fashion, it does not need to be done at all.

Because there was never any genuine need to do it.  

It is like the referee's report that the editor angrily sends to another reviewer after too long a lapse. However, many tasks have deadlines. For our students, the cost of procrastination involves "pulling an all-nighter" to get the term paper (conference paper) done on time.

The paper may be better in consequence. What we are dealing with is uncertainty.  Who can say why a particular paper they wrote was great while others were trash? 

A.   Stalin's Takeover

My first example concerns Stalin's ascension to power in Russia. The history of the Bolshevik party and the history of Synanon are strikingly similar.

No. Synanon was a cult. Communism was a political ideology which, in Russia, seized power and held it for seven decades.  

(I take the Bolshevik history from Isaac Deutscher, 1949). Initially, there were the early days of reformist zeal, of meeting secretly in lofts, ware-houses, and other strange places.

The Bolsheviks were revolutionaries, not reformists. Stalin had robbed banks and escaped countless times from Siberia. As an ethnic Georgian, he was able to give the Bolsheviks the appearance of having transcended Greater Russian Chauvinism. Stalin's theory of nationalities and his willingness to grant relative autonomy to Language 'added value'. By contrast, Trotsky appeared the 'Napoleon' of the movement who would want a war of conquest against more advanced economies to the West of Russia. Bukharin was associated with the NEP which was bound to collapse in a second 'scissors crisis'. Collectivization was inevitable otherwise the regime would be vulnerable to a peasant insurrection spearheaded by Cossacks. Famine and the liquidation of the kulaks killed off the spirit of Pugachev and rendered the rural masses docile.  

But, in addition, and most importantly, there was commitment to the organization. To the Bolsheviks, this commitment was of paramount importance. Indeed, it was over the constitutional issue as to whether party members should merely be contributors (either financial or political) or should, in addition, submit to party discipline that split the Russian socialist workers' movement into two parts-the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.

Nonsense! The Bolsheviks wanted a small, professional, party. The Menshiviks wanted a big 'mass contact' party similar to the Narodniks. But the industrial proletariat already had 'division of labour and specialization'. Its leaders were bound to be professionals- either Labour organizers/lawyers or else Communist cadres- whereas the peasants were likely to select their own leaders and cooperate selectively on specific issues. But this was also their weakness. The Red Army, thanks to its control of the railways and the munition factories, could hit one region after another while the peasants were on the defensive. Moreover, the village was a house divided against itself. Targeting priests, kulaks and grain merchants appealed to the poorer folk and the riff raff. 

This loyalty to party discipline, useful in the revolution, ultimately enabled Stalin to take over the party and pervert its ideals.

Sadly, the opposite was the case. He took the land from the peasants and forcibly extracted surpluses from the primary sector which he used to import capital goods. The proletariat really had gained the type of power previously possessed by the landed aristocracy. The Criminal Justice system took account of 'class origin'. If you were a poor proletarian by birth, you could be rehabilitated. If you were upper class, you got short shrift.  

It underlay the acquiescence of his tough comrade revolutionaries in the scrapping of the original principles of Bolshevism: open intraparty debate and dedication to the cause of the workers and peasants.

The other great thing about Stalin was that he was against Jews, Homosexuals, and 'modernist' artists.  

In the 1920's and 1930's, as Stalin collectivized the peasants and tyrannized over dissidents, these old comrades stood by, perhaps not quite agreeing, but not actively disagreeing either, much like Milgram's passively obedient, passively resistant subjects.

Stalin had spent a lot of time escaping prison or Siberian exile. He made sure his penal system kicked ass. Why did he gain supreme power in 1929? The answer is that if he was toppled, Trotsky would return. But this raised the spectre of a second war with neighbours to the West- a war the Soviets were bound to lose. 

The reason a Mafia boss, or Dictator, stays in power is because of the uncertainty as to what happens if he is toppled. Better the devil you know.  

Even Trotsky in exile did not unambiguously oppose Stalin until the purges had begun as a series of decisions were made that increasingly brutalized the peasantry and cut off political debate.

Russia and China had always faced the threat of a peasant rebellion. Stalin and Mao ended that threat by fucking over the peasantry so badly they remained supine forever thereafter. Stalin began industrialization in 1928. Where were resources for it supposed to come from? The answer was obvious. The primary sector had to be squeezed like a lemon. Under the first five year plan, some five million tons of agricultural produce was exported till output collapsed because of famine. But even as the Holodomor was raging, about a million tons were exported. After 1933, there was no possibility of a peasant uprising. 

Incidentally, in Eurasia, 'political debate' is a fucking nuisance. It only occurs when a regime is on the point of collapse. 

The exception to the lack of dissent proves the rule. Nadia Alliluyeva was

a nobody. She married a notorious philanderer at the age of 18. Her health was poor. She shot herself at the age of 31. Nobody cared.  

the daughter of one of the founding Bolsheviks and thus an heiress by birth to the ideals of the party.

Her dad was a pal of Stalin. But he wasn't important.  

She was also Stalin's wife. When Stalin collectivized the peasantry, moving perhaps 80 million from their farms in six months' time, she voiced her disapproval at a party-he replied savagely. That night she  committed suicide.

This is nonsense. Neither she nor other members of her family gave a damn about the peasants. She killed herself because her health was poor and her hubby was having affairs.  

This behaviour contrasts with the party leadership who,

knew that if the peasants took power, their own throats would be slit. Kulaks don't like atheists. 

like Milgram's subjects, had been participating in the decisions that were being taken.

The big decision was to get rid of Trotsky because he looked like he might become the Napoleon of the Russian Revolution. After that, there needed to be an autocrat. Autocracies can be run no other way. It isn't the case that Putin is constantly consulting with peasants and proletarians. Nor is Chairman Xi.  

At each juncture, they were confronted by the decision whether to break ranks with the increasing brutalization of the peasants

which they fucking loved! They knew that the Cossacks would take their time with them before chopping them into kebabs.  

and the choking off of dissent, or to remain loyal to the party.

i.e. continue to get paid and have access to a nice dacha.  

By acquiescing

cooperating.  

step by step to the crescendo of Stalin's actions, they were committing themselves to altered standards of behavior.

Hilarious! These guys had waded through a sea of blood to ensconce themselves in the Kremlin. Ivan the fucking Terrible was a pussycat compared to the average Bolshevik Commissar.  

In contrast, Nadia Alliluyeva, who had withdrawn from the decision-making process

she was sacked from the Party in 1921 because she was stupid and useless. As her hubby's star rose, so did that of her family. But, some were killed during one of Stalin's purges.  

to be wife and mother,

and spokesperson of disabled lesbian peasants who were being brutalized and subjected to body shaming by evil Capitalist bastids. 

could feel proper revulsion at the deviation of the party's actions from its prior ideals.

Very true. When Lenin said, in August 1918,  "Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers" what he actually meant was 'give cuddles and kisses to peasants. They are so nice.' Also, the Tzar and his family weren't shot. They died of pure joy because of all the cuddles and kisses they were receiving. 

Standard economic analysis is based

on identifying opportunity cost and trying to minimize it.  

upon the Benthamite view that individuals have fixed utilities which do not change.

That is an assumption. But it is known that some goods & services change preferences as they are consumed.  

Stigler-Becker and Becker-Murphy have gone so far as to posit that these utilities do change, but that individuals are forward looking and thus foresee the changes that will occur.

Indeed. That's why you hand over your car-keys to the bar-keep and book a taxi home.  

A more modern view of behavior, based on twentieth-century anthropology, psychology, and sociology is that individuals have utilities that do change

people change. What is useful to you today may be useless to you tomorrow.  

and, in addition, they fail fully to foresee those changes or even recognize that they have occurred.

Knightian Uncertainty is a bitch. We don't have a Momus window into our own hearts. We come from the unknowable and go to the unknowable and such knowledge as we have is a delusion or a dream.  

This lecture has modeled such behavior in sequences of decisions, given examples from everyday life, indicated the situations in which such behavior is likely to occur, and, in some instances, suggested possible remedies.

Sadly, there are no such 'sequences' because there are no well defined sets or graphs of functions.  

The theory of procrastination and obedience has applications to savings, crime, substance abuse, politics, and bureaucratic organizations.

But it cashes out as mere mechanism design. But that assumes a 'Revelation principle' and so the same problem with 'revealed preference' returns. One may as well admit that 'preferences' or 'utility' or 'capability' or 'regret' are all epistemic 'intensions' which don't have well defined extensions. For some particular purpose, a good enough approximation may be useful. But the thing will be arbitrary. What matters is whether it pays for itself.  

Econ & Identity Theory

Seeking to explain why a stupid theory was stupid (hint- it was because it was a theory and only stupid people, i.e. pedagogues, care about theories) Akerlof & Kranton did something more stupid yet- they made a distinction between the agent and his identity- in a paper they wrote 20 years ago- 

An individual gains utility when her actions and those of others enhance her self-image.

Why not say 'people become taller if they stand on tip-toe and everybody says 'oh my! how much taller you've gotten!' ? In this way, when the Doctor tells me that I am morbidly obese because I weigh 20 kg more than anyone of my height ought to weigh if they want to avoid diabetes or heart disease, I could put on a pair of stilts and hire people to say that I'm eight foot tall- in which case I am underweight. 

We may say that actions, in the main, are motivated by 'ophelimity'- expected gain- or utility which might cash out, under Knightian uncertainty as 'regret minimization'- because there is a 'fitness landscape' which weeds out behavior with negative survival value or, more actively, drives extinct all but those with a particular adaptive trait. 

What is foolish is to cure one type of idiocy- viz. pretending expected utility theory (which is only accessible if there is no uncertainty, perfect information, zero cognitive costs, P=NP etc, etc) is descriptive- with another crazier type of idiocy- viz. that people have multiple identities. There is me the fat guy who knows he needs to lose weight and there is another me the crazy bastard who puts on stilts and hangs out only with peeps wot say how tall he is. Obviously, there must also be a crazy bastard me who is totes gay for fat, sad, me but, nil desperandum, there must be a fat, sad, me who will oblige crazy-bastard-on-stilts me. The task of Economics is to arrange a marriage between these two of my various identities so Pareto optimality is achieved. Pareto himself preferred the term ophelimity to utility. What would he made of an Econ which would be matchmaker between, crazy-fat-bastard-on-stilts, Hamlet and poor drowned Ophelia whose corpse is drifting away down the stream?

Furthermore, self-image, or identity, is associated with the social environment:

But self-image is not identity. There are few men or women who are not chided by those closest to them to put aside their vanity and behave as befits what they are. The 'social environment', like the 'natural environment' can determine which identities- i.e. bodies- thrive or at least remain alive. But both can be changed by 'identities'. Akerlof and Kantor had lived too long on Campuses which had been getting steadily crazier and crazier since the late Sixties. 

People think of themselves and others in terms of different social categories.

Which is why all White Peeps must be sentenced to endless lectures on Critical Race Theory. Also, how come some heterosexual men still have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! We must re-educate all straight men till they chop off their own bollocks.  

Examples of social categories include racial and ethnic designations, and in the school context include, for example, “jock” and “nerd.”

Akerlof was 62 years old when he wrote this shite. Had he watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer he'd have known that kids in middle school had outgrown this sort of nonsense. The typical African American would play at different roles in High School and then settle upon an identity sometime between College and the Coffin. But the thing itself is no biggie. At the end of the series, everybody who could be a Vampire Slayer was a Vampire Slayer but then after the monsters were slain they got on with their lives. But life is what shows us the emptiness of any Identity save one univocal with... ah! who can say?

Prescriptions give the ideal, or stereotypical physical attributes and behavior, of people in each category.

But Paideia itself kills off those prescriptions. You quit measuring your dick or examining the mirror to see if maybe you need to start to shave. There are better things to measure and among razors Occam's is best.  

Individuals then gain or lose utility insofar as they belong to social categories with high or low social status and their attributes and behavior match the ideal of their category

Very true. If I were reclassified as an 18 year old, all my aches and pains would disappear.  Alan Kirman, by no means an imbecile, tried to repair Akerlof's stupidity in a 2006 paper co-authored with Teschl

In our view, the identity of the economic agent is

they mean motivation, not identity. If economic agent, Smith, buys cake not bread, we all agree that the identity of the buyer of cake is Smith. Previously, he bought bread. Also, he hates cake. Today he bought cake because it is his Mummy's birthday. She too hates cake but she forced him to be an economic agent when what he really wanted was to become a Secret Agent like James Bond.  

not characterized by a given and unchanging preference ordering or orderings,

save that which obtains at 'the end of time' after everything that can happen has happened or has been simulated or else everything 'factorizable' about human behavior has been as fully specified as possible. 

but reflects rather a process of continuity and change, i.e. an interplay of three different aspects of a persona that evolve over time:

why just three?  

what she currently is and does,

why not what she currently believes she is and who she is doing?

who she wants to be and where she chooses to participate, that is, to which social group she chooses to belong.

If only things were so easy! Proust wrote a very long book to show that we don't belong to the social group we think we are choosing to belong.  

Each of these aspects will correspond to a vector in the characteristics space,

there is no such 'characteristic space' because shite like this can't be factorized, is intricately impredicative and, more importantly, is non-informative if not nonsense. We may as usefully say 'everything is encoded in the poop of the neighbor's cat whose Nicaraguan horcrux is showing signs of actually having an at least partially Guatemalan identity.' 

a list, undoubtedly very long, of all relevant features of that aspect.

But very long lists can have zero impact on decision making. Cognition is costly.  

The three chosen vectors can be thought of as forming the ‘corners’ of a triangle of identity that moves and changes in a space of characteristics.

Only in the sense that the poop of my neighbor's cat can be thought of as forming the 'corners' of a polygon which once fucked a triangle and gained supernatural powers along with a nasty STD which is why its corners keep falling off. The moral of this story is stay clear of triangles- even the acute ones. You may be called a square for saying so but I used to be a polygon, till one of my corners fell off. 

John Davis added to this mishegoss by arguing that 

 the individual has a special personal identity capability, ‘interpreted as a capability for maintaining and developing an account of oneself in changing interactions with others’ (Milnar & Crespo)

This is bullshit. We pay good money so as not to have to give an account of ourselves for what we do with out own money or time. This is not to say that where you have a fiduciary or other contractual or statutory or professional duty, you might not be obliged to give such an account. But that's why you say 'no comment' and get a fucking lawyer. But this is a case of once bitten twice shy. You so order your affairs such that you either have 'Hohfeldian immunities' or it is just too fucking expensive and annoying for anyone to bother trying to get you to account for your actions. Worst comes to the worst, convert to some bizarre religion and start talking about it if you are asked to explain your actions.  

He labels this position ‘the capabilities conception of the individual’ (2011, 170).

We are capable of doing stupid shit. Take Nixon. He was capable of taping himself committing impeachable offences. But we quickly discard such capabilities. It is not a good idea to tape yourself or to have a 'discursive' self-image. The thing may feed your vanity, but it is actually your Achilles heel. 

The truth is there are sound game-theoretic reasons why our own true motivations are a mystery to us. If they weren't they'd be easily 'hacked' by a predator or a parasite.  

Individuals have several changing capabilities. The danger to be avoided is the possibility of transforming the individual in a set of multiple selves, not a unified single being. He believes this problem can be overcome with ‘self-narratives’ – ‘discursive accounts people keep of themselves’ (2011, 183) – that allow people to ‘construct personal identities for themselves in the form of autobiographies’ (2011, 171).7 The identity capability is people’s ability to organize themselves through a self-narrative (2011, 190). Self-organizing allows people to have enduring personal identities (2011, 209). Self-narratives are ‘evolutionary, open-ended, and generally do not get resolved, because people are continually engaged in developing their capabilities and this continually creates new possibilities for how their narratives will proceed’ (2011, 209). Rather than an individual task, this implies a mutual influence of personal and social identities: ‘who they [individuals] are is socially influenced, while at the same time they are a part of the social world because they influence it as well’ (2011, 213). Thus, self-narratives are both individual and social.

But those stupid lies are dangerous to the self and dangerous to society. It is better to shrug your shoulders and look at the other guy like he's a fucking Martian if he starts trying to cross-examine you. Alternatively, you could go on the offensive. You could say 'you only ask that coz you eat dog shit. Many of Lizard People do you know. Ever heard of David Icke? Crack a book sometime.' 

Libtards in the Academy bought into a notion of Identity as a 'narrative'. But only Maoists or Freudians or Cult leaders pretend any such things exist. But this is because charlatanism has a knack of getting high on its own supply and then dropping dead because that supply was shit.  

Miriam Teschl (2011, 79)8 describes Davis’ position on identity: This evolution and development of capabilities occurs through social interaction in society.

as opposed to social interaction inside a rock at the bottom of the sea.  

Conflict is important here: different capabilities arise out of different social identities, but it is the conflicts between identities that generate the need to engage in self-organizing processes.

Very true. If you are a capitalist, there is a big conflict between your identity as a capitalist and your inclination to buy a sandwich. This is because capitalists are assumed not to consume anything. That is why it is important to understand that a 'self-organizing process' is occurring any time any one buys a sandwich or takes a piss or has a wank. 

Still, it is nice to think of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type conflicts occurring all over the place and this generating the need for 'self-organizing processes' which probably involve downloading an app to your smartphone. 

Social identity has two aspects for individuals. One is relational and concerns an individual’s engagement with others from a particular position or role that they occupy using first-person, i.e., self-reflexive, representations.

So, when delivering a Pizza, don't overthink your motivation.  On the other hand, if you forget to bring the Pizza and are actually urinating on the door whose bell you have rung, your reflexive self-representation as a Pizza guy who was just trying to deliver a fucking Pizza for fuck's sake and how was I to know that the bell I rang was that of my wife's lover? As for my pissing on the doorstep- it wasn't coz I was drunk- it was just standard operating procedure when delivering invisible pizzas to peeps wot didn't order them. Of course, the better thing to do is to keep shtum when arrested. Your lawyer may be able to get you off by claiming you were suffering from some tropical disease you picked up when you were with the Peace Corps. 

The other is categorical and concerns the collective aspect of their identity, assessed from a third-person perspective.

There are an infinity of those. Spend a little money and get one you like.  

Over their lifetimes, individuals keep narrative accounts of themselves,

as Secret Agents on Mars who have sex with aliens.  

which is a way to reflect on conflicts that their social identities may create,

Wife doesn't understand me. UX-74, the sentient gas from the Asteroid belt, however, knows how to keep me hard. No. It does not involve a strap on. Anyway, sentient gasses aren't that way inclined. Crack a book sometime.  

and this engagement and self-examination is what constitutes their personal identities.

as boring farts who got tenure before everybody discovered that stuff which seemed cool then was stoooopid.  

Indeed, personal identity is an evolving narrative, but it does not necessarily have to be a single, continuous story.

Coz UX-74, the sentient gas from the Asteroid belt could become embodied in your neighbor's wife. She does have a strap-on but not necessarily as part of a single continuous story coz you have been turned into a sentient gas- or, in my case, fart.  

It is rather a succession of ongoing conflict-solving discursive accounts, which also help the individual reflect upon the past and project themselves into the future.

why not parallel realities? Did these guys not watch Quantum Leap?  

It is a way of being influenced by and influencing the social structure in which the individual evolves. The individual is thus socially embedded, and yet each self-narrative is highly individualized.

Sadly, narratives can't be individualized greatly without becoming as boring as shit. There are only a small number of plots which can hold anybody's attention. This is the moral of the final episode of the first series of She-Hulk Attorney at Law. 

Ivana Anton Mlinar & Ricardo F. Crespo, in a paper titled 'Identity theories in Economics ; a Phenomenological Approach', write 

Buying a new car is an economic action.

It may be. It may not. Only if scarcity obtains and a rational calculus of an objective was applied would the action be economic. The fact that an action has a certain type of effect does not mean the action was, itself, of that type.  

When buying a car, you make calculations and economic comparisons among car models, taking into account their specific features.

I don't. I get expert advise. If this is unavailable I look at the worst case scenario. If the thing is a 'lemon', how much do I stand to lose on resale or return? This is a well studied 'information asymmetry problem'. Thus, I know in advance some manufacturers of okay-but-not-great cars will go to great lengths to protect me from the 'lemon' downside because they want to sell cars to guys like me who know shit about cars. This means I will look for less protection because there must be other manufacturers who have low marketing costs to better informed customers. This means I need to identify the market or forum where guys with my level of income but greater knowledge congregate and establish metrics. But manufacturers know this as well. There's a tradeoff here between becoming a pseudo-connoisseur and getting shafted and being an ignorant guy who also gets shafted. Maybe, I'll pay a little money to get expert advise. 

However, you may also feel loyalty to a brand, sympathy for the seller, or you may be used to buying cars from a single dealership; you listen to and take into account your wife’s tastes and opinions; you might be influenced by the beauty of a specific car, and so on. In short, there are plenty of motivations involved in the transaction.

There is only one motivation for the customer- viz. 'regret-minimization'. You buy a car your wife hates and you will regret it even if you say you don't coz people know your wife and are silently chuckling over the hell she is giving you.  

 Thus, we need a concept of agency and identity that supports all the abilities and characteristics implied in the second meaning above.

Fuck off! Regret doesn't involve a whole lot of agency- menus are given and your choice is be shafted now by this guy or be shafted later by that other guy- and identity is irrelevant. People are laughing at you for buying a heap of junk. You try telling them about that time Mrs. Mwanga slapped you in Swahili class and you shit yourself and they laugh even more- more especially when your wife reveals that's the reason you quit teaching and had to settle for a job working for her idiot brother. 

Resale value has nothing to do with agency or identity, nor does fuel efficiency. Do Mlinar & Crespo really get a lot of calls from friends and family asking them to apply phenomenological conceptions of identity and agency to help them decide between buying a Vauxhall Corsa and Nissan Qashqai? 

In fact, these traits do not call for an ‘economic’ specificity in agents and their identity. Agents performing economic actions are entirely involved in these actions. A notion of ‘economic agent’ only makes sense for the third meaning the economic; consequently, as the third meaning is an ‘idealization’, we can only speak about an ‘economic agent’ as an unrealistic simplification.

Not if we were employed as economists by Vauxhall or Nissan or were industry analysts working for a hedge fund. 

In the second meaning, there is no economic agent, but ‘simply’ a human agent, that has to be considered in her completeness.

would she sleep with me if I told her I did Tom Cruise's taxes? We often go out for a curry together.  

Similarly, we do not need a specific notion of identity for economic actions but ‘simply’ a human identity – in all its richness.

An identity class consists of members who are interchangeable for some particular purpose. For economic purposes, human beings- in all their richness, like hens- in all their richness, are interchangeable when something about them is a factor of production or a determinant of demand for particular industries.  

The example of buying a car shows how all kinds of motivations influencing human agency are involved. Hence, it seems clear that an identity theory becomes necessary to grasp economic affairs because the economic agency is essentially a human agency.

Sadly, this isn't the case. Hens can eat corn as can men. It is quite possible that the corn industry may prefer to supply hens rather than men. Hens don't pay for corn, because they have no money. But those feeding corn to the hens may be making money by selling their eggs and their corpses. Yet, as the old saying goes 'sheep eat men'- i.e. human beings may be displaced from land which can be more profitably used to raise sheep. But then our species can be displaced from particular habitats by evolutionary pressures. Ultimately, evolutionary game theory unites the Life Sciences and Economics. Both are about the same thing- survival on an uncertain fitness landscape. In aggregate, a regret minimizing multiplicative update weighting algorithm may characterize evolutionarily stable strategies for hens as much as men. But this is like 'the problem of prediction from expert advice, in which a decision maker needs to iteratively decide on an expert whose advice to follow. The method assigns initial weights to the experts (usually identical initial weights), and updates these weights multiplicatively and iteratively according to the feedback of how well an expert performed: reducing it in case of poor performance, and increasing it otherwise.' In other words, the phenomenology, or inwardness, or soul, of the agent is irrelevant. Experts matter if their expertise is about the traits of the population and the likely fitness landscape. 

Indeed, the agent, the acting-who must be considered in all her wholeness.

Only by those who can get paid to do so or who have private means and nothing better to do. Life is cruel. Stupid shit which nobody will pay for either doesn't get done or else is done for a bad reason or is done by crazy people.  

In the last section, we will introduce an identity theory that supports the characteristics of human agents when dealing with economic affairs, explaining the link between identity and agency. The standard economist can be sceptical about the usefulness of considering identity in economics. This is understandable in the context of economics as currently conceived. However, within the conception of economics as a social science, with a methodology that leaves room for prudential reason assessing decisions stemming from an incommensurable plurality of motives, identity happens to be a central motive. This concept differs greatly from today’s economics but draws closer to classical political economy. The authors of this paper believe that the ‘spirit’ of this ancient original thought about economic life should be re-established and that personal and social identity constitute a critical factor for consideration.

This is like substituting a nineteenth century panel of experts for a twenty first century panel. John Stuart Mill might say 'horsepower is what matters when you buy a carriage. Horseless carriages don't actually get hitched to horses so you probably need a really powerful bunch of horses to get it to move by pushing it.' Karl Marx would say 'carriages are owned by the fucking bourgeoisie mate. Horseless carriages are hitched to proletarians. But proletarians actually make the horseless carriage! Thus the horseless carriage is actually the proletariat-as-horse! The more carriages the proletariat fabricates the more the proletariat is compelled to pull those carriages! Coming back to the question of what sort of car to buy- how about a Ford Mustang? That's got a horse in its name.' 

Husserl started off as a mathsy guy back when people thought intuition could be non-arbitrary. In other words, sooner or later maths would put everything on an algorithmic basis. Truth would be provable for everybody or have 'naturality'- i.e. non-arbitrariness. There would be certainty. One implication would be that Evolution would pose no scandal. Whether God created us in his image or we are just hairless apes wouldn't matter. Nature would be Truth would be Mathematical and thus the Logos, indeed, would be all. 

For Husserl , us being persons originates in us performing a specific kind of intentional act, which he calls ‘position-taking’ (Stellungnahme).

having an opinion- this is 'doxa'. But this is a foolish opinion. Us being persons originates in us being babies and then us being little kiddies and then obnoxious adolescents and so forth. Many of us have no opinion on anything but can adopt any old shit if it is to our advantage or seems cool or holds boredom at bay.  

Husserl may have had the intention of making a big deal about intentionality but he failed because we think he merely had the intention of writing bollocks so as to get peeps to think he was smart. 

The whole point about intentions is that we only talk about them because they are strategic. The murderer needs to say that he only intended to help the guy he stuck a knife in. There was this piece of dirt on his shirt and I intended to brush it off very gently with this brush I was holding in my hand except it turned out it was a knife. How did it get there? Fuck if I know.

Uncertainty under coordination and discoordination  is the reason it is useful to have a separate branch of 'theory of mind' for intentions.

In the same sense, Wojtyla asserts that “knowledge about man and his world has been identified with the cognitive function […] And yet, in reality, does man reveal himself in thinking or rather in the actual enacting of his existence? –

acts are important. Thoughts, for most of us, are not.  

in observing, interpreting, speculating, or reasoning […] or in the confrontation itself when he has to take an active stance upon issues requiring vital decisions and having vital consequences and repercussions?” (Wojtyla 1979, vii–viii).

Fuck that. Do what the smart folks are doing or what the guys with the guns want you to do.  

To be a self – namely, to be a person – means, first, not to be a natural object 

be an unnatural subject instead. Phenomenology will send you round the bend. More work for the psychoanalysts- right? Then yet more stupid charlatans can get busy marrying Husserl to Freud or Heidegger to Marx or other such foolishness. Meanwhile sensible socioproctologists concentrate on marrying dogs to cats.

– that is, an ‘I’ does not appear as a dependent part of causal connections,

so, this is a nineteenth century ideology which doesn't get that Nature may not be composed of inert stuff tightly bound together by causal chains. Causality costs money- i.e. energy or information- & the economy of the Universe may be more parsimonious than we can imagine. Since meaning is economy- at least in Hinduism- Life may actually be even less meaningful than Nature. It is merely a sort of arbitrage on a collapsing market. 

as a mere individual with its specific essential features, but it emerges in motivational connections of intentional subjects.

so, intentionality is game theoretic- i.e. strategic.  

This can be understood considering that causality is the fixed and empirical legality of physical nature, characterized by certainties in expectations,

So Quantum Theory is just bullshit then. Still, in Physics, we don't have to worry about bosons trying to put one over on fermions. Thus we can speak of wave functions. In Econ, Uncertainty is Knightian. There are no probability distributions because possible states of the world are unknown.  

whereas motivation serves as the basic principle of consciousness – in other words, of the subjective condition.

No. Motives are things imputed or ascribed to for a particular purpose. They aren't 'basic' to any thing. They are second order. First order stuff has to do with conatus and oikeiosis- staying alive and helping your family or group survive. We don't cite motives for first order stuff- like kissing Mummy. We do cite motives when refusing to kiss Mummy because she is very cruel and is made us do our homework when that time could have been more profitably spent beating the Maths teacher till he gave us a better grade.   

Husserl (2004, 299) asserts, ‘It should be taken into account that this causality of nature, […], is radically different from the causality of motivation that purely reigns inside the sphere of the mental, of the sphere of the immanent subjectivity. In the case of causality of motivation, the necessity of the connection is comprehensible’. For him, ‘causality in the physical nature is nothing else than a fixed empirical regulation of coexistence and succession, always given in the experience in form of certainties in expectation’ (1960, 134).

But 'experience' is costly in terms of cognition. We have to be choosy about what we experience and parsimonious in signal reception and processing. That's why Knightian Uncertainty is a fundamental feature of empirical reality or our 'Lebenswelt' or phenomenology or whatever. There is always something arbitrary about this. Canonicity or Naturality, for a particular purpose, may arise- but we can't be sure this ever happens. 

The intentional character of an ‘I’ entails taking a stance towards things, towards the world and others, not merely relating in a fixed, predictable way but in a comprehensible manner.

But nothing is more predictable than that a charlatan, or practitioner of pseudo-science, will talk high falutin' bollocks of an obviously foolish kind. Why speak of an intention to act when it is merely a meta-action cancelled out by the fact that an infinite number of contradictory meta-actions are compossible with any given action- or no fucking action at all?

It consists of more than perceptual, wakeful awareness, but it does not involve other higher-order activities in its original core sense. Taking a stance does not include making explicative or comparative judgments  – higher order activities.

Not necessarily. A judgment is still a judgment even if no evidence is examined and no stance is taken. A higher order activity involves a review of lower order activities. But such review may arise even if there is no such intention on anyone's part. Only where some great cost or conflict is to be avoided might 'review' be invoked.  

It is simply the defining feature of the personal subjective condition of the self; then, it is the “quality” of the subjective way to view or connect with objects (facts, etc.), revealing their traits but not as imposed features.

In which case this is a Brouwerian choice sequence which may be 'lawless'. Intuitionism, Semiotics, Phenomenology all arose out of a faulty, nineteenth century, view of Physics and would have the effect of putting to rest the Darwinian scandal. It turned out that the real scandal for Reason would arise only if Darwin was hopeless wrong because then only Occasionalism of a very strict Monist sort would be true. Of course, for us, this may still be the case. It's just that we are in the wrong universe. More sadly, the Universe each of us is at home in is unique and wholly arbitrary.

Subjective receptivity adopts this form: specific availability directions are in the person, influencing the (theoretical, axiological or practical) way she handles an object (facts, etc.).

Till she sees it is more sensible to outsource that kind of stuff. But then, our genes have already done so.  

All position-taking occurs as a specific form of intentional directedness towards being, values, or goals.

Only in a manner of speaking. The truth is, no position-taking occurs save if that is what one is paid to do but even then the thing is just play-acting.  

By means of a progressive position-taking exercise, a stable, “sedimented” character is shaped –

only to be abandoned if something else pays better or you suddenly realize everybody thinks you are a boring fart.  

that is, the person becomes determined, more receptive to specific dimensions or directions of the availability of things or facts. 

this happens even to slaves who never got to take any position. Indeed, the less meaningful or rewarding our activity, the more we take on the traits, generally negatively, associated with it.  Phenomenology may have started off innocently enough as a search for something deeper and more meaningful than what was available in an increasingly utilitarian Academy. But it soon became shrill and sententious. 

... how could first personal givenness be brought about by narrative structures?

Joyce gave the answer. If you have literary genius then your narratives have that epiphanic quality. Phenomenology didn't notice the advances that were being made while it was going quietly potty.  

An account of self that disregards the basic structures and features of our intentional-experiential life is not fundamental,

because 'experiential life' is co-evolved, multiply realizable, and may be replaced by something with greater adaptive fitness. 

and this is the first-person perspective with the primitive form of self-reference that it entails.

Nope. Self-reference is something evolves. Maybe ontogeny really does replicate phylogeny in this particular case but, either way, Joyce got everybody to see that the Narratives begin with the 'he' of the Epics and end in the always vanishing I of the modern novel.  

In order to tell stories about one’s own experiences and actions, one must already hold a first-person perspective.

No. The reverse is the case. One must first have a third person perspective of oneself- 'baby want cake'- before you evolve a second person perspective as belonging to another till finally you start getting tp 'ego autonomy'. Consider Tolkein's Gollum who speaks of himself as though he were a little child. We may well believe that this sort of self-pity and inability to see oneself as responsible for one's own action is the mark of a tyrant or a psychopath. Yet such people may have high cognitive functioning. They can present an account of themselves which might be very convincing and which might win sympathy for them. 

Identity arises where autonomy has been established. But that may involve going beyond language which is merely our 'being for others'. Stories unfold in time. There is 'Granger causality'. But Identity may be outside time. It may have no principle of causation or principle of sufficient reason. We simply don't know. For any specific purpose, there is a good enough way of simplifying the problem by 'factorizing' it or specifying different 'representative agents'. But that is an extensional matter. Identity may be wholly intensional.