In Defense of Anagorism

political economy in the non-market, non-state sector

Do I contain multitudes?

Looks like someone invented picoeconomics. Based on the name alone, it sounds like a very nice idea, sort of like ramen profitability only better. At least one of the complaints I have with Economics As We Know It is lack of scalability. In Earth’s high rent district (a.k.a. the “first world”) there’s a level of income below which survival is not feasible. On a little further reading, it seems the idea behind picoeconomics is not scalability of economic activity, but of economic actors:

Where microeconomics is used to describe the negotiation for resources between individuals, picoeconomics (or micro-micro-economics) describes a similar process but within an individual himself, helping define different aspects of his [sic] behaviour.

This may have implications for thick individualism. According to Robert Vienneau:

If a community cannot have group rights and cannot have an unique ordering of choices2, how can an individual have such rights when he may be just as divided in mind as a community?

Comments

3 responses to “Do I contain multitudes?”

  1. n8chz Avatar

    It seems that the application of picoeconomic theory is a matter of contractual obligations between one’s selves. This doesn’t bode well for the prospects of contract-free society, or even for the nonzero tolerance policy.

  2. Jeremy Weiland Avatar

    Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Not sure an economic analysis of the different aspects within the self is the right lens – what scarcity would we be allocating? – but I am very curious about “piercing the individual veil” and understanding the individual as not simply a singularity but as a dialectical, composite phenomenon. It’s not enough IMHO to say the individual is socially constructed – one has to at least begin to explore the discrete composition of the individual within in order to make sense out of the social/individual dichotomy in the first place.

    And by the way, as a left libertarian who has been railing against market fundamentalism in left libertarianism for years, I’m very, very excited to follow your future posts and thought.

    1. n8chz Avatar

      I don’t know, maybe allocating time (or money) between physical fitness and books? Build the body or feed the head. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could max out both. Meanwhile I can only imagine that the correlation between income and life expectancy gets stronger by the year. I should try to scarf up some statistics on that.

      Railing against market fundamentalism in left libertarianism…sounds like I’ve come across a fellow traveler! I never worded it quite that strongly in the case of left libertarian causes, but I must admit that I absolutely bristle every time I see a link to that right wing think tank mises.org (complete with aristocratic coat of arms) on a left libertarian website.

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