musings of an itinerant lover

According to wikipedia “conceptual frameworks are a type of intermediate theory that have the potential to connect to all aspects of inquiry (e.g., problem definition, purpose, literature review, methodology, data collection and analysis). Conceptual frameworks act like maps that give coherence to inquiry.” I view it as an explicitly stated understanding of what you know to be true. So we go through life making tons of assumptions: people are bad, people are good, that’s just the way it is, business is business, don’t mix business and friends, businesses are supposed to make money, organizations are supposed care for the well-being of their members, reality is integrated, etc. Of course some of our assumptions are accurate and others are not. The purpose of writing a conceptual framework is to hang these assumptions in front of you so that you can examine them critically and hopefully, over time, you will be able to discard some of the erroneous assumptions and more deeply develop some of the more accurate ones.

In my first undergraduate economics course, a rather self-assured professor of mine stood in front of the classroom and confidently declared that humans are “selfish, greedy, have unlimited wants and the world has limited needs and thus the field of economics.” What he really meant to say was that “we have a conceptual framework that has evolved throughout the history of civilization and this framework has underlying assumptions about human nature, the purpose of governance, the distribution of wealth and other things. Sometimes those assumptions are accurate and sometimes they’re a bit inaccurate and what the field of economics is based on today is the assumption that human nature is exclusively selfish, greedy and has unlimited wants”….that’s what he really meant to say I think…it just came out wrong.

(more…)

I have recently had the opportunity to participate in a forum wherein the participants have been exploring the foundation of the current global economic system and challenging some of the basic assumptions that may not represent our current understanding of reality.  Though I think virtually everybody on that forum is far more qualified and capable of providing meaningful input to the discussion, I wanted to share some thoughts that I posted on my blog.

My own formal training in economics was only at the undergraduate level, most of the time of which I was fairly intellectually comatose. My interface with our economic system has instead been mainly as an entrepreneur. In doing so I feel and daily taste the fruit of our system but I find that I rarely take the time or energy to think deeply and penetrate the assumptions underlying such a system. As such I feel it is helpful for me to start from the most fundamental assumptions that I believe to be true, state those assumptions explicitly, and work my way from there. I unfortunately don’t have much of a toolkit for this type of thinking, so unless I start from the absolute basic underlying assumptions of what we know to be true I find time and again my thinking gets hijacked by largely unexamined patterns of thinking that, because I have been thinking this way for so long, become my go-to default modus operandi. I hope that the following provides some useful and relevant content for the ongoing discussion surrounding the current global economic situation and that it is not too basic or elementary. If so I hope you bear with my attempt and I very much welcome any assistance in ways that I can improve my approach or thinking on these topics.

(more…)