Developmentalism and the design of societies, part 2

To continue building on the subject from the last post, I will now refer to the book "Poetic Justice" by Martha Nussbaum. The author of the book is a philosopher who started teaching a Law and Literature course in 1994 to Law students at the University of Chicago. Ms. Nussbaum's drive to write this book was her growing concern that philosophical discussion of literature and art, essential elements of public deliberation, had been replaced in law and public service curricula by the "scientific" approach of the law-and-economics movement.

To me the book draws a parallel between law and literature on the one hand, and economics and design on the other. As practices of law and economic development have been dominated by statistical data for decision-making, literature and design invite us to understand humans as individuals with unique needs, passions, desires, emotions and intelligence that cannot be disregarded or summarized into pseudo-scientific data.

Ms. Nussbaum used the novel "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens throughout her book to illustrate the dangers of applying utilitarian theory models to summarize human behaviors. One of the main character in the book is Thomas Gradgrind -

"Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over... With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic."

Gradgrind's thinking - although obviously exaggerated - is Dickens' criticism of the pseudo-scientific utilitarian approach that decision makers in the public and business worlds often take to interpret human behavior and make decisions concerning the future of public life and organizational strategy.

According to Ms. Nussbaum, defenders of the utilitarian theory have three responses to this criticism. The first is that utilitarian theory is not intended to offer a complete account of every aspect of people and their inner worlds. But some proponents claim that economics can indeed give a predictive account of human behavior. The second is that utilitarian theory is descriptive, not normative. However, as we saw in the previous posting, developmentalists use utilitarian models to yield information that is used for normative policy making. The third response is that all insights of human behavior can be assigned weights and thus turned into calculations. But the process of assigning weights to human behaviors is not scientific, and therefore it requires some level of interpretation and deliberation before a "rational" result is achieved.

Criticism of utilitarian theory and developmentalism has led a group of economists and philosophers to develop quality of life measures that focus on individual needs, functions and capability rather than on the opulence of a nation. This approach has been used by the governments of Finland and Sweden, proving that inequalities in a population can be successfully measured with qualitative approaches.

The good news for prospective MBA students is that leading business schools in North America and Europe are re-designing their curricular programs to add such courses as cognitive science, behavioral psychology and linguistics amongst others in order to compensate for their lack of humanity. The current changes in business programs will be the subject of the next post.