The essential, the useless and the harmful (part 2)
By Eloi Laurent
How do we know what
we can do without while continuing to live well? To clarify this sensitive
issue, economic analysis offers a central criterion, that of the useful, which
itself refers to two related notions: use and utility.
First of all, and
faithfully to the etymology, what is useful is what actually serves people to
meet their needs. From the human point of view, then, something is useless that
doesn’t serve to meet people’s needs. Amazon announced on March 17 that its warehouses would now store only “essential
goods” until April 5, and defined these as follows in the context of the
Covid-19 crisis: “household staples, medical supplies and other high-demand
products”. The ambiguity of the criterion for the useful is tangible in this
definition, which conflates something of primary necessity and something that
emerges from the interplay of supply and demand. While giving the appearance of
civic behaviour, Amazon is also resolutely in line with a commercial
perspective.
Furthermore, this
first criterion of the useful leads into the oceanic variety of human
preferences that punctuate market movements. As Aristotle recalls in the first
chapter of the Nicomachean ethics,
the founding text of the economics of happiness written almost two and a half
millennia ago, we find among individuals and groups a multiplicity of
conceptions of what constitutes a good life. But contrary to the thoughts of Aristotle,
who erected his own concept of happiness as well-being that is superior to
others, it is not legitimate to prioritize the different conceptions of a happy
life. Rather, a political regime based on liberty is about ensuring the
possibility that the greatest number of “pursuits of happiness” are conceivable
and attainable so long as none of them harms others.
But the Aristotelian
conception of happiness, which emphasizes study and the culture of books, is no
less worthy than any other. Are bookstores, as professionals in the sector
argued at the start of the lockdown in France, essential businesses just like earthly
food businesses? For some, yes. Can they be considered useless at a time when
human existence is forced to retreat to its vital functions? Obviously not.
Hence the importance
of the second criterion, that of utility, which not only measures the use of
different goods and services but the satisfaction that individuals derive from
them. But this criterion turns out to be even more problematic than that of use
from the point of view of public policy.
Classical analysis,
as founded for example by John Stuart Mill following on from Jeremy Bentham,
supposes a social welfare function, aggregating all individual utilities, which
it is up to the public authorities to maximize in the name of collective
efficiency, understood here as the optimization of the sum of all utilities. Being
socially useful means maximizing the common well-being thus defined. But, as we
know, from the beginning of the 20th century, neoclassical analysis called into
question the validity of comparisons of interpersonal utility, favouring the
ordinal over the cardinal and rendering the measure of collective utility
largely ineffective, since, in the words of Lionel Robbins (1938), “every
spirit is impenetrable for every other, and no common denominator of feelings
is possible”.
This difficulty with
comparison, which necessitates the recourse to ethical judgment criteria to
aggregate preferences, in particular greatly weakens the use of the statistical
value of a human life (“value of statistical life”, or VSL) in efforts to base
collective choices on a cost-benefit monetary analysis, for example in the area
of environmental policy. Do we imagine that we could decently assess the “human
cost” of the Covid-19 crisis for the different countries affected by crossing the VSL values calculated, for example by the OECD,
with the mortality data compiled by John Hopkins University? The economic analysis of environmental issues
cannot in reality be limited to the criterion of efficiency, which is itself
based on that of utility, and must be able to be informed by considerations of justice.
Another substantial
problem with the utilitarian approach is its treatment of natural resources,
reources that have never been as greatly consumed by economic systems as they are today – far from the promise of the
dematerialization of the digital transition underway for at least the last
three decades.
The economic analysis
of natural resources provides of course various criteria that allow us to
understand the plurality of values of natural resources. But when it comes to
decision-making, it is the instrumental value of these resources that prevails, because these are
both more immediate in terms of human satisfaction and easier to calculate.
This myopia leads to monumental errors in economic choices.
This is particularly
the case for the trade in live animals in China, which was at the root of the
Covid-19 health crisis. The economic utility of the bat or the pangolin can
certainly be assessed through the prism of food consumption alone. But it turns
out both that bats serve as storehouses of coronavirus and that pangolins can
act as intermediary hosts between bats and humans. So the disutility of the
consumption of these animals (measured by the economic consequences of global
or regional pandemics caused by coronaviruses) is infinitely greater than the
utility provided by their ingestion. It is ironic that the bat is precisely the
animal chosen by Thomas Nagel in a classic article from 1974 aimed at tracing the human-animal border, which
wondered what the effect was, from the point of view of the bat, of being a
bat.
Finally, there
appears, halfway between the useless and the harmful, a criterion other than
the useful: that of “artificial” human needs, recently highlighted by
the sociologist Razmig Keucheyan.
Artificial is understood here in the dual sense that these needs are created
from scratch (especially by the digital industry) rather than spontaneously,
and that they lead to the destruction of the natural world. They contrast with collectively
defined “authentic” needs, with a concern for preserving the human
habitat.
At the end of this
brief exploration, while it may seem rather difficult to determine the question
of useful (and useless) well-being, it nevertheless seems… essential to
better understand the issue of harmful well-being. This will be the subject of
the last post in this series.