Ignorance

Abstract: The opportunity to deliver the Richard T. Ely Lecture, from which this chapter is derived, afforded me some very personal satisfactions. Ely, unbeknownst to him, bore a great responsibility for my economic education, and even for my choice of profession. The example of my uncle, Harold Merkel, who was a student of Commons and Ely at Wisconsin before World War I, taught me that human behavior was a fit subject for scientific study, and directed me to economics and political science instead of high energy physics or molecular biology. Some would refer to this as satisficing, for I had never heard of high energy physics or molecular biology, and hence was spared an agonizing weighing of alternative utiles. I simply picked the first profession that sounded fascinating. Ely's influence went much further than that. My older brother's copy of his Outlines of Economics – the 1930 edition – was on our bookshelves when I prepared for high school debates on tariffs versus free trade, on the Single Tax of Henry George. It provided me with a sufficiently good grounding in principles that I was later able to take Henry Simons' intermediate theory course at the University of Chicago, and the graduate courses of Frank Knight and Henry Schultz without additional preparation. The Ely textbook, in its generation, held the place of Samuelson (1947) or Bach in ours.

Abstract: This paper presents a new experimental paradigm for the study of human-computer interaction, Five experiments provide evidence that individuals’ interactions with computers are fundamentally social. The studies show that social responses to computers are not the result of conscious beliefs that computers are human or human-like. Moreover, such behaviors do not result from users’ ignorance or from psychological or social dysfunctions, nor from a belief that subjects are interacting with programmers. Rather, social responses to computers are commonplace and easy to generate. The results reported here present numerous and unprecedented hypotheses, unexpected implications for design, new approaches to usability testing, and direct methods for verii3cation.

Abstract: The article subjects the assumptions and prescriptions of the ‘Corporate Culture’literature to critical scrutiny. the body of the article is devoted to teasing out the distinctive basis of its appeal compared with earlier management theory. It is seen to build upon earlier efforts (e.g.‘theory Y’) to constitute a self-disciplining form of employee subjectivity by asserting that ‘practical autonomy’is conditional upon the development of a strong corporate culture. the paper illuminates the dark side of this project by drawing attention to the subjugating and totalitarian implications of its excellence/ quality prescriptions. to this end, parallels are drawn with the philosophy of control favoured by the Party in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Specifically, the paper critiques the ‘doublethink’contention that autonomy can be realized in monocultural conditions that systematically constrain opportunities to wrestle with competing values standpoints and their associated life projects.