http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/429
Några citat (dock har bold och italic text försvunnit, läs hellre artikeln):
So originally, the raison d’être of economic science was the macroeconomic management of growing political entities. Basically, the way you manage a macro-entity is to fit all the micro-pieces (i.e., people) into the micro-positions (i.e., jobs and functions) in which—so you believe—they will best contribute to the macro-entity’s “performance.” In order to efficiently produce and distribute goods, and later services, you basically have to get the best functional fit between your population and the economic tasks at hand. Thus was economics born, as the social-engineering science that dealt with the allocation of efforts and rewards within a system of functional interdependence. Note that, from the beginning, the efforts required were (obviously) both physical and intellectual, while the rewards were exclusively material: they were measured by the amount of goods and services that your material rewards made accessible for you.
In such a context, it should be noted, “society” is first and foremost—and often exclusively—seen as the system of governance schemes designed to order a potentially disorderly set of individuals scrambling for material rewards. Society, in such a view, is something that’s designed by people—but mainly and even exclusively by those people who are “in charge” of looking after the Whole and to keep it in a measure of internal order. This rather hierarchical view (which is often left implicit in economics) has important implications for our understanding of the notion of “incentives”. Seeing society as a system of order-maintaining governance schemes implies that those who are in charge of looking after these schemes will tend to view the population of agents as a more or less homogeneous statistical whole. The reasons is that top-down management of the overall system requires a positivistic (exterior, surface-oriented) attitude towards the components of that system because the manager simply can’t take into account all individual specificities. In fact, the more homogeneous the components—or, at least, the more interchangeable—the easier it will be to manage the system. It will be complicated enough, mind you! But at least you won’t have to worry about individuals standing up and asking for things like recognition, respect for their subjectivity, and so on. You can use statistical tools and fairly transparent formal models in order to see through the chaos.
One of the main implications of this is that economics has to become evolutionary in a way that’s it isn’t yet today: it has to embrace our ability, and our (often stifled) desire, for individual work on what it means to be “economically rational” and for collective work on what a truly “human-potential-enhancing” economic system would be—in short, economic evolutionism has to fully honor our ability and desire for conscious evolution,whereas today’s mainstream economic evolutionism is still stuck within a narrowly adaptive and computational form of consciousness.
