homo economicus outdated
i attended the 5th interdisciplinary university conference “menschenbild im 21. jahrhundert” (“the idea of man in the 21st century”) held on 3rd december at the university of vienna. homo ecologicus is needed. homo economicus is outdated. it’s a reductionistic, deterministic view that does not hold anymore. that message was clear throughout all contributions.
in particular, i was impressed by helga kromp-kolb, professor at the institute of meteorology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. that climate change has started, is a fact. that it is due to anthropogenic causes, is substantiated by climate models. that is, though model simulations are the constructs of human brains and prone to failure, it is hard to argue that they don’t capture any feature of our common reality as radical constructivists might be inclined to do. the only question is: have we already crossed the tipping point beyond which we leave to our next generation a planet that escapes human intervention? we have to do with self-organising systems. they are complex and nonlinear and small changes in the causes might have incredible effects. so it’s not a tame problem, as harald wilfing from the faculty of life sciences of the University of Vienna pointed out correctly. it’s rather a so-called wicked problem, if not a super-wicked one: we do not exactly know how the final state is where we would like to head for; we do not exactly know how to get there, since there are barriers to appear; and we don’t even exactly know the state-of-the-art from which we are to start from.
also the analyses given by several speakers were quite clear. technology (which brings about the effects in nature that are harmful for our life) is driven by socio-economic developments like profit-making and principles that go hand in hand with it like orientations toward quantitative growth, gdp, interest and compound interest, shareholders instead of stakeholders etc.
the photo shows the vicerector of the University of Vienna, johann jurenitsch, when opening the conference. the picture in the background which was promoted to the logo of the conferences is from friedensreich hundertwasser. a text of his from 1972 is quoted: “the straight line is unholy.” (photo: thea meinharter)