Economic Ironies Throughout History

Applied Philosophical Insights for Modern Life

Michael Szenberg, L. Ramrattan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137450821
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Théorie économique

Economics for Alfred Marshall, the last of the classical economists, is concerned with activities in the ordinary business of life. In that milieu, we find conflicts and chaotic behavior among people, firms, and countries, which make them conduct their affairs in different, and sometimes, ironic ways. Economic Ironies Throughout History explores, explains, predicts, and harnesses these ironies for economists and scholars alike.Szenberg and Ramrattan distill their core economic ironies from a vast history of philosophy and literature that applies to economic thought. They include philosophical, psychological, literary and linguistic discussions and the personalities behind those ideas such as Socrates, Kierkegaard, Hume, Freud, Jung, Saussure, and Barthes. This book is ideal for economists as well as scholars across the business, social science, and humanities fields.

Part I

Historical and Logical Aspects of Irony

1

Introduction

This book is about ironies in the ordinary business of life. These aspects deal with how people produce, exchange, and consume goods and services. A subtle irony may reside in the fact that no matter how careful we are in performing these activities, the results do not always come out the way we intend. For instance, we may want natural resources and the environment to be sustained for future generations, so we choose to make the best net productive capacity available to them. Yet this does not necessarily guarantee that some unique species of ­animal or plant will not become extinct. This view indicates the serious side of ironies.

Some people may take irony lightly, as a play of life with characters on a world stage. In that case, we can observe that play directly or gather information about it. Such information may reveal that the characters in the play are either round or flat. A flat character is one whose behavior is predictable, while a round character is mercurial. Now a character may be ironic, flat, or round, in the role he or she plays. Even if a character just sits and does nothing, the choice not to act may have unintended ironic consequences. This work distills the ironic actions of characters in their business environment, as they are reported in media such as television, magazines, newspapers, and the radio. The purpose of this book is to present their verbal discourses, their actions in situations, and the ironic roles they play. This book is unique in several ways.

• While a too-wordy piece of literature in general may be ironic, we are interested in exploring the ironic role a character plays in the political, social, and business environments.

• An ironic view is not just a character in a literary work, but also a philosopher, a viewpoint, a way of self-expression, or an action taken. Indeed, we will find irony in the words and deeds of a person.

• Irony is also found in the stance a person or a group takes against nature, God, or others.

• Irony can be manifested in the way one says something, or the expressions one uses, such as a question mark.

• An irony may be sustained over time, or morphed into what is most relevant for an epoch.

• An irony frames the way one looks at the pre-modern, modern, and post-modern worlds.

After reading this book, one will be more irony conscious in one’s business environment.

Because irony is a broad concept, the information we present can only be a sample for a particular time. Sampling observations of a particular ironic behavior over a long period of time may be sufficient to reveal long-term behavior of a person in his or her business dealings. But that long-term view is not necessary. One may find long-term ironic behavior by examining sub-periods of time for a cross-section of persons. For instance, we learn that if one gives a sample of people a certain amount of income, they will spend it in a certain way, and that would not change over time. Intuitionalists have been able to detect conspicuous consumption as a long-term behavior, which if misdirected can have ironic consequence in business life. Classical economists have discovered the psychological propensity in individual behavior to better one’s conditions. If the individual is only accumulating wealth, an unintended ironic consequence may result. Some claim that such behavior may have created global warming, as accumulation leads to more production that results in increased pollution. While petty behavior may change easily over time, human ironic behavior remains stable at least for a sub-period of time. Good moral judgment asserts that we ought to prefer the good over the bad, as well as seek to understand who we are and the true essence of our environment. A look at our behavior may be our best guide for sustained life on earth.

We most likely have met with the term “irony” as a mode of expression. An expression is designed to convey several meanings. In an ironic expression, we are told to look for the opposite of the literal meaning of the expression. For instance, one may say of the Greek philosopher Socrates that he was the most ignorant man in Athens, although we know that he was the ­wisest man in Athens. In most of our daily lives, when a politician promises not to increase our taxes, we are inclined to think that the opposite is true. An ironic expression need not be simple, but may take on the role of a complex figure of speech such as a metonymy, metaphor, allegory, or a trope, which we will have occasions to discuss later.

Besides being a mode of expression, an irony can be expanded into a body of work. When one is looking at a play or drama, one may observe that the character has only partial information on which he or she bases the decision to act. One classic example of this is King Oedipus in Sophocles’ drama Oedipus Rex. Oedipus does not know his father, whom he has killed in an earlier scene. Later, he becomes king and is determined to find out who had killed the former ruler—his father, unbeknown to him, whom he has murdered. The irony is that the audience has this information, which is unknown to Oedipus.

Another classic example of dramatic irony relates to Romeo in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The audience knows that Juliet has only taken a sleeping potion, which Romeo is not aware of. When news reaches Romeo that Juliet has died, Romeo, ignorant of the true story, commits suicide as a result of his love for the lost Juliet. We can draw a picture of similar situations from other Shakespearean dramas where characters are disguised in the play but known to the audience, such as Viola as Cesario, Portia as the wise young law clerk, Henry V as a common soldier, and Edgar as Tom O’Bedlam (Duncan 1973, 791).

A third popular sense of irony, besides the verbal and the dramatic, is situational irony. In this type of irony, one faces conditions in his or her actions. In his poem Mending Wall, the poet Robert Frost alludes to the principle that good fences ­create a situation for having good neighbors. Following the ­situation logic rule of Sir Karl Popper in his book The Poverty of Historicism, the ironic behavior of two neighbors, separated by fences around them, is to live autonomous lives.

Irony does not always present itself in simple verbal, dramatic, and situational forms. Irony can be infinite, and no number of works can exhaust its potency in our daily life. In a situation such as a fire in a theater, one may seek a single exit, such as the nearest door, or look for multiple exits. Each time period, or epoch, has specific manifestations of irony for people to deal with their environment. Ironies stand alongside myths, science, and other time-honored ways to deal with appearance and reality. Time and technology make information accessible, revealing new appearances and new masks for old appearances in civilization. Humans are faced with the complex challenge of separating facts from appearance.

One difficult aspect of irony is that it can be a path one chooses to defend one’s most cherished beliefs. On the active side, one may need to take part in processes that would lead to decadence, as Socrates did to protect democracy in ancient Greece. In the current economic crisis called the Great Recession, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Hank Paulson Jr. have adopted policies against their ideologies in order to save our financial institutions that are said to be “too big to fail.” On the passive side, one may need to forebear things that appear inhuman, like the biblical character Job, who even in facing the Wrath of God did not give up. People are also ironically indifferent, as when Nero fiddled while Rome burned. We will discuss cases where irony is said to be a paradox, a situation that defies reason but is true.

Irony has a convergent aspect. With some ironies, one can start where he or she is and iterate to the true position of knowledge. Irony leads us to question our beliefs, and conversely one’s ironic beliefs can lead to knowledge. Armed with an ironic stance, we do not believe blindly, but learn and inquire about the things we believe. Some philosophers say that belief and knowledge occupy the extreme ends of a road. In between the two reside religion, science, and other disciplines. There is a saying attributed to the philosopher Plato that “what one believes in one comes to know.” Irony is about how we use what is at hand: tools, work, relationships, faculties, and discourses. In short, the purpose of our existence is to answer deep questions about our being. In this way irony is not a dead subject, because we dwell on it in our conscious and unconscious lives.

The examples we provide represent a simple manifestation of the many complex forms irony assumes in our media. Different forms of irony dominate different time periods; therefore we partition phases in human development in order to assign the appropriate meaning to each period. In the ancient, medieval, and modern societies, we see varied aspects of ironies emphasized. Humans were able to stem the tide of change by succeeding from the different stances they took through many different phases of life.

Some have looked for the first principles of ironic behavior. For instance, one common tactic humans have to follow in the ironic way of life is to use language. Like the ancient Greek philosophers, one postulating air, another water, and yet another earth as the first principle, linguists too are trying different first principles. Aside from language, one can start with speech and writing as the beginning principles. From time immemorial, humans have learned to communicate meaning through signs, language, sentences, and narratives. From a sound or a phoneme, we form a word. We choose among words with similar or associative meanings (vertical sense or paradigmatic), and then order them in a sentence (horizontal sense or syntagmatic) for linguistic studies (Allen 2003, 56–57). Narratives are larger than sentences. Narratives involve ­functions, actions, and storylines. Languages are dialogues relating a speaker (say, the ironist) to the audience or situations (ibid.). These ideas are comingled with the development of the human psyche. This psycho­analysis philosophizes different schools of thought over time, imprinted in our psyche through perception, and translated by linguists and economists for practical business life through social media. We will explore several first principle paths in the development of ironies in the business aspects of life.

2

Definitions of Irony

In Latin, ironia, and in Greek, eirōneia, stand for irony. The word is used in everyday speech and in philosophical ­treatises. In language it is listed as a figure of speech, but in philosophy its meaning is harder to fathom. As a working definition, we take irony to mean a pretense, ignorance, or falseness. Irony refers to many ideas—verbal irony, dramatic irony, situational irony, irony of fate, irony of satire, and Socratic irony. Verbal ironies are common in speech, such as when we say one thing but mean the opposite—for example, saying it is a nice day when it is actually raining heavily. Situational irony is also well known, such as in the saying that someone “killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.” We mention dramatic ironies as used in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and in Shakespeare’s dramas.

To further underscore the significance of irony, Goethe, a German literary authority, spoke of “artful irony designed to please us,” “good willed irony with their justness,” “broadness of view,” “gentleness in adversity and constancy in changes,” and “narrative irony,” affirming that truth can be known only through its “manifold manifestation and reflections” (Goethe 1995, Vol. 3, 184, 256; Vol. 10, 9). Booth, a modern rhetorician, gives us definitions of irony that are overt (stable and l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part I: Historical and Logical Aspects of Irony
• Part II: Application of Ironies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index