Varoufakis gives a basic definition of instrumental rationality: “A person is instrumentally rational if she applies her resources efficiently in order to satisfy her preferences” (44). Later, he summarizes the equi-marginal principle: “Stop acting when the marginal utility (i.e. the contribution to utility from the last unit of activity) comes as close to (without being less than) the marginal dis-utility (i.e. the losses of utility following that last unit of utility)” and suggests that, “According to instrumental rationality, the rational person chooses the quantity which best satisfies her preferences all things considered (e.g. cost, fatigue, etc.). If preferences are translated into utility, to be instrumentally rational is to maximise utility subject to various constraints (e.g. fatigue, cost, etc.). And since utility is maximised when the Equi-marginal Principle is satisfied, the instrumentally rational person must always respect this principle” (50). Furthermore, Varoufakis notes the neoclassical economic contention that the equi-marginal principle “applies generally to any situation in which you have to choose between different quantities of a single ‘experience'”(51).
My interests are in trying to figure out how these principles might play out in the wired writing classroom: after all, if I’m writing about class, and if one consistent factor across all the definitions of class I’ve seen is that they carry either an explicit or implicit economic component in their definitions of position and mobility, then it would serve me well to attempt to apply the principles of that economic component of the definition of class to what happens in the writing classroom.
Let me offer one more quotation from Varoufakis on neoclassical economic models before I ask a few questions trying to figure out some of the economic workings of the wired writing classroom.
Varoufakis points out that “Economists measure the cost of doing X not in terms of just how much money X costs but in terms of what you had to give up (other than money) in order to do X. Thus the opportunity cost of reading this book includes two things: (1) having to do without the item that you would have bought had you not purchased this book; (2) the benefit from doing something other than reading this book now. [. . .] Notice how the marginal rate of substitution measures the opportunity cost of small amounts of ‘experience’/commodity Y: it measures how much you value the loss of a small amount of Y in terms of extra quantities of X, that is the opportunity cost of that one unit of Y” (58).
Some of this seems to work, at least initially, when applied to higher education: students apply their resources (and their parents’) in order to satisfy their preferences; they weigh the comparative utility of going to college or working after graduation from high school, and so on. And perhaps the marginal rate of substitution can be applied, in general terms, to doing homework or going to class: you get a certain quantity of utility from working hard, as opposed to the quantity of utility you get from sleeping in or hitting a few keggers.
But what about writing a paper? How does the marginal utility approach zero when one writes? What are the opportunity costs of doing versus not doing a paper? Of revising or not revising a paper? What is the marginal rate of substitution for student papers? One obvious answer is that it seems to depend on the individual student, or on the teacher reading the papers, or on the parent, or the friend, or the prospective employer, or the writing program administrator — and one of the chief tenets of neoclassical economics is that utility cannot be compared across individuals. I’ll have more to say about this supremacy of individualism in the next few days, but for now I think these questions point me back to the complications I detailed several days ago involved with thinking of information as a commodity. Information, as Varoufakis points out, is not like other goods, especially not when it’s digitally reproducible. The economic logics of material products have had thousands of years to be worked out, but immaterial products — information, “experience goods”, things like education or essays — demand an entirely different understanding of the notions of property, production, exchange, and consumption.
Which is why the IP work that Charlie and Clancy and others are doing with open source / open access / open content and copyleft seems so important to me. I think I’ll definitely have to go check out the CCCC IP caucus next year; while Charlie seems very focused on the scholarship side of things, I really think revising composition’s notions of intellectual property could have profound pedagogical implications.
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