And What Does This Post Signal?

By -
Ryan Murphy contends that buying local organic "crap" is just a form of signaling. Two things:

1) No one is trailing me as I shop, Ryan. I can buy anything I want to without anyone knowing. I could buy the cheapest, most distantly grown things in the store and tell everyone it's local organic produce, if I want, and get away with it for years. If it is "all about" signaling, then why would I actually buy local produce instead of just talking about how I do so?

2) Isn't what is good for the goose also good for the gander? Shouldn't signaling theorists (and other reductionistic social theorists) apply their theory to themselves? If organic-food shoppers are "really just" signaling how environmentally conscious they are, shouldn't we be asking what Ryan is signaling in putting forward that theory? Perhaps he's not actually doing economics, he's "really just" signaling how tough-minded and cynical he is.

UPDATE: And none of the above means that signaling does not occur! Of course it does. But it is an abstraction, and no human action is ever "just" an abstraction.

Comments

  1. Anonymous1:36 AM

    This is just stupid. Do some people do this? Sure. I don't, because I don't give two shits about what anybody thinks about me. I can care less if it's organic, but I do buy local pretty often for two main reasons: A lot of stuff is cheaper because you can actually haggle the price, and there simply is some stuff that you will never be able to find at a regular store.

    The fact that there are trendy douches in the world who "signal" is nothing new. You can spot them by their contempt for those who don't do as they do.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more