As an economist, I would have to say that Panetics has to come to grips somewhere along the line with cost-benefit analysis.

It isn't quite clear to me whether Panetics deals with the infliction of suffering or the existence of suffering. I get the impression that the latter is the more important. The study of the infliction of suffering perhaps is more manageable, being the smaller of a very large pie, or perhaps one should say cesspool.

Economists, of course, are often rather naive about cost-benefit analysis, thinking it can be reduced to dollars by asking people questions for which they invent answers, and certainly there is a concept beyond the economic concept which includes non-economic valuation. Cost-benefit analysis is a kind of balance sheet which comes up with a "bottom line" of net worth. I have argued that we should perhaps expand this to "net worthiness" to include valuation elements that cannot be reduced to monetary measurement.

If suffering is seen as a cost, then if the overall value of the benefits resulting is larger, then suffering is justified in terms of "net worthiness". Then a very important research question arises: what are the circumstances under which decisions are made which, in terms of some overall system of valuation, imposes costs which are less than the benefits?

Here we face some very tricky problems in the study of decision. Economists, of course, are rather obsessed with the principle of maximizing behavior, but the principle that people do what they think is best at the time, which underlies the mathematics of maximizing behavior, seems to me one of these things that might be called a "near identity," something that almost has to be true. Then the question arises, of course, as to whose costs and whose benefits are included in these calculations. The torturer inflicts pains, perhaps in part because he is a sadist, in part if he doesn't he will lose his job. This is a very narrow view of what is "best at the time." The person who orders the torturer, who pays the torturer, does so because he thinks the example of carrying out a threat for the information obtained or something is worth the increase in power or security which he believes, perhaps wrongly, that it gives. When Truman decided to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he no doubt thought that the suffering involved would be less than would be involved in an invasion of Japan.

The question is therefore, what kind of social institutions and structures diminish the probability of "bad decisions," those in which the net benefit, that is, benefit minus cost, is negative, or at least less than it might be if other decisions had been made in terms of what might be called "mature" structure of valuations?

This perhaps breaks down into two further questions: what are the learning processes by which people improve their estimates of costs and benefit? And what are the processes which make it more probable that people in positions of power will have both more accurate estimates of future costs and benefits and a mature value system that covers not only their own power and welfare but the whole state of the world? Under all this perhaps lies the question of what are the learning processes in the world and the institutions which promote these learning processes which are most likely to improve net benefits?

We also have to recognize that over against cost-benefit analysis, even in its more refined form, there may be an ethic of absolute values. In my presidential address to the American Economic Association I quoted one of Wordsworth's ecclesiastical sonnets, the one on King's College chapel, which begins:

Tax not the royal saint with vain expense,

With ill-matched aims, the Architect who planned—

Albeit laboring for a scanty band

of white-robed scholars only—this immense

And glorious Work of fine intelligence:

Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore

of nicely-calculated less or more.

"Lore" is, of course, economics. I think it was St. Francis who said, "To give and not to count the costs. Labor and ask for no reward." Militarism rests on a rather similar appeal, that there is no sacrifice too great, including one's life, to save one's country from defeat. I don't think the rejection of cost-benefit analysis can be completely ignored in human nature. At the same time it can, of course, be very dangerous. One reason why I regard military organizations as almost inherently pathological is that they cannot justify their budgets without an enemy. Decisions are almost certainly likely to result in negative benefits.

From: Panetics l (l), 1-2. 1992