Monday, March 13, 2006
algebra
In international health near the turn of the twenty-first century, a mentality prevailed that borrowed from the nineteenth-century utilitarian philosophers, from the notion that one should provide the greatest good for the greatest number, and it was expressed in a language of realism. The world had limited resources. Nations whose resources weren't just limited but scarce had to make the best possible uses of the little they had. Other countries and international institutions might help out, but these days, if you wanted money from big donors for health projects in poor countries, if you wanted to be taken seriously, your proposals had to pass a test, called cost-effectiveness analysis.
The general technique was first used in engineering, later on in war and medicine. You calculated the cost of a public health project or medical procedure and tried to quantify its effectiveness. Then you compared the results for competing projects or procedures. But it seemed to Farmer that the high councils in international health often used this analytic tool to rationalize an irrational status quo: TB treatment was cost-effective in a place like New York, but not in a place like Peru.
"Resources are always limited." In international health, this saying had great force. It lay behind most cost-effective analyses. It often meant, "Be realistic." But it was usually uttered, Farmer thought, without any recognition of how, in a given place, resources had come to be limited, as if God had imposed poverty on places like Haiti. Strictly speaking, all resources everywhere were limited, Farmer would say in speeches. Then he'd add, "But they're less limited now than ever before in human history." That is, medicine now had the tools for stopping many plagues, and no one could say there wasn't enough money in the world to pay for them.
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains
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Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary society. Complete analogy.
Algebra and money are essentially levelers, the first intellectually, the second effectively.
The relation of the sign to the thing signified is being destroyed, the game of exchanges between signs is being multiplied of itself and for itself. And the increasing complication demands that there should be signs for signs....
Among the characterizations of the modern world we must not forget the impossibility of thinking in concrete terms of the relationship between effort and the result of effort. There are too many intermediaries. As in the other cases, this relationship which does not lie in any thought, lies in a thing: money.
As collective thought cannot exist as thought, it passes into things (signs, machines...) Hence the paradox: It is the thing which thinks, and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing.
The spirit, overcome by the weight of quantity, has no longer any criterion other than efficiency.
Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.
This is true even with material things: fire, water, etc. The community has taken possession of all these natural forces.
Question: Can this emancipation, won by society, be transferred to the individual?
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
The general technique was first used in engineering, later on in war and medicine. You calculated the cost of a public health project or medical procedure and tried to quantify its effectiveness. Then you compared the results for competing projects or procedures. But it seemed to Farmer that the high councils in international health often used this analytic tool to rationalize an irrational status quo: TB treatment was cost-effective in a place like New York, but not in a place like Peru.
"Resources are always limited." In international health, this saying had great force. It lay behind most cost-effective analyses. It often meant, "Be realistic." But it was usually uttered, Farmer thought, without any recognition of how, in a given place, resources had come to be limited, as if God had imposed poverty on places like Haiti. Strictly speaking, all resources everywhere were limited, Farmer would say in speeches. Then he'd add, "But they're less limited now than ever before in human history." That is, medicine now had the tools for stopping many plagues, and no one could say there wasn't enough money in the world to pay for them.
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains
-----
Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary society. Complete analogy.
Algebra and money are essentially levelers, the first intellectually, the second effectively.
The relation of the sign to the thing signified is being destroyed, the game of exchanges between signs is being multiplied of itself and for itself. And the increasing complication demands that there should be signs for signs....
Among the characterizations of the modern world we must not forget the impossibility of thinking in concrete terms of the relationship between effort and the result of effort. There are too many intermediaries. As in the other cases, this relationship which does not lie in any thought, lies in a thing: money.
As collective thought cannot exist as thought, it passes into things (signs, machines...) Hence the paradox: It is the thing which thinks, and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing.
The spirit, overcome by the weight of quantity, has no longer any criterion other than efficiency.
Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.
This is true even with material things: fire, water, etc. The community has taken possession of all these natural forces.
Question: Can this emancipation, won by society, be transferred to the individual?
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
