How Do I Know If the Agreements I Accept Are the Ones I Would Choose? — The Purpose of the Ecosynomics Framework

Does our “normal” practice today for how we organize our interactions with other people, following the guidelines provided by best practice, lead to the outcomes and experiences — the ends and means — we expect?  What we expect for all of our efforts?  If not, are there examples of people whose practices do?  Everyday for everyone?  Ecosynomics is a name we have given to the emerging science that is identifying, describing, and connecting them.

We find that the outcomes and experiences of our interactions are a choice, a choice in human agreements.  For there to be choice in human agreements, Ecosynomics requires “disciplined discourse, discourse in which there are substantive as well as procedural tests of the worth of statement” (Anderson, 1990, Pragmatic Liberalism, p.47).

Whereas “explanation in physics will inevitably take the form of laws of force and motion…[and] in biology, explanation will have to do with ideas of the development of organism…[for] this is what explanation in physics and biology means…Such core presuppositions of a discipline are not really subject to criticism or experimental analysis.  They are rather constitutive principles of the enterprise” (p. 47).  In ecosynomics, we base explanation on the outcomes and experience human beings have when they interact, through their agreements, thus its constitutive parts are agreements. experience, and outcomes.

The question for testing the value and validity of human agreements, whether they are unconsciously accepted or consciously chosen, is whether they lead to the expected outcomes and experiences, the ends and the means.  If they don’t, we change them.  If we don’t know how, we can look to see whether someone else has figured out how or we innovate on our own.  Some of these agreements are more relevant, of greater value, and some are more rigorous and coherent, more valid.  It would seem that the human experience, in great part, is about the search for forms of agreements about how we interact that lead, ever more so, to the experiences and outcomes we expect.  The ecosynomics framework shows that it is possible to test the value and validity of forms of agreements.  What do you want?  What do you agree to?  Does it work?

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