Editorial

Citation

Alam Choudhury, M. (2010), "Editorial", Humanomics, Vol. 26 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/h.2010.12426daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Humanomics, Volume 26, Issue 4.

The traditional bounds of economics that were limited to materiality and measured commensurable variables and their relations have widened to allow for non-cognitive phenomenon to enter this analytical discipline. The result has been the budding of new economic dimensions that cannot even be adequately contained within such traditional compartmentalization of knowledge. The complexity of our age and lives, the rise of holistic purview of the phenomenological understanding of things necessarily made our vision and understanding a multidimensional and interdisciplinary intellection. Humanomics as the scientific research program that started 26 years ago and is still in its budding momentum, is that widening interdisciplinary field, yet most analytical to the core for the understanding of the endogenous or system nature of ethics and values, morality and similar non-cognitive factors that profoundly enter our holistic equation in social evaluations. Institutions and social orders entangle with economic and financial ones to widen our search for the more realistic answers to issues. Policymaking is a field that is directly affected by such a holistic methodological approach.

Humanomics is nonetheless not a babble of noises arising from many disciplines taken up as we feel is amenable for easing analysis. Interaction between the disciplines is not to patch up the singles into a whole. The result of the complex aggregation is different from the summation of the parts. We cannot even say that the sum of the monies earned is greater or less than the social perspective of wealth that is collectively preserved. This is because the largeness of the added result of components can most probably inflate prices and interest rates, environmental cost and inequities. The result of the linear aggregation is then lower than the sum of the parts. On the other hand, resources preserved as a common claim, at least a good part of it, are secured. Modern societies learned this fact by abandoning the hunter-gatherer social norms and moving into social security nets. The new deal, the environmental awareness, consciousness for ethics and social justice in the economic order and a socially oriented, guided future for wellbeing away from the accounting nature of gross domestic product and all that genre of incomes held in macroeconomic terms, are the result of such moves away from the linear additive nature of the old economic idea.

The papers in this issue present some such inner variables of the meta-cognitive types that define the new economy, beyond accounting identities. The result then is a new search for the complex but meaningful aggregate objective criterion for socioeconomic analysis. In Humanomics we refer to such an endogenous objective criterion with complex and unifying organic linkages between the composite variables as the wellbeing function. In its analytical form, the objective criterion function of Humanomics lends to simulation of such a multidimensional, interactive and unifying function between the selected variables. The simulation takes place by circular causation and its resulting estimation of the structural forms of relations between the variables. This signifies the organic relationship between the variables. In the end, the positivistic estimation results are reconstructed by changing the structure of the relations with normative changes in the variables, including policy variables and instruments.

While various issues have been pointed out in the different papers in this issue, they together point out the multidimensional simulation nature of the wellbeing criterion function that remains at the foundation of an epistemological multidimensional study.

Masudul Alam Choudhury