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S1309 Modern Economics as Thought - The Difference of Preferences between Western Culture and Japanese Culture

Matsumoto Yasumi

In this course, we compare the Western way of thinking and the Japanese way of thinking.  It is obvious that they are quite different from each other.  The difference comes from one’s own culture including language, religion, and concept of time, among others, which crucially affect people’s preferences and decision-making.  Modern economic theory, however, does not consider such differences among cultures but only reflects typical Western culture, which is explained in the lecture in comparison with Japanese culture.  In this course, students may realize that the applicability of present economics is limited in the sense that its background thought reflects only Western culture represented by crucial dependence on logic, but lacks ideas on nonwestern culture.

First, Western and Japanese ways of thinking are compared in detail because the sharp difference between them is expected to give us new hints for the creative development of decision-making methods, which may have a positive effect on the improvement of modern economic theory in a narrow sense and on mutual understandings among various people and nations in the world in a broad sense.

Next, we try to introduce a realistic way of individual decision-making based on the mixture of Western and Japanese ways of thinking, which may make up for the defect of today’s popular decision-making methods heavily dependent on the logic of the Western way of thinking.  However, the way of individual decision-making presented is given by modifying the framework of Arrow’s impossibility theorem in order to reflect people’s actual choice procedure.  It is promising to use Arrow’s impossibility theorem as a basic starting point not only for economics but also for human science in the future, because it is a nonexistence proof given by thorough logical thinking and, therefore, it has a universal value.  In other words, Arrow’s impossibility theorem means that it is impossible to solve a problem solely by logic.  Arrow’s theorem shows that we should not be rational fools (in Sen’s sense) though logical thinking is important.  Finally, we try to present a new approach to seek a realistic way of human decision-making.

Since this lecture comes from our deep worries about contemporary worldwide problems, various additional topics are mentioned, as given below.

Today, we have many worldwide issues not only in the economy but also in fields such as international economic conflicts, environment problems, global warming, and expansion of epidemics such as AIDS, bird flu, and BSE.  It is clear that the Western approach, the major thought leading today’s world, is not enough to solve these problems by itself.  It is also obvious that no other thoughts exist, which are effective enough to deal with the issues.  It is time we found a new way of thinking, which might be possible to effectively handle today’s problems.  For that, we need to investigate the Western way of thinking in order to make clear the good points and the limits.  Then, we need to investigate other ways of thinking.  In this lecture, the Japanese way of thinking is introduced as a counterbalance for the defects of the Western way of thinking.  These two ways of thinking are compared mainly in terms of their consciousness towards time and language, because these seem to be crucial factors in forming the culture and the nature of the people, including attitudes towards gods and religions.

 

Learning Outcomes

Students are expected to grasp how the differences between Western culture and Japanese culture (language, gods/religions, history) affect people’s decision-making and how to combine both ways in order to create a better situation.

 

Teaching and Evaluation Methods

Answers to questions in class and evaluation of regularly assigned essays.

 

Required Preliminary Knowledge

Knowledge of basic mathematical logic, though some of this will also be taught in the class.  Students are strongly recommended to study the difference between cultures in advance.  For that, it is highly useful to study articles in pedagogy where many Western and Japanese researchers reach almost the same conclusion on the features of and differences between the Western and the Japanese cultures.