Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 43, No.

2, 2009

Philosophy of Education and Economics:

A Case for Closer Engagement

STEPHEN GOUGH

Relatively little contemporary philosophy of education

employs economic concepts directly. Even where issues such
as marketisation of education are discussed there may be little
clarification of underlying concepts. The paper argues that
while much contemporary economic thinking on education
may be philosophically naive, it is also the case that
philosophy of education can productively engage with
particular economic insights and perspectives. The paper
examines particular conceptualisations of ‘economics’ and
‘the market’, drawing upon these to consider aspects of an
issue that is significant for the philosophy of education: human
becoming. An example, the notion of ‘wellbeing’ is briefly
discussed.

INTRODUCTION
First thoughts about this paper were triggered by two personal experiences,
both of which occurred at philosophy of education conferences. First, at the
annual conference of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain in
2004 a keynote speaker referred frequently to ‘market values’. It should be
said that the keynote paper itself was well received, that the audience appeared
to know exactly what the speaker meant, and that wider discourse would
suffer considerably if the use of shorthand phases such as this were to be
subject to over-close policing. Nevertheless, it also seems important to register
the objection that, in fact, markets do not, and cannot, have values. People
have values. They may attach some of their values to particular markets, or to
the idea of a market in general. More or less certainly, they will express their
values, at particular places and times, through their participation in markets.
But there is no value that is intrinsic to markets, other than perhaps, as
Amartya Sen (1999) points out, a propensity to engage in exchange that is
inherent in any credible account of what it is to live as a human being.
Secondly, at the European Conference on Educational Research in 2006
I decided to attend a session of the Educational Economics Network. The
number of those present was very small compared both to the sessions of
the parallel Philosophy of Education Network, and to the size of the

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conference as a whole. Those individuals who had come along were

considering whether their network should continue or fold. However, this
in no way indicated that they had somehow resigned themselves to the
irrelevance of economics to education in the modern world. Rather, they
were asking themselves whether it made sense to attend education
conferences—within which their thinking, perhaps most particularly in
relation to markets, was clearly of marginal interest—when they might
just as well attend economics conferences, at which their assumptions and
methodologies would be accepted as mainstream, and through which their
arguments and findings might ultimately be significantly more influential.
In response to these experiences, this paper considers relationships
between some aspects of economic thinking and some aspects of
philosophy of education. It is necessarily selective, and often necessarily
summary in its treatment of long-standing, widely discussed and
meticulously argued traditions of thought. Its purpose is to suggest that
these disciplines have something to offer each other in relation to some of
their established intellectual concerns. Of course, to say that economics
and philosophy are interrelated is uncontroversial, but the literature that
discusses the relationship also identifies particular difficulties. For
example, Julian Le Grand notes: ‘A striking imbalance between, in the
case of the philosophers, the depth of philosophical argument and the
cursory treatment of its practical implications, and, in the case of the
economists, the sophistication of the economic analysis and the
shallowness of its philosophical base’ (Le Grand, 1991, p. 3). Geoffrey
Hodgson makes a very similar point:
Things go awfully wrong for science when:

(1) unwarranted policy claims are made for theoretical analysis

(2) a jump is made from the theoretical to the normative without
adequate consideration of questions of feasibility and mechanisms
of implementation (Hodgson, 2006, p. 6).
A particular concern of this paper, therefore, is that of simultaneously
attending to both the ‘philosophical base’ and ‘practical implications’ of
educational activity.

WHAT IS ECONOMICS?
The above suggests that a philosopher of education might want to engage
with economic ideas as a way of considering the practicalities of a
particular philosophical position, or as a way of assisting economists in
conceptualising their work. A second, more straightforward possibility is
that some work in economics touches directly upon the concerns of
philosophy of education, though, quite clearly, much of it does not.
Among mainstream economists there are many today who would
describe their discipline as ‘the science of choice’. Given that this is so it
is unsurprising if, as already noted, non-economists tend to identify
economics with markets, and markets, in turn, with the underlying

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assumptions about the nature of human beings that mainstream economists

typically make. While I will argue in what follows that there may be
instances in which philosophers of education might usefully engage with
economic thinking of even this narrow type, we should note that this
definition of the discipline is rejected by a number of eminent economists.
For example, Hodgson (2004) notes a tendency on the part of mainstream
economists simply to dismiss any approach not based on personal utility
maximisation as ‘not economics’. This has the effect of excluding not only
the work of Friedrich Hayek and Amartya Sen—both of whom are further
discussed below—but also Marx, Malthus, and at least some aspects of
that of the ancestor of neoclassical economics himself, David Ricardo
(Hodgson, 2006). Also from within the discipline Blaug (1997) has
complained that mainstream economics has developed in ways that render
it little more than an intellectual game, with no grip on the real
implications of analysis. We should note therefore, in the context of the
present discussion, and notwithstanding the remarks of Le Grand (1991)
above, that the power of economics to assist in engaging philosophical
understandings with practical applications cannot always and everywhere
be taken for granted. By way of further examples: 2008 Nobel Laureate in
Economics Paul Krugman (1994, in a chapter wittily entitled In the Long
Run Keynes is Still Alive) proposes the heterodox notion that perfect
rationality is itself economically irrational; 2001 Nobel Laureate Joseph
Stiglitz (2002) has famously challenged conventional economic wisdom in
relation to globalisation; and, more recently, economists such as William
Jackson (2007) have built on the work of Hodgson and others to theorise
the social structures that underlie markets.
For the purposes of this paper ‘economics’ is defined inclusively,
following Hodgson: ‘Sciences should not be defined by their methods or
assumptions, but by their objects of analysis. Economics should thus be
the science of the economy’ (Hodgson, 2006, p. 1). This might be taken to
mean that economics is the study of how human beings survive through
productive interaction with their environment.
However, there is an irony here. To say that mainstream economics is
incomplete is not to say that it can explain nothing. On the contrary, it is
often very good at explaining things—current prices for example—that
matter a great deal in the here and now. In Banquo’s words it may:

Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s

In deepest consequence (Macbeth, 1.3.132).

One thing that neoclassical economics explains very well is its own
tendency—noted above by Hodgson—to exclude all other economic
perspectives from the canon of ‘economics’. Controlling entry to a
profession is an ancient and effective way of raising the earnings and
status of those within it or, in economic terminology, of obtaining
economic rent.
In this section we have noted that economics, at least in the definition
here preferred, may properly concern itself with non-market-focused

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matters. Nevertheless, much economics is in fact focused on markets, and

markets have featured prominently in recent debates about education. It is
therefore to a consideration of markets that the paper now turns.

THE CONCEPT OF THE MARKET

According to Robert Nozick, ‘The market is an institutional process
whereby individual actions and plans are coordinated’ (Nozick, 2001, p.
284). This definition uncovers the apparently simple heart of the concept,
and also points in a salutary way to the reason why markets are so
ubiquitous. Coordinating individual actions and plans turns out to be a task
of almost unimaginable complexity, even in relation to apparently simple
goods. For example, when I buy a shirt, its price, relative not only to the
prices of other shirts but also to prices of other goods or services I might
buy instead of a shirt, summarises information about the preferences of
other people relative to my own, global raw material and capital-goods
prices, international wage levels, international regulation of production
and its enforcement at the local level, transport costs, the relative prices of
other goods that might be produced using the same inputs, taxation
structures and levels in different countries, and more besides.
This extraordinary power of markets to coordinate individual actions
and plans deserves serious recognition. However, at least three distinct
(though frequently confused) issues arise. The first is whether the market
can be trusted to perform this coordinating function properly. Might there,
for example, be instances of inefficient transmission of information,
exercise of monopoly power or plain criminality within the supply chain
for (some) shirts? Questions of this sort invoke the well-known concept of
‘market failure’. However, it is one thing to agree on the existence of
market failure in a particular case, and quite another to decide what should
be done about it. Depending on our disposition we might decide: that we
want nothing whatever to do with markets; that the market is failing only
because it contains certain imperfections that can and should be removed;
that the market should have a limited role and be subject to some kind of
correction; that the market enables us to make the best of a bad job: or,
that while the job might not be perfect it is actually rather good all the
same. So, for example, we find disagreement between James Tooley
(2003) and Harry Brighouse (2004) over (among other things) whether
equality of opportunity in education would be best served by increasing
marketisation or restricting it.
The second issue for markets-as-coordinators-of-plans is more funda-
mental. Is it really safe to assume that all the relevant ‘plans and actions’
are individual ones? And even if we can confidently answer this in the
affirmative in relation to the production of shirts, can we extend that
confidence to the provision of education? Many think not. For example,
Geoff Whitty warns against approaches that ’define education as a private
good rather than a public issue and make education decision-making a
matter of consumer choice rather than citizen rights’ (Whitty, 2002, p. 47).

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Yet at the same time we should note that commentators as differing in

their perspectives as Tooley and Brighouse share a view that markets
should not be wholly excluded from educational provision because they
provide protection against the treatment of individuals simply as means to
collective ends (Tooley, 2003). There are questions of both a practical and
a philosophical nature concerning individual and collective participation
in society as this occurs through markets.
In respect of both the foregoing issues, it is clear that any final
judgement requires an appeal to deeper issues that underlie the operation
of markets. In both cases, the economics of the market leads us to
philosophical questions. The third issue is rather different. Returning
briefly once more to the market in shirts, we may say that even if there
is general agreement that individual actions and plans are being
appropriately coordinated, this cannot automatically be taken to mean
that shirt production is happening in ways consistent with the national
interest, environmental conservation, poverty eradication, human rights
in the workplace, the enhancement of human wellbeing, or any number of
other aspirational goals that might seem to be significantly more
important, in the absolute, than whether I myself have a shirt to wear at
all. This is partly a further consequence of the existence of collective
actions and plans. However, it is also because such aspirations require us
to accept the possibility that human actions and plans might in future
become different from, and qualitatively better than, the ones we
commonly exhibit at present. We might see this as simply a wider
example of a well-established educational problem: that of bringing
learners to acceptance of a new way of thinking when all they have
available to them to evaluate it is the old way of thinking (Schwab, 1978;
Reid, 1999). In what follows it is assumed that, in the modern world,
education of all kinds is likely to be (at least) frequently associated with
qualitative aspirations for educators and learners that go beyond the
straightforward substitution of one generation of social actors by the next.
Therefore, and for example, we may wish to educate young people about
the evils of the sweatshops that make cheap shirts possible. We may wish
further to promote a wider vision of a better, more egalitarian future.
Doing so (and, let me say, I believe we should do so) raises a number of
interesting questions. One of these—not necessarily the most important—
concerns the likely actual impacts through markets of changing under-
standings in this way. It cannot be regarded as a matter of complete
irrelevance to the educational case if former sweatshop workers
subsequently starve as production is shifted elsewhere, or consumers
fund the extra cost of shirts through reductions in charitable giving, or
parents transfer their children to private education to correct for perceived
inappropriateness in the curriculum. An understanding of the short-term
workings of markets is likely to be helpful if more philosophical
judgements are to bear educational fruit.
However, a fuller, more sophisticated account of economic processes
would be still more useful, and it is therefore surprising that the narrow
version is dominant. I now turn to a discussion of possible reasons for this.

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HOW PEOPLE ARE: HOW THEY MIGHT BECOME

Taking a broad view (for there are exceptions to, and quibbles about,
almost any general claim one might make in this regard) neoclassical
economics has achieved a status as the most influential social scientific
discipline in policy terms through application of a particular model.
Central to this model is the belief that rational free choice in the market
leads to Pareto optimality—that is (again broadly speaking, for there are a
number of variations on this theme), a situation in which no reallocation
can make anyone better off without making someone else worse off.
Neoclassical approaches depart from the ‘classical’ economics of, say,
Adam Smith in two key respects that are both of some significance for our
continuing discussion of education. One is their emphasis on utility as the
basis of value. The other is their focus on marginal, rather than absolute,
valuations as the basis of choice.
We should note that the status of individual utility seems to be an
interesting issue (at the very least) within the work of pro-marketisation
commentators such as Tooley, who writes:

Real education businesses—the sort I will defend here—do exist ‘to serve
the best interests of schoolchildren’ and their families, as well as their
shareholders. If they are not serving the interests of children then they will
go out of business. The only way they can make profits for their owners is
if they provide high-quality educational services (Tooley, 2000, p. 19).

On this account the ‘best interests of schoolchildren’ collectively equate to the

aggregate of individual best interests as expressed through the market. Debate
on this point has been engaged within the philosophy of education, notably in
the debate between Tooley and Brighouse already mentioned. I do not wish to
comment further upon it, except to reiterate that this is not the only relevant
form in which economic considerations may manifest themselves.
With regard to the second distinguishing feature of neoclassicism
identified above, the emphasis on choice-making at the margin provides
one compelling explanation of the success of neoclassical approaches. It is
powerful as a descriptive and predictive tool because it recognises that
human choice normally occurs in relation to incremental gains or losses
rather than the absolute value of things. Most famously perhaps, this
explains why water is often cheap and diamonds are pretty-much-always
expensive, though the former is clearly absolutely more valuable than any
quantity of the latter. It also explains, for example, why pupil absenteeism
in English schools rises at the ends of terms, since this reflects not an
absolute valuation of skiing (say) above education, but a preference for a
relatively large increment of fun over what may be perceived as a
relatively small addition to learning. Given this, and also that—whatever
one thinks of utilitarianism—people do quite often do things (as opposed
to stating intentions, attitudes, moral principles or, even, academic
arguments) consistent with a fairly narrow account of their own self-
interest, we might suggest that the success of (particularly neoclassical)

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economics in the social policy marketplace derives substantially from its

focus on how people are in particular circumstances, rather than on how
they could or should be in general.
One consequence of this focus on the actual and the particular is that the
distinction between needs and wants becomes analytically redundant.
People’s choices reflect their reality. For philosophy of education, and
educational theory more widely, things can never be this simple, it seems.
Richard Pring has written:

No wonder there is suspicion of researchers when there is an appeal to

‘the social construction of knowledge’ or to ‘the multiple rationalities of
the learner’ or to ‘subjective meaning of the learners’ or to ‘the personal
construct of truth’. So much flies in the face of common sense
understandings of the problem and its solution. And as the researchers
embrace with enthusiasm and uncritically the latest ‘ism’ (such as
‘postmodernism’) so the gulf between researcher and teacher is even more
unbridgeable (Pring, 2000, p. 6).

I myself have worked with teachers who found the concept of

postmodernism useful, but even so we may say that, by and large,
economists have a head start to the extent that they begin from the
problems that people believe themselves to have. This same point is
strengthened by the existence in economics (not only neoclassical
economics) of a further basic concept, the implications of which can
only be ignored in an applied area such as education at the cost of
complete (if sometimes unwitting) loss of sense. This is ‘opportunity cost’,
which tells us that nothing is free. Rather, anything we might do has costs
in terms of foregone alternatives. Decisions about the future have costs in
the present, and these will be evaluated in the present. Hence, educational
commitments proposed by education academics and policy-makers with a
view to bringing about long-term changes in social values, aspirations or
behaviours will be judged against the alternatives by those persons
targeted, in the present, in the light of their existing values, aspirations and
behaviours. Economics provides a sophisticated set of tools for making
such judgements with rigour. Whatever the ultimate philosophical, or even
the long-term economic, reality of the case there will be a tendency for
contemporary economic analysis smoothly to align with contemporary
‘common sense’, while educational philosophy may sometimes appear
uncomfortably at odds with it.
However, a focus on the issue of how people might become in the future
leads us to ask what scope there might be, within a neoclassical account of
education-as-market-good, for the development of the learner. Since the
information-set best able to inform rational choice within this framework
must be that already possessed by the child (or parent), the potential would
appear to be quite limited. This will not do, because learners do develop.
This brings us to the question of how they do so.

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THE PLACE OF THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT: INDIVIDUAL

RATIONALITY

As soon as economics is freed from narrow, exclusive neoclassical

definitions, and our wider definition adopted, engagement with philoso-
phical questions becomes more common. The reason for this seems to be
particularly linked to the question of human becoming, and so to
education or, at least, to learning. For mainstream economists, it is a
powerful and useful—if limiting—working assumption that the structure
of human preferences remains constant. For educationalists and
philosophers it is usually really rather important that such preferences
are to some degree malleable.
In fact, at any particular moment in time both these assumptions will be
true. Particular values or behaviours may be so entrenched as to be
inescapable axioms of today’s policy decisions; and yet, at the same time,
all the evidence tells us that even these most unquestioned and
unquestionable features of the social landscape mutate over time. That
social dispositions will change is one of the few things of which we can be
absolutely certain. How they change matters for our future selves, and for
our children: but it also matters now because we want to believe that our
lives have lasting results. One possible perspective on this situation is that
of Amartya Sen.
Sen rejects mainstream (i.e. predominantly neoclassical) economic
theory specifically on the grounds that it associates rational choice with
either internal consistency of choice, the maximisation of self-interest or
maximisation in general. The first of these he finds inadequate on the
grounds that it permits quite contradictory schemes of choice to be
simultaneously equally rational. Of the other two, he writes: ‘Rationality
cannot be just an instrumental requirement for the pursuit of some given—
and unscrutinized—set of objectives and values’ (Sen, 2002, p. 39).
Rather, the primary deployment of rationality in human affairs must be a
normative one. Rational choice will seek to favour what is better and
banish what is worse. However, it should not be imagined that this
prescription will necessarily help us to predict the choices people actually
make. Nor should we suppose that rational choice will necessarily be
overtly public-spirited rather than self-interested, or collaborative rather
than competitive. All that rationality on these terms requires is that the
person doing the choosing subjects their choices to self-scrutiny.
Opportunities to choose, not only by selecting from a set of available
options, but also by developing ‘metarankings’ (p. 12)—that is,
preferences about what to prefer—are essential to freedom, and so
ultimately to the ‘capability approach’ that Sen advocates. Hence,
freedom, rationality and capability are conjoined by a process—iterative
reflection on the worth of things—that might reasonably be described as
learning, and could conceivably be serviced by particular forms of
education. However, such reflection is an individual matter.
How individual lives might be improved through education is a proper
concern of philosophy of education, even if it is reached, as in this case,

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from a starting point in economics. Coming from this starting point

reminds us that change starts with a given learner, embedded in a
particular context characterised by its own peculiar opportunities and
constraints. For a given teacher-pupil relationship this seems likely to be
valuable. Within philosophy of education the possible implications of
Sen’s overall approach have been carefully explored by Saito, who
concludes: ‘the kind of education that best articulates the concept of Sen’s
capability approach seems to be the one that makes people autonomous
and, at the same time, develops people’s judgement about capabilities and
their exercise’ (Saito, 2003, p. 29).
It should not concern us too much that this prescription is capable of
sitting quite happily within a neoclassical utility-maximising framework,
since as Hodgson (2006) demonstrates, at its most fundamental such a
framework is inherently non-falsifiable. More significantly, however, it
returns us to our earlier question about the possible importance of
collective actions and plans.

THE PLACE OF THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT: COLLECTIVE

RATIONALITY VERSUS THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONS
Proposals for social improvement through education frequently emphasise
their commitment to, and indeed their exemplification of, rationality (see,
for example, Kemmis and Fitzclarence, 1986; Brown and Lauder, 2001).
This version of rationality is similar to that proposed at the level of the
individual by Sen to the extent that it embraces a normative basis.
However, and as we have seen, for Sen determination of the nature of that
normative basis is itself a matter properly entrusted to the rational
individual, while for much socially-focused educational writing a
commitment to the achievement of social justice forms the only possible
underpinning of rational, progressive action. We might ask, again using
economic ideas, whether societies are in fact amenable to rational
planning of this kind.
Pennington (2008) discusses the implications of Hayekian economic
and philosophical thinking for one instance of such planning, what aims to
produce ‘sustainable development’. Sustainable development is a concept
that has implications for education and is typically understood by its
advocates to bring together issues of both environmental conservation and
social justice (Scott and Gough, 2003). Pennington writes that, for Hayek:

If social wholes are indeed more than the sum of their individual parts
then it follows logically that none of the constituent elements even when
acting in an organised group via institutions such as the state can ever
comprehend all of the factors that contribute to the advance of the whole
. . . a reliance on spontaneous order is preferable precisely because it
facilitates a higher level of rationality at the macro-social level than
would be possible were the process of societal development to be
controlled by a designing mind or group . . . For Hayek, incremental
change via competitive testing of alternate practices is able to draw on a

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much wider division of knowledge than socialist attempts to ‘reconstruct’

cultural practices, whole cloth (Pennington, 2008, p. 97).

A number of important points arise from this analysis. We can see that
Hayek’s overall focus is social progress. To this extent, he shares the
perspectives of not only socialist planners but also of all those who would
seek to use government fiscal and regulatory interventions to ‘correct
market failures’. However, beyond this point Hayek is as much at odds
with mainstream neoclassical economics as he is with socialist central
planning, since these both typically claim to be able to determine ‘right’ or
‘best’ allocative arrangements, and this presupposes: firstly, that someone
has, or can acquire the knowledge to do so, and; secondly, that there exists
some optimum equilibrium position to serve as a target. In fact, Hayek
argues, knowledge is both diffuse and dynamic. Individuals are embedded
in an overall social context that is constantly changing and of which they
can only ever comprehend a small part—whomsoever they may be, and
even if they collaborate with others. There is plenty of scope for learning,
and perhaps very little, beyond the straightforward transmission of
knowledge and skills, for education.
However, an alternative way of thinking about the collective goals of
societies, and the possible place of education in achieving morally
satisfactory, practically operable change within them, is offered by some
‘institutional’ economists (Hodgson, 2002, 2004, 2006). This is a tradition
that is firmly located within pragmatist philosophical thought. It
acknowledges a direct descent from Thorstein Veblen and a debt to John
Dewey. It is consistent, in its explicitly Darwinian stance, with the
philosophy of, for example, Richard Rorty (1999). Pragmatism continues
to be influential in the philosophy of education, for example in the recent
work of Andrew Stables (2005).
Crucial to the institutionalist position is the recognition of emergent
properties at ontologically distinct levels. Hence, it is possible, and indeed
normal, for institutions to be reconstitutive of individuals, since they are
more than the sum of the individuals that comprise them. In this respect,
Hodgson (2004, p. 328) quotes Frank Knight as follows:

Wants are usually treated as the fundamental data, the ultimate driving
force in economic activity, and in the short-run view of problems this is
scientifically legitimate. But in the long run it is just as clear that wants
are dependent variables, that they are largely caused and formed by
economic activity. The case is somewhat like that of a river and its
channel; for the time being the channel locates the river, but in the long
run it is the other way round (Knight, 1924, pp. 262–3).

Here we have, in the most brutally brief of summaries, a developed

economic view of the individual in society, not as an original and
unexplained determining force, but as an emergent, active intellect already
engaged with ongoing events. Education is not only possible, but also
unavoidable, as individual learners are inducted into shared social

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traditions and habits. At the same time they retain the potential for rational
critique of these traditions and habits. My point is not that all philosophy
of education should concern itself with these possibilities, or with the
apparent Hayekian lack of them, but simply that these are matters to which
any complete philosophy of education might want to attend.

THE FUTURE IS ANOTHER COUNTRY . . .

As we have seen, one way of thinking about the relationship between how
people are now and how they might become in the future, while retaining
key economic insights, is to modify (or abandon) the assumptions of a
neoclassical approach in one way or another. An alternative is to retain the
core assumptions of such an approach along with the analytical power
they confer, but to detach them philosophically from long-term social
decision-making processes so that they become, in effect, a vehicle for the
conduct of social thought-experiments. The results of such experiments
can then be considered in the fuller context of normative policy
considerations. An example will serve to illustrate this possibility.
Le Grand (2003) considers changing preferences over time in the context
of individual savings and insurance decisions. In common with education
aimed at personal and social development, both savings and insurance
require a cost-bearing commitment in the present in order to generate an
improved range of options under future circumstances that cannot be fully
predicted. This is simply to say that current education takes place in a
context of expectations, hopes and (sometimes) fears for the future; and that
the future, when it arrives and for better or worse, will be partly formed
from educational consequences. There should be no confusion here, on
terminological grounds, with Freire’s concept of ‘banking education’.
Drawing on the work of Derek Parfit (1984) and John Broome (1985),
Le Grand develops a case that persons in the present may be said to treat
their future selves as though they were different people. Further, this
behaviour cannot be said to be irrational, since what connects the identity
of a person aged nine to the identity of that same person when aged ninety
is a set of psychological links that become increasingly attenuated as the
age gap increases. Hence, present decisions cannot be expected to take
proper, rational account of future potentialities. Le Grand writes:

This in turn means that there is a possibility of market failure. For there is
now a group of people who are not participating in the market but who are
affected by the decisions made by those who are participating in it. An
individual’s future self is a person who is directly affected by that
person’s current decisions in the marketplace. A 65-year-old may be poor
because of myopic decisions taken by her 25-year-old self. Hence the 25-
year-old is imposing costs on the 65-year-old through her decisions; but
the 65-year-old has no say in those decisions (Le Grand, 2003, p. 90).

Hence, argues Le Grand, there is a straightforward economic case for

corrective intervention by the state. Such action might or might not have

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educational components, but it certainly has educational implications, since

the form of education indicated for young people who have been to some
extent relieved of direct responsibility for their future selves would seem to
be necessarily quite different from that indicated by the assumptions of
Sen’s individual rationality, Hayek’s ‘spontaneous order’, or Hodgson’s
account of institutions and habit-formation. In short, there are questions
here that are at once educational, philosophical and economic.

CONCLUSION: CO-EVOLUTIONARY GRIDLOCK AND HUMAN

WELLBEING
All the approaches discussed above engage in one way or another with a
fundamental difficulty noted earlier: that future potentialities can only
possibly be evaluated in the light of (somebody’s) current knowledge and
dispositions.
An analogous difficulty—itself not without possible implications for
education—has been identified in relation to human societies and
environmental change by Richard Norgaard (1984, 1994). Readers will
recall that it was suggested earlier that economics might be thought of as
the study of how human beings survive through productive interaction
with their environment.
Norgaard proposes that the relationship between a society and its
environment is a ‘co-evolutionary’ one in which each element iteratively
shapes the other. Human actions over time bring about changes in the
physical surroundings that people inhabit, that is, in the environment.
These new surroundings call forth adjustments in social arrangements and
meanings, which prompt actions resulting in further environmental
adaptation; and so on. We should note two points in passing. Firstly,
while this view attaches great significance to the social meanings that are
attached to the natural world, it is neither anti-realist nor anti-scientific.
When changes occur they do so in obedience to natural scientific laws,
both known and unknown. However, since our knowledge of the workings
of both the natural and social worlds is objectively incomplete, co-
evolutionary changes in both the environment and society are unlikely to
be fully predictable. Secondly, there is no prospect of an equilibrium or
final state. Norgaard’s account of the core problem this situation creates is
as follows:

The coevolutionary perspective explains why options are disturbingly

limited in the short run; culture has determined environment and
environment has determined culture. At each point in time there is a
near gridlock of coevolved knowledge, values, technologies, social
organization, and natural environment. Yet over the longer run we
approach an equally disturbing situation of nothing determining anything,
that all will change in unpredictable ways. Where we will be in the future
is determined by neither today’s culture nor environment alone but by
these and a host of unpredictable future factors. Yet come the future, near
gridlock will prevail (Norgaard, 1994, p. 46).

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 Philosophy of Education and Economics 281

This notion of ‘co-evolutionary gridlock’ seems useful in thinking about

the relationship between philosophy of education and economics. This can
be seen by reference to a particular issue—human wellbeing—that is of
established interest to philosophers of education (White, 2007), philoso-
phers more widely (Seel, 1997), economists and others (Sumner, 2006). Its
most commonly used measure at present is economic, but this is subject to
challenge (McGillivray and Clarke, 2006).
In contemporary policy discourse this notion of ‘wellbeing’ occupies a
place somewhat similar to that of environmental protection. Neither
concept has a conclusively determined set of parameters. Both are subject
to repeated definition and re-definition of basic terminology, are treated
very differently by different disciplinary specialisms, and sometimes give
rise to demands (of one sort or another) for educational change. Wellbeing
is clearly the larger concept of the two, however, since any meaningful
conception of wellbeing cannot be located within a catastrophically
degraded environment, whereas there is no obvious reason in principle
why the environment might not flourish—in terms of biodiversity, for
example—under circumstances in which human wellbeing was severely
attenuated.
White elaborates the concept of wellbeing, and the role of education and
the philosophy of education within it, in the following terms:

Wellbeing is not to be understood in terms of individual desire-

satisfaction, even where the desires are both informed and of major
significance in a person’s life. If it is not a subjective matter in this sense,
neither is it an objective matter of deriving it from features of our human
nature. The truth is more subtle. Wellbeing is still desire-dependent, but
the desires in question are not those of an individual, but of a loose
collection of people (White, 2007, p. 25).

White goes on to characterise the role of education in wellbeing as the

facilitation, between individual members of society, of conversations and
other forms of communication that have the effect of developing those
shared ‘desires’ while enhancing and extending participation in that ‘loose
collection of people’. Education’s unique contribution is central to a
wellbeing project that is developmental, inclusive and democratic. This
project values people for what they are, but also is ambitious about what
they might become. As we have seen, there is a tension here that can be
theorised in a number of ways.
However, the notion of co-evolutionary gridlock—which we might see
as a broad description of the problem these theorisations address—
reminds us that our current state of wellbeing is a product of our current
knowledge, understandings and practices, and will be understood,
evaluated and challenged in the light of these. And yet, over time,
everything will change—even perhaps, in time, those values we presently
hold most dear. Broadly speaking, the economics of the market provides
particular insights into how things are. Philosophy requires us to consider
how we would like things to become, and here the philosophy of education

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282 S. Gough

has particular significance in respect of matters such as human wellbeing

where, as in White’s characterisation, education and learning are central to
the process of change. However, co-evolution also suggests that any
notion of an ideal end-state is a chimera. Education can, therefore, only
ultimately be about supporting a journey; about travelling hopefully, never
arriving. Wider accounts from economics will sometimes be helpful in
managing progress, so responding to Le Grand’s already-mentioned
complaint that philosophers pay too little attention to ‘practical
implications’ with an acknowledgement that each and every ‘next step’
will have consequences in the here-and-now.
White’s notion of a philosophy of education that facilitates the
development of shared desires is suggestive and positive: but the pursuit
of desires—even shared ones—impacts differently upon the circumstances
of different individuals, and changes, over time, the parameters within
which desires are formulated and the means of achieving them devised.
For this reason, philosophers of education are also likely to find an
engagement with alternative conceptions of the origins of economic
behaviour worthwhile, even as they maintain their critiques of the
narrowness of much contemporary educational-economic modelling.

Correspondence: Stephen Gough, Department of Education, University of

Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
E-mail: S.R.Gough@bath.ac.uk

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