Karl-Heinz Brodbeck

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl-Heinz Brodbeck (born December 15, 1948 in Wertingen ) is a German philosopher , creativity researcher, economist and business ethicist. He is professor emeritus for economics, statistics and creativity techniques at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt and a member of the faculty at the University of Politics in Munich . He advocates a business ethic based on Buddhist ethics , formulated his own alternative theory of creativity and developed a new theory of money against the background of his criticism of traditional economics .

Life

Karl-Heinz Brodbeck is the son of Wiltrudis and Karl Brodbeck. He attended elementary and secondary school in Wertingen from 1955 to 1966. After several industrial internships, he studied electrical engineering at the Rudolf Diesel Polytechnic in Augsburg . Following his graduate degree, he worked as an engineer at Siemens in Augsburg. In 1972 and 1973 he did community service in Munich, where he then studied philosophy and economics at the University of Munich from 1973 to 1977 . From 1978 to 1981 he worked as a research assistant in Munich. He received his doctorate in 1981 with a theoretical thesis on technical change ("Production, Division of Labor and Technical Change") and was academic advisor at the Economics Institute of the University of Munich from 1981 to 1988. From 1989 to 1991 he then worked as a lecturer at the University of Politics (University of Munich) and worked at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research . In 1991 and 1992 Brodbeck was managing director of the Gesellschaft für Medienmarketing in Munich and gave lectures at the Bavarian Academy of Advertising in Munich. From 1992 to 2014 he was professor of economics, economic policy, business statistics and creativity techniques at the University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt and lecturer at the University of Politics for Economic Policy.

Since 1981 Brodbeck has been married to Elisabeth Müller-Brodbeck, a teacher for the Feldenkrais method . Since 1995 he has been the publisher of praxis-perspektiven , an annual publication in the business administration department of the Würzburg-Schweinfurt University of Applied Sciences. From 2003 to the end of 2015 he was chairman of the board of trustees of the Fairness-Stiftung gGmbH in Frankfurt am Main . Furthermore, since autumn 2003 he has been a cooperation partner of the Finance & Ethics Academy in Diex , Austria, and on the scientific advisory board of the Tibet House in Frankfurt, as well as on the Advisory Board of the ICAE (Johannes Kepler University Linz).

Works

Brodbeck has published numerous articles on creativity , creativity research, the philosophy and theory of economics , business ethics , Buddhism as well as monetary theory and philosophy and explained them in numerous lectures.

Brodbeck developed a Buddhist business ethicbased on the logic of Nagarjuna and Dharmakirti and criticizes traditional economics and neoliberalism in their basic categories as implicit ethics that scientifically - recognizable by countless false prognoses - has failed. He also advocates the thesis "... that economics has not yet succeeded in developing a theory of money that is conclusive based on its own assumptions." The main theme of his work on philosophy are epistemological problems and their circular social mediation.

Critique of Neoclassical Theory

Brodbeck sees the application of statistical methods based on classical mechanics and thermodynamics as a problem, since the necessary assumptions (e.g. distribution assumptions, stable equilibrium, time invariance of non-modeled quantities) are not given in classical physics. The neo-classical economics foot on a mechanistic model of thought which the Physiocrat the "and closely related human-machine as " philosophy Descartes is borrowed. The real economy, on the other hand, consists of creative individuals who have to be described by a post-mechanical form of theory including the formation of habits and creative processes. According to Brodbeck, economic forecasts fail in principle because after a forecast becomes known, the economic subjects include the forecast in their decisions and thus change their behavior in an unpredictable way. "Published forecasts tend to falsify themselves."

Critique of Neoliberalism

Brodbeck sees the central figure of neoliberalism in Friedrich August von Hayek . Its demand for deregulation in particular is untenable. It is true that “the abolition of rules also represents an interference in the economic system. (Hayek and neoliberalism) assumed knowledge that they deny other economic schools: the knowledge of which regulations and how much regulation is 'good' for the economy. ”According to Brodbeck, von Hayek therefore gets entangled in a central point of his Theory of rule selection turns into an irresolvable contradiction: In order to be able to judge which rules are necessary for the formation of a spontaneous order , one needs a knowledge which, according to Hayek, one cannot dispose of at all.

Creativity research

Brodbeck sees creativity as a fundamental property of human life. “Living means: being creative.” Although he ties in with psychological creativity research, he also formulates an interdisciplinary philosophy of creativity and tries to continue earlier approaches in a new framework. Habits and routines are not interpreted as the opposite of creative processes, but just as much their product as their source. The mindfulness - a term Brodbeck from Buddhism accepts - plays a central role. Mindfulness "liquefies" habits and thus allows new patterns to arise. Brodbeck defines creativity as the meeting of novelty and value. In his opinion, creative processes can be analyzed in five dimensions ( model of the creative situation ): innovations in sensory objects, in emotions, perceptions, habits and thought processes. Consciously made and varied thought processes (“thought models”) do not play an exclusive, but a guiding role, which should enable a decision to be creative in every situation.

Philosophy of money

Brodbeck sums up his theory of money as follows: “The essence of money can be characterized by two sentences: Money is a form of thought. Money is a special way of human socialization. This can also be formulated negatively: money is not a thing among things, not a mere object, even if it always appears in objective forms, just as language appears in vocal expression or in writing. Money has its place in the subject. However, it is not an isolated consciousness of the Cartesian tradition, so not a lonely self, but a linguistically mediated form of thinking that coordinates social actions. "

Money can only be understood within the framework of a general semiotic theory, which is also to be understood as a theory of socialization. “In the process of social communication and action, society reproduces itself economically as well as semiotic. In other words: semiotics and economics actually investigate the same phenomenon. ”That is why Brodbeck develops in his almost 1200-page main work Die Herrschaft des Geld - after a critique of traditional social science methods, a“ semiotics as a social process ”and on this basis his monetary theory. In addition to human language, money appears as the second central form of socialization. A Cartesian understanding of theory as in traditional economics is therefore a mistake for monetary theory. The monetary value is not a result of other values ​​(labor values, utility, religion, state norms), but a circularly generated social deception that is repeatedly disappointed in crises and crashes. "Karl-Heinz Brodbeck's huge work of theory and history of ideas, written over 20 years, has two key purposes: first, to show that mainstream economics fails to explain what money is and how it works. Because money is the central economic phenomenon, we must question the coherence of the whole discipline. Secondly, and more interestingly for the general reader, he shows how the conventions that permeate monetary societies have infiltrated our psyche and shaped our moral landscape. In his view, the pursuit of money inherent in competitive market economies de-moralises the social space that markets occupy. "

Since its beginnings, money has been superimposing linguistic logic (logos) into a form of arithmetic (ratio), also the basis of mathematics and natural science. Methodically, Brodbeck bases his theory on a phenomenology of money that characterizes the subject form of modernity as the dominance of the money subject and explains the internal conflict of modernization . Interest is the subjective form of Marx's capital formula: money - goods - more money, which is realized as “greed for money” through repeated creative overturning of traditional economic structures. In the atomized boundaries of private property, however, this overall movement remains unrecognized. “Interest on capital employed, economic crises and global poverty are only the front and back of a process. Every new form of socialization via markets, organized by the usurers, cancels the acquired interest crops in the competition, in which greed for money meets itself in diversity, and forces an upheaval over and over again - not without constant people on the fringes of their societies to offend. ”According to Brodbeck, interest is the“ institutionalization of greed for money, thereby replacing moral socialization ”. The greed for money has a thoroughly objective reason: “Money (is) a barrier to entry: only the owner of money can become a buyer. From this arises the tendency to strive for money ownership again and again if one wants to participate in the money society. This objective compulsion to pursue money becomes habit, and ultimately the pursuit of maximizing money ownership in order to ensure market entry. "

More texts

Brodbeck has written numerous texts on Buddhist philosophy, trying above all to approximate the Western and Buddhist tradition from an epistemological and ethical point of view. Brodbeck also dealt critically with questions of business ethics independently of Buddhist models of thought. He also claims an “irreconcilable difference between ethics and neuroscience”. In the discussion in the Zeitschrift für Politik with Niklas Luhmann , Brodbeck formulated a criticism of the more recent systems theory, emphasizing above all the circular social role of creativity and insecurity: "The creativity of A is the insecurity of B". Brodbeck also examined the economic role of the Internet, u. a. the new function of prices and the transformation of money itself. He comes to the conclusion that, eventually, original money functions would also be “electronically replaced”.

Criticism and appreciation

Brodbeck's work on creativity research and Buddhist business ethics received widespread approval. His criticism of the neurosciences from an ethical-philosophical perspective was commented on as follows: "Karl-Heinz Brodbeck (proves) to a freedom-denying neuroscience that it not only argues unethically, but also lacks care in the scientific evaluation of its thesis-supporting experiments."

Brodbeck's texts on economics, on the other hand, initially met with mixed echoes. The book Success Factor Creativity , published in 1996 , which, in addition to a critique of classical economics, also contained a draft of a post-mechanical economics , was viewed on the one hand as a possibility of how creativity could "free the economy from the shackles of mechanical reality and set it free to transform the world economy" , on the other hand, felt as a simple provocation that went against the predominantly neo-liberal view of economists. In Manager Magazin it was said: “An economics professor insults the guild. (...) Everyone is talking about deregulation, just one not, the Munich economist Professor Karl-Heinz Brodbeck. And he bases his counter-speech on the allegedly simple illogic of classical dogma. ”The first edition of the 1998 book The Questionable Foundations of Economics was also received very ambiguously. Like Manager Magazin , Axel Wehmeier in Handelsblatt regards Brodbeck as an “outsider”, differentiated from the majority of economists: “In poor outline, Brodbeck outlines a 'post-mechanical economy', at the center of which is the homo oeconomicus, completely reinterpreted as a creative human being. It is undisputed that neoclassicism falls short in this regard. But why economists of all things force themselves as creativity researchers remains open. ”Wehmeier defends against Brodbeck's criticism of“ market incentive systems ”and emphasizes the work of the“ invisible hand ”, which is“ not a phantom of the market ”. Carsten Kasprzok accuses Brodbeck's book of being primarily a “polemical work”. Michael Schefczyk said in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that Brodbeck's criticism of the dubious assumptions of the neoclassical economists was invalid because, according to Milton Friedman, "usable hypotheses (scil. For prognoses) can be obtained from the - strictly - incorrect model assumptions". Like Schefczyk, Wehmeier still believed in 1998 that traditional economics could be used to make “acceptable statements of tendencies”, a thesis that was emphatically contradicted in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis .

But there were also positive voices: “The book does what its title promises. The questionable foundations of economics turn out to be just as untenable as the metaphysical presuppositions of classical mechanics. ”“ The questions posed by the author are provocative, his philosophical researching analyzes are often masterful. ”In the meantime,“ The questionable foundations ”have become“ bestsellers of the economic philosopher Karl-Heinz Brodbeck ". “Brodbeck's book is more than just one of many theoretical business books. It is a milestone in economics. ”His criticism of the rationality postulate and the predictability of economics also met with approval. “Karl-Heinz Brodbeck is one of the few economists who has not been completely wrong since the 1990s. (...) Brodbeck considers (...) the claim that economics, to be a science capable of making predictions, has been empirically refuted. "

In the foreword to later editions of his book “The Questionable Basics”, Brodbeck rejects the accusation that he only draws “a post-mechanical economy in 'poor outlines'” (Wehmeier): in it he “largely relied on a philosophical criticism of mechanical economics ( limited), because the positive draft of a post-mechanical theory in the form of my 1996 book 'Success Factor Creativity' is already available. "

Brodbeck's main work, The rule of money , was generally received positively. Peter Johnson comes to the following summary assessment: “Brodbeck's approach and conclusions will be unwelcome in universities and was certainly discouraged in my day. It crosses into other disciplines and threats vested interests. It requires great effort from the man-in-the-street and impossible courage of the politician. (...) But these are pragmatic objections and the critique remains powerful and important. (...) Brodbeck offers no recipe for a different economic order, and I think this is right. That would be another Cartesian fallacy and an invitation to tyranny. Instead, he hopes for what might be referred to as economic enlightenment. "

Publications (selection)

Web links

References and footnotes

  • Cover texts for the publications mentioned, website and press coverage
  1. ICAE (Johannes Kepler University Linz)
  2. cf. Buddhist business ethics. An introduction. 2nd edition, Berlin 2011. These ethics are divided into a critical part: criticism of all forms of thought that cause suffering, and a positive part: from the mutual dependence of all living beings, it is concluded that universal compassion is the only adequate, positive ethical norm.
  3. Economic theory as implicit ethics ; in: M. Breuer, A. Brink, OJ Schumann (eds.): Business ethics as critical social science, Bern-Stuttgart-Vienna 2003, 191-22.
  4. The rule of money. History and systematics 2nd edition: Darmstadt 2012, p. 15.
  5. ^ The questionable foundations of economics ibid, p. 245ff.
  6. Why Forecasts Fail in Business ; praxis-perspektiven Volume 5 (2002), pp. 55-61; here: p. 59.
  7. ^ The questionable foundations of neoliberalism - economic order and market in Hayek's theory of rule selection . Zeitschrift für Politik 2001.1, pp. 49–71.
  8. Neoliberalismus , Ethik-Letter 2/1999, pp. 5-9 .
  9. cf. on the criticism of Hayek and the Austrian School of Precise Economics of Knowledge. On the reality of images in the economy ; in: K. Hirte, S. Thieme and WO Ötsch (ed.): Knowledge! What knowledge? Marburg 2014, pp. 17-38; on Brodbeck's criticism of the subjective school of economics from Gossen to Menger to Mises and Hayek cf. The rule of money, ibid, pp. 640–715.
  10. Decision to be creative . 4th edition 2010, p. 30.
  11. cf. New trends in creativity research , Psychology in Austria 4 & 5 (2006), pp. 246-253.
  12. cf. Creativity as a success factor, ibid., Pp. 77-183. Brodbeck is referring to earlier work here: Theory of Work . Munich 1979; Transrationality . Munich 1986.
  13. cf. Creativity of Mindfulness ( Memento from May 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). Cause & Effect 82 (2012), pp. 26–28.
  14. cf. Decision on creativity ibid, pp. 35–40.
  15. Faust and the Language of Money. Forms of thinking in the economy - impulses from the time of Goethe. Freiburg / Munich 2014, p. 29.
  16. The rule of money, ibid, p. 171.
  17. cf. the short presentation in the YouTube video Paper Money: The Great Illusion .
  18. Peter Johnson: The Rule of Money , openDemocracy, September 8, 2009.
  19. cf. Faust and the Language of Money, ibid, pp. 39-41; Philosophy of money ; in: WD Enkelmann, BP Priddat (ed.): What is? Economic-Philosophical Explorations, Volume 3.1, Marburg 2014, pp. 62–73.
  20. The "money subject" is introduced as a fundamental category in Die Herrschaft des Geldes ibid, pp. 848-983; see. also Faust and the language of money, ibid, pp. 155–169.
  21. In greed for money, according to Brodbeck, one of the three poisons of the spirit as identified in Buddhism - ego delusion, greed, hatred - has taken on a specifically modern and at the same time social form; see. Buddhist business ethics ibid, p. 86ff.
  22. ^ The rule of money, ibid, p. 984.
  23. The rule of money, ibid, p. 987.
  24. Basics of Buddhist Business Ethics . Economic Ethics Forum 18.1 (2010), p. 45.
  25. cf. Circle of knowledge ibid; Buddhism read interculturally . Nordhausen 2005; Secular Ethics from a Western and Buddhist Perspective. Berlin 2015, and the articles in the magazine “ Sorge & Effect”  ( page no longer available , search in web archivesInfo: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.ursache.at  
  26. cf. Contributions to ethics and economics . 3rd edition, Groebenzell 2002; “Ethical rules of the game for competition” , praxis perspektiven 6 (2003), pp. 13–18.
  27. ↑ A pipe dream. On the irreconcilable difference between neuroscience and ethics , Ethikjahrbuch 2004, 17-31. See also The difference between knowing and not knowing , in: A. Zeuch (ed.): Management of not knowing in organization, Heidelberg 2007, pp. 54ff.
  28. ^ Discussion with Niklas Luhmann (text collection).
  29. Economy as an autopoietic system? Notes on N. Luhmann's book 'Die Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft' , Zeitschrift für Politik 38 (1991), 317-326; here: p. 321.
  30. ^ Theory of Internet Economics , praxis-perspektiven Vol. 4 (2000), pp. 47-59; here: p. 50.
  31. "'Decision on Creativity" is a phenomenology-based plea for openness of thought. "Göttinger Tageblatt of June 8, 1995, p. 17." ... a clever book with lots of food for thought and instructions for action ", Frankfurter Rundschau March 29 2003, p. A 27. “Karl-Heinz Brodbeck succeeded in taking the reader on a journey of reflection on correct behavior, also in everyday life. (...) (He) immerses the reader in this deeply humanitarian way of thinking. ” Michael Schäffer: An ethic that connects cultures , netzwerk ethikheute April 17th, 2015.
  32. Hans Martin Brüll: Review . Ethics Report No. 5 / June 2005, p. 10. “Karl-Heinz Brodbeck succeeds with flying colors in unmasking the exaggerated claims of some neuroscientists for a complete naturalization of ethics as 'pipe dreams'." Reinhard Lassek: Key questions of human development . Parliament No. 01-02 / January 3, 2005.
  33. ^ Dorothee Feigel: Success factor creativity , magazine for members 262/1996, p. 3.
  34. Off to Kreatopia. Economics is based on outdated dogmas, claims an economics professor - and is redefining the fundamentals. Manager Magazin 8/1997, p. 5 and p. 144.
  35. Axel Wehmeier: From artists and machines , Handelsblatt, May 28, 1998, pg06.
  36. Wehmeier ibid.
  37. Carsten Kasprzok: Review , Kyklos 4 (1998), p. 586.
  38. Michael Schefczyk: Unpredictability. A philosophical critique of economics , Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 207 of September 8, 1998, p. 48.
  39. Wehmeier ibid.
  40. KJ Green: Contra furorem Oeconomicum . Wissenschaftlicher Literaturanzeiger 38 (1999), p. 66.
  41. Petr Drulák: Against the one-way street , FAZ May 22, 1998.
  42. Ferdinand Knauß and Tim Rahmann: The war of faith of the economists . Wirtschaftswoche July 13, 2012.
  43. Review by Andreas Zeuch. (Online text)
  44. cf. Guillaume Paoli: Discharges the experts , FAZ from April 19, 2005. Compare as empirical evidence the forecasts of the last few years .
  45. everyday life and philosophy . Brodbeck had already asserted the necessary failure of the economic forecasts early on; see. Transrationality (1986) ibid; Success factor creativity (1996) ibid, pp. 129–133.
  46. ^ The questionable foundations, ibid, p. 1f. See also: Outlines of a Post-Mechanical Economy ; in: R. Benedikter (ed.), Postmaterialism, Volume 1: Introduction to post-materialistic thinking, Vienna 2001, pp. 117-142; Economy as a creative process (2002) ibid.
  47. Roland Geitmann calls the book a “mountain range”: The “scope of what Brodbeck has processed (is) as admirable as the breadth and sovereignty of his gaze”; Review , Zeitschrift für Sozialökonomie 46 (2009), pp. 70–71.
  48. cf. Agree to "The rule of money " .
  49. Peter Johnson: The Rule of Money , ibid.