What is an Aspect of Behaviour?
(Based on Robbins, L. (2007). An essay on the nature and significance of economic science.)
By moving away from buying and selling as categories, to these as aspects of behaviour, Robbins has expanded the scope of economics to include such territories which have never been charted, and remain unexplored till to date. What is meant by buying as an aspect, and selling as an aspect?
If you are giving your time to read/listen this further, and I am writing/speaking more, then is it that you are buying more ideas from me, by giving me your attention, and I am selling you my ideas, by taking your attention? How shall we treat buying and selling as aspects of our behaviours in this case?
Is it selling when a potential mate attempts to attract attention of opposite sex, say as birds do by dancing or building nests. Is it selling when, of two friends, one tells a joke and receives in return a pun? The pun was unexpected reward, or perhaps a cost? Is it an aspect of behaviour when one obeys authority in gross violations of his morals? Is it buying favour from boss by selling loyalty which was unquestioned? What is the range of implications, the territories which are now included in the study of economics? This question remains of prime importance, and, despite it, very little can be found in literature on this definition of aspect.
While Robbins attempted to demark boundaries, his demarcation is successful in that now we know we deal with the implications of means and ends, but at once it has now left us with a method with which all can be studied whatsoever, from dance of birds to seduce a mate to cracking a joke with friends, from battle of sexes to political dilemmas, from the price of money lent in financial market to the most difficult to express gratification of serving your partner who now lives with a behavioural disposition of a clinical sort, now everything is an economic phenomenon!
But before we can rely on this conclusion I came across we need more about this question and in this regard too other sciences can provide us their findings where buying and selling may be treated as an aspect.
Accordingly, now it also becomes a question that if buying and selling are aspects of behaviour, what are means and ends?
Is it that my behavioural inclination towards reading and writing, now is an aspect of my behaviour which acts as a means to my ends? Not all means are aspects of our behaviour, but perhaps something becomes a mean because it has an aspect relevant to the nature of our ends. But then it raises a question what are our ends? Perhaps, they too are aspects of things, and of our behaviour? This is but an intricate issue about which I have little information. However, this idea can be expanded, I believe. Anything becomes a mean because mean is just an aspect of it given ends. Likewise, ends are too aspects of things, or of our mental state. Here too psychological research may be imported and combined with our mathematical ways of thinking.