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These essays were originally drafted 30 years ago between 1988 and 1990, and then they were filed away and rediscovered just this year. They represented an attempt to offer a simple and unadorned version of fundamental issues in economics pertaining to our urgent need for a realistic concept of choice on which to found our constructions. The first essay introduces the notion of ‘opportunity cost’ and our use of caeteris paribus in the process of partial analysis. The second essay offers two metaphors for economic behavior: the ‘neighborhood store’ where virtually all neoclassical choice occurs; and the ‘chessboard’ that opens three issues simply ignored in orthodox settings. The third essay addresses the problem of interdependence, since choice in this setting confronts our range of awareness as bounded where outcomes spread forever with externalities everywhere, ruling out additivity.

The six metaphors analyzed in this paper unfold stepwise into an interdisciplinary systems framework based on planning horizons. The notion of planning horizons serves as an ordinal measure of rationality and organization, in a social systemic context of ecological interdependence. Each metaphor opens into the next to extend our understanding. The neighborhood store is where almost all neoclassical choices are made, with visible options spread on shelves and a budget allocated among them, maximizing its worth. The chessboard demands strategic contingency planning in an evolving context of incompletely projectable outcomes. A transportation network combines substitutes and complements into a static complex system, intertwined and non-decomposable, leaving economists with a problem of institutional choice. Love is a complementary good-virtually costless to produce and distribute, always in demand-that should be abundant, though it is scarce. The educational system brings inter-horizonal complementarities into our field of view, where contagion effects of longer horizons enhance complementarity at the expense of substitution, shifting the mix of interdependence away from conflicts to concerts of interest. Human ecology is a dynamic complex system of interactive phenomena opening into time, evolving constantly in its structure, relationships and diversity and demanding ethics in our relations. These six metaphors raise some pressing questions on the invisible limits of models standing on substitution applied where they have no place. Symptoms of failure reveal themselves in myopia, ecological loss and the rise of violence in society. Economic implications of these metaphors are reviewed to illustrate the basis for an interdisciplinary approach to social scientific constructions.

The concept of planning horizons serves as a measure of many unsettled aspects of economic analysis. First and foremost, the notion is ordinal: we speak of ‘horizon effects’ as directional shifts in planning horizons without tallying ‘wits’ or calibrating horizonal axes of change. Second, the derivation of horizon effects is inductive; we simply assert their inherence in the range of factors subsumed within the imagined projections behind all choice. The planning horizon is set wherever surprise supplants expectation; the horizon occurs at the outer range of accurate anticipation, to which we lack clear epistemological access. Planning horizons – horizon effects – suggest a new foundation for an ethical economics of conscience, social maturation and growth.The idea of planning horizons invites a distinction of foresight from myopia in economic constructions. But time horizons are only one aspect of our planning horizons: to see ahead in time we must embrace all relevant causal effects. Foresight depends on knowledge of how reality actually works, which is a matter more of degree than ‘truth’; the planning horizon offers an index of our ‘rational bounds.’ Our range of anticipation is also related to our internalization of social and ecological externalities in our decisions, so to the scope of our ethical conscience and to our sense of human community. Indeed, the organizational health and integrity of our society is horizonal in this sense.The aim of this paper is to explore and develop the concept of planning horizons in its intellectual origins and economic concerns. Its philosophic conceptual roots, methodological underpinnings, psychological insights and economic implications are outlined to show why an economics of planning horizons offers an ethical economics of interdependent dynamic complex systems. With standard doctrines seen as a special case in a larger horizonal frame, social theory embraces an ethical economics with dissimilar institutional implications favoring cooperation.