Gary Miller

Quotes From

Hierarchies, unlike markets, institutionalize long-term mutual commitments that make it easy to trade off social acceptance and esteem against wealth.#
Incentive systems such as profit sharing and gain sharing can be easily criticized on economic grounds. Each individual’s share in the extra profits generated by his or her own marginal effort is so tiny as to have no effect whatsoever on that individual’s self-interested behavior. However, these criticisms miss the point. The notion of plans such as the Scanlon plan is not to harness individual self-interest in the interest of the firm; it is rather to serve as a symbolic commitment of managers to a shared ownership in the firm.#

Inside and Outside Perspectives on Institutions: An Economic Theory of the Noble Lie
If there exist no incentive or selective mechanisms that make cooperation in large groups incentive-compatible under realistic circumstances, functional social institutions will require a divergence between subjective preferences and objective payoffs – a “noble lie”. This implies the existence of irreducible and irreconcilable “inside” and “outside” perspectives on social institutions; . . .
On "Feels-Based" Policy
Right-wingers often claim that Leftists, especially the campus left, decide political questions based mainly on feelings, as opposed to their own supposedly hard-nosed evaluation of the facts. The charge isn’t entirely unfair, but it’s not quite accurate either. Facts and Feelings First, the charge imagines some sort of two-mode decision module in . . .
Bootstrapping Social Cooperation
Social cooperation is the major thing to be explained in both sociobiology and economics. From the perspective of the former, most species never achieve it at all. From the perspective of the latter, most societies never get very far along compared to the advanced Western societies of the modern world. One . . .