Quotes from Macroeconomics as Systems Theory

By Richard Wagner (2020)

• A great deal of liberal thought seeks to eliminate the political from society through some combination of law, ethics, and economics. Schmitt held that any such effort will be incomplete, and in this point of incompleteness resides the autonomy of the political.#
  Politics
• Carl Schmitt theorized that political action had autonomy within society. This autonomy turned on the inability for any complete specification to limit executive authority.#
  LawInstitutions
• What economists recognize as preferences are not autonomous beyond the level of basic survival, but rather these are artifacts we generate through our interactions inside the civilization in which we are encased.#
• There is probably no human activity that can be totally specified in advance by rules. If this is the case, opportunities will always exist to act with some degree of discretion.#
• Real values must be derived and inferred from nominal observations. To call money merely a veil is to lose sight of its overwhelming significance for economical conduct.#
  Money
• Publicly ordered enterprises operate without residual claimancy, which means that expenses and rents can be difficult to distinguish… What is excess cost to a private enterprise with transferable ownership and market value can thus be executive rent for managers of public enterprises where market value does not exist.#
• If there is anything of analytical value to the efficiency wage notion, it is recognition that the theory is not a theory of involuntary unemployment. If it is anything, it is a theory of the size distribution of business firms. It is a theory that holds that as firms grow larger they experience a growing set of bureaucratic-like problems related to shirking which firms seek to counter by creating such relatively complex instruments as performance bonds that are forfeited upon termination.#