Topic: Political Economy

Posts

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  Money’s Mutation of the Modern Moral Mind: The Simmel Hypothesis and the Cultural Evolution of WEIRDness

  A great number of theories have been offered as to the root of the difference between the modern mind and the premodern mind. One neglected account comes from Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, which argues that the rise of the mass money economy in the early modern era encouraged calculative . . .

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  Paternalism Is Justifiable on Civil Libertarian Grounds

  In a footnote in The Limits Of Liberty, Buchanan argues that legitimate law exists to internalize externalities: to minimize harmful external effects, and promote beneficial external effects (i.e. provide public goods). In technical terms, ‘‘law’’ which involves the elimination of general external diseconomies or the creation of general external economies is . . .

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  It's Not Socialism, It's Clientelism

  Most of what passes for ‘socialism’ in the U.S. today is actually clientelism, the exchange of favors for political support. Based on the examples of Venezuela and Post-soviet Russia, that’s likely even worse.

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  The Feudal Origins of the Western Legal Tradition

  This paper draws a distinction between ‘communitarian’ and ‘rationalist’ legal orders on the basis of the implied political strategy. We argue that the West’s solution to the paradox of governance – that a government strong enough to protect rights cannot itself be restrained from violating those rights – originates in . . .

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  Returns to Scale, Not State Capacity

  Liquid markets are the basic prerequisite to industrialization and growth. But where do liquid markets come from? A naïve libertarian might say that markets are self-organizing, and economic growth picked up historically when governments simply stepped out of the way. While there are certainly some respects in which this is true, . . .

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  Myth and Modernity: A Review of Persecution and Toleration

  One doesn’t need much detailed historical knowledge to be struck by just how recent many of the most deeply held moral and political convictions in the modern West are. Prior to just a few hundred years ago, it would have been considered eccentric (at best) or seditious (at worst) to . . .

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  What Does It Mean To Impact Institutions? Tiebout vs. Cascade Models of Institutional Change

  The most plausible argument for mass immigration would be something like factor efficiency plus Tiebout competition. Labor mobility improves people’s lives in the short run by letting labor move to where it’s most productive, a straightforward implication of welfare economics. It also improves lives in the long run by letting . . .

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  Thoughts on the Paradox of Tolerance

  This comic has been making the rounds on the internet, mostly by people justifying the legitimacy of punching Nazis. The response has been an interesting battle between the immune responses against Nazis and the immune response against attacks on free speech. There’s a slippery slope on both sides. But taking . . .

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  Discretion Is Necessary For Commitment Power

  The usual supposition in economics is that predefined rules are preferable to administrative discretion, in that the latter often precludes credible commitments, and introduces a social dilemma that an enforceable rule could solve (Simons 1936; Kydland and Prescott 1977; Root 1989). This logic holds to the extent that one can rely . . .

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  Only Outlaws Will Have Guns

  More and more I’ve come to appreciate the aphorism: “if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns” – not as a slogan for gun rights, but as an instance of a much more fundamental insight that non-self-enforcing norms tend to select for increasingly bad outcomes when you can’t guarantee . . .

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  A Post-Scarcity Society Would Probably Be Dystopian

  In 1930 John Maynard Keynes published Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. With this pamphlet, the hope of a post-scarcity society, where people no longer have to work for a living, moved from a utopian pipe dream to something with some amount of mainstream clout. More recently, advances in automation have . . .

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  The State's Double Standard

  A great variety of political philosophies, libertarian, anarchist, pacifist, and even leftist, are essentially animated by some sentiment like Mr. Wollstein’s above. The appeal is obvious: a separate morality for collective action feels inconsistent. And more practically, it would seem to make it a lot easier for state actors to . . .

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  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 . . .

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  Christianity, Cooperation, and State Formation

  Human cooperation, I’ve argued before, is remarkable and unlikely. Even more remarkable is that it ever got beyond the tribal scale of a couple dozen to a couple hundred people, given that the institutions necessary to sustain cooperation at that scale are very different from those necessary to sustain anonymous . . .

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  Why Are There Taxes? Or, Taxation Isn't About Revenue

  In a recent post on the concept of a “stock of savings”, I argued: In a proper money economy investment does not depend on anyone’s conscious decision to save. All it requires is the purchasing power to bid away resources into investment use. This purchasing power can be amassed by abstaining . . .

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  Liberty As Legitimacy

  Lots of ink has been spilled in political philosophy over whether liberty is valuable as an end in itself, or as a means to some other end. I’d like to suggest that most discussions of political liberty can and should be understood in terms of legitimacy, and without invoking moral . . .

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  Evonomics - How About Evopolitics Too?

  David S Wilson says we need to ditch Hayek’s politics in order to save his evolutionary insights. On the contrary, the argument in The Road to Serfdom follows straightforwardly from Wilson’s own premises if you take an evolutionary perspective on politics as well as the economy. The basic problem is . . .

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  Economics Is Not About Policy

  Imagine if the field we call microeconomics were actually devoted to giving business advice to Microsoft. Dozens of journals are devoted to telling Microsoft the best way to make a profit. There would be papers at conferences about the optimal price of an Xbox; papers about a market niche that . . .

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  Intellectual Property and Institutional Efficiency: The Limits of the Demsetz Story

  Harold Demsetz (1967) in his classic paper “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” makes the case that property rights arise endogenously when the cost of the commons problem begins to exceed the cost of exclusion, and illustrates with the case of Native American tribes and land rights. Once buffalo become . . .

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  The Curious Contours of Contractual Freedom: A Cynical Spin on Civil Society

  Freedom of contract is not sacrosanct in American legal culture. What is sacrosanct is non-discrimination along several definite lines – most importantly, religion, race, and gender. Sometimes these norms conflict, as in the multitude of laws governing employment and labor. But sometimes they overlap – particularly on the question of freedom of . . .

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  Apparatus Cost

  “The art of Economics,” says Henry Hazlitt, “consists in looking not merely at the immediate, but at the longer effects of any act or policy.” This is true not only for the economic effects of policy, but also for the political effects of policy. These longer effects in the political . . .

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  A Theory of Bargaining Power

  Between equality of wealth and equality before the law, there lies a third sense of the word, important but overlooked: equality of bargaining power. The left would do well to stop confusing wealth-inequality with it, and the right would do well to stop ignoring it. . . .

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  Coercion and Bargaining Power

  The idea of coercion is central to many strands of Libertarian thought, held up as the summum malum and opposed to voluntarism. But to actually define coercion precisely enough to build a political theory on it is a bit trickier. In general, definitions can be grouped into two broad categories: . . .