司马迁的因俗以治思想及其现实镜鉴?

作为一种非正式制度,习俗在国家的社会经济发展和治理中起着非常重要的作用,在我国的古代社会尤其如此。司马迁较早注意到了俗与治的内在关联,但学术界忽视了其在司马迁经济思想中的重要地位。文章对司马迁的经济思想谱系中“俗”与“治”两大重要范畴进行了关联阐述,介绍了司马迁“因俗以治”治道思想的源流和主张,并结合现代经济学理论对其进行延伸与扩展,探讨其现实意义。研究发现：(1)司马迁的治道思想兼容了道家与儒家的无为而治思想的不同侧面,而其“善因论”的要义正在于“俗之所欲,因而予之”。(2)因俗以治的核心是因循人“生有欲”和“皆为利”的本性及民间习俗来因地制宜、因时制宜地立俗施事,以达至“事少而功多”的理想治理效果。(3)由于司马迁的经济思想带有浓厚的经验色彩和朴素性质,而且中国古代社会缺乏良好的市场环境,因此其在近代以前始终未得到重视和采纳。(4)司马迁“因俗以治”思想给现代国家治理带来了众多启示：一是要尊重风俗习惯并加以因势利导;二是要注重习俗等非正式制度与正式制度的兼容;三是要让好的习俗成为一种稳态均衡而固定下来并延续下去。文章不仅是对司马迁经济思想研究的丰富和拓展,而且对中国国家治理能力的提升也提供了有益的历史借鉴。     

Measuring the Unmeasured: Cultural Heritage Studies in Honor of Prof. Francesco Forte

This paper presents the contributions of Francesco Forte to the measurement of art and cultural goods and services, as I worked with him as his co-author. These contributions range from the valuation of art goods by the art matrix we conceived, to the valuation of the cultural welfare of nations, regions and local communities. Our work also assessed the provision of cultural welfare at the national, regional and local level for the public and non-profit sectors and measured the efficiency and effectiveness of museum bureaucracies. We also studied the profitability of investments in the arts by considering product life cycles, artistic movements and economies. More recently, with Michele Caputo, we focused on the long-run life cycle and success of the movie industry for select countries competing with foreign movie industries and TV entertainment by adopting Caputo’s fractional derivatives theory, which captures the role of past history. Professor Forte and I also developed the Differential Touristic Development Index to measure the effects of art and cultural enterprises as tourist attractions. The most innovative contributions of Francesco Forte to the measurement of the economic value of cultural goods and services demonstrate that it is possible to “measure the unmeasured,” and therein improve public collection of statistical data with the goal of increasing the preservation and valuation of cultural goods and services and highlighting their potential as economic multipliers.     

Francesco Forte’s Contributions to <Emphasis Type="Italic">Essentials of Fiscal Sociology</Emphasis>

Francesco Forte has made major contributions to many areas of economics with the result that his theoretical work and applications have opened new areas of inquiry. This paper connects Forte’s work with the work of Jürgen Backhaus on fiscal sociology. Positioned at the crossroads of economics and sociology, the answers to these questions helped fill the void which gave rise to the field of fiscal sociology. Fiscal sociology is primarily a study of taxation and fiscal policies which illuminates core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism. It includes the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and adds to our understanding the basis for the inequality between rich and poor countries. Our paper reviews several of Forte’s papers on Pareto’s fiscal sociology and the failure of European planning for less-developed regions. The paper highlights Forte’s contributions to economic theory focusing on Pareto’s sociological theory and the influence of the European Union on regional development.     

The making of Beveridge's Unemployment (1909): three concepts blended

The aim of this paper is to re-examine William Henry Beveridge's (1879?–?1963) early ideas on unemployment. After developing through three phases (‘from the unemployable to the unemployed’, ‘from the unemployed to unemployment’, and ‘perfection of the labour market’), Beveridge finally accomplished a coherent package of remedies for unemployment: labour exchanges with National Insurance on the basis of the living wage principle (previously unexplored but evident through his work). These three concepts, perfectly blended, formed his original and unique standpoint. By analysing this development of ideas, we can position Beveridge's doctrine of unemployment more appropriately in the history of economic thought.     

Japanese Consumption,External Disequilibrium and their Statistical Measurement

Georgescu-Roegen's work is usually divided into two categories, his earlier work on consumer and production theory and his later concern with entropy and bioeconomics beginning with his 1966 introductory essay to his collected theoretical papers published in the volume Analytical Economics. Most economists usually praise his earlier work on pure theory and ignore his later work which is highly critical of neoclassical economics. Those economists sympathetic to his later work usually take the position that he “saw the light” and gave up neoclassical theory some time in the 1960s to turn his attention to the issues of resource scarcity and social institutions. It is argued here that there is an unbroken path running from Georgescu's work in pure theory in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, through his writings on peasant economies in the 1960s, leading to his preoccupation with entropy and bioeconomics in the last 25 years of his life. That common thread is his preoccupation with “valuation.” The choices our species makes about resource use and the distribution of economic output depends upon our valuation framework. Georgescu-Roegen's work begins in the 1930s with a critical examination of the difficulties with the hedonistic valuation framework of neoclassical economics, moves in the 1960s to the conflict between social and hedonistic valuation, and culminates in the 1970s and 1980s with his examination of the conflict between individual, social, and environmental values. This paper traces the evolution of Georgescu-Roegen's thought about valuation and the environmental and social policy recommendations which arise out of his bioeconomic framework.     

Luigi Einaudi,the European Federation and the ECB’s Monetary Policy as Seen by Francesco Forte

Francesco Forte dedicated three books to the figure of Luigi Einaudi. The first was published in 1982, the second in 2009, and the third in 2016. Through these books he provides a comprehensive analysis of the liberal thought of Einaudi. This article focuses on Forte’s exploration and comments regarding Einaudi’s views and proposals for the European Federation (Einaudi 2011) and the European Central Bank’s unconventional monetary policy. Forte’s analysis of Einaudi has the merit of exalting one of the most prominent and lesser known features of his thought. Einaudi appears as the architect of what we call today the European Union. However no historian, economist, or politician has ever recognized the fundamental role of Einaudi. This lack of recognition should be extended to the Eurotower banker whose unconventional monetary policy has drawn so much from Einaudi’s theory of financial stability.     

The rent disease: Achille Loria’s criticism to the capitalistic society

This paper is a reconstruction and a reconsideration of Achille Loria’s (1857–1943) economic and social thought, in particular his criticism of capitalism. Loria, a leader of the Italian and European economic science of his generation, was convinced that the true and most relevant conflict in the capitalistic society was that between rent and profit. Loria, following David Ricardo, considered this conflict much more radical than the profit-wages one, and therefore assigned to income redistribution a central place in his theory. Loria was an outstanding economist in the first part of his career (1780–1900), but underwent a sudden decline with the advent of the marginalist revolution, when his “classic” approach to political economy was considered obsolete and wrong. The paper claims that Loria’s system deserves to be reconsidered, and that his criticisms are particularly relevant in contemporary financial capitalism based again on rent seeking.     

Widening Wicksell’s conception of political economy: his “thoroughly revolutionary programme”

Abstract

Knut Wicksell’s opinion that political economy is a “thoroughly revolutionary programme” has often been neglected in the literature. Actually, Wicksell aimed at implementing such a programme in order to enlarge political economy as a “practical science”. It is articulated around three main features: a criticism of the marginal theories, the redefinition of society as a whole, and the advent of social justice. Indeed, Wicksell claimed that economic and social problems may be solved only by a complete social reorganisation. Hence, I show that Wicksell’s social reform programme drives his particular view of and approach to political economy.     

Toward Generalized Evolutionism: Beyond “Generalized Darwinism” and Its Critics

This article seeks to transcend the debate regarding “generalized Darwinism” or “universal Darwinism” for the social sciences. Highlighting recent discoveries in evolutionary biology, the article argues that it is no longer tenable to insist that (neo-)Darwinism is the only proper doctrine for understanding biological evolution. Moreover, social evolution is much more than purely (neo-)Darwinian or (neo-)Lamarckian. As such, the debate on whether we deploy only (neo-)Darwinism or (neo-)Lamarckism — generalized or not — to understand social evolution is a red herring. Instead, social scientists should embrace “generalized evolutionism,” a more accommodating and versatile doctrine that subsumes “(generalized) Darwinism” or “(generalized) Lamarckism.” Empirical inquiries that deploy “generalized evolutionism” have shed important new light on some critical puzzles in human society: from institutional change to the foundation of economic development before 1500 AD, through the coming of the industrial revolution, to the evolution of the international system. More empirical efforts along this line of theorizing are needed.     

Institutionalism and the “Common Man” Through the Lens of Philip Klein: Business Cycles,the Public Sector,and Keynes’s Economics

This article reviews and assesses Philip Klein’s work on business cycles and macroeconomics, the public sector, and the economics of John Maynard Keynes. The article makes several findings. First, Klein built on the pioneering efforts of Wesley Mitchell to advance the development of cycle indicators and to outline an eclectic theory of cycles that remains useful for synthesizing a broad literature. Second, Klein’s essays on macroeconomics contain enduring discussions of the malleability of the “natural” rate of unemployment and the value of a behavioral approach to expectations. Third, he refocused the institutionalist attention on the public sector by introducing “higher efficiency” and other concepts to help explain how government policy plays a role in economic life. Fourth, Klein emphasized the role of fiscal policy in moderating business cycles. Fifth, his work points in the direction of today’s post-Keynesian institutionalism, both by stressing that Keynes was “profoundly institutionalist” in his approach and by arguing that conjoining Keynes and institutionalism would provide a stronger foundation for macroeconomic theory and policy.     

Changing knowledge in the early economic thought of Michael Polanyi

How did Polanyi, a middleman between Keynes and Hayek, see economics education as a way to save the challenged liberal economic system of the 1930s? The first part of the article explores how experts and non-experts were engaged in making and disseminating economic knowledge, what role perception had in these engagements, and how such practices contributed to a kind of mental division of labor in the early economic thought of Michael Polanyi. The second part reconstructs Polanyi’s endeavors to show how the visual presentation of social matters could foster these engagement practices and the construction of economic knowledge. The third part points out that top-down and bottom-up approaches were both present in Polanyi’s economic thought and explains why the latter is evolutionary in a sense that it is based on changing knowledge in cognitive, behavioral, social and technical domains. The fourth part discusses how public understanding of economic ideas connected interactional expertise and boundary work in Polanyi’s account, and how he was engaged in developing both as part of his social agenda. The article concludes by showing how Polanyi positioned his growth theory and social agenda to save liberal economic thought and our civilization.     

30 years after the nobel: James Buchanan’s political philosophy

There are three main foundations of Public Choice theory: methodological individualism, behavioral symmetry, and “politics as exchange.” The first two are represented in nearly all work that identifies as “Public Choice,” but politics as exchange is often forgotten or de-emphasized. This paper—adapted from a lecture given on the occasion of the 30th year after Buchanan’s Nobel Prize—fleshes out Buchanan’s theory of politics as exchange, using four notions that are uniquely central to his thought: philosophical anarchism, ethical neutrality, subjectivism, and the “relatively absolute absolutes.” A central tension in Buchanan’s work is identified, in which he seems simultaneously to argue both that nearly anything agreed to by a group could be enforced within the group as a contract, and that there are certain types of rules and arrangements, generated by decentralized processes, that serve human needs better than state action. It is argued that it is a mistake to try to reconcile this tension, and that both parts of the argument are important.     

The biological hypothesis in cliometrics of growth: a methodological critique of Fogel (post 1982) and Ashraf &amp; Galor (2013)

The resort to biological “analogies”, “metaphors” and “concepts” is an important aspect of the history of the relationships between economics and biology and has long been greatly controversial. This controversy continues today in the most recent work of three cliometricians, i.e. Fogel (post 1982) and Ashraf and Galor (2013). We focus on the theories of historical growth relying on biological explanations which have been formulated by these economists, from the specific angle of biological reductionism. We propose a methodological critique of their use of biological variables as determinants of the historical dynamics of economic growth. Based upon the transposition to the field of economics of Ernst Mayr’s distinction between functional and evolutionary biology and his definitions of reductionism, we argue that despite some similarities, the questions raised by Fogel’s and Ashraf & Galor’s theories are of distinct nature. Nonetheless, we stress the need for a careful examination of the biological mechanisms supporting these researches.     

Post-Crisis Experiments in Development Finance Architectures: A Hirschmanian Perspective On ‘Productive Incoherence’

Abstract

The Asian and especially the global crisis of 2008 have catalyzed decentralization of the developing world’s financial governance architecture. I understand this state of affairs via the concept of “productive incoherence” which is apparent in a denser, multilayered development financial architecture that is emerging as a consequence of heterogeneous practical adjustments to changing circumstances rather than as the embodiment of a coherent doctrine. Drawing on Albert Hirschman, I argue that the absence of an encompassing theoretical blueprint for a new economic system—i.e. a new “ism” to replace neoliberalism—is in fact a vitally important virtue. If we cannot live without a new “ism,” I propose “Hirschmanian Possibilism” as a new doctrine—one that rejects an overarching theoretical framework from which to deduce the singly appropriate institutional structure of the economy. Hirschmanian Possibilism asserts instead the value of productive incoherence as a framework for pursuing democratic, ethically viable development institutions.     

Solving the U.S. Trade Deficit and Competitiveness Problem

We compare the analytical approach of John R. Common and Ronald H. Coase to institutional analysis and social provisioning. In particular, we examine their similarities in (i) the definition and role of institutions in the economy, (ii) the allocative (social provisioning) role of institutions in the economy, and (iii) the inescapable and unchanging role of institutions in shaping the social provisioning process. We contend that Commons and Coase had more in common than did Coase and many of his followers in the “new institutional economics.” In particular, the two had strong similarities in both (a) their insights into the nature of institutions in the legal-economic nexus that is the foundation of the economy and (b) their methods for conducting economics research. Because this role of institutional evolution is, as Warren Samuels noted, an inescapable and unchanging part of an economy’s social provisioning process, it will remain an integral part of any such work in the future, regardless of the “school of analysis” or methodological approach.     

Memorable occasions

Eucken, in his paradigm of a functionally competitive social market economy, established the basis for a free market economy which institutionalizes concerns for economic and social justice. The Bishops’ Pastoral (and also the Lay Letter) on the U.S. economy approach the concept of a social and just economy from a Christian moral tradition. A community of interests between these two approaches, as well as Donaldson’s synthesis of Nozick’s and Rawl’s theories of justice, causes a moral-economic dialogue and cross fertilization to emerge. The Bishops postulate that the evolution of a just and fair market economy, as the guarantor of freedom, human dignity, and justice, cannot be left to chance but needs to be consciously guided. Therefore, they emphasize the integration of economic theories and policies with notions of “fairness” and “justice,” advocating a holistic approach in viewing the economic system as an organic whole. This paper shows that the broad economic guidelines, which Bishops suggest, fall within the framework of a functional market economy, i.e., a social market economy. It does not deal with the religious and biblical arguments of the Pastoral Letter.     

Pastoral economics within the framework of a social economy

Eucken, in his paradigm of a functionally competitive social market economy, established the basis for a free market economy which institutionalizes concerns for economic and social justice. The Bishops’ Pastoral (and also the Lay Letter) on the U.S. economy approach the concept of a social and just economy from a Christian moral tradition. A community of interests between these two approaches, as well as Donaldson’s synthesis of Nozick’s and Rawl’s theories of justice, causes a moral-economic dialogue and cross fertilization to emerge. The Bishops postulate that the evolution of a just and fair market economy, as the guarantor of freedom, human dignity, and justice, cannot be left to chance but needs to be consciously guided. Therefore, they emphasize the integration of economic theories and policies with notions of “fairness” and “justice,” advocating a holistic approach in viewing the economic system as an organic whole. This paper shows that the broad economic guidelines, which Bishops suggest, fall within the framework of a functional market economy, i.e., a social market economy. It does not deal with the religious and biblical arguments of the Pastoral Letter.     

Permanent On-The-Spot Job Creation—The Missing Keynes Plan for Full Employment and Economic Transformation

The paper rejects the conventional view that Keynes had an aggregate demand approach to full employment. Instead, it proposes that he advocated a very specific labor demand targeting approach that would be implemented both in recessions and expansions. Modern policies, which aim to “close the demand gap” between current and potential output are inconsistent with Keynes's work on theoretical and methodological grounds. There is considerable evidence to suggest that a permanent program for direct or (in his words) “on-the-spot” job creation is the missing Keynes Plan for full employment and economic transformation. The current crisis presents the social economist with a unique opportunity to set fiscal policy straight along the original Keynesian lines. The paper suggests what specific form such a policy might take.     

Cognition,Social Impulse,and the Principle of Adaptation: Insights into the Peirce-Veblen Connection

This article seeks to offer insights into the connections between Charles S. Peirce and Thorstein B. Veblen regarding their understanding of the logic of scientific thought and cognition. In this sense, this work explores how both Veblen and Peirce dismissed the Cartesian notion of unmediated cognition and how they sought to depict cognition as a process. Furthermore, this article presents Peirce’s concept of “social impulse” and Veblen’s “principle of adaptation” as complementary perspectives on science and cognition that have strong evolutionary content.