Ecological economics and the politics of knowledge: the debate between Hayek and Neurath

Hayek's epistemic arguments against planning were aimed notjust against socialism but also the tradition of ecologicaleconomics. The concern with the physical preconditions of economicactivity and defence of non-monetary measures in economic choicewere expressions of the same rationalist illusion about thescope of human knowledge that underpinned the socialist project.Neurath's commitment to physicalism, in natura calculation andplanning typified these errors. Neurath responded to these criticismsin unpublished notes and correspondence with Hayek. These highlightedthe epistemological premises his work shared with Hayek's, representinga response to Hayek from Hayek's own assumptions. This paperexamines the cogency and continuing relevance of the argumentsin this debate.     

Policy Dimensions of Progressive Institutional Change: Lessons from China’s Construction of a Socialist Market Economy

Abstract:

Through a comprehensive review of the progressive institutional change (PIC) literature, I first discuss four possible trajectories of PIC by considering the forces of societal reaction that might frame the path, as well as the scale and scope of the changes. Thus, I pose four questions that need to be asked when related policies are formulated for PIC. To illustrate this method, I scrutinize the evidence from the construction of a socialist market economy by the Chinese government since the 1980s and argue that related policies have successfully promoted PIC from three dimensions: (1) curbing potential conflicts with power groups; (2) promoting a sense of awareness among stakeholders; and (3) minimizing disturbances to the community. Actually, the related changes demonstrate a dynamic “displacement process” for PICs. Despite the success of this sociosystem, it is found that the sustaining of PIC which requires policy factors that enhance instrumental efficiency in the Chinese context will serve as a challenge to the Chinese government ahead.     

From Judicial Sovereignty to Collective Democracy: The Development of J.R. Commons’ Perspective on Progressive Institutional Change

Abstract:

This article clarifies the significance of “collective democracy” in the works of John R. Commons by comparing it with “judicial sovereignty” in terms of its contribution to “progress.” We can thus answer two issues that Paul D. Bush does not clearly address: (i) what setup for policy formation contributes to progress and (ii) what is the role of economists within a collective democracy? Based on the comparison, the answer to the first question is collective democracy, and regarding the second question, the roles of economists as both economists and “institutional” economists are extrapolated.     

The nudge wars: A modern socialist calculation debate

We investigate the claims of behavioral paternalism in the more realistic framework of complex choice. In particular, we analyze the claims made by behavioral paternalists that predictive analytics over large amounts of data will make it possible to target and successfully implement purportedly welfare-enhancing nudges deemed to make nudged agents better off “as judged by themselves” (AJBT). We draw parallels between the socialist calculation debate and nudge theoretical arguments, particularly the libertarian socialism of H. D. Dickinson and the libertarian paternalism of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. We find that if actual idealized behavior is a more complicated process of recursive feedback using a knowledge classification method, behavioral paternalists engaging in an automatized process of notice-and-comment rulemaking using Big Data methods still encounter epistemological problems and the problems associated with radical uncertainty unearthed during the socialist calculation debate and afterwards.

     

Is the economics of time and ignorance a “classic”?

A history of economic thought perspective on The Economics of Time and Ignorance reveals that the book rehabilitates some major themes in the Austrian tradition that were all but lost subsequent to the formalist revolution in economics that took place in the middle of the twentieth-century. The book also anticipates some important ideas that were extended and applied in Austrian economics after it was first published. Reviews have claimed that the book was a “classic” and also “original”. The book is too close in a temporal sense to judge whether or not future generations will canonize it as a “classic”. Using Stigler’s criteria as to what constitutes scientific “originality”, it is concluded that, taken as a whole, the book was not original. From the vantage point of the overall discipline of economics, it was a work advancing controversial ideas that would not easily change the beliefs, practices and interests of economists in general but it offered sound reasons for taking the Austrian thought-trajectory more seriously. It would be more fitting to view the authors as providers of many innovations contributing to the mature Austrian economics of the twenty-first century.     

The reception of Marx in France: La Revue Socialiste (1885–1914)

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to provide context to reading, interpreting and using Marx from 1885 to 1914 in La Revue Socialiste, the main journal of socialist movements in France. The article first states some quantitative elements on the absolute and relative importance of the references to Marx and the words “Marxism” and “Marxist” in the journal. The central editorial line of the review – to restore a French descent to socialism and to try to found a socialism not exclusively “Marxist” – is then analysed. This line is maintained over time, with variations, in different national and international contexts. Finally, three key economic themes defining the relation to Marx in the journal are presented. Based on this quantitative and qualitative analysis, a brief conclusion stresses some of the most specific aspects of the socialist reception of Marx in France before WWI.     

Will the MEGA2 edition be a watershed in interpreting Marx?

Abstract

The MEGA² edition is a watershed in interpreting important aspects of Marx’s oeuvre, but not all of them. It provides hints as to why Marx failed to complete his magnum opus, Capital, and informs about his doubts regarding the “law of motion” of capitalism centred on the “law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit” he was keen to establish.     

Emil Lederer’s Theory of Economic Fluctuations and the Role of Financial Institutions

Abstract

Emil Lederer was characterized as the “leading academic socialist of Germany in the 1920’s” by Joseph Schumpeter and was a highly respected economist of his time. However, most aspects of his work remain totally unexplored. This paper focuses on Emil Lederer’s theory of economic fluctuations defending the thesis that certain aspects of Lederer’s conceptualization of economic fluctuations underwent considerable modifications when his 1925 article Konjunktur und Krisen is compared with his 1938 book Technical Progress and Unemployment, a shift unacknowledged so far in the literature. In his first attempt to tackle the issue, in Konjunktur und Krisen (1925), Lederer had constructed an explanation consistent with the so-called “disproportionality theory” introduced by Tugan-Baranowsky (codified as “early Lederer”). However, Lederer’s conception of the business cycle during the 1930s and especially in his major work Technical Progress and Unemployment underwent considerable modifications. Lederer’s (1938 Lederer, E. 1938. Technical Progress and Unemployment, Geneva: King and Son.  [Google Scholar]) analysis is, apparently, very ‘Schumpeterian’ (codified as “late Lederer”). In this version of his theory, the cycle is explained by supply-side factors, and more specifically by technical change. Additionally, Lederer’s view on the role of financial institutions (credit and banks) with regards to business cycles is analysed. Lederer avoided attributing a causative role to monetary factors. The interrelation between ‘real’ factors and financial institutions constitutes an essential element in his analysis of the business cycle.     

Institutionalism,Planning, and the Current Crisis

This article originated in a shock of recognition. In the second volume of his discourse on “Civilization and Capitalism,” Fernand Braudel muses on the “eclecticism” of “the most advanced kind of capitalism”: “As if the characteristic advantage of standing at the commanding heights of the economy … consisted precisely of not having to confine oneself to a single choice, of being able, as today’s businessmen would put it, to keep one’s options open.”¹ My colleagues and I work as venture capitalists and as investment bankers of a specialized kind, engaged in raising capital to support the growth of technologybased companies and in realizing liquidity for their founding investors—often ourselves—by managing public offerings of their shares or by merging them into much larger companies. A primary virtue of our practice is the opportunity to choose with broad discretion where to commit our own and our clients’ capital across what Braudel calls “the differential geography ofprofit.”²     

Marx,postmodernity, and transformation of the individual

Postmodernity raises for Marxism the question of what happens to the alienated subject's consciousness and purposeful action in the aftermath of its alienation. Arguing that some of Marx's own ideas can shed light on this question, I make a conceptual distinction between form of consciousness and mode of consciousness to capture what I take to be the kernel of his thinking on the transformation of the “average” individual and her/his consciousness in his Early Writings, and especially in the Grundrisse.     

A bias in growth-rate comparisons of capitalist and socialist economies

An economy is described by an n-sector linear production matrix and a fixed vector of consumption needs. There are many ways in which goods may be priced and many ways in which “surplus labor” may be allocated among sectors. Depending on which vector of prices and which distribution of surplus labor prevails, the average growth rate of the economy will differ. It is shown that the surplus-labor-price constellation likely to prevail in oligopolistic, free-enterprise economies overestimates the “true” growth rate, and in a centrally planned socialist economy underestimates it. This raises the question whether actual growth rates are systematically biased in the directions indicated. J. Comp. Econ.,     

The Dowry Gift in South Asia: An Institution on the Intersection of Market and Patriarchy

Abstract

Dowry refers to marriage gifts that are instrumental to the negotiation of the marriage contract. Historically, the dowry gift was constituted by law across the Roman empire. While dowry has become largely irrelevant in Europe in contemporary times, it is still pervasive across the Brahmanical Hindu societies of South Asia. Moreover, what was traditionally token gifts from friends and well-wishers has taken on the form of “new dowry” since the colonial period. “New dowry” is heavily composed of cash and market goods, including land and is frequently accompanied by violence against new brides when their families fail to make larger dowry gifts with higher market value. This article examines the evolution of “new dowry” through a Polanyian lens. Unlike the neoclassical Beckerian approach which takes an ahistorical outlook to marriage as a “market” for matching partners and dowry as a market price, the substantivist lens à la Polanyi investigates the historical evolution of “new dowry” through the advent of market processes in the colonial period and the countermovement of legal reform in the post-colonial period.     

Pleasure and belief in Hume's Decision Process

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce explicitly pleasure and belief in what aims at being a Humean theory of decision, like the one developed in Diaye and Lapidus (2005a). Although we support the idea that Hume was in some way a hedonist – evidently different from Bentham's or Jevons' way – we lay emphasis less on continuity than on the specific kind of hedonism encountered in Hume's writings (chiefly the Treatise, the second Enquiry, the Dissertation, or some of his Essays). Such hedonism clearly contrasts to its standard modern inheritance, expressed by the relation between preferences and utility.

The reason for such a difference with the usual approach lies in the mental process that Hume puts to the fore in order to explain the way pleasure determines desires and volition. Whereas pleasure is primarily, in Hume's words, an impression of sensation, it takes place in the birth of passions as reflecting an idea of pleasure, whose “force and vivacity” is precisely a “belief”, transferred to the direct passions of desire or volition that come immediately before action. As a result, from a Humean point of view, “belief” deals with decision under risk or uncertainty, as well as with intertemporal decision and indiscrimination problems.

The latter are explored within a formal framework, and it is shown that the relation of pleasure is transformed by belief into a non-empty class of relations of desire, among which at least one is a preorder.     

Marx and Kalecki on aggregate instability and class struggle

Abstract

Michal Kalecki developed his original model of the business cycle in the early 1930s. Several versions referred as versions I, II and III have been developed until the late 1960s from which Kalecki draw three central propositions on instability and class struggle: (1) the capitalist system “cannot break the impasse of fluctuations around a static position” unless it is shocked by “semi-exogenous factors”, (2) the dynamics of the profit rate and investment – as in version I and II – may be disconnected from “class struggle” and (3) when class struggle impacts the dynamics of the economy – as in version III – this is happening in a context in which expected profitability of new investment projects is negatively related to the profit share. In this article, we want to show that each of these three proposals represents key differences with Marx.     

Professor Fisher and the quantity theory – a significant encounter

Abstract

Irving Fisher's encounter with the Quantity Theory of Money began in the 1890s, during the debate about bimetallism, and reached its high point in 1911 with the publication of The Purchasing Power of Money. His most important refinement of the theory, derived from his recognition of bank deposits as means of exchange, was to treat their out of equilibrium recursive interaction with inflation as integral to it. This treatment underlay both his 1920s work on the business cycle as a “dance of the dollar” and his advocacy of subjecting monetary policy to a legislated price stability rule, initially to be based on his “compensated dollar” scheme. Fisher's failure to recognise the onset of the Great Depression even as it was happening was directly related to his faith in the quantity theory's seeming implication that price level stability in and of itself guaranteed the continuation of prosperity, while his subsequent work on the debt deflation theory of great depressions initially failed to repair the damage that this failure did to his reputation, and to that of the quantity theory. In the 1930s Fisher nevertheless remained an active supporter of various schemes to reflate and then stabilise the price level. His subsequent influence on the quantity theory based Monetarist counter-revolution that began in the 1950s lay, directly, in its deployment of his analysis of expected inflation on nominal interest rates, and, indirectly, in its espousal of the case for subjecting monetary policy to a legislated rule.     

Relevance of barriers and facilitators in the use of health technology assessment in Colombia

Objectives: Several studies, mostly from developed countries, have identified barriers and facilitators with regard to the uptake of health technology assessment (HTA). This study elicited, using best-worst scaling (BWS), what HTA experts in Colombia consider to be the most important barriers and facilitators in the use of HTA, and makes a comparison to results from the Netherlands.

Methods: Two object case surveys (one for barriers, one for facilitators) were conducted among 18 experts (policymakers, health professionals, PhD students, senior HTA-researchers) from Colombia. Seven respondents were employees of the national HTA agency Instituto de Evaluación Tecnológica de Salud (IETS). In total, 22 barriers and 19 facilitators were included. In each choice task, participants were asked to choose the most and least important barrier/facilitator from a set of five. Hierarchical Bayes modeling was used to compute the mean relative importance scores (RIS) for each factor, and a subgroup analysis was conducted to assess differences between IETS and non-IETS respondents. The final ranking was further compared to the results from a similar study conducted in the Netherlands.

Results: The three most important barriers (RIS >6.00) were “Inadequate presentation format”, “Absence of policy networks”, and “Insufficient legal support”. The six most important facilitators (RIS >6.00) were “Appropriate timing”, “Clear presentation format”, “Improving longstanding relation”, “Appropriate incentives”, “Sufficient qualified human resources”, and “Availability to relevant HTA research”. The perceived relevance of the barriers and facilitators differed slightly between IETS and non-IETS employees, while the differences between the rankings in Colombia and the Netherlands were substantial.

Conclusion: The study suggests that barriers and facilitators related to technical aspects of processing HTA reports and to the contact and interaction between researchers and policymakers had the greatest importance in Colombia.     

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? GENDER,LABOR, AND DISCOURSE IN THE NOIDA EXPORT PROCESSING ZONE AND DELHI

Abstract

Export processing zones (EPZs) are like islands of globalization. Much of the literature on EPZs and export-oriented industries (EOIs) notes a preponderance of women who are constructed as “cheap,” “nimble fingered,” and “docile” labor. This literature is dominated by socialist feminist thinkers, and this paper argues that there is a need to incorporate the insights of postmodern feminist thinkers. The article focuses on the role that language, discourse, and subjectivity play in the gendering process in handmade jewelry production in the Noida Export Processing Zone (NEPZ) and in the ranch production units related by common ownership in Delhi, India. It thus gives “voices” to women and men, and brings out their agency in structuring the labor market. The study confirms that gender division of labor is a product of discursive and material practices that are reproduced through discourses into which different actors invest, and that feed into the gendered subjective identities of these actors.