The Culture of (Dis)Contentment

John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1992 The Culture of Contentment was written to assess the long-term impact of the Reagan/Bush era on American culture and politics. In light of recent electoral politics and outcomes, this article revisits Galbraith’s central argument to consider how the culture of contentment influences our discontented politics today. To do so, the author briefly examines the recent findings of sociologists and political scientists to examine the culture and politics of discontent in the United States at present. The article concludes with a brief examination of Veblen’s views of democracy as a lens through which to examine the foregoing.     

Notes on Contributors

In recent political-economic theories of ‘nature’, Mill and Marx/Engels form important reference points. Ecological economists see Mill's ‘stationary state’ as seminal, while Marxists have ‘brought capitalism back in’ to debates on growth and climate change, sparking a Marxological renaissance that has overturned our understanding of Marx/Engels' opus. This article explores aspects of Mill's and Marx/Engels' work and contemporary reception. It identifies a resemblance between their historical dialectics. Marx's communism is driven by logics of ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ (including the ‘tendency of profit rates to fall’). In Mill's dialectic a ‘thesis’, material progress, calls forth its ‘antithesis’, diminishing returns. The inevitable ‘Aufhebung’ is a stationary state of wealth and population; Mill mentions countervailing tendencies but fails to consider their capacity to postpone utopia's arrival. Today, Mill's schema lives on in ecological economics, shorn of determinism but with its market advocacy intact. It appears to contrast with the ‘productive forces expansion’ espoused by Marx/Engels. They stand accused of ‘Promethean arrogance’, ignoring ‘natural limits’ and ‘gambling on abundance’. But I find these criticisms to be ill-judged, and propose an alternative reading, arguing that their work contains a critique of the ‘growth paradigm’, and that their ‘cornucopian’ ends do not sanction ‘Promethean’ means.     

杜威的德育思想以及对我国学校道德教育的启示

杜威教育思想体系中,德育思想占有重要的地位,他认为道德教育应该生活化,教材应与社会生活连接在一起,研究社威的德育思想对我国学校德育的实施具有一定的借鉴价值。     

Vicarelli,Keynes, and the unstable nexus between investment,liquidity, and finance

The goal of this article is to reconstruct Keynes’s vision of the unstable nexus between investment, liquidity and finance, as set out by the Italian economist Fausto Vicarelli (1936–1986). As argued in the article, one of Vicarelli’s main contributions consists of explaining the inherent instability of financially sophisticated capitalist economies in terms of the interaction (and double dissociation) between investment, saving, and stock-holding decisions, within a Keynesian framework characterized by the presence of fundamental uncertainty. While Vicarelli’s interpretation of Keynes is best understood in the context of the post-Keynesian literature, its relevance goes beyond that, as its sheds light on current issues related to the post-2008 financial crisis and its policy implications.     

Price elasticity and bid-ask price spreads in the treasury bond market

Typical analyses of transactions costs in the bond markets explain these costs in terms of yield, term to maturity, coupons, and issue size. However, these analyses do not recognize the price elasticity of bonds to interest rate movements, which provides better measures of market risk and bid-ask price spreads. Elasticity or duration and issue size together display stronger associations with bid-ask price spreads than do the traditional variables. The association is also less subject to multicollinearity of the independent variables. Finally, stepwise regressions show that coupon and yield data add no information about bid-ask price spreads not already impounded in the duration statistic. This casts doubt on the nonduration arguments often used to support these variables as separately meaningful in transactions cost analyses.     

Listen Libertarians!: A Review of John Tomasi’s “Free Market Fairness”

John Tomasi’s 2012 book, Free Market Fairness, has been well received. On the dust jacket, Tyler Cowen proclaims it “one of the very best philosophical treatments of libertarian thought, ever” and Deirdre McCloskey calls it a “long and friendly conversation between Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls — a conversation which, astonishingly, reaches agreement.” The book does present an authoritative state of the debate across the spectrum from right libertarianism, on one end, to high liberalism (that shares some ideas with democratic socialism), on the other end. My point is not to question Tomasi’s own version of “market democracy” as a remix of Hayek and Rawls, but to use his sympathetic restatements of views across the liberal spectrum in order to show the basic misframings and common misunderstandings that cut across the liberal-libertarian viewpoints surveyed in the book. The heart of the debate is not in the answers to carefully framed questions, but in the framing itself.     

The valuation of subsidies in kind and their effects on costs

This study focuses on the effects of subsidies in kind on cost minimizing behavior and the resulting estimates of costs. It is shown that subsidies in kind may distort the usual equilibrium conditions and cost-output relationships among firms in the same industry. Even if they do not, the value of subsidized inputs to the firm, in terms of reduced costs, may differ from its market value. Methods are developed to cope with both problems, and estimations of the value and importance of subsidies in kind to the credit union industry are performed.     

The concept of choice: why and how innovative behaviour is not just stochastic

The goal of this paper is to highlight the importance of the concept of choice. To do so, a synopsis of the most important contributions to this topic—featuring an eclectic set of scholars across disciplines—is provided. As central to the argument, John von Neumann’s contributions, game theory and simulation techniques on von Neumann machines, are identified. Innovation (economic and theoretic) as the driving force behind human evolution seems to head for a new scientific paradigm based on von Neumann’s ideas.

The Economics of Property Rights in Early and Medieval Christianity

Early and medieval Christianity pioneered an economics of property rights that had no precedent in antiquity. The early Church Fathers Tertullian, Ambrose, and John Chrysostomos successively evolved conceptions of the right to own property as a prerequisite for poor relief, and the basis of the right to own property was later formulated by Pope John XXII to settle a dispute on this issue instigated by Francis of Assisi. This article challenges assessments advanced by Joseph Schumpeter, Jacob Viner, and Frank Knight, who argued that the doctrines of Christianity were devoid of economics, and draws attention to the work of Georg Ratzinger (1844–1899), who first expounded how in early Christianity property rights and poor relief were linked.