Neverfox’s comment to my last post, Why Was Slavery Wrong?, was so rich that I will reply by this new posting, rather than just a comment on the comment.
Archives for Economic theory
The fatal flaw in finance theory: Capitalizing “goodwill”
The fatal flaw at the root of today’s post is really what might be called “the fundamental myth” about the current property system, namely that the market-contractual role of being the residual claimant in a productive opportunity is treated as a “property right” that is currently owned by some legal party (e.g., the corporation having the contractual role) and that may be bought and sold as well as capitalized into the party’s current valuation.
Social Engineering vs. Pragmatism: Part I of Commentary on the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission
The point of this Part I commentary on the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission is to juxtapose the social engineering perspective implied in the whole exercise of trying to find a better index of “economic performance and social progress” to a more pragmatic perspective.
The Fatal Flaw in Cost-Benefit Analysis
In Part I of this commentary on the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, the focus was on the social engineering perspective underlying the search for such an index. But at the end of that commentary, I noted that the Commission’s discussion of different indices was rather “academic” since there [...]