Archives for Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life

Why is Non-democratic Government Wrong? Involuntariness or Treating Persons as Things?

Published on March 2, 2010

Is Democracy Government based only on the Consent of the Governed?

Classical liberalism takes the most basic question about a social institution as: “consent or coercion.” Democracy is often characterized as “government based on the consent of the governed” so non-democratic government is then typically condemned as being involuntary and coercive.

This common condemnation of non-democratic government on the basis of involuntariness has caused much intellectual history to just go “down the memory hole.” Those who routinely condemn autocracy on coercive grounds have either forgotten or never knew that from Antiquity down almost to the present there have always been those anti-democratic (or non-democratic) writers who: (1) presented a defense of non-democratic government based on consent or contract, and (2) interpreted much of historical autocracy as being based on implicit or explicit social contracts of subjection.

My focus here is not on (2), the empirical question of whether or not any historical autocracy could be interpreted as being voluntary, but (1), the fact of intellectual history that so many classical authorities defended non-democratic government if based on consent.

Why is Non-democratic Government Wrong? Involuntariness or Treating Persons as Things? continued »

Filed in Intellectual history,Legal theory,Political economy,Political theory | No replies

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Are the self-sale and self-rental contracts on the same moral footing?

Published on March 1, 2010

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. That post asked the question of whether historical slavery was wrong because it was involuntary or because it treated persons as things. The usual answer is that slavery was wrong because it was involuntary. And since the current system of employing, hiring, or renting workers is voluntary, there is a clear moral separation between the old economic system of owning workers and the current system of renting workers. But the “problem” in that standard view was that from Antiquity up to the present, there have been prominent moral and legal philosophers who have argued that slavery (i.e., lifetime labor obligations) should be allowed if based on a voluntary contract. Moreover, examples of voluntary slavery contracts existed even in the ante-bellum United States.

But voluntary as well as involuntary slavery has been outlawed. If “involuntariness” was “why slavery was wrong”, then why is voluntary slavery outlawed too? Indeed, some modern libertarians such as Harvard’s Robert Nozick have argued that a free libertarian society would permit voluntary slavery. If, on the other hand, the case against slavery, either involuntary or voluntary, is based on it legally treating persons as things, then the voluntary self-rental contract appears in a different moral light.

Are the self-sale and self-rental contracts on the same moral footing? continued »

Filed in Economic theory,Intellectual history,Legal theory,Political economy,Political theory | 2 replies

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Why was Slavery Wrong? Involuntariness or Treating Persons as Things?

Published on February 28, 2010

“Involuntariness” is the usual answer.

Indeed, classical liberalism takes the most basic framing of a social question as: “consent or coercion?”  In this view, democracy is characterized as government “with the consent of the governed” so slavery and non-democratic government were both condemned for the lack of consent.

This common condemnation of slavery on the basis of involuntariness has caused a large amount of intellectual history to just go “down the memory hole.” Those who routinely condemn involuntary slavery have either forgotten or never knew that from Antiquity down almost to the present there have always been those pro-slavery writers who: (1) presented a defense of slavery based on consent or contract, and (2) interpreted much of historical slavery as being based on implicit or explicit contracts.

Why was Slavery Wrong? Involuntariness or Treating Persons as Things? continued »

Filed in Intellectual history,Legal theory,Political economy,Political theory | One reply

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Evaluations versus Peer-to-Peer Social Learning

Published on February 15, 2010

Is the debate about evaluation asking the wrong questions?

There are such strong debates about evaluations in the field of economic development that it sometimes seems like a civil war. But the debates about evaluation may be to some extent ill-posed. We might conceptualize the practice of development assistance as the “helpers” (development agencies, funding sources, and North NGOs) trying to give some assistance to the “doers” (people, organizations, and governments in developing countries). The assumed model is that those helpers sponsoring (and funding) a development program will want to do evaluations to see “what works and what doesn’t” so they will know how to better structure programs in the future. Then the debate rages about which evaluations are “best.”

Evaluations versus Peer-to-Peer Social Learning continued »

Filed in Current events,Development aid | One reply

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The fatal flaw in finance theory: Capitalizing “goodwill”

Published on February 5, 2010

The fatal flaw series

When one is criticizing a certain discipline, such as orthodox economics, then it is best if one can boil down the criticism to one specific “fatal flaw” rather than just giving a “lawyer’s list” of criticisms. Much criticism of economics is so spread “all over the map” that it seems to be more part of  “identity maintenance” for the critic—with Marxism (not to mention post-modernism) being the leading example of that sort of identity-maintenance criticism. But that’s a topic for another posting. A “fatal flaw” may appear in several guises but it should still boil down to one single basic error.

Since so many of my posts will be about “the fatal flaw” in this or that, I have made it a category. The category already has one post which gives the fatal flaw in cost-benefit analysis and in the economic analysis of law (particularly the Chicago variant of that virus). 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. In today’s post, we look at the guise this myth takes in finance theory where it is behind the seemingly innocuous controversy about accounting for “goodwill”—but in a more fundamental way, it is behind the basic formulas of finance theory for the “capitalized value of an asset” including the case when the asset is a whole corporation.

The fatal flaw in finance theory: Capitalizing “goodwill” continued »

Filed in Economic theory,Fatal Flaws,Political economy | No replies

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Development or just poverty reduction?

Published on February 3, 2010

Many of the debates about foreign aid and development assistance seem to pivot on different visions of the goal: development or just poverty reduction?

  • Remittances from labor migration certainly help poverty reduction in the sending country, but do they tend to help or perhaps even retard development?
  • The discovery of natural resources in a developing country will lead to some poverty reduction (at least for the elites) but does it tend to help or retard development?
  • Within the US, gambling casinos on Indian reservation land have certainly helped reduce poverty but will they also lead to economic development for the Native American peoples?
  • Microfinance programs seem to often provide a dignified form of poverty reduction but can they even remotely live up to the hype as a road to development?

These questions hardly make sense unless one makes some distinction between poverty reduction and development. Too many commentators on aid, both lay and professional, seem to slip into a discourse that takes poverty reduction as the end goal of foreign aid and development assistance, and then debate about specific programs is rather pointless without refocusing on this basic distinction.

Development or just poverty reduction? continued »

Filed in Current events,Development aid,Political economy | 4 replies

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Social Engineering vs. Pragmatism: Part I of Commentary on the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission

Published on January 31, 2010

My former boss at the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, has just completed a stint as the head of Sarkozy’s Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. The report and the whole exercise behind it says a lot about the economics profession. After modeling individual actions as maximizing some function, in this case an individual’s “utility function,” the economics profession (with a few exceptions) seems hell bent on applying the same model to the “decisions” and “actions” of a whole society—as if there was some “group mind” making the decision and then some composite Leviathan taking the action. In the case of a society, the quantity to be maximized is variously thought of as “social welfare,” “social well-being,” “social wealth,” gross national product (GNP), net national product, or a host of other composite indices (see one of the Commission’s working papers for a survey).

Social Engineering vs. Pragmatism: Part I of Commentary on the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission continued »

Filed in Current events,Development aid,Economic theory,Political economy | No replies

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The Fatal Flaw in Cost-Benefit Analysis

Published on January 31, 2010

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 is one dominant index used in governmental decision-making: the monetized gains minus the monetized losses of cost-benefit analysis. A proponent of cost-benefit (CB) analysis would roll up all the Commission’s discussion into the question of the better “costing out” of all the direct and indirect impacts of a social decision.

The Fatal Flaw in Cost-Benefit Analysis continued »

Filed in Current events,Economic theory,Fatal Flaws,Political economy | No replies

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Obama needs new job creation ideas

Published on January 29, 2010

The Obama economics team seems trapped by rather conventional job-creation ideas, e.g., Keynesian pump-priming or tax breaks for small businesses, ideas whose main virtue is that they are better than the opposition’s ideas of more tax breaks for the rich. But there are other ways to increase job creation and entrepreneurship that have been hindered by the size-maximizing tendencies of American corporations.

Obama needs new job creation ideas continued »

Filed in Current events,Development aid,Political economy | 2 replies

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Associational speech: Citizens United vs. FEC

Published on January 28, 2010

The Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) decision is quite interesting and may open up some interesting topics. The basic argument that is rather valid is the right to associational speech in addition to individual speech. In the old set of campaign finance restrictions, there were all sorts of loopholes carved out for associational speech such as PACs and issue-oriented NGOs. The Right has argued that corporate speech is also associational speech and should not be denied simply because the association is a for-profit corporation rather than an NGO or the like. The entry point for a ‘teachable moment’ is: why does the Left or progressives so vehemently oppose corporate speech when the Left does support the general principle of associational speech?

Associational speech: Citizens United vs. FEC continued »

Filed in Current events,Legal theory,Political economy,Political theory | 2 replies

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