Re: Re: Re: Question for the Lefties -- II

["Jeffrey L. Beatty" <Beatty.4@xxxxxxx>]

At 09:11 AM 12/18/00 -0800, Jim Devine wrote, responding to me:

>At 07:01 AM 12/18/00 -0500, you wrote:
>>I'm basically a plain old Bill Clinton Democrat,
>
>I won't ask about the Lincoln Bedroom.....
>;-)
>

Probably a good idea.  I hear the ghost of old Abe has been known to haunt it :  )  

Thank you for your discussion of Enlightenment and Romantic notions of human nature.  I had always been struck by the contrast between pessimistic English and Scottish types like Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith, and the optimistic French philosophes.  

Thank you also for the reference to your paper.  I've checked out the copy on the Web; it actually looks like it might be useful to me in some of my own research (I'll titillate you with that for the time being).   

Apropos of the latter, your comments express surprise at discovering that professional economists' notions of "natural" property rights are descendents of Locke's ideas about property rights.  If you check out the early pages of the _Second Treatise of Government_, you will find that at one point Locke's notion of "natural property rights" presupposes resource abundance--that nature provides "enough and to spare" for everyone.  I've often wondered about the implications of contemporary environmental dilemmas for Locke's analysis.

Jim continues:

>I think that Aristotle's distinction between what's immediately 
>pleasurable, what's useful (paying off in the future), and what promotes 
>one's true happiness and humanity (physical, mental, & social health) is a 
>good replacement for _homo ec_. People often don't understand the third one.
>

I like Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs.  I wonder whether or not a political economy could be based upon the assumption that maximization of Maslowian need fulfillment, rather than production of private goods and services for consumption, was the goal to be achieved.  Of course, this would imply a "rethinking" of the nature of the fundamental economic problem.

>I appreciate your antagonism to the Austrian school. I'll get out my silver 
>bullets and my stake. The cult of H*yek & Mises (which I guess is backed up 
>by the There Is No Alternative political movement of Thatcher and Reagan)!! 
>Recently I had a discussion with a follower of H*yek who employed the 
>Master's information-based critique of centralized top-down planning but 
>didn't understand that economics has applied an information-based critique 
>of markets...
>

Let me guess:  probably also didn't understand that Hayek's critique of "socialism" (defined basically as central planning) can also be used to demonstrate the impossibility of centralized management of corporations.  After all, the sales of the largest multinational corporations equal the size of the gross domestic product of small industrialized countries.  But nooo, corporations don't plan!  (I'm being facetious).

I've always liked the transaction cost school's analysis of the implications of information asymmetries for the operations of markets (I'm assuming that's what Jim is referring to in the above).

While I'm on the subject of Hayek, I may as well respond to Justin Schwarz's comments.  He writes:

>>>>
> That'd be me, probably, the local Hayek fan on the list, or cultist, maybe.
<<<<

But you seem so nice! : )

The antipathy I expressed toward the Hayekian school comes from philosophical disagreement, but at least as much from some personal antagonism between me and a particular Hayekian on another list.  I'm fresh from a
cyberwar of about three years' duration with this person.  Eventually, I got so nauseated by what I considered his shady debating tactics and attempts to thought-police the list I shared with him (a list sponsored by a major professional organization) that I just had to take a walk around the block.  Fortunately, not all Hayekians are like him.

>>>>
> There's a lot I don't understand. For example, the idea of a "Clinton 
> Democrat." My folks were New Deal-Great Society Democrats. I think Clinton 
> Democrats are Republicans, no? I mean, Clinton didn't support national 
> health, a guaranteed annual income, expansion of worker health prpotection, 
> expansion of environmental protection, or wage and price controls, all 
> supported by Nixon.
<<<<

Why does this make New Democrats Republicans?  Maybe it just means Nixon was a closet Democrat.  After all, he _did_ say, "I am now a Keynesian in economics." : )

Your fellow libertarians at the Cato Institute certainly don't see ol' Bill as a closet Republican.  One of the mailings I got from them during the last couple of years (I have no idea how I got on their mailing list) expresses the suspicion that Clinton was bowing to political reality rather than expressing his true convictions when he proclaimed, "The era of Big Government is over."  

However much the Democratic Party might have shifted to the right on economic issues, I don't think it has embraced the nativism and incipient neo-segregationism that increasingly define the contemporary GOP.  Thank God.


>>>>
> I used to teach at Ohio State, in philosophy and Slavic studies, this was in 
> 1989-94. Maybe we ran into each other there?
<<<<


I don't remember knowing many people in philosophy or Slavic studies during that time.  You may have known some people I knew, though--Jessica Vener, Karen Woodrum, Rick Herrmann, Phil Stewart. . . .

Returning to Jim Devine's post:

>The notion that one can't do interpersonal comparisons of utility seems to 
>be in order to avoid the egalitarian conclusions of such comparisons (a 
>rich guy gets less marginal utility from a dollar than the poor woman does, 
>so it's a net improvement to redistribute from the former to the latter). 
>I'm not absolutely sure, but a well-informed neoclassical told me this 
>years ago and his hypothesis has fit the facts I've seen since.
>


Yes.  It also seems to be a notion invoked rather inconsistently and arbitrarily by the neoclassical sorts, i.e. when the implications of not invoking it would be ideologically embarrassing for the free-marketeers.  If you cannot compare the relative utility for wealth of a rich man and poor woman, can you assess the desirability of a particular economic growth path over time?  Assuming a non-fixed population and mortality in the growing economy, doing so seems to involve an interpersonal comparison of utility between different individuals at different moments in time (i.e., a claim that the utility for wealth is the same for all individuals at all times, and that more wealth thus represents greater utility).  Some economists might claim that growth theory simply describes growth paths rather than assessing them in a normative sense.  Nevertheless, economists frequently make statements about countries being "better off" because of growth in GDP per capita over time.  


Finally, a word to David Shemano, who writes: 

>>>>
> But my question is different than that.  To give an example, lefties hate
> cars and love public transportation -- there is no greater symbol of  the
> philosophical divide between right and left.  What is interesting to me is
> that lefties criticize "capitalism" because it somehow preordains that
> people will choose/demand cars over public transportation, but such
> criticism assumes a moral judgment that public transportation is preferable
> to cars, and if people had complete metaphysical freedom, they would choose
> public transportation over cars.  In other words, the "criticism" of
> capitalism, at least in this example, is dependent on a preexisting moral
> judgment which seems to be completely untethered to any economic analysis.
> If so, isn't your criticism of capitalism dependent more on debatable
> ethical judgments as opposed to empirical economic results (at least in that
> example)?
<<<<

David, reread my post--I tried to argue that the "economic analysis" you refer to itself effectively assumes a preexisting moral judgement in favor of producing the kinds of goods markets are assumed to be good at producing.   That is what I meant by saying that if political and social institutions allow markets to function and do not ameliorate their failures, this constitutes a de facto political choice in favor of goods markets can produce efficiently.  This choice cannot be value free.



--
Jeffrey L. Beatty
Doctoral Student
Department of Political Science
The Ohio State University
2140 Derby Hall
154 North Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210

(o) 614/292-2880
(h) 614/688-0567

Email:  Beatty.4@xxxxxxx
______________________________________________________   
If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement-- President Jimmy Carter