Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

An excerpt from
Stephen A. Marglin, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Harvard, 2008).

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/MARDIS.html

Economics celebrates the self-interested, calculating individual and the market as a means of realizing individual satisfactions, and this celebration is important in overcoming opposition to extending the sway of the market and, by the same token, undermining community. Economics is not only descriptive; it is not only evaluative; it is at the same time constructive—economists seek to fashion a world in the image of economic theory.

The problem with the idea that economics is purely, or even primarily, a descriptive undertaking is that the apparatus of economics has been shaped by an agenda focused on showing that markets are good for people rather than on discovering how markets actually work. And from this normative perspective has come the constructive agenda. If you believe that economics is or should be about describing the world, then it is a case of the tail wagging the dog. If you believe, as I do, that the normative agenda has been central to economics from well before Adam Smith’s time, then it is more understandable why the apparatus of economics is built on foundations that undermine community. Undermining community is the logical and practical consequence of promoting the market system.

This much is certain: if all we economists cared about was describing the world, we could easily forgo much of the framework that I find problematic. Take one of the most basic tools of economic analysis, demand. If we did not care about drawing conclusions about how well markets work, as distinct from how markets actually work, we could start directly from the demand curve rather than basing demand on choices made by rational, calculating, self-interested individuals. We do not take demand as the starting point because it would then be impossible to argue that—subject to some fine and not so fine print—a system of markets maximizes welfare.

In making this argument, economics relies on value judgments implicit in foundational assumptions about the self-interested individual, about rational calculation, about unlimited wants, and about the nation-state, and it is these assumptions that make community invisible. In arguing for the market, economics legitimizes the destruction of community and thus helps to construct a world in which community struggles for survival.

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Posted in Books, Culture, Economics | 2 Comments »

The Reagan Diaries

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

“Early on he told his utterly shocked military chiefs what he could tell nobody else without destroying deterrence, that he would never authorize the use of nuclear weapons, even if the United States were attacked with them.” ((Edward Luttwak, “Let their systems fail,” Review of The Reagan Diaries, TLS, July 27, 2007. Available online at: http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25336-2647781,00.html)) According to the TLS review, the editor of The Reagan Diaries, Douglas Brinkley, was shoddy and thoroughly unworthy. There is no explanatory material and the index is very poor. The diaries were also heavily abridged so as to fit in one volume. Still the diaries paint a very different picture of Reagan than the casual bonhomie he projected. There is evidence of a sharp mind in control of many details:

Monday January 11 1982 . . .
Press running wild with talk that I reversed myself on Taiwan because we’re only selling them F5Es & F104s. I think the China Lobby in State Dept is selling this line to appease the P.R.C. which doesn’t want us to sell them anything. The planes we are offering are better than anything the P.R.C. has. Later on if more sophistication is needed we’ll upgrade & sell them F5Gs.

That last phrase, incidentally, is one of a myriad fragments of evidence in the diary that Reagan’s stance of casual bonhomie – in sharp contrast to the Carter and Clinton displays of relentless diligence – concealed much very detailed knowledge accumulated by reading the documents that kept landing on his desk. Unlike the F-4 Phantom or F-104 Starfighter, the F-5G was not a fighter in operational service that would often be depicted and reported in the normal course of events, but rather a project of the Northrop Corporation, whose existence was only known to specialists. ((http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25336-2647781,00.html))

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No Neutral Ground

Friday, May 12th, 2006

Last week I involved myself in a debate over anti-bias laws on the Independent Gay Forum. The bias law issue arose when the proprietor of a film and video processing store announced a policy of refusing to duplicate material deemed contrary to the owners Christian values. This policy announcement came after the owner refused to duplicate a couple of gay video tapes. (I believe they were documentaries produced in the 1980s about pride parades.) The Arlington County (Virginia), the location of the film store, Human Rights Commission held a public hearing and investigated the store owner (Mr. Bono) on charges that he discriminated against the woman seeking tape duplication in violation of the county’s anti-bias law. Predictably, this caused a conservative and libertarian uproar. The title of the Independent Gay Forum post is “Liberal Authoritarianism.” Conservative and libertarian responses to bias-laws objected to the way such laws quash individual autonomy and force people, like the store owner, to sublimate their values. But, as I pointed out in a comment, that view incorrectly assumes individual freedom and autonomy as the neutral baseline from which bias laws are a departure. To wit:

If you side against anti-discrimination laws, the government grants the shopkeeper the liberty (right) to choose any customer (discriminate) and the government denies the customer a remedy. Or to put it another way, the government places a duty upon the customer to respect the shopkeeper’s liberty (discriminatory choices). The government forces the customer to have the thick skin [the thick skin idea comes from those who argued one should accept discriminatory practices, i.e., have a thick skin]. The lack of remedy (or the existence of the duty, if you prefer) may not matter that much if there are other choices, but suppose we are dealing with the only shop nearby that does X. It may be an onerous duty for the customer to bear. And is it fair to discount the psychological impact of discrimination on the customer? After all, if we are concerned about the result on the mind of the shopkeeper for having to sublimate his values why not also consider the mind of the customer? My inclination is to say the result of discrimination on the customer shouldn’t be completely ignored but I don’t know for how much it should count.

If you side the other way, in favor of the anti-discrimination law, you flip the positions. The government places the duty to accept all comers on the shopkeeper while the customer has the liberty to choose any shopkeeper. Here the government forces the shopkeeper to have the thick skin.

Enter the new book by Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer.

200605121640

From the book’s blurb:

Economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of “nanny state” policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off. It’s time for the rules to change. Sound economic policy should harness the market in ways that produce desirable social outcomes – decent wages, good jobs and affordable health care.

It appears Baker makes the case with economic policy that I was attempting, in my comment about bias-law choices, to make for law generally. Namely, there is no neutral ground. Conservative economic policy choices are not neutral. A free market is not a natural entity. Rather, it is the result of choices to favor one set of actors over another. You can order the book in paperback from the book’s website or download the book in electronic PDF format for free here.

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Posted in Books, Law, Politics | 1 Comment »

Thursday Afternoon Words #2

Thursday, June 2nd, 2005

This week I will stray into literature with an excerpt from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. From Wikipedia: “born July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island [McCarthy] is an American novelist, author of eight Southern Gothic and Western novels. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and, less often, Herman Melville.”

It was gray and raining, leaves were blowing down. A ragged stripling stepped from a doorway by a wooden rainspout and tugged at the judge’s elbow. He had two pups in his shirtfront and these he offered for sale, dragging one forth by the neck.

The judge was looking off up the street. When he looked down at the boy the boy hauled forth the other dog. They hung limply. Perros a vende, he said.

Cuánto quieres? said the judge.

The boy looked at one then the other of the animals. As if he’d pick one to suit the judge’s character, such dogs existing somewhere perhaps. He thrust forth the lefthand animal. Cincuenta centavos, he said.

The pup squirmed and drew back in his fist link an animal backing down a hole, its pale blue eyes impartial, befrighted alike of the cold and the rain and the judge.

Ambos, said the judge. He sought in this pockets for coins.

The dogvendor took this for a bargaining device and studied the dogs anew to better determine their worth, but the judge had dredged from his polluted clothes a small gold coin worth a bushel of suchpriced dogs. He laid the coin in the palm of his hand and held it out and with the other hand took the pups from their keeper, holding them in one fist like a pair of socks. He gestured with the gold.

Andale, he said.

The boy started at the coin.

The judge made a fist and opened it. The coin was gone. He wove his fingers in the empty air and reached behind the boy’s ear and took the coin and handed it to him. The boy held the coin in both hands before him like a small ciborium and he looked up at the judge. But the judge had set forth, dogs dangling. He crossed upon the stone bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched them in.

At the farther end of the bridge gave onto a small street that ran along the river. Here the Vandiemenlander stood urinating from a stone wall into the water. When he saw the judge commit the dogs from the bridge he drew his pistol and called out.

The dogs disappeared in the foam. They swept one and the next down a broad green race over sheets of polished rock into the pool below. The Vandiemenlander raised and cocked the pistol. In the clear waters of the pool willow leaves turned like jade dace. The pistol bucked in his hand and one of the dogs leaped in the water and he cocked it again and fired again and a pink stain diffused. He cock and fired the pistol a third time and the other dog also blossomed and sank.

The judge continued on across the bridge. When the boy ran up and looked into the water he was still holding the coin. The Vandiemenlander stood in the street opposite with his pizzle in one hand and the revolver in the other. The smoke had drifted off downstream and there was nothing in the pool at all.

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Joseph Epstein on Lust

Tuesday, March 15th, 2005

“Beyond a certain age–and I fear I have reached it–too great an interest in lust appears unseemly, not to say obscene, in a man.”

Joseph Epstein on why he forwent writing about lust for the Oxford University Press series of books on the seven deadly sins. Epstein settled on Envy.

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