Suchergebnisse

Stimulated by recent work of Levy-Peart-Ferrant, Rosser & McPhail, I read The Road to Serfdom by projecting it onto four registers -- security & freedom, impersonal forces & the market, rules & the rule of law, & language & education -- & identify in each the need for judgement, hopefully balanced but inevitably arbitrary beyond an analytical threshold, a need exacerbated by incomplete & dispersed knowledge. My larger project is to understand the role of the expert, theoretician if one prefers, in a 'free' society. References. [Copyright 2004 Elsevier B.V.]

I open Peter Singer's One World: The Ethics of Globalization
to a 'local' and a 'global' text, and am thereby led to argue that
problems of poverty, inequality, governance, corruption, transparency,
tolerance, growth and welfare, and more generally of justice and
freedom, be they economic or political, are not the monopoly or ward of
a particular region, packages to be pried open by the language of
economic theory alone. They rather demand an acknowledgement that an
economy is also a society, a polity, a community, a collectivity in
short; and a conceptual recognition by agents, albeit embodied with
their own needs and desires, that is correspondingly capacious. Thus, to
move beyond conception to fruition, theory, of necessity, can hardly
ignore values garnered from the past, ethics, and therefore texts, local
to the collectivity, that make its past come alive.

I read the three texts of Marshall singled out by Levy-Peart in their implication of statistical prejudice in canonical texts of eugenics, & thereby reconsider their more far-reaching implication of the theorist's relationship to the theorized. 19 References. [Copyright 2004 Elsevier B.V.]

I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have
done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have
never found one ... who could deny that a single shelf of a good
European library was worth the whole native literature of India and
Arabia. i If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British
Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is
truth.2 Education is a weapon whose effect depends on who holds it in
his hand and who is struck with it.Consider a shop, here and now, which
stocks a finite but very large number of commodities, each of whose
characteristics is known to both the shoppers and the shopkeeper, and
each of whose prices is posted at the shopdoor. Let one of these
cOinmodities be units of undergraduate education, measured in years. The
following scenario, thought-experiment if one prefers, brings out how
the shop functions. I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked
"five years of undergraduate education." He takes the slip to the
shopkeeper, who.......

If I do not count the introductory essay by the editors, the book Economics and Language (Henderson, et al., 1993), can be divided into three substantive parts. The first is titled rhetoric and critical theory, the second, controversy and hedging in economics, and the third, language and the history of economic thought. Again not counting the introduction, the volume consists of a total of ten essays: four in the first part and three each in the remaining two. In Part I, the reader is introduced to a realist philosophy of economic rhetoric, to Ricoeur and the significance of the hermeneutic project for economics, to Bakhtin's dialogism in the formation of the canon, and to the relevance of Derrida and of deconstructive methods for rational choice theory. Part II is concerned with the "stylistics" of two sets of material: with the "debate" between Milton Friedman and his critics; and with 11 articles chosen from a recent issue of the Economic Journal. Finally, the three essays in Part III are devoted to Adam Smith, to Edgeworth and to the response of six elementary textbooks to a "puzzle" of economic theory.

Harberger introduced his influential 1971 essay with the
following words. This paper is intended not as a scientific study, nor
as a review of the literature, but rather as a tract - an open letter to
the profession, as it were - pleading that three basic postulates be
accepted as providing a conventional framework for applied welfare
economics. The postulates are: (a) The competitive demand price for a
given unit measures the value of that unit to the demander; (b) The
competitive supply price for a given unit measures the value of that
unit to the supplier; and (c) When evaluating the net benefits or costs
of a given action (project, programme, or policy), the costs and
benefits accruing to each member of the relevant group (e.g., a nation)
should normally be added without regard to the individual(s) to whom
they accrue.

In this paper, we present a stylized model for the study of
development policy in a less developed country with several (rural)
provinces, each with its own local economy, and a federal (urban) sector
with a relatively more developed economic structure. A distinguishing
characteristic of the model is that labour from each province is easily
distinguishable from that of any other on the basis of (say) language,
race, ethnicity, caste, gender or simply, accent. Each province has
economic ties to the federal sector and to the world economy but no
direct ties to any other province. Inter-provincial economic relations
are a consequence of the relation which each province bears to the
federal sector and to the world economy. The object of the study is to
bring out how closely interwoven the economy is despite the assumption
of no direct economic relations between any two provinces. In
particular, we would like to study the effect of a variety of economic
policies on the economy of one province when such policies are primarily
directed at the economy of another province. Our model illustrates, in a
rather dramatic way, how the fortunes or misfortunes of a particular
province impinge on those of the others and how attempts by
policy-makers to alleviate or exploit the economic successes or failures
of one province have economic consequences for the economies of all the
others.