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The statist neo-institutionalism of Acemoglu and Robinson
Abstract
In a long review of Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2019 The Narrow Corridor McCloskey praises their scholarship but criticizes their relentless statism—their enthusiasts for a bigger and bigger Stato, so long as it is somehow “caged.” Their case is mechanical, materialist, and structuralist, none of which is a good guide to history or politics. Their theory of social causation mixes up necessary with sufficient conditions, though they are not unusual among political scientists an economists in doing so. They downplay the role of ideas, which after all made the modern world through liberalism. They recognize how dangerous the modern “capable” state can be, what they call The Leviathan, after Hobbes. But their construal of “liBerty” is the provision of goodies to children by a beneficent Leviathan. It is not the adultism that in fact made the modern world of massive enrichment and true liberty. Their vision is deeply illiberal, and mistaken as science.
... В-третьих, многие исследователи в качестве недостатка работ Аджемоглу, Джонсона и Робинсона отмечают отсутствие в них роли идей [Капелюшников, 2019aБакеев, 2020;Заостровцев, 2022;McCloskey, 2023]. Проблема в том, что остановка на макроуровне не позволит получить нетривиальные выводы, выходящие за рамки утверждений, что идеи могут заставить «народ» и «элиту» отклониться от непосредственных стимулов (в частности, в ожидании благ прогресса) или служить дополнительной гарантией уступок. ...
The 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to D. Acemoglu, S. Johnson and J. Robinson, and was the first prize since 1993 to include a mention of institutions in its rationale. The article discusses the development of research on the relationship between institutions and economic development over the past decades, the contributions of the laureates, the connection with Acemoglu's theory of directed technological change, and the problems and further prospects of the institutional theory of economic development. The main progress has been related to the application of game theory to the analysis of institutions, as well as the use of econometric and other methods to test theoretical hypotheses. As a result, significant changes have occurred in the direction of greater formalization and rigor of institutional analysis. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson have become emblematic of these changes, and a number of their works can be called classic in this regard. Among other things, they proposed a game-theoretic model of the formation and change of political institutions and used the instrumental variables method to demonstrate that institutions cause development, and not vice versa. Acemoglu and his co-authors are often accused of neglecting culture, ideology, the process of creating and disseminating inventions, and of trying to present institutions as the only factor determining all aspects of economic development. Although an analysis of their work paints a more complex picture, this criticism is not unfounded. I show that the theory of directed technological change leads to the conclusion that progress can and should be directed in a direction that is beneficial to society. This means that it depends only on political institutions whether this can be done. The reason for this view lies in the general orientation of institutional development theory to macro-level processes and the long-term perspective. The main challenge facing this line of research is to overcome this attitude and to search for the microfoundations of institutional dynamics and their connection with technological progress.
This chapter relates the work of the pioneers of the study of innovation who were part of the Scottish Enlightenment with current theorists. All of them search for a non-individualistic concept of innovation. The individualistic innovation paradigm is based on the seminal work by the british author Jeremy Bentham, Defence of Usury (1787). Bentham claimed that innovation is the driving force of development and it must go hand in hand with credit. Then, rates of interest must be determined in the free-market. But previous authors from the Scottish Enlightenment had another definition of growth and innovation which was more preventive of uncertainty. David Hume had a historical perspective, making innovation a consequence, not a cause, of growth. Although change is desirable, it should not be at the expense of the past, as this past is the matter and substance for learning by doing. Adam Smith also pointed out limits to innovation advocating for usury laws and claiming that it is not the greatest individual inventiveness what increases the amount of capital, but the skill with which work is customarily done. In the period of the Scottish Enlightenment, other economists put forward a non-individualistic vision of innovation, as is the case with John Rae, who talked about an expansion of capacities. All these elements have entered into the recent developments of institutionalism at the hands of Institutional Political Economy. The idea of institutional innovation rejects the concept of equilibrium in favour of the process and shows that the market and the state are nothing more than the face of the same coin where limitations and skills are intertwined.
This article seeks to provide a comprehensive re-evaluation of the redistributive models of democracy advanced by Carles Boix, and Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, their reception within the democratization literature, and the subsequent trajectories of their authors. Contrary to the existing literature, which commonly envisions RMDs as a unified framework, this article argues that Boix and Acemoglu and Robinson’s models should be understood as divergent theories of democratic transitions. In the aftermath of numerous criticisms, both authors have developed sharply different understandings of democratization. We argue that Acemoglu and Robinson have backtracked from their original formulation toward a “Whiggish” history of the rise of liberty, while Boix has increasingly reverted to the core propositions of classical modernization theory. In the process, this article argues that RMDs have lost, and reneged on, much of their apparent explanatory power regarding transitions to and reversions from democracy.
Any innovation—mechanical, biological, institutional, scientific, artistic, personal—begins of course as a new idea in a liberated human mind. The point is obvious. But it has not been prominent in economics. The agent in economic models does not have agency. He merely accedes to a budget line or to a law or to a custom or to a habit of thought facing his already known utility function. He does not create, that is, but reacts in requisite fashion. Human action, the liberated will, is absent. He is a vending machine, not an innovator, or not even an ordinarily choosy consumer exploring her tastes. Therefore the unprecedented economic growth since 1800, a Great Enrichment of a fully 3,000 percent increase in real income per person, has been traced by economists not to “innovism,” as one might call it. The Enrichment has been traced rather to various routine and intermediate and largely material causes—investment; exploitation; the rule of law. Some of these are necessary, but none is sufficient to explain our enrichment. They are ancient. They are often trivial. They are sometimes necessary, but never have the great oomph to explain the Great Enrichment. The creation of new ideas in human minds, in other words, has been firmly set aside by economists. The non-economists who might save the ideational day, meanwhile, have seized on the wrong ideas, such as the labor theory of value or disenchantment or the Enlightenment or sheer modernity. The economic trouble with the economist’s non-ideational causes such as investment and institutions or exploitation is that they are merely allocative, and are, further, subject to sharply diminishing returns, and are commonly indeed zero sum. They are routine, not transformative. They are small potatoes beside the 3,000 percent increase in human material welfare. And the historical trouble is that most of them, and even most of the non-economist’s ideational causes, are of very, very long standing—in ancient Mesopotamia, commercialization; in ancient Athens, enlightenment; in ancient Rome, good property rights; in ancient China, long canals; in medieval Italy, skilled craftsmen; in early modern Japan, long peace; in 18th century Prussia, cameralist policy; in pre-1860s Sweden, Protestantism; in Russia 1917-1989, fierce pursuit of profit; in China 1948-1978, fierce pursuit of central planning. Yet no Great Enrichment ensued in such places. Early on, the cause of the Enrichment was said to be piling up physical capital, emphasized by Adam Smith, with the division of labor. Then it was indeed an ideational cause, put forward on the left or right of politics by anti-economists, such as the rise of “capitalism,” or “possessive individualism,” or “secularized asceticism.” All have all been rejected in later research. Then it was the alleged routinization of innovation, such as Joseph Schumpeter came to believe, against his early belief in human creativity. Then it was human capital, from elementary education to craftsmen’s skills. Then it was institutions of various sorts, from legal to scientific. But all of them depend of course upon ideas conceived in somebody’s mind—and foundationally on her ideas about ideas, such as ethics, ideologies, political philosophies supporting the liberated imagination. The change of ideas in human minds, that is, seems a more promising hypothesis. The ideational change is called liberalism. The idea of a non-slave society, it can be shown, has the oomph and the novelty to account for the 3,000 percent. I propose here, mathematically and quantitatively, by historical comparison and by the paradoxical logic of creativity, to offer, that is, a fresh ideational explanation for why the modern world became so very rich—well, “my” explanation is as “fresh” as can be a restatement of the 18th-century promise of human liberation. The crux, I claim, was liberalization at the level of ideas in the Netherlands and then in Britain, favoring a culture of somewhat free speech and an economy of quite energetic enterprise. It was followed during the next century by actual liberalizations and a consequent explosion of creativity—in the U.K the civil emancipation of Catholics, the abolition of Jamaican slavery, the free importation of wheat from Kansas and Ukraine, and then similar liberalizing measures in the U.S., Sweden, Italy, Japan, and the rest. Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson and Mary Wollstonecraft had put forward in the Anglophere the then-bizarre notion that no one should be a slave, that all people are created equal, and should be permitted liberated speaking and liberated voting, and liberated buying and selling. Richard Cobden and John Stuart Mill in the mid-19th century extended the idea. The equality of permission in liberalism proceeded to erode the inequalities of hierarchies anciently stultifying. It made people bold to venture. As the British say in their sporting manner, appropriated by the economic historian Peter Matthias, ordinary people were permitted by liberalism for the first time, after 1776 or 1789 or 1848 or 1865, to “have a go.” And go they did. Liberalism was gradually implemented in northwestern Europe, as lately it has been, at any rate in the economy, even in far China and India. And the Great Enrichment came. Both economists and their critics, in other words, need to understand the conditions for the flourishing of liberty and its fruits in novel ideas for enrichment, and to see that good laws and long railways and honored science and skilled craftsmen and strong institutions are all good, but are not themselves originating. Creativity depends on liberty and its ethical accompaniments, every time. Liberation in ethics and ideology yielded an innovism, not a “capitalism” that one can find in Mesopotamia in 2000 BCE or in England in 1066 CE or Mesoamerica in 1492 CE. To use a mechanical image, the gearing in the historico-economic watch was, to be sure, investment and institutions, necessary for any economy at any time, from the caves of Lascaux to the caves of Wall Street, or for that matter in Crusoe’s cave. But liberal thinking was the new and largely sufficient spring imparting motion to the old and stiff gears. It happened in Britain, but not immediately in, say, France. It could have happened in Japan or the Ottoman Empire, but in the contrived corridors of history it did not. The implication for policy is straightforward. Ideas in human minds, as Keynes said, largely rule the world. The Ukrainians defend themselves for the idea of liberty, not for the policies of left, right, or middle. Encouraging a loving and responsible liberty, with its mighty material and spiritual consequences, should be our chief aim. Coercive, illiberal nudges and taxes and subsidies and regulations and fines and imprisonments, of which policymakers are so very fond, are not the path forward. The liberal path of an honest and competent but restrained state, under which ordinary people are permitted without let or hinderance from other people to have a go, has already led in much of the world to a stunning enrichment of the poorest. It’s the Bourgeois Deal: “Leave me alone and I’ll make _you _rich.” In the next couple of generations, it promises to permit the rest of the wretched of the earth to raise themselves up. The illiberal path of statism, by contrast, leads to the radical populisms of left and right, to Maduro and Putin. And even its middle path of well-meaning regulation and redistribution it leads adults back into childhood under the masterful state. It turns back to the subordination that characterized agricultural societies until 1776, and to its corresponding poverty of body and mind and spirit. Liberalism worked to overcome such childishness and subordination. It works yet.
Silvestri interviews McCloskey about her forthcoming book, ‘Beyond Behaviorism, Positivism, and Neo-Institutionalism in Economics’, critical of recent economics, especially of neo-institutionalism. Neo-institutionalism uses the ugly character ‘Herr Max U’ as its central idea: the elevation of Prudence to the only virtue. Institutions are mainly intermediate, not ultimate, causes in society. Ethics, rhetoric, identity, ideology, and ideas matter. McCloskey's turn to defending liberalism is in the background of her critique of behaviorism, positivism, and neo-institutionalism as anti-liberal, reducing the analysis of people to a model of childish slaves. Liberalism is the theory of non-slave adults. Of the big ideas of the past few centuries, only liberalism treats people with suitable dignity, and permits them to have a go, and make others rich. Neo-institutionalism shares the two sins of modern Samuelsonian economics: a devotion of mere existence proofs; and a deviation to arbitrary tests of statistical ‘significance’. And in its tale of a rise of ‘capitalism’, it shares the errors of amateur economic history. The better word for the modern economic world of the Great Enrichment – fully 3,000% increases in real income per person – is ‘innovism’. Neo-institutionalism, as the method of historical economics, must be replaced by ‘Humanomics’.
This paper contextualizes the early political economy of Austrian economist and social philosopher F. A. Hayek in the intellectual milieu of German ordoliberalism. It argues that the particular urgency during the 1930s and 1940s to preserve and stabilize the disintegrating orders of economy and society was a crucial driver behind the numerous parallelisms between Hayek and the ordoliberals. Their political economies are reconstructed by emphasizing the notion of the framework as an economic constitution of general and stable rules, with the overarching goal to render the orders in the postwar world more robust. In a nutshell, the central configuration is that liberty can thrive sustainably only after such a framework has been established. Hayek's "learning ordoliberalism" emerged during the socialist calculation debates when knowledge became the center of his oeuvre, so that he aimed at identifying rules which could enhance the use of knowledge in society and thus societal learning. Hayek's search was similar to that of the ordoliberals in substance and in rhetoric, and culminated in the competitive order as the chiffre for a well-ordered market economy. These parallelisms surfaced during the 1930s and became most explicit in The Road to Serfdom and at the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947. In the years after The Constitution of Liberty, a shift of Hayek's focus is identified: from a theory of designing frameworks at a point of time towards a theory of their evolution across time. Overall, Hayek of the 1930s and 1940s is interpreted as a continental liberal thinking in interdependent societal orders, while the ordoliberals are depicted as a constitutive building block of the international neoliberal archipelago.
In this paper I discuss Deirdre McCloskey's argument that " ideas, not capital or institutions, " were the cause of the " great enrichment, " the spectacular growth of the world economy since 1800. I disagree that the ideas of liberty and equality alone caused the great enrichment but agree that these ideas were central and necessary for it. Most theorists of development and economic history fail to recognize the importance of these ideas despite implicitly assuming them in what I call the " neoclassical fallacy. " I also extend McCloskey's views to include a greater understanding of liberty and equality through their implementation, which necessarily involves institutions that provide political officials with incentives to honor these ideas in practice. Ideas of liberty and equality are not self-implementing, and most attempts to implement them fail. Finally, I argue that a range of political theorists from Hobbes to Madison studied the problem of implementing liberty and equality. In the 150 years prior to 1800, they helped devise a series of institutions that sustained liberty, equality, and the rule of law. These ideas also contributed to the great enrichment.
This article uses a laboratory experiment to probe the proposition that property emerges anarchically out of social custom. We test the hypothesis that whalers in the 18th and 19th centuries developed rules of conduct that minimized the sum of the transaction and production costs of capturing their prey, the primary implication being that different ecological conditions led to different rules of capture. Ceteris paribus, we find that simply imposing two different types of prey is insufficient to observe two different rules of capture. Another factor is essential, namely, as Samuel Pufendorf theorized over 300 years ago, that the members of the community are civil minded. © 2012 The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
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Cross-sectional studies have shown that intimate partner violence and gender inequity in relationships are associated with increased prevalence of HIV in women. Yet temporal sequence and causality have been questioned, and few HIV prevention programmes address these issues. We assessed whether intimate partner violence and relationship power inequity increase risk of incident HIV infection in South African women.
We did a longitudinal analysis of data from a previously published cluster-randomised controlled trial undertaken in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa in 2002-06. 1099 women aged 15-26 years who were HIV negative at baseline and had at least one additional HIV test over 2 years of follow-up were included in the analysis. Gender power equity and intimate partner violence were measured by a sexual relationship power scale and the WHO violence against women instrument, respectively. Incidence rate ratios (IRRs) of HIV acquisition at 2 years were derived from Poisson models, adjusted for study design and herpes simplex virus type 2 infection, and used to calculate population attributable fractions.
128 women acquired HIV during 2076 person-years of follow-up (incidence 6.2 per 100 person-years). 51 of 325 women with low relationship power equity at baseline acquired HIV (8.5 per 100 person-years) compared with 73 of 704 women with medium or high relationship power equity (5.5 per 100 person-years); adjusted multivariable Poisson model IRR 1.51, 95% CI 1.05-2.17, p=0.027. 45 of 253 women who reported more than one episode of intimate partner violence at baseline acquired HIV (9.6 per 100 person-years) compared with 83 of 846 who reported one or no episodes (5.2 per 100 person-years); adjusted multivariable Poisson model IRR 1.51, 1.04-2.21, p=0.032. The population attributable fractions were 13.9% (95% CI 2.0-22.2) for relationship power equity and 11.9% (1.4-19.3) for intimate partner violence.
Relationship power inequity and intimate partner violence increase risk of incident HIV infection in young South African women. Policy, interventions, and programmes for HIV prevention must address both of these risk factors and allocate appropriate resources.
National Institute of Mental Health and South African Medical Research Council.
Adam Smith (1723-1790), economista inglés, identificado dentro de la llamada escuela clásica de economía. El contenido de su obra lo expone en cinco apartados, En los cuatro primeros, aporta elementos teóricos que permiten determinar el crecimiento económico de una nación a partir del análisis de las categorías: trabajadores, división del trabajo y capital. En el último apartado, analiza las contribuciones económicas al soberano por parte de los gobernados.
"Arguing that neither the sciences nor the humanities synthesizes a full account of property, the book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: Property is a universal and uniquely human custom. Integrating cognitive linguistics with philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, the book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. That is, all human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the origins of property lie not in food, mates, territory, or land, but in the very human act of creating, with symbolic thought, something new that did not previously exist."
This book picks up where Karl Polanyi's study of economic and political change left off. Building upon Polanyi's conception of the double movement, Blyth analyzes the two periods of deep seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century: the 1930s and the 1970s. Blyth views both sets of changes as part of the same dynamic. In the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the market's effects by 'embedding liberalism.' In the 1970s, those who benefited least from such 'embedding' institutions, namely business, reacted against these constraints and sought to overturn that institutional order. Blyth demonstrates the critical role economic ideas played in making institutional change possible. Great Transformations rethinks the relationship between uncertainty, ideas, and interests, achieving profound new insights on how, and under what conditions, institutional change takes place.
Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism shows how life improves under the economic system often called “entrepreneurial capitalism” or “creative destruction,” but more accurately called “innovative dynamism.” The book describes how, in such a system, innovation occurs through the efforts of inventors and innovative entrepreneurs, how workers on balance benefit, and how good policies can encourage innovation. The inventors and innovative entrepreneurs are often cognitively diverse outsiders with the courage and perseverance to see and pursue serendipitous discoveries or slow hunches. Economies grow where innovative dynamism flourishes through leapfrog competition, as in the United States from roughly 1830 to 1930. Consumers vote with their feet for innovative new goods and for process innovations that reduce prices, benefiting ordinary citizens more than the privileged elites. Some labor-market fears are unjustified, since more and better new jobs are created than are destroyed; other fears can be mitigated by better policies. Since breakthrough inventions are costly and difficult, patents can be fair rewards for invention and can provide funding to enable future inventions. At the key early stage of most breakthrough innovations, when innovative ideas are hardest to communicate and most widely doubted, the innovations are largely self-funded. The steady growth in regulations, often defended on the basis of the precautionary principle, increases the costs of innovation for the entrepreneur. Secular (long-term) stagnation is due to bad policies, not to having picked the low-hanging fruit, as illustrated by innovative medical entrepreneurs who are constrained from bringing us quicker and better cures for cancer.
The paper mapping from “interests” to outcomes in political economy depends on many unstated assumptions about the ideas that political agents have about: what they are maximizing; how the world works; and the set of tools they have at their disposal to further their interests. These ideas are subject to both manipulation and innovation, making them part of the political game. There is a direct parallel, as I will show, between inventive activity in technology and investment in persuasion and policy innovation in the political arena. I focus specifically on models professing to explain economic inefficiency.
There is much debate about the state of the world. Matt Ridley argues in The Rational Optimist that we can solve problems such as economic crashes,population explosions, climate change and terrorism, of poverty, AIDS, depression and obesity. His trust of capitalism and progress is examined and challenged in this book review.
Barry Weingast agrees that the idea of liberalism was crucial for the making of the modern world, though in most of his comment he turns to his own writings making institutional change the crux. Yet institutions in Britain did not in fact change much, the changes had little economic oomph, and underlying property rights were good in numerous economies worldwide since ancient times. An ideational economic history works better: liberty caused our riches. © 2017 The Scandinavian Society for Economic and Social History
During the Allied bombing of Germany, Hitler was more distressed by the loss of cultural treasures than by the leveling of homes. Remarkably, his propagandists broadcast this fact, convinced that it would reveal not his callousness but his sensitivity: the destruction had failed to crush his artist's spirit. It is impossible to begin to make sense of this thinking without understanding what Wolf Lepenies calls The Seduction of Culture in German History. This fascinating and unusual book tells the story of an arguably catastrophic German habit--that of valuing cultural achievement above all else and envisioning it as a noble substitute for politics. Lepenies examines how this tendency has affected German history from the late eighteenth century to today. He argues that the German preference for art over politics is essential to understanding the peculiar nature of Nazism, including its aesthetic appeal to many Germans (and others) and the fact that Hitler and many in his circle were failed artists and intellectuals who seem to have practiced their politics as a substitute form of art. In a series of historical, intellectual, literary, and artistic vignettes told in an essayistic style full of compelling aphorisms, this wide-ranging book pays special attention to Goethe and Thomas Mann, and also contains brilliant discussions of such diverse figures as Novalis, Walt Whitman, Leo Strauss, and Allan Bloom. The Seduction of Culture in German History is concerned not only with Germany, but with how the German obsession with culture, sense of cultural superiority, and scorn of politics have affected its relations with other countries, France and the United States in particular.
This laboratory experiment explores the extent to which impersonal exchange emerges from personal exchange with opportunities for long-distance trade. We design a three-commodity production and exchange economy in which agents in three geographically separated villages must develop multilateral exchange networks to import a good only available abroad. For treatments, we induce two distinct institutional histories to investigate how past experience with property rights affects the evolution of specialization and exchange. We find that a history of unenforced property rights hinders our subjects' ability to develop the requisite personal social arrangements to support specialization and effectively exploit impersonal long-distance trade.
In the West are the 'haves', while much of the rest of the world are the 'have-nots'. The extent of inequality today is unprecedented. Drawing on an extraordinary range of contemporary and historical examples, Why Nations Fail looks at the root of the problems facing some nations. Economists and scientists have offered useful insights into the reasons for certain aspects of poverty, such as Jeffrey Sachs (it's geography and the weather), and Jared Diamond (it's technology and species). But most theories ignore the incentives and institutions that populations need to invest and prosper: they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep it - and the key to ensuring these incentives is sound institutions. Incentives and institutions are what separate the have and have-nots. Based on fifteen years of research, and stepping boldly into the territory of Ian Morris's Why the West Rules - For Now, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson blend economics, politics, history and current affairs to provide a new, persuasive way of understanding wealth and poverty. And, perhaps most importantly, they provide a pragmatic basis for the hope that those mired in poverty can be placed on the path to prosperity.
In this landmark work, a Nobel Prize-winning economist develops a new way of understanding the process by which economies change. Douglass North inspired a revolution in economic history a generation ago by demonstrating that economic performance is determined largely by the kind and quality of institutions that support markets. As he showed in two now classic books that inspired the New Institutional Economics (today a subfield of economics), property rights and transaction costs are fundamental determinants. Here, North explains how different societies arrive at the institutional infrastructure that greatly determines their economic trajectories. North argues that economic change depends largely on "adaptive efficiency," a society's effectiveness in creating institutions that are productive, stable, fair, and broadly accepted--and, importantly, flexible enough to be changed or replaced in response to political and economic feedback. While adhering to his earlier definition of institutions as the formal and informal rules that constrain human economic behavior, he extends his analysis to explore the deeper determinants of how these rules evolve and how economies change. Drawing on recent work by psychologists, he identifies intentionality as the crucial variable and proceeds to demonstrate how intentionality emerges as the product of social learning and how it then shapes the economy's institutional foundations and thus its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. Understanding the Process of Economic Changeaccounts not only for past institutional change but also for the diverse performance of present-day economies. This major work is therefore also an essential guide to improving the performance of developing countries.
Experimental economists robustly observe that people in the laboratory regularly make choices that result in lower payoffs for themselves. When faced with this paradox of preferences, economists posit that there must be two meanings of preferences: preferences for the self and preferences for the social. In this paper I argue that this is an example of economists forcing ordinary human behavior to fit their models. The force of my argument is to confute the notion that an individual's expression of so-called social preferences as an action can be represented as a set of separable and private utilitarian "preferences" within him.
Mark Blyth's rebuttal to our constructive critique of Polanyi “blithely” takes for granted the accuracy of Polanyi's now‐outdated historiography of capitalism—by means of a loose, overly expansive definition of capitalism that question‐beggingly equates it with modernity. Blyth emphasizes the need to view markets as “socially embedded,” with which we agree—but he appears not to take account of the individual self‐interest that is thus embedded. Similarly, he asserts a priori the role of ideas in history, in parallel to the economists he condemns (unfairly) for reading ideas out of history a priori. All of this poorly serves the cause of extracting Polanyi's welcome emphasis on social embeddedness and on the empirical from the ideological and methodological certitudes and errors in which The Great Transformation placed them.
The Sereer-Safèn occupied a defensible refuge zone in Western Bawol, where forests and sandstone ridges provided protection against Wolof monarchy. The Safèn were part of a larger world that defined itself by opposition to Islam in the period from 1700 to 1914. This religious divide made the Sereer targets for enslavement by the Wolof, but Sereer religion was also linked to Safèn resistance to Islam, slavery and monarchy. Religion was interwoven with an ethnic boundary, which emphasized the incompatibility of Wolof and Sereer society. Safèn religion was centered on the village or xérém, which served as the focal point of ritual, justice, communication with the other world and defense.
After acknowledging the growing focus on ideas in Political Science and giving two cheers for that development, this paper warns against the concomitant rejection of the importance of materialist factors in explaining stability and change. The argument is illustrated by a focus on recent literature on globalisation and the global financial crisis.
This article questions the centrality of interest-based explanation in political science. Through an examination of the “turn to ideas” undertaken in the past decade by rationalist and nonrationalist scholars in both comparative politics and international relations, it seeks to make three points. First, interests are far from the unproblematic and ever-ready explanatory instruments we assume them to be. Second, the ideational turn of historical institutionalism and constructivist international relations theory marks a substantive theoretical shift in the field precisely because it problematizes notions of action that take interest as given. Third, such scholarship emerged from, and in reaction to, the inherent limits of rationalist treatments of interests and ideas. That it did so suggests that progress in the discipline may be more dialectic—rather than linear or paradigmatic—than we realize.
All societies must deal with the possibility of violence, and they do so in different ways. This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger social science and historical framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked. Most societies, which we call natural states, limit violence by political manipulation of the economy to create privileged interests. These privileges limit the use of violence by powerful individuals, but doing so hinders both economic and political development. In contrast, modern societies create open access to economic and political organizations, fostering political and economic competition. The book provides a framework for understanding the two types of social orders, why open access societies are both politically and economically more developed, and how some 25 countries have made the transition between the two types.
We design a laboratory experiment to explore whether and how property endogenously arises in a specialization and exchange environment where “theft” is costless. Additional treatments make available optional private protection mechanisms. We find that although an absence of exogenous enforcement does not hamper property's emergence in all cases, the private options tend to worsen outcomes on average. Property emerges when subjects self-organize groups, understand potential gains from trade, convince group members that all benefit by avoiding theft, and display credible commitment to cooperation in their actions. In other words, as Hume argued in 1740, property is a convention.
En esta obra, Douglass C. North, premio Nobel de Economía de 1993, expone un marco analítico para explicar las formas en que las instituciones y los cambios internos en ellas afectan a la economía.
It has been previously documented that wife and child abuse often co-occur. The present study tested competing hypotheses about the reasons for this co-occurrence, specifically trait versus instrumental theories of aggression within families. Three commonly cited catalysts (unemployment, drinking, and life-stress events) for men's abuse of family members were analyzed to determine whether they equally predict partner or child abuse. Interviews were conducted with 363 women and children about spousal and paternal abuse, and women were interviewed about sociodemographics and the stressors described above. Families were oversampled for the presence of spousal violence. Logistic regressions revealed that heavy drinking (log-odds ratio 4.86) and life stress events (log-odds ratio 1.6) predicted men's abuse of their partners. These risk factors were unrelated to child abuse. Wife battering, however, placed children at heightened risk (log-odds ratio = 2.77). Children of battered women stood a 42% chance of receiving escalated abuse from their fathers. It is proposed that men's abuse of children is in many instances instrumental in order to coerce or retaliate against women, echoing the Greek myth of Medea who killed her own children to spite their father.
The past twenty years have seen great theoretical and empirical advances in the field of corporate finance. Whereas once the subject addressed mainly the financing of corporations--equity, debt, and valuation--today it also embraces crucial issues of governance, liquidity, risk management, relationships between banks and corporations, and the macroeconomic impact of corporations. However, this progress has left in its wake a jumbled array of concepts and models that students are often hard put to make sense of. Here, one of the world's leading economists offers a lucid, unified, and comprehensive introduction to modern corporate finance theory. Jean Tirole builds his landmark book around a single model, using an incentive or contract theory approach. Filling a major gap in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance is an indispensable resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as researchers of corporate finance, industrial organization, political economy, development, and macroeconomics. Tirole conveys the organizing principles that structure the analysis of today's key management and public policy issues, such as the reform of corporate governance and auditing; the role of private equity, financial markets, and takeovers; the efficient determination of leverage, dividends, liquidity, and risk management; and the design of managerial incentive packages. He weaves empirical studies into the book's theoretical analysis. And he places the corporation in its broader environment, both microeconomic and macroeconomic, and examines the two-way interaction between the corporate environment and institutions. Setting a new milestone in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance will be the authoritative text for years to come.
The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State
- D N Mccloskey
- A Mingardi
- Great London
- Durnford
- McCloskey, D.N.
The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
- D Acemoglu
- J A Robinson
- Acemoglu, D.
Warfare State: Britain
- D Edgerton
- Edgerton, D.
The Selected Writings of Lord Action
- J R Fears
The Afrikaners: Biography of a People
- H Gilomee
- Gilomee, H.
Historical Impromptus: Notes, Reviews, and Responses on the British Experience and the Great Enrichment
- D N Mccloskey
- McCloskey, D.N.
Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness
- T Parks
- Parks, T.