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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Limits On The Application Of Motivational Homogeneity In The Work Of Buchanan And The Virginia School, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Limits On The Application Of Motivational Homogeneity In The Work Of Buchanan And The Virginia School, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
At its founding, the set of ideas that came to be known as Virginia Political Economy originated from the work of Rutledge Vining, James Buchanan, Warren Nutter, Ronald Coase, and Gordon Tullock. In terms of scholarly stature, that short list comprises two Nobel Prize winners (Buchanan and Coase) and a recipient of the American Economic Association Distinguished Fellow award (Tullock). It also includes an economist (Nutter) who, in the midst of the Cold War, described the Soviet economy more accurately than any of the major experts in that field. Virginia Political Economy was characterized by four foundational principles: the endogeneity …
Learning From Failure: A Review Of Peter Schuck’S Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (Book Review), David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Learning From Failure: A Review Of Peter Schuck’S Why Government Fails So Often: And How It Can Do Better (Book Review), David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Peter Schuck catalogs an overwhelming list of US government failures. He points to both structural problems (culture and institutions) and incentives. Despairing of cultural change, Schuck focuses on incentives. He relies on Charles Wolf ’s theory of nonmarket failures in which “internalities” replace the heavily-studied market failure from externalities (Wolf 1979). Internalities are evidence of a discord between the public goals by which a program is defended and the private goals of its administrators. What might economists contribute? We suggest that economists have neglected internalities because they take group goals as exogenously determined and we defend an alternative tradition in …
F. A. Hayek’S Sympathetic Agents, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
F. A. Hayek’S Sympathetic Agents, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
In what follows, we show first that, for Hayek, behavior within the small group – the “small band or troop,” or “micro-cosmos” – is correlated, resulting from agents who are sympathetic one with another. We shall argue that sympathy in this context for Hayek entails the projection of one’s preferences onto the preferences of others. With such correlated agency as the default in small-group situations, Hayek attempts to explain the transition from small groups to a larger civilization. We consider the role of projection in Hayek’s system at length, because projection from the local group characterized by a well-defined preference …
Adam Smith, Collusion And “Right” At The Supreme Court, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Adam Smith, Collusion And “Right” At The Supreme Court, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Adam Smith’s views on collusion were injected into the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly as Justice Stevens puzzled over why a collusive action might be viewed as “right.” Motivation by a desire for approbation provides Smith’s explanation for the existence of well- functioning groups. “Right” action is approved by the group. The question is what happens when the groups are in conflict. For Smith, collusion is one instance of the larger problem of faction in which a small group organizes to exploit the larger society.
Counterfeiting Truth: Statistical Reporting On The Basis Of Trust, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Counterfeiting Truth: Statistical Reporting On The Basis Of Trust, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
There are two parts of our chapter. First, we review Adam Smith's argument that the evolution of monetary institutions is tied up in the problem of detecting deceitful metal offered in exchange. Smith points to no such comparable institution by which deceitful policy advocacy is detected and severely punished.5 Yet his recommendation for caution in the evaluation of policy advocacy points to the caution that routinely prevailed in monetary matters before public safeguards evolved to make the metallic content of the medium of exchange transparent and to preserve its quality. Second, we tum to a different sort of deceit, …
On The "Bitter Quarrel" Between Economics And Its Enemies, Sandra J. Peart
On The "Bitter Quarrel" Between Economics And Its Enemies, Sandra J. Peart
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
Economics has long had its enemies. The question is, why? What, precisely, is it about economics that its critics oppose? William Coleman seeks to tell the story of «anti-economics», «to take its measure» (p. 3), and then finally to defend economics from these attacks. His is a broad, sweeping study that uses a wide lens, panoramically over time, to survey the opposition. The crisis in economics, edited by Edward Fullbrook, provides us instead with a detailed snapshot of a recent sort of anti-economics - the Post-Autistic Economics (PAE) movement that originated among French economics students in 2000. Both serve to …
The Negro Science Of Exchange: Classical Economics And Its Chicago Revival, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
The Negro Science Of Exchange: Classical Economics And Its Chicago Revival, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
For analytical purposes, are economic agents—humans—the same or not? In this chapter, we argue that, historically, the debate between those who trusted in markets and those who did not followed logically from different answers to this questions. Starting with Adam Smith, classical economists held that humans are the same in their capacity for language and trade. They concluded that since markets are useful for some agents, they are beneficial for all of us. But the supposition of homogeneous competence was widely questioned in the nineteenth century but those who held that significant differences exist among humans, only some of whom …
"Not An Average Human Being": How Economics Succumbed To Racial Accounts Of Economic Man, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
"Not An Average Human Being": How Economics Succumbed To Racial Accounts Of Economic Man, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
In this chapter, we shall show how the attacks on the doctrine of human homogeneity succeeded—how, late in the century, economists came to embrace accounts of racial heterogeneity entailing different capacities of optimization.1 We attribute the demise of the classical tradition largely to the ill-understood influence of anthropologists and eugenicists2 and to a popular culture that served to disseminate racial theories visually and in print. Specifically, W. R. Greg, James Hunt, and Francis Galton all attacked the analytical postulate of homogeneity that characterized classical economics from Adam Smith3 through John Stuart Mill. Greg cofounded the eugenics movement …
Denying Human Homogeneity: Eugenics & Making Of Post-Classical Economics, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Denying Human Homogeneity: Eugenics & Making Of Post-Classical Economics, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy
Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications
The question we propose to address is how did economics move from the classical period characterized by the hardest possible doctrine of initial human homogeneity—all the observed differences among people arise from incentives, luck, and history1—to become comfortable with accounts of human behavior which alleged foundational differences among and within races of people? (Darity 1995) In this paper, we shall argue that early British eugenics thinkers racialized economics in the post-classical period.2