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Full-Text Articles in Political Theory
Some Wittgensteinian Reservationas About Neuroeconomics, Greg Hill
Some Wittgensteinian Reservationas About Neuroeconomics, Greg Hill
Greg Hill
Abstract: In Economic Theory and Cognitive Science, Don Ross proposes a radical reconstruction of neoclassical economics, retaining its rational-choice framework while substituting neural networks and other “mechanisms” for people as the prototypical decision-making agents. This essay describes some of the difficulties that arise when concepts belonging to what Wittgenstein called the human “form of life” are invoked to explain the behavior of such sub-personal “agents” as parts of the brain. The result is a misbegotten conception of “agency” and a “cyborg economics” the subject matter of which bears little relation to what economists and ordinary people mean by “making a …
From Hayek To Keynes: G.L.S. Shackle And Our Ignorance Of The Future, Greg Hill
From Hayek To Keynes: G.L.S. Shackle And Our Ignorance Of The Future, Greg Hill
Greg Hill
G.L.S. Shackle stood at the historic crossroads where the economics of Hayek and Keynes collided. Shackle fused these opposing lines of thought in a macroeconomic theory that draws Keynesian conclusions from Austrian premises. In Shackle’s scheme of thought, the power to imagine alternative courses of action releases decision makers from the web of predictable causation. But the continuous stream of spontaneous and unpredictable choices that originate in the subjective and disparate orientations of individual agents denies us the possibility of rational expectations, and therewith the logical coherence of market equilibrium through time.