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Economic Individualism And Preference Formation, Andrzej Rapaczynski
Economic Individualism And Preference Formation, Andrzej Rapaczynski
Faculty Scholarship
This note examines some issues involved in an attempt to go beyond the assumption, long-made by most economists, that people’s preferences are simply to be treated as “given” and that the principle of consumer sovereignty entails a refusal to consider some (or some people’s) revealed preferences as more authoritative than others. The most important break with that assumption has been the development of behavioral economics, which shows that people may not always know what they really want, and that economists have to develop a more critical approach, distinguishing people’s true preferences from those that are merely apparent. While this approach, …
Impact Investing As A Form Of Lobbying And Its Corporate-Governance Effects, Andrzej Rapaczynski
Impact Investing As A Form Of Lobbying And Its Corporate-Governance Effects, Andrzej Rapaczynski
Faculty Scholarship
Impact investment is attractive to many because it seems to combine support for progressive causes with an apparent commitment to the principles of a market economy. In fact, however, a rational impact investor is not simply creating demand for certain types of corporate actions; he/she is attempting to use corporate governance mechanisms to influence fiduciary decisions of the management. The cost of this tactic for the health of the capitalist economy is potentially very considerable. The American capitalist system relies heavily on a relatively fragile corporate governance arrangement in which the agency problems of a modern corporation are minimized by …
The Moral Significance Of Economic Life, Andrzej Rapaczynski
The Moral Significance Of Economic Life, Andrzej Rapaczynski
Faculty Scholarship
Much of the modern perception of the role of economic production in human life – whether on the Left or on the Right of the political spectrum – views it as an inferior, instrumental activity oriented toward self-preservation, self-interest, or profit, and thus as essentially distinct from the truly human action concerned with moral values, justice, and various forms of self-fulfillment. This widely shared worldview is rooted, on the one hand, in the Aristotelian tradition that sees labor as a badge of slavery, and freedom as lying in the domain of politics and pure (not technical) knowledge, and, on the …