nep-hpe New Economics Papers on History and Philosophy of Economics
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Issue of 2019‒09‒16
nine papers chosen by
Erik Thomson (University of Manitoba
http://ep.repec.org/pth72
[Selections by Humberto Barreto for SHOE list.]
1. "Positional Views" as the Cornerstone of Sen's Idea of Justice
Antoinette Baujard; Muriel Gilardone
2. Macroeconomic Dynamics at the Cowles Commission from the 1930s to the
1950s
Robert W. Dimand; Harald Hagemann
3. Everything must change, so that the world can remain the same: In
memory of the life and work of Elmar Altvater
Mahnkopf, Birgit
4. The Cowles Commission and Foundation for Research in Economics:
Bringing Mathematical Economics and Econometrics from the Fringes of
Economics to the Mainstream
Robert W. Dimand
5. The ideological use and abuse of Freiburg's ordoliberalism
Dold, Malte; Krieger, Tim
6. How economics forgot power
Carlos Mallorquin; ;
7. On Artificial Intelligence’s Razor’s Edge: On the Future of
Democracy and Society in the Artificial Age
Julia M. Puaschunder
9. The Political Economy of the Prussian Three-Class Franchise
Sascha O. Becker; Erik Hornung
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1. "Positional Views" as the Cornerstone of Sen's Idea of Justice
Antoinette Baujard (CREED and Tinbergen Institute, University of Amsterdam,
Amsterdam, Netherlands); Muriel Gilardone (Normandie Université, Unicaen,
CNRS, CREM UMR 6211, F-14000, France)
Our paper offers a novel reading of Sen’s idea of justice, beyond the
standard prisms imposed by theories of justice – resting on external
normative criteria – and formal welfarism – involving the definition of
individual welfare and its aggregation. Instead we take seriously Sen’s
emphasis on personal agency and focus on his original contribution to the
issue of objectivity. Firstly, we demonstrate that Sen’s idea of justice,
with at its core “positional views”, is more respectful of persons’ agency
than would be a theory based on individual preference or capability.
Secondly, we argue that Sen’s conception of objectivity considers that both
information and sentiments are relative to a position. Such an alternative
approach to subjectivity allows the formation of more impartial views through
collective deliberation and a better consideration of justice by agents
themselves.
JEL: A13 B31 B41 D63 I31
Keywords: Individual preferences, positional objectivity, sentiments,
public reasoning, agency, justice
Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gat:wpaper:1922&r=hpe
2. Macroeconomic Dynamics at the Cowles Commission from the 1930s to the
1950s
Robert W. Dimand (Department of Economics, Brock University); Harald
Hagemann (University of Hohenheim)
Jacob Marschak shaped the emergence of monetary theory and portfolio choice
at the Cowles Commission (which he directed from 1943 to 1948, but with which
he was involved already from 1937) at the University of Chicago, where he was
the doctoral teacher of Leonid Hurwicz, Harry Markowitz and Don Patinkin, and
then from 1955 at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University, where he was a
senior colleague of James Tobin until moving to UCLA in 1960. Marschak’s
later attempts to clarify the concept of liquidity and to emphasize the role
of new information for economic behavior date back as far as to his early
experiences with hyperinflationary processes in the Northern Caucasus during
the Russian Revolution. Marschak came to monetary theory with his 1922
Heidelberg doctoral dissertation on the quantity theory equation of exchange
(published in 1924 as “Die Verkehrsgleichung”), and embedded monetary theory
in a wider theory of asset market equilibrium in studies of “Money and the
Theory of Assets” (1938), “Assets, Prices, and Monetary Theory” (with Helen
Makower, 1938), “Role of Liquidity under Complete and Incomplete Information”
(1949), “The Rationale of the Demand for Money and of ‘Money Illusion’”
(1950), and “Monnaie et liquidité dans les modèles macroéconomiques et
microéconomiques” (1955), as well as in Income, Employment and the Price
Level (lectures Marschak gave at Chicago, edited by Fand and Markowitz,
1951). We examine Marschak’s analysis of money within a broader theory of
asset market equilibrium and explore the relation of his work to the monetary
and portfolio theories of his doctoral students Markowitz and Patinkin and
his colleague Tobin and to the revival of the quantity theory of money by
Milton Friedman, a University of Chicago colleague unsympathetic to the
methodology of the Cowles Commission.
JEL: B22 B31
Keywords: Jacob Marschak, Money in a theory of assets, Cowles Commission,
Harry Markowitz, James Tobin
Date: 2019–09
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2196&r=hpe
3. Everything must change, so that the world can remain the same: In
memory of the life and work of Elmar Altvater
Mahnkopf, Birgit
Elmar Altvater was a renowned political economist and professor at the
Otto-Suhr-Institute of Freie Universität Berlin from 1970 until 2006. Until
his death in 2018 he was a point of reference for several generations of
students, left-wing academics and politicians, trade union activists,
representatives of civil society organizations in Germany, across Europe and
in Latin America. He became one of the few academics in Germany who based the
analysis of contemporary economic and political developments on a critical
reading of Marxian approaches to understand the historical cycles of growth,
recession and crisis in modern capitalism. The following text attempts to
sketch some elements of a remarkable leftist intellectual history of the
Federal Republic of Germany through the prism of Elmar Altvater while
referring to some of the political initiatives Elmar Altvater was involved in
and touching on some of the most important topics he has dealt with: the
causes and consequences of the numerous debt crisis; the role of
neoliberalism which emerged in the course of crisis of world finance since
the late 1970s; the impact of "finanzialization" on social cohesion and
politics at national, European and international level and, most importantly,
his attempt to analyze the degradation of nature as the "price of progress" -
on the basis of an ecologically expanded critique of political economy.
Keywords: Marx,capitalism,critical political economy,debt
crisis,globalization,nature
Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ipewps:1232019&r=hpe
4. The Cowles Commission and Foundation for Research in Economics:
Bringing Mathematical Economics and Econometrics from the Fringes of
Economics to the Mainstream
Robert W. Dimand (Department of Economics, Brock University)
Founded in 1932 by a newspaper heir disillusioned by the failure of
forecasters to predict the Great Crash, the Cowles Commission promoted the
use of formal mathematical and statistical methods in economics, initially
through summer research conferences in Colorado and through support of the
Econometric Society (of which Alfred Cowles was secretary-treasurer for
decades). After moving to the University of Chicago in 1939, the Cowles
Commission sponsored works, many later honored with Nobel Prizes but at the
time out of the mainstream of economics, by Haavelmo, Hurwicz and Koopmans on
econometrics, Arrow and Debreu on general equilibrium, Yntema and Mosak on
general equilibrium in international trade theory, Arrow on social choice,
Koopmans on activity analysis, Klein on macroeconometric modelling, Lange,
Marschak and Patinkin on macroeconomic theory, and Markowitz on portfolio
choice, but came into intense methodological, ideological and personal
conflict with the emerging “Chicago school.” This conflict led the Cowles
Commission to move to Yale in 1955 as the Cowles Foundation, directed by
James Tobin (who had declined to move to Chicago to direct it). The Cowles
Foundation remained a leader in the more technical areas of economics,
notably with Tobin’s “Yale school” of monetary theory, Scarf’s computable
general equilibrium, Shubik in game theory, and later Phillips and Andrews in
econometric theory but as formal methods in economic theory and econometrics
pervaded the discipline of economics, Cowles (like the Econometric Society)
became less distinct from the rest of economics.
JEL: B23 B41 C01 C02
Keywords: Cowles Commission, Formalism in economics, Mathematics in
economics, Cowles approach to econometrics
Date: 2019–06
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2198&r=hpe
5. The ideological use and abuse of Freiburg's ordoliberalism
Dold, Malte; Krieger, Tim
In the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, a "battle of ideas" emerged over
whether ordoliberalism is part of the cause or the solution of economic
problems in Europe. While German ordoliberals argued that their policy
proposals were largely ignored before and during the crisis, implying a too
small role of ordoliberalism in European economic policy, critics saw too
much ordoliberal influence, especially in form of austerity policies. We
argue that neither view is entirely correct. Instead, both camps followed
their ideological predispositions and argued strongly in favor of their
preconceived Weltanschauung. The ordoliberal Freiburg School ceased being an
active research program and instead grew to resemble a "tradition" whose
proponents shared a certain mindset of convenience. As a result, ordoliberal
thinking was both used and abused by its proponents and critics to emphasize
their ideologically framed policy recommendations. The present paper analyzes
this ongoing debate and reflects on how the different ideological camps refer
to the Freiburg School to push their own agendas. Building on this
discussion, we end our paper with some constructive thoughts on how a
contemporary ordoliberalism might want to react to some of the challenges of
the ongoing Eurozone crisis.
JEL: B29 D43 E61 G18 P16
Keywords: Freiburg School,Ordoliberalism,Eurozone Crisis,Austerity,Ideology
Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:wgspdp:201904&r=hpe
6. How economics forgot power
Carlos Mallorquin (Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas); ;
The article discusses a recent book publication by Philip Pilkington, in
which an interesting and novel reconceptualizing of the investment
(accumulation) process and economic growth is proposed. The gaze and critique
through which the book is examined underlines certain theoretical
similarities found in the Latin American economic discourse during the
1950´s, denominated as “Latin American structuralism”, in Anglo Saxon or
European academia. Central to its perspective is the examination of economic
formations and its agents as a configuration of power asymmetries.
JEL: B22 B41 B50
Keywords: Desarrollo, crecimiento económico, asimetrías.
Date: 2019–08–01
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cjz:ca41cj:53&r=hpe
7. On Artificial Intelligence’s Razor’s Edge: On the Future of
Democracy and Society in the Artificial Age
Julia M. Puaschunder (The New School, NY)
The introduction of Artificial Intelligence in our contemporary society
imposes historically unique challenges for humankind. The emerging autonomy
of AI holds unique potentials of eternal life of robots, AI and algorithms
alongside unprecedented economic superiority, data storage and computational
advantages. However, the introduction of AI to society also raises ethical
questions. What is the social impact of robots, algorithms, blockchain and AI
entering the workforce and our daily lives on the economy and human society?
Should AI become eternal or is there a virtue in switching off AI at a
certain point? If so, we may have to define a ‘virtue of killing’ and a
‘right to destroy’ that may draw from legal but also philosophical sources to
answer the question how to handle the abyss of killing with ethical grace and
fair style. In light of robots already having gained citizenship and being
attributed as quasi-human under Common Law jurisdiction, should AI and robots
be granted full citizen rights – such as voting rights? Or should we simply
reap the benefits of AI and consider to define a democracy with different
classes having diversified access to public choice and voting – as practiced
in the ancient Athenian city state, which became the cradle of Western
civilization and democratic traditions spread around the globe. Or should we
legally justify AI slaves to economically reap their benefits, as was common
in ancient Rome, which became the Roman Law legal foundation for Continental
and some of Scandinavian Law traditions and which inspired very many
different codifications around the world. Finally, we may also draw from the
Code Napoléon, the French Code Civil established under Napoleon in 1804,
which defined male and female into two classes of human with substantial
right and power differences, and – to this day – accounts for one of the few
documents that have influenced the whole world in legal and societal ways. In
asking critical questions and unraveling the ethical boundary conditions of
our future artificial world, the paper thereby takes a descriptive – afar
from normative – theoretical angle targeted at aiding a successful
introduction of AI into our contemporary workforce, democracy and society.
Keywords: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Athenian city state, Code Civil,
Code Napoléon, Democracy, Right to destroy, Roman Law, Slavery, Society,
Workforce
Date: 2019–04
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:smo:cpaper:5jp&r=hpe
9. The Political Economy of the Prussian Three-Class Franchise
Sascha O. Becker; Erik Hornung
Did the Prussian three-class franchise, which politically over-represented
the economic elite, affect policy-making? Combining MP-level political
orientation, derived from all roll call votes in the Prussian parliament
(1867–1903), with constituency characteristics, we analyze how local vote
inequality, determined by tax payments, affected policymaking during
Prussia’s period of rapid industrialization. Contrary to the predominant view
that the franchise system produced a conservative parliament, higher vote
inequality is associated with more liberal voting, especially in regions with
large-scale industry. We argue that industrialists preferred self-serving
liberal policies and were able to coordinate on suitable MPs when vote
inequality was high.
JEL: D72 N43 N93 P26
Keywords: inequality, political economy, three-class franchise, elites,
Prussia
Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7801&r=hpe
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