nep-hpe New Economics Papers on History and Philosophy of Economics
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Issue of 2019‒11‒18
eleven papers chosen by
Erik Thomson (University of Manitoba)
http://ep.repec.org/pth72
[Selections by Humberto Barreto for SHOE list.]
1. Time for a Paradigm Shift: From Economic Growth and Price-Making
Markets to Social Ecological Economics
Clive L. Spash
2. Relative Fairness and Quasifairness
McCain, Roger
3. The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Rational Expectations. How Did
They Meet and Live (Happily?) Ever After
Thomas Delcey; Francesco Sergi
4. Sniff Tests in Economics: Aggregate Distribution of Their Probability
Values and Implications for Publication Bias
Snyder, Christopher; Zhuo, Ran
5. Natural Resources in the Theory of Production: The
Georgescu-Roegen/Daly versus Solow/Stiglitz Controversy
Quentin Couix
6. On the Role of Finance in Sraffa’s System
Dvoskin, Ariel; Feldman, Germán David
7. Commodity Instability and Developing Countries
Maizels, Alfred
8. Law’s Humility: The Possibility of Metajurisprudence
Gkouvas, Triantafyllos
9. Dobrogea School of Economics
ARTENE, Alin
10. Political acceptability of climate policies : do we need a "just
transition" or simply less unequal societies ?
Francesco Vona
11. Friedrich Hayek and the Price System : a speech at "The Road to
Serfdom at 75: The Future of Classical Liberalism and the Free Market"
Ninth Annual Conference of the William F. Buckley, Jr., Program at Yale,
New Haven, Connecticut, November 1, 2019.
Quarles, Randal K.
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1. Time for a Paradigm Shift: From Economic Growth and Price-Making
Markets to Social Ecological Economics
Clive L. Spash
Ecological economics has ontological foundations that inform it as a
paradigm both biophysically and socially. It stands in strong opposition to
mainstream thought on the operations of the economy and society. The core
arguments deconstruct and oppose both growth and price-making market
paradigms. However, in contradiction of these theoretical foundations,
ecological economists can be found who call upon neoclassical economic
theory as insightful, price-making and capitalist markets as socially
justified means of allocation and economic growth as achieving progress and
development. The more radical steady-state and post-growth/degrowth
movements are shown to include confused and conflicted stances in relation
to the mainstream hegemonic paradigms. Ecological economics personally
challenges those trained in mainstream theory to move beyond their orthodox
education and leave behind the flawed theories and concepts that contribute
to supporting systems that create social, ecological and economic crises.
This paper makes explicit the paradigmatic struggle of the past thirty years
and the need to wipe away mainstream apologetics, pragmatic conformity and
ill-conceived postmodern pluralism. It details the core paradigmatic
conflict and specifies the alternative social ecological economic paradigm
along with a new research agenda.
JEL: A11 A12 A13 A14 B29 B50 D40 D46 D62 O44 P1 P2 P16 P28 Q56 Q57
Keywords: Paradigm shift; Economic growth; Markets, Price, Value theory,
Social ecological economics, Steady-state economics, Degrowth,
Post-Growth, Capitalism, Neoclassical economics, Socialism
Date: 2019
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwsre:sre-disc-2019_07&r=hpe
2. Relative Fairness and Quasifairness
McCain, Roger (Drexel University School of Economics)
Fairness has been an important topic of the philosophic literature in recent
decades, with John Rawls' (1971 1993), ideas at the center. It is less well
known that there is a literature on fairness (or equity) in neoclassical
economics, which shows the influence, at least, of Rawls' difference
principle, and that that literature has in turned influenced philosophical
writing, principally through the work of Robert Dworkin (1981). Dworkin
designates his view as "resource equalitarianism" and essentially adopts
Varian's (1973) ideas from the neoclassical literature in order to define
equal access to resources. In this paper, the first section will outline
concepts of relative fairness and quasifairness in the comparison of social
situations; the second will offer an argument for their representation of
fairness based on an adaptation of the veil of ignorance, and the third will
argue that relative quasifairness, in particular, addresses what has been an
unsolved problem: intergenerational fairness.
JEL: D60
Keywords: fairness; efficiency; preference; overlapping generations
Date: 2019–10–07
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:drxlwp:2019_007&r=hpe
3. The Efficient Market Hypothesis and Rational Expectations. How Did
They Meet and Live (Happily?) Ever After
Thomas Delcey (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique - UP1 - Université
Panthéon-Sorbonne); Francesco Sergi (UWE Bristol - University of the West
of England [Bristol])
This article investigates the origins and early development of the
association between the efficient market hypothesis and rational
expectations. These two concepts are today distinctive theoretical
benchmarks for mainstream approaches to, respectively, finance and
macroeconomics. Moreover, scholars in each of these two fields tend to
associate the two ideas as related equilibrium concepts; they also claim
that the two have a common historical origin. Although some historical
accounts have been provided about either the origins of rational
expectations or of the efficient market hypothesis, very few historians have
been investigating the history of the association between the two concepts
(or, more generally, the history of the interactions between macroeconomics
and finance). The contribution of this paper is precisely to fill this gap
in the historical literature, while assessing and challenging self-produced
narratives told by practitioners. We suggest that the two concepts were
independently developed in the 1960s. Then, we illustrate how they were
associated for the first time the early 1970s, within a debate about the
term structure of the interest rates involving Sargent, Modigliani, Shiller,
and Fama. Finally, we discuss some early controversies about the
association, which nevertheless became, at the turn of the 1970s, a
step-stone for both macroeconomics and finance.
Keywords: Efficient market hypothesis,Fama (Eugene),Lucas (Robert
E),history of finance,history of macroeconomics,rational
expectations,Sargent (Thomas J)
Date: 2019–07–17
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02187362&r=hpe
4. Sniff Tests in Economics: Aggregate Distribution of Their Probability
Values and Implications for Publication Bias
Snyder, Christopher; Zhuo, Ran
The increasing demand for rigor in empirical economics has led to the
growing use of auxiliary tests (balance, specification, over-identification,
placebo, etc.) supporting the credibility of a paper’s main results. We dub
these “sniff tests” because standards for passing are subjective and
rejection is bad news for the author. Sniff tests offer a new window into
publication bias since authors prefer them to be insignificant, the reverse
of standard statistical tests. Collecting a sample of nearly 30,000 sniff
tests across 60 economics journals, we provide the first estimate of their
aggregate probability-value (p-value) distribution. For the subsample of
balance tests in randomized controlled trials (for which the distribution of
p-values is known to be uniform absent publication bias, allowing
reduced-form methods to be employed) estimates suggest that 45% of failed
tests remain in the “file drawer” rather than being published. For the
remaining sample with an unknown distribution of p-values, structural
estimates suggest an even larger file-drawer problem, as high as 91%. Fewer
significant sniff tests show up in top-tier journals, smaller tables, and
more recent articles. We find no evidence of author manipulation other than
a tendency to overly attribute significant sniff tests to bad luck.
Date: 2018–11–30
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:metaar:8vdrh&r=hpe
5. Natural Resources in the Theory of Production: The
Georgescu-Roegen/Daly versus Solow/Stiglitz Controversy
Quentin Couix (UP1 UFR02 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - UFR d'Économie -
UP1 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne
- CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UP1 - Université
Panthéon-Sorbonne)
This paper provides a theoretical and methodological account of an important
controversy between neoclassical resources economics and ecological
economics, from the early 1970s to the end of the 1990s. It shows that the
assumption of unbounded resources productivity in the work of Solow and
Stiglitz, and the related concepts of substitution and technical progress,
rest on a model-based methodology. On the other hand, Georgescu-Roegen's
assumption of thermodynamic limits to production, later revived by Daly,
comes from a methodology of interdisciplinary consistency. I conclude that
neither side provided a definitive proof of its own claim because both face
important conceptual issues.
Keywords: Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,Robert Solow,Joseph Stiglitz,natural
resources,theory of production
Date: 2019–10–24
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-02332485&r=hpe
6. On the Role of Finance in Sraffa’s System
Dvoskin, Ariel (National University of San Martín); Feldman, Germán David
(National University of San Martín)
We critically review the previous attempts to introduce money and finance
into Sraffa’s price system, whose main difference is, we argue, their
conception of the interest rate, either as an opportunity cost or as an
effective cost of production. We examine the implications on three different
grounds: (i) the formal consistency of the system; (ii) the possibilities to
explicitly treat the financial industry as any other productive sector; and
(iii) the validity of the so-called “monetary theory of distribution” (MTD).
We then suggest a possible route, inspired by Schumpeter’s ideas on economic
development, to introduce the banking sector through its role of granting
credit to innovation. Unlike previous contributions, this reformulation
allows us both to justify the basic nature of the financial sector and
simultaneously preserve the validity of MTD.
JEL: E11 E43 E52
Keywords: Banking industry; Innovation; Monetary theory of distribution;
Sraffa; Surplus approach.
Date: 2019–10–16
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:sraffa:0037&r=hpe
7. Commodity Instability and Developing Countries
Maizels, Alfred
The significance of commodity price instability for the economic development
of commodity-exporting countries has been perhaps the dominant theme in the
postwar literature on the "commodity problem". One of the contending postwar
views of the significance of excessive commodity price fluctuations on the
economies of producing countries can be traced back to Keynes. In a now
famous memorandum, written in 1942, Keynes argued that commodity price
fluctuations led to unnecessary waste of resources and, by resulting in
fluctuations in export earnings, had a detrimental effect on investment in
new productive capacity and perpetuated a cycle in commodity output and thus
in commodity prices. His solution to the problem was to propose the
establishment of a series of international buffer stocks for the main
primary commodities entering international trade, with finance to be
provided by his proposed Clearing Union (which later came into existence, in
modified form, as the International Monetary Fund), and with a General
Council to oversee and guide the operations of the individual buffer stocks.
Keynes' analysis of the problem of excessive instability in commodity prices
was not, however, accepted by the postwar school of neoclassical economists,
who argued that intervention by governments in the working of commodity
markets was not in the interests of producing countries or of the world
economy in general. Several distinct arguments have been advanced by
neoclassical economists to support the view that market intervention would
be harmful to the economies of commodity-exporting developing countries or
to world economic growth, or that such intervention is unnecessary since its
objective of reducing fluctuations in export earnings could be achieved more
efficiently by other means. The purpose of this Working Paper is to show
that these arguments, which underlie the perceptions of the 'commodity
problem' of developed country negotiators, are based on untenable
assumptions or are otherwise invalid or of limited applicability.
Keywords: International Development
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ags:widerw:295563&r=hpe
8. Law’s Humility: The Possibility of Metajurisprudence
Gkouvas, Triantafyllos
This thesis propounds a metatheoretical regimentation of legal claims that
can accommodate theoretical disagreement across the board. The solution
explored does not question the incommensurability between the descriptive
and the normative variants of first-order disputes about the grounds of law.
What it targets instead is an unpronounced agnosticism about the possibility
of a more inclusive type of metajurisprudential disagreement that does not
take for granted either the existence of legal facts—construed either as
descriptive or as normative facts about what the law requires—as the trivial
truthmakers of propositions of law or their potentially reason-giving
properties. On the assumption that the fact that for every legal proposition
there is something in the world that makes it true is a premise shared by
all legal philosophers but those of an expressivist inclination, an
unpronounced, primitive division of opinion occurs as early as one ventures
to question that our commitment to the possibility of legal truth logically
entails our commitment to entities of a distinctly legal kind. The
alternative idea that comes out of the rejection of this entailment will be
that part of what could explain the slow pace at which the
positivism-antipositivism debate is moving beyond the traditional conceptual
jargon of 20th century analytic jurisprudence is the fact that we may have
been blind to the possibility that our quest for the ultimate grounds of law
could have been taking place under the veil of a narrow understanding of the
available options with regard to what could legally exist. In virtue of this
reconfiguration the prospect of metajurisprudential disagreement acquires
definitive shape. At this higher level of abstraction questions about the
perspectival character of legal statements, the constitution of legal
authority, the relation of legal truth to reality as well as about the
nature of legal grounding and legal normativity become available for
meaningful contestation. If there is something that could serve as a
leitmotiv for this research proposal is that there is no more apt a byword
for what it is to conduct foundational work in legal philosophy than that
there is no royal way from semantics to ontology.
Date: 2018–05–11
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:thesis:zu8q9&r=hpe
9. Dobrogea School of Economics
ARTENE, Alin
At present, we have all the necessary elements to be able to claim that
"Dobrogea Economics School in Constanta" really exists in the Romanian and
European academic landscape. Among these elements, we take into account
those related to tradition, university education programs, valuable teaching
staff, material basis, results / scientific visibility, etc. This article
provides an approach to the establishment and further development of the
Faculty of Economics at "Ovidius" University of Constanta. The continuous
development of the collaboration relations with other universities -
Romanian and foreign -, with governmental or private institutions, with the
business environment, etc. confirms that today there is a Dobrogean School
of Economics and, moreover, it has all the chances to last forever.
Date: 2018–09–17
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:lawarx:jb3um&r=hpe
10. Political acceptability of climate policies : do we need a "just
transition" or simply less unequal societies ?
Francesco Vona (Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques)
This blog post is partly based on the policy paper published in the journal
Climate Policy: ‘Job Losses and the Political Acceptability of Climate
Policies: why the job killing argument is so persistent and how to overturn
it.’ Concerns for a ‘just transition’ towards a low-carbon economy are now
part of mainstream political debates as well as of international
negotiations on climate change. Key political concerns centre on the
distributional impacts of climate policies. On the one hand, the ‘job
killing’ argument has been repeatedly used to undermine the political
acceptability of climate policy and to ensure generous exemptions to
polluting industries in most countries. On the other hand, the rising
populist parties point to carbon taxes as another enhancer of socio-economic
inequalities. For instance, the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow vest) movement in
France is a classic example of the perceived tension between social justice
and environmental sustainability.
Keywords: Low carbon economy; Climate policy; Social justice;
Environmental sustainability
Date: 2019–10
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/309vnu061i84latgu6i6t1omhj&r=hpe
11. Friedrich Hayek and the Price System : a speech at "The Road to
Serfdom at 75: The Future of Classical Liberalism and the Free Market"
Ninth Annual Conference of the William F. Buckley, Jr., Program at Yale,
New Haven, Connecticut, November 1, 2019.
Quarles, Randal K. (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
(U.S.))
Date: 2019–11–01
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedgsq:1100&r=hpe
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