I'm looking for two respondents at the June HES meeting for a panel on Henry George: Equity in Economics. Here's the panel. Please contact me off the list at [log in to unmask] Thanks, Polly Cleveland Henry George: Equity in Economics In George's economic theory, economies function best within an equitable political framework. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Speaker 1: John C. Medaille Justice and Mr. George: What Henry George Knew, What the Neoclassicists Forgot, and Why it Matters Abstract Henry George was acclaimed by the general public and disdained by the professional economists, largely for the same reasons. For the general public, Progress and Poverty seemed to go to the heart of the matter, treating economics as a question of justice. But for the professionals, he was often regarded as a dangerous radical, even though he reasons within the tradition of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. However, he conducted his studies at the precise moment of the marginalist revolution, just as the profession was undergoing a transition from political economy to economics. For the former, economic science was embedded in particular political and cultural systems, while the later aspired to be a pure science with its own mathematics. While some of the marginalists, such as Walras and Marshall, could maintain a commitment to justice, many others found the whole question superfluous. This paper will argue, however, that without some notion of justice, and especially justice in property relations, a complete description of an economy is impossible. Moreover, without some notion of equity, equilibrium is unattainable. And this relation can be shown to be present in the very starting conditions of neoclassical formulations, which initial conditions are, alas, too often forgotten. Respondent: TBA &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Speaker 2: Francis K. Peddle HENRY GEORGE: ARISTOTELIAN OR KANTIAN? Abstract: Henry George presents a pervasive conjunction of ethical and economic thinking that is unusual in the history of classical political economy. There has been surprisingly little written about the school, or schools, of ethics to which this important figure in American intellectual history may belong or which ones had the pivotal influence on his economic thinking. Natural law, Enlightenment principles, biblical nostrums and an embryonic philosophy of history all have their resonances in his writings. On the one hand, there is a powerful drift towards a Kantian notion of cosmopolitan law. Absolute political and legal rights are not enough. There must be an economics that provides a universal guarantee of access to the plenitude of nature. On the other hand, there are teleological and organic elements in George's concept of natural law, in both its physical and mental manifestations, that seem to put him squarely within the confines of the ethical naturalism of Aristotle. This Aristotelian naturalism, or what is known today as virtue ethics, makes assumptions about the human disposition that have implications for both the economic behaviour of individuals and their interaction in the Greater Leviathan, to use George's term, or the body economic. Kantians view the ethics of naturalism as relativistic and lacking in a strong theory of obligation. Aristotelians often dismiss rule-dominated ethics as formalistic and inadequate as an ethical guide on account of its insensitivity to the nuances of human nature. This paper will argue that George's conceptualization of the fusion of ethics and economics attempts to reconcile these fundamentally different schools of ethics. Key Words: George, Aristotle, Kant, ethics, economics, natural law, cosmopolitan law, teleology, rights, philosophy of history. Respondent: TBA &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Speaker 3: Mary (Polly) Cleveland Mason Gaffney's Georgist/Wicksellian Three-factor Macroeconomics How Mason Gaffney uses the ideas of Henry George and Knut Wicksell to develop a three-factor macroeconomic theory in which equity and efficiency coincide. Abstract: Henry George advocated shifting all taxes to economic rent--land value taxation broadly conceived--and using the revenues for public purposes. This shift, he claimed, would raise wages, make land use more efficient, and tame the boom and bust cycle that regularly devastated the nineteenth century US economy. Mason Gaffney has extensively explicated and developed George's theories in modern marginalist terms. When it comes to cycles of boom and bust, however, Gaffney argues that George was right for the wrong reasons. To build a more compelling theory, Gaffney has turned to the modified Austrian economics of Knut Wicksell. Wicksell attributed boom and bust cycles to a lag in the bank rate behind the "natural" rate of interest--so that in a boom, banks continue to lend at too low a rate, encouraging excessive investment in fixed capital. In the following bust, banks hold the rates too high, hindering recovery. In Gaffney's modification, banks lend at too low a rate because low rates combined with expectations of continued appreciation overinflate the value of land and other resources used as collateral. In short, a boom creates an asset bubble. A policy of taxing rents, by reducing speculative values during a boom, can indeed dampen boom and bust. Respondent: Marianne Johnson