Learning Objectives

• 1. To understand the interconnectedness between psychology and entrepreneurship

• 2. To introduce different cognitive biases confronted by an entrepreneur

• 3. To learn about different types of personalities and attitudes of entrepreneurs

• 4. To familiarize with different sets of emotions of an entrepreneur

• 5. To recognize the role of an entrepreneurial mind-set, and how it becomes a differentiating factor for an entrepreneur

Opening Scenario: Apple and US Book Publishers

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Apple and five major US publishers for colluding to raise the prices of ebooks. Three of the publishers settled the suit; two others and Apple were unwilling to settle.

The publishers had negotiated a new business model for ebook pricing with Apple as it prepared to launch the iPad: in exchange for a 30 percent sales commission, Apple would let the publishers set their own prices for ebooks. For the publishers, this pricing model appeared to be a vast improvement on their wholesaling arrangement with Amazon. After at least one of the publishers threatened to delay the release of its digital editions, Amazon reluctantly replaced its flat $9.99 price for ebooks with Apple’s model, and prices rose industry-wide to about $14.99 on average.

The DOJ’s lawsuit suggests that the negotiators and attorneys involved may have neglected to thoroughly analyze whether their agreement would truly create value for consumers and thus whether it fell within the parameters of US antitrust law. In the flush of hammering out a deal that appears to create synergy for everyone involved, negotiators sometimes neglect to consider how their agreement could affect outsiders, an oversight with ethical and legal implications.

Understanding Interconnections between Psychology and Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship has a multidisciplinary perspective. Disciplines such as psychology, economics, sociology and anthropology contributed to the development of the field of entrepreneurship during the last years. Psychology is one discipline that has had a strong influence on entrepreneurship. Essentially, psychological characteristics as demonstrated by the entrepreneur play an important role in entrepreneurship. Major scholars, such as Schumpeter (1934) and later McClelland (1967), have contributed to the psychological perspective particularly in terms of individuals and their behavior also; economic and strategic theories have been used to understand entrepreneurship (Kirchhoff, 1991).

This is the first paragraph of the first letter that my biological mother, Maria, wrote to me after my wife and I located her in June of 1983. It is so beautiful. I was ecstatic and humbled at the same time by her words. I always believed my biological mother must have been a good person, and this verified my deepest intuition about her.

Maria speaks no English, and I don’t speak any Greek, so Billy Maganiotou, the administrator of the Babies Center Mitera in Athens, translated this letter into English and sent it with the original in Greek. Billy Maganiotou was the administrator who worked with my adoptive parents when they first laid eyes on me on Christmas Eve, 1957. Billy knew quite a bit about me, because my mother, Jean, consistently sent updates as I grew up; about my personality, and about my accomplishments throughout my life.

The second and third paragraphs of the same letter:

Peter L. Berger needs few introductions. Although adopted by sociologists of religion as one of our own, Berger’s influence is much broader. As the chapters in this volume and a plethora of commentary attest, his name is often treated as synonymous with the emergence of “social construction” as a key term in the social sciences. Berger’s main work in the sociology of religion The Sacred Canopy is, in turn, in the author’s own words (1967, vi), “a direct application of the same theoretical perspective in the sociology of knowledge,” which he and Luckmann introduced in The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967), “to the phenomenon of religion.”

Yet, for all his constructionism, Berger’s sociology of religion is curiously disconnected from the broader framework introduced in The Social Construction of Reality. While the “systematic elements” in The Sacred Canopy (worldconstruction, theodicy, alienation) indeed follow the sociology of knowledge framework, they are much less evidently present in the “historical elements” (secularization, legitimation) of the book. Although Berger later said that “I found the sociology-of-knowledge framework of my early work very useful and have not been motivated to exchange it for another,” there is not a lot of evidence of it in his subsequent writings, even less so in the work inspired by him (Hjelm 2018).

I argue here that Berger’s writings on religion represent a missed opportunity for a genuinely constructionist approach. I use Berger’s definition of religion in The Sacred Canopy as a prism through which it becomes possible to understand the rather more traditional paths that Berger himself and sociology of religion inspired by his work has taken. “Three religions” is, then, not a reference to Berger’s biography—although that is also a story of religious switching (Berger 2008)—but rather to the substantive, functional, and constructionist approaches that the definition of religion in The Sacred Canopy enables. I discuss each approach and their role in the work of Berger and his followers in detail below.

A Reluctant Definition

In the preface to The Sacred Canopy, Berger emphasizes that “this book is not “a sociology of religion” ‘ (Berger 1967, vi). He is not interested in providing an overview of different sociological approaches to religion, including discussion of the different definitions of religion, which, Berger later wrote, he considered “sublimely uninteresting” (Berger 2014, 17)

October 1996: Flight from New York to Athens

I met someone once who disliked airports. How is that possible? Air bursting with ions, charging it, making it alive. The most exciting time is the period after the formalities of check-in when all that remains is anticipation. That delicious wait. There is nothing quite like it. Except this time. This wait is particularly hard. The anticipation immeasurable.

We’ve boarded now and are seated. As you face the back of the plane there I am, fifteen rows back and next to the window on the left side, a vantage point, which I will rue during takeoff, but appreciate once we’ve stabilized. On my left are my wife, 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son.

Waiting to meet us in Athens will be many relatives, among them my twin brother, fraternal not identical (we look nothing alike), my mother, and any number of cousins, aunts, and uncles.

I have extended family in Greece. Quite a large family, actually. What I’ve neglected to mention, until now, is that three months earlier I did not know any of this family existed. Soon I will meet them for the very first time.

Thank goodness that boarding appears to be winding down and we’ll soon be airborne. It will be a long flight. There is a preponderance of thoughts trafficking through my mind.

I imagine people to be like buildings. The foundation needs to be solid or the building tips and waivers. So do people. Blood is the most fundamental connection of all. A visceral, subconscious connection, made not of intellect, but of sinew and tissue, both physical and spiritual. The absence of that foundation causes what can be a lifelong pursuit of equilibrium. The presence of love helps to counterbalance the imbalance, but never completely eradicates it. Nothing can.

The literature that references personal data collection risks is growing amidst international scandals, notably the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook interference in the Brexit referendum and 2016 US presidential election as well as other elections in countries throughout our world. Questions of fundamental importance to the study and practice of international relations are being asked as concerns are expressed, including the most pressing that speak to accountability, the ethics of use in local areas and the impact on the vulnerable populations that information and communications technologies (ICTs) promise to serve. Yet, the editors observe that in key texts written to teach international relations, less mention is made of personal data collection risks in countries around the globe. As we address this significant omission in the literature, this introduction notes the observation made by Acharya and Buzan that ‘with the possible exception of the emerging ideology of environmental stewardship, no new ideologies of equivalent weight have come along to reshape international relations’ (p. 12).

As the call for the protection of personal data increases globally, other uses of data under the colour of state action continue to complicate the issue. The attack by Russia on Ukraine occurred simultaneously with Russia’s participation in the UN’s Ad Hoc Committee to Elaborate a Comprehensive International Convention on Countering the Use of ICTs for Criminal Purposes. Russia strongly advocated for a new global cybercrime treaty despite the existence of the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime ratified by sixty-six countries, but Russia did not join, stating that the convention violated state sovereignty principles. Yet, alongside its urging that statements to the Secretariat should not include information about the war against Ukraine, Russia pushed the UN to adopt its proposal, which lessened humanitarian rights. All the while Russia has seemingly turned a blind eye to cybercriminals operating within its borders and has openly and actively supported these perpetrators.

These chapters provide a glimpse into the struggles of liberal internationalism and, yet, seem to suggest a way forward. First, there remain concerns about the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on liberal internationalist principles because the virus severely tested many governments’ resolve to support its premise.

Learning Objectives

• 1. Understand the importance of negotiation for startup ventures

• 2. Familiarize with historical developments of negotiation

• 3. Understand factors that impact the effectiveness of negotiation at individual and group levels

• 4. Understand the difference between integrative and distributive negotiation

• 5. Familiarize with outcomes of poor negotiation

Opening Scenario: Disney’s Purchase of Lucasfilm

Walt Disney Company made a surprise announcement that it was acquiring Lucasfilm. Lucasfilm was founded by George Lucas who owned the famous Stars Wars brand. Walt Disney agreed to pay US$ 4.05 billion split evenly between stock and cash for the deal. Lucas was the sole shareholder of Lucasfilm.

The acquisition bolstered Disney’s status as a leader in animation and superhero films. It was a beneficial deal for Disney as the company had rights to Star Wars and afforded them the opportunity to reap benefits from related merchandizing and media business. Disney promised to begin producing new Star Wars films every two to three years. The acquisition included a great deal of negotiation and even included a detailed script for three upcoming Stars Wars films.

The 68-year-old Lucas founded Stars Wars, and he had extensive negotiations with Disney before he settled for terms of purchase. After the purchase, it was agreed that Lucas will serve as a consultant for the acquired Star Wars brand. Lucas had been planning to retire for years. In a past interview with the Times, Lucas revealed that he was tired of the pressure of living up to the expectation of Star Wars fans.

According to Walt Disney Chairman Robert Iger, a famous negotiator in Hollywood, he and Lucas conducted the negotiations personally. Speaking of Lucas’ decision to hand over his creative legacy to Disney, Igor told, “There was a lot of trust there.” The acquisition of Star Wars by Disney illustrates the importance of building trust through successful negotiations when dealing with a powerful counterpart.

Startup Ventures and Negotiation

Startups are business ventures in their nascent stage and do not have a fully developed business models or other related strategic frameworks. Such ventures often lack funding and tend to rely on external funding to take their specialized products or services to market.

For sociologists of my generation, our introduction to undergraduate sociology was typically through Peter L. Berger’s Invitation to Sociology (1963). I still possess my Penguin paperback copy, which I bought while at the University of Leeds in 1968. The Invitation is well written and packed with illustrations that an average student could understand and remember. The basic theory behind the book is somewhat hidden, and few students would have taken much notice of the limited references in the footnotes to the German sociologist Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976), who in many ways is the theoretical backbone of the book. Gehlen’s sociology is complex and challenging, but the basic idea is that animals are driven and determined by their instincts, while humans also have instincts, their lives are determined and guided by social institutions. To quote Berger (1963, 104) “Gehlen conceives of an institution as a regulatory agency, channeling human actions in much the same way as instincts channel animal behavior.” He then gives a typical Berger example. When a young man meets a young woman and falls in love, the institutional imperative declares “Marry! Marry! Marry!” What we might want to say now is that, while animal instincts are permanent, institutions are not. Since the 1960s, the institution of marriage has been radically transformed to include same-sex marriage or no marriage at all. Institutions address the problem of social order, but that order is changing and fragile.

For my “disobedient generation” (Sica and Turner, 2005) in the 1960s, Berger’s sociology carried a radical, if somewhat hidden, doctrine that institutions are socially constructed and can be, with some political effort, de-constructed and re-shaped to meet new needs and ideas. The underlying radical view of knowledge in the Invitation was not explicit. With Thomas Luckman, a more complete and sophisticated view of knowledge was to appear three years later as The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). The book contributed to the emergence of an influential movement in modern sociology called “social constructionism,” which has radical implications for how we understand social institutions and their legitimacy.

Another obscurity of the utmost importance: metaphysics. The category is ambivalent because it seems to be under the jurisdiction of philosophy. Metaphysical, as we know, is a world that describes an obscure behind; metaphysical effects are not of this world. Metaphysics circumscribes a realm beyond the real world and thus stands in strict opposition to everything understood under the category of politics.

Nevertheless, in the history of violence, various alliances between politics and metaphysics can be observed. These alliances encompass not only the realm of the religious but also all forms of millenarianism, the history of salvation and ultimately the ideological wars that flag themselves with sacred motifs. They are alliances that obviously point deep into the past and form a hermetic section of history.

The present age has distanced itself from the realm of the metaphysical in various ways. Power and politics depend on physical but not metaphysical grounds. The doubt one cannot shake at this point goes back to the absoluteness with which one can make this judgement. It would be all too easy for a contemporary observer to find traces of metaphysical orientations even in the present. Metaphysics is not ‘historical’; it repeatedly pervades the surface of liberal structures. Such a tendency seems to be formed not only in the figure of the god-warrior but also in the forms of contemporary power politics that invoke supposedly overcome ideologies of the older war.

If we simplify these phenomena drastically, violence is justified by invoking the almighty God. God warriors invoke a higher, sacred law, absolute commandments that are disturbing to all outsiders. No less disturbing is the return of war in the first decades of the beginning millennium.

The impressions of the present (2022) are now difficult to fit into a reflection that would have to judge events from a serious distance. However, all observers seem to have the impression that the wars of the present (including above all the so-called civil wars in Syria and the wars on Ukrainian territory) are taking on anachronistic, if not metaphysical forms. In particular, the attack on the sovereign state of Ukraine in February 2022 seems to suggest such a description.

These violent confrontations are not the actual subject here, although they do enter into the reflection via detours.

Introduction

When talking about wars, the moral feelings evoked by them play a major role. This cannot be surprising – to the same extent that the intuitive historical evaluation of contemporary wars is also influenced by such strong feelings. War is rejected by the majority in modern times because it is morally unambiguous: it causes suffering and destroys the moral, social and economic foundations of societies. But when wars are waged in defiance of this insight, the question of consent becomes not only a moral question but also a historical self-questioning. In the sign of war, old and new lines of enmity are drawn, the capacity for violence is mobilised and present violence is related to past violence. Wars trivially take place against the backdrop of past wars, so that they sometimes seem like an endless succession of permanent confrontations.

An intellectual intervention from 2002 sounds correspondingly familiar. Karl Otto Hondrich wrote about the future and present of war from a Western European, or German, point of view with mixed feelings: for half a century here (in Western Europe) war was considered the greatest conceivable calamity. Memories of the world wars, Vietnam and the threat of nuclear war gave a deep seriousness to the fear of war. This condemnation of war has remained, but under the table the feelings and arguments are transforming: they are turning to war again (Hondrich, 2002, p. 7).

This consent to violence is ambivalent and reluctant; the new attitude towards war contained all the fears from the older wars. It was more like an acceptance of fate. One submitted to a development that was experienced as unstoppable.

The author wrote about the violence in Southeastern Europe, Bosnia and Kosovo; about the war in the Hindu Kush and the looming war in the Gulf at the beginning of the millennium. The participation of German society in these wars and interventions was, as we know, small; it had hardly affected everyday life. One participated in large coalitions and with only a small part of one’s collective self; one left it to special troops and military specialists to enforce peace. The progress of military and technical systems offered a guarantee that this war, like all other ‘small wars’ in the periphery, posed no threats to world peace.

Does the twentieth century lie before our eyes like a book? Is history readable and left to our interpretation? In such talk lies an error in thinking that leads to problematic consequences. The history of violence breaks down into episodes that can be integrated into a whole. The individual events can be framed in a narrative and arranged according to a certain logic. How one thinks together the aspects of colonialism, imperialism and fascism, for example, how one connects the eruption of violence with the disintegration of the great empires – all this can be determined narratively. To these patterns of interpretation, however, we must add a perspective that cannot be reduced to a concise motif. In this sense, the talk of dark places emphasises that the past century has not been opened up in every respect and that the events of violence are still a cause for heightened reflections that may well turn out to be gruelling and agonising.

But what is the point of presenting it in essay form if the insights from a certain point of view are few? The claim of the present discussions goes back to the idea that we live with a world reference in which the past century enters in various ways. In order to stabilise this world reference, a coping strategy is needed in which historical narratives can and should make a contribution. Not by reconstructing the harrowing experiences of violence over and over again, but by linking them as strategies of self-assurance.

Historical constructions fulfil psychic effects, which cannot be disposed of at will, but which produce a specific cultural meaning. The century of violence evokes the psychological reflex of justification and self-protection (hereafter: Straub 1998, p. 138 ff.). The culpable involvement in violence must be cleared up, without finally being able to ‘clear the air’. Who was involved in the situation of violence under what circumstances and with what intentions can no longer be meaningfully resolved. Henceforth, it is more a matter of the complex relationships between past and present temporalities. From a phenomenological point of view, it should be considered that our own self is directly entangled with the determinations of the foreign.

Learning Objectives

• 1. To become familiarized with the barriers to entrepreneurship

• 2. To highlight the major challenges and issues related to conflict

• 3. To understand the nature and sources of conflict in an entrepreneurial venture

• 4. To identify the types of conflicts observed in an entrepreneurial venture

• 5. To highlight approaches to conflict management

• 6. To learn the ways to manage conflicts in an entrepreneurial venture

Introduction

Erving Goffman’s work is transforming criminology, because scholars and criminological policy-makers are finally recognizing the power of his overall perspective, as well as the value of specific concepts such as presentation of self, stigma, havoc and containment, the interaction order, encounters, and framing. In Goffman’s perspective, “crime” is potentially present at all times and places; it is not a distinct phenomenon amenable to causal explanations. “Crime” is not a separate category of behavior, but an existential possibility inherent in all interaction.

Because Goffman did not offer a simple causal analysis of crime (or types of crime) as a coherent phenomenon, his work is only now being fully incorporated into the canon of contemporary criminology. Although both the public and criminologists continue to define and discuss “crime” as a distinct category of action and behavior amenable to explanation, Goffman instead examined it as a potential within all actions and interactions and therefore posited that its regulation is also present everywhere. By refusing to acknowledge boundaries between “crime” and “non-crime,” Goffman remained a dissenting, critical voice in the sociology of crime; his work was rarely systematically featured in the conventional discussion of causes of crime and efforts at prevention. The array of issues that are now coming to public attention calls for new engagement with his insights, and in recent years, research and theory articles based on his contributions are increasing very rapidly. Criminology in the twenty-first century confronts a range of issues that call out for Goffman-inspired analysis. They include racial inequities in policing, mass incarceration in the United States, confinement of mentally ill people in prisons, the dominance of powerful criminal gangs in many nations, and the rise of international cons and scams, some with political implications and all closely linked to the Internet and social media.

The sociological foundation of criminology demands inquiry beyond analysis of individual propensity to commit crime; it requires attention to social contexts and social structures that define, generate, and punish specific types of actions—both transgression and regulation. Émile Durkheim created the overall theoretical framework, rejecting all individual-level psychological explanations.

There is absolutely no doubt that David Ricardo was one of political economy's greatest theorists. Nicholas Kaldor suggested many years ago that his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation should be rated as one of the discipline's five great texts, preceded by Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and followed by Karl Marx's Capital, Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics and John Maynard Keynes's General Theory (Kaldor 1982: 259). But, like these four authors, Ricardo was no armchair theorist. His interest in political economy was first aroused by his concern with the important policy question of the causes of the high price of bullion, which led in 1809–11 to his first publications, and in the Principles he devotes 15 of its 32 chapters to policy issues. To explain both Ricardo's concern with questions of economic policy and the positions that he took on these matters, I begin this chapter by describing the society that he lived in and his understanding of the problems that were posed by the nature of its economic and political systems. I then outline Ricardo's own political beliefs, before examining his position on four crucial issues: monetary policy, fiscal policy, social welfare and international trade. I conclude the chapter with something related yet very different, the views of the so-called Ricardian Socialists, who accepted the truth of the labour theory of value but took a very different position from that of Ricardo on many of these questions.

Ricardo's England

Ricardo's England had three essential characteristics. First, it was a very complex society, which had changed very substantially since the ending of feudalism several centuries earlier. Second, it was continuing to change very rapidly. Third, and despite these two important features, it contained a very simple core that formed the basis of Ricardo's policy prescriptions: there were three social classes, landlords, capitalists and workers, who faced very different circumstances and so behaved in very different ways (King 2013: chapter 1).

According to the 1771 census, the England into which Ricardo was born in the following year had 6.6 million people. Half a century later, two years before his death in 1823, it had increased to 11.5 million. By the 1820s the English population was growing at 1.5 per cent per annum, faster than ever before and unparalleled anywhere in the world.

How ought one to conduct research in post-conflict spaces? The issue of ethical data collection becomes increasingly fraught when research takes place in settings that have experienced, or are currently experiencing, violent conflict. In addition to the usual considerations of human research subject protections – in particular, preserving the confidentiality of personally identifying information and minimising harm or the potential for harm to research subjects – researchers who study populations in settings that have experienced violence also must take into consideration the heightened vulnerability of these populations. For example, research participants may face grave threats to their physical security should their personally identifying information be exposed. Furthermore, participation in research may be triggering to participants who have experienced primary or secondary trauma as a result of the conflict. That is to say, these research participants face greater and different risks than research participants in other situations, and thus it is necessary to take special care when designing research in conflict and post-conflict spaces.

The Project

This project began as the subject of my doctoral dissertation, which aimed to assess secondary school students’ attitudes towards different ethnic groups within BiH. The 1992–95 Bosnian War ended with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), also known as the General Framework Agreement for Peace. The DPA introduced consociational democracy to BiH and consequently restructured all of the country’s political institutions. The redesign of these political institutions included the administration of the Bosnian education system, and as a result, there are effectively three different models of primary and secondary education in BiH. My project was rooted in the suspicion that those different models of education would correspond with differences in students’ attitudes towards different ethnic groups.

BiH holds the distinction of being the most ethnically mixed of the former Yugoslavia’s six constituent republics. Unlike Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, BiH could not be claimed by any one dominant ethnic group. Rather, BiH prior to the war was a republic in which three main ethnoreligious groups – Bosniaks (who were typically Muslim), Croats (who were typically Catholic) and Serbs (who were typically Orthodox) – lived together, with none of these groups able to claim an absolute majority of the population.

Introduction

The meticulous scholar, mindful of the need to know the literature on a topic and wanting to have something fresh to say, must tremble in the face of writing about anyone with 377,959 citations in Google Scholar (as of February 15, 2022). Only the intrepid, overconfident, or the retired with no reputation left to lose would dare to do so, at least not without a note from their mother.

Erving Goffman was a brilliant metaphorician (if there isn’t such a word, there should be!). Keeping with the “M” alliteration a few more: messes, mendacity, morality, magic, and mystery apply as well. The laser-like precision and evocative richness of his concepts and illustrations are central to his insights and impact.

In the fine articles in this volume, and in the secondary literature, among the main ways Goffman has been characterized are shown in Table 1:

In the beginning, there are the questions. How has the distribution of such characterizations of Goffman changed over the last many decades across time, contexts, and places? Apart from Goffman per se, what do they say about the characteristics, goals, time periods, and location of the characterizers? Most importantly, what do they say about understanding society?

Drawing on the chapter included in this present book, Goffman’s own work, the Goffman archives (Shalin 2007), the enormous secondary literature and personal experiences with him and several of his University of Chicago cohort over decades, I here offer thoughts on some implications of his work and life.

Maps

Central to Goffman’s brilliance was cartography. He was the penultimate map maker. Despite the obvious limits in any concept chosen, they are fundamental to scholarship. In one of his final publications, he wrote:

In this call, we potentially find a splendid, large, warm tent with room for all the children: the qualitative and quantitative, descriptive and explanatory theories, structure, function, and process.

In 1974 Peter Berger published his important book Pyramids of Sacrifice. That book examines what Berger calls “political ethics and social change.” In particular, it considers the “ethical dilemmas of development.” As Berger described his project, it was “largely shaped by my experience in and my reflections about Latin America […] I tried very hard to be evenhanded as between capitalist and socialist models of development, arguing that both should be assessed in terms of a number of moral criteria I proposed” (1986, 12).

Berger’s assessment in Pyramids of Sacrifice was that capitalism has some advantages and some shortcomings. The same is true of socialism. Between the two modes of political–economic organization, there is no obvious choice. To satisfactorily deal with development, capitalist and socialist advocates alike must abandon adherence to extremes and forge a practical third way.

Twelve years later, Berger changed his position: “the empirical evidence led me step by step to my present position, which is that capitalism is the morally safer bet” (1986, 12). Yet the view Berger expressed in Pyramids of Sacrifice approximates one that many people still hold today. According to that view, capitalism’s effect on development is ambiguous and mixed. We should therefore be cautious and modest advocates of markets. Those who do not water down, qualify, and temper their praise for capitalism as an engine of development are “ideologues,” “dogmatists,” and “free-market fundamentalists.” They let wishful thinking cloud their sight of reality, which does not warrant cheering for capitalism.

Berger’s (1986) later book, The Capitalist Revolution, urges social scientists to not be “dogmatic,” to generate falsifiable propositions, and to examine the evidence in light of those propositions. In that spirit, we empirically evaluate the popular view that cheering for capitalism is unwarranted. Our evaluative benchmark reflects the dual moral criteria for development that Berger identified in Pyramids of Sacrifice. The first of those criteria, which Berger calls the “calculus of pain,” refers to the avoidance of human suffering. The second criterion, which he calls the “calculus of meaning,” refers to respect for the values of individuals in the developing world.

During the depths of the harshest year of the Famine, ‘Black ‘47’, it may seem a little curious that leading Irish members of parliament were occupying themselves with matters of population and population counts. Such interests were not of recent vintage. The Irish were a much-counted people. Censuses and census-type surveys dated back to the seventeenth century and continued into the eighteenth century in large part driven by the insecurities of the British state and the Established Church in Ireland. Unlike Britain, the great majority of the inhabitants was Roman Catholic, of Gaelic and Old English stock, and hence suspect on grounds of religion and loyalty. The penal laws against Catholics and Protestant dissenters were progressively relaxed during the eighteenth century. By the end of that century, individuals within the Catholic community were expressing an interest in ascertaining the size and relative strength of the Catholic population. The first initiative of this kind was formulated by Edward Hay, scion of a prosperous landed family and later a leading advocate of Catholic rights, who in 1795 proposed a national religious census. The outbreak of regional rebellions in Ireland in 1798 put paid to this idea.

But the spirit of the age favoured such empirical inquiries, in part stimulated by the contributions of Thomas Malthus and his critics on the progress of population. Early in the new century, the political economist Thomas Newenham arranged with southern Catholic clergymen the collection of population estimates for their parishes. These partial surveys were published in his Population of Ireland and View of Ireland. A series of other informal surveys followed. There was even a suggestion that the Catholic clergy were especially well placed to conduct population counts. A prefiguration of later, Famine-time initiatives was the attempt by Daniel O’Connell's ‘Popish Parliament’ to organise a national religious census in Ireland in the 1820s. O’Connell was a strong critic of the 1821 statutory census which had reported a national population of 6.8 million.