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3 results

  • ECONOMISTS ON PRIVATE INCENTIVES, ECONOMIC MODELS, AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE: THE CLASH BETWEEN HAPPINESS AND THE SO-CALLED PUBLIC GOOD

  • Sandra J. Peart
  • Journal:
    Social Philosophy and Policy / Volume 38 / Issue 1 / Summer 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 October 2021, pp. 152-169
    Print publication:
    Summer 2021

  • This essay examines the administrative state as a ubiquitous phenomenon that results in part from the mismatch of incentives. Using two dramatic episodes in the history of economics, the essay considers two types of mismatch. It then examines how economists increasingly endorsed the “general good” as a unitary goal for society, even at the expense of private hopes and desires. More than this, their procedures and models gave them warrant to design mechanisms and advocate for legislation and regulations to “fix” the supposedly suboptimal choices of individuals in service to the overarching goal. The rise of New Welfare Economics dealt an additional blow to the sovereignty of individual motivations, notwithstanding that Hayek and Buchanan warned that this engineering approach allowed social goals to override individual preferences. Throughout, the argument is that it is important to recognize that people within or advising the administrative state are influenced by the same sorts of (private) motivations as actors throughout the economy.

  • 1 - Why the Virginia School of Political Economy Matters

  • David M. Levy, George Mason University, Virginia, Sandra J. Peart, University of Richmond
  • Book:
    Towards an Economics of Natural Equals
    Published online:
    16 December 2019
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020, pp 1-21

  • Summary

    The early Virginia School of Economics builds upon the work of the British classical economists as extended by Knight at the University of Chicago. In opposition to the nascent economic orthodoxy's emphasis on efficiency, the Virginia School emphasized economic activity and policy as processes generated by discussion. One continuing controversy involves the status of group goals. Virginia's Vining defended the NBER against Koopmans’ criticism as atheoretic and thus inefficient. For Vining, the NBER attempted to discover hypotheses, an activity for which efficiency is undefined. Buchanan used the Knightian principle of government by discussion to argue that Arrow’s demonstration of an inefficient democracy assumed away the possibility of discovering one’s goals through discussion. Government by discussion has an unappreciated role in Buchanan’s development of Wicksell’s unanimity criterion into the view of politics as exchange. Who participates in the discussion? Only people who actually exist. That privileges the status quo and reduces the economist’s role to offering advice to fellow citizens as equals.

Towards an Economics of Natural Equals
  • A Documentary History of the Early Virginia School
  • David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart
  • Published online:
    16 December 2019
    Print publication:
    02 January 2020
  • The Virginia School's economics of natural equals makes consent critical for policy. Democracy is understood as government by discussion, not majority rule. The claim of efficiency unsupported by consent, as common in orthodox economics, appeals to social hierarchy. Politics becomes an act of exchange among equals where the economist is only entitled to offer advice to citizens, not to dictators. The foundation of natural equality and consent explains the common themes of James Buchanan and John Rawls as well as Ronald Coase and the Fabian socialists. What orthodox economics treats as efficient racial discrimination violates the fair chance entitlement to which people consent in a market economy. The importance of replication stressed by Gordon Tullock, developing themes from Karl Popper, is another expression of natural equality since the foresight of replication induces care into research. The publication of previously unpublished correspondence and documentation allows the reader to judge recent controversy.