Adam Smith Lives!

Economics and Ethics at GMU?

Here are a few of Evan Cantwell's photos from the Buchanan Lecture two weeks ago at George Mason University.  Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen have a nice discussion at Marginal Revolution.

 

The event was a great success, in large measure thanks to a collaborative effort with the GMU Libraries.  Their display of documents relating to Tullock and Buchanan's Calculus was fascinating. 

Deirdre made the case for virtue ethics, an "economics that takes human flourishing seriously", she writes, "should start with the virtues -- and finish with them, too".  "To put it in terms that begin to edge towards Virginia Political Economy, the seven virtues are what a flourishing individual wants for herself; it is what she chooses ..."  Moreover, she argued, notwithstanding the "vivid realization that we need to talk about politics as it actually is" -- "the great merit of the so-called public choice, or Virginia, school", of Buchanan and Tullock -- McCloskey finds in Buchanan something of a kindred spirit:

[Buchanan] notes over and over again in his work that "if we [in Prudence-Only style] are considering games with effectively large numbers of players, there may exist little or no incentive for any single player to participate actively in any serious evaluation of the rules,"... He concludes that "participating in the discussion of constitutional rules must reflect the presence of some ethical precept that transcends rational interest for the individual.  Bingo.  Suddenly we are back in an ethical world.  "We remain," Buchanan wrote in 1992, "ethically as well as economically interdependent."

A few reactions, for what they are worth.  First, though Buchanan was quick to point out that we can get a great deal of action out of some sort of reciprocity norm -- so we don't need all of McCloskey's 7 virtues, perhaps (including Faith, Hope and Love), I do think McCloskey's got a point:  Buchanan is driven by ethical concerns.  Whether that takes him beyond fairness or not is something I've not sorted out.

Second, even the short bit above makes sense out of what sometimes seems (to an outsider like me) to be an disconnected collection of research and teaching interests at GMU:  what holds together the unusual collection of research interests in the Center for Study of Public Choice; and why they're joined -- at least sometimes and certainly at the lecture -- by colleagues in experimental economics and neuroeconomics -- as well as by various diverse scholars from the economics department itself.

Deirdre McCloskey to give the Buchanan Lecture

On Friday, Deirdre McCloskey will give the Inaugural Buchanan Lecture at George Mason University.  Find out more here.  It should be a fun event.  Her talk is entitled, The Hobbes Problem:  From Machiavelli to Buchanan.  The event is hosted by GMU's Center for Study of Public Choice and the Libraries of GMU.  There will also be a display of manuscript material relating to Buchanan and Tullock's Calculus of Consent. 

I'll be introducing Deirdre, trying to explain how her work intersects with Jim Buchanan's.  Two main ways, I'll argue:  first, her celebration of the market as the means by which we become moral; and, second, her emphasis on motivational homogeneity and taking the ideas of ordinary people seriously.  Here's a preview of parts of the intro:

Deirdre McCloskey is the perfect choice to give the Inaugural Buchanan Lecture. Two major themes in her research also figure prominently in the research of Professor Buchanan and the Center.

First and foremost, there is Deirdre’s celebration of trade. Not so much for the notion that economics is everywhere – whether there’s an explicit market or not – ideas that led Buchanan and Gordon Tullock to develop their seminal analysis in the Calculus of Consent. Nor, quite, for all the usual properties associated with markets, for the increment to physical stuff that we read about in Tyler Cowen’s and Alex Taborrok’s "markets for everything", or speculate about with Robin Hansen’s market for ideas. ...

Adam Smith – whose great books figure prominently in the work of both McCloskey and Buchanan – said that all of us are capable of imaginatively changing places with one another, a sort of "sympathetic exchange". That act of imagination takes place whenever we exchange, trading physical or imaginative stuff – goods or approbation – and it comes to temper pure self interest with a reciprocity norm that has been so important to Professor Buchanan’s argument for eliminating the off-diagonals in prisoner’s dilemma games. Only recently, with the development of experimental economics and neuroeconomics, have economists come to fully appreciate the subtlety and power of Smith’s sympathy. For Smith, the process of sympathetic exchange makes us generous beings, sometimes compelled to act in ways that violate self interest narrowly construed, as when Smith’s European gives up his finger to save those he has never seen and never will see.

McCloskey’s forthcoming book, Bourgeois Virtues, celebrates the virtues that market interactions give rise to, notably among them, "Prudence". In it, she writes:

Any society, religious or not, has a sacred sphere and a profane, a sphere in which love and justice determine largely who gets what as against a sphere in which prudence and courage largely do so. But "largely" is not "exclusively". Life in a market is not exclusively a matter of the profane. Buyers and sellers show their sacred qualities too. The economy is .. not a sphere of Prudence Only independent of other ethical considerations.

So, we can be devout and virtuous and bourgeois withal. Professor Buchanan has also pressed the ethical norms associated with market interactions. In a conversation with Warren Samuels at the Center 2 summers ago, Buchanan reiterated his longstanding politics as exchange position and the reciprocity norm this entails:

one half of public choice is politics as exchange, in this ultimate sense – that people are getting together to... try to accomplish shared purposes that they couldn’t accomplish on their own. ... One thing that has driven me in a normative sense more strongly than anything else is I can’t stand unfairness; and I can’t stand people getting ahead of the game unfairly. ... And somehow or other, it seems to me that I, personally, have a kind of moral obligation, if you want to call it that, to look at the world from a window that does, in fact, emphasize the positive features..."

... Buchanan’s motivational homogeneity argument – those who make policy decisions are neither more nor less self interested than the rest of us. What David Levy and I have done, is to push motivational homogeneity to yet another sphere, that of the economist himself/herself, to argue that we economists/experts, too, are under Jim’s moral obligation to theorize about our subjects as the same as us.