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.
adam smith wrote a very long and interesting book called adam smith wealth of nation
By the way you can view a free online version of this book at the link below
http://www.adam-smith-wealth-of-nations.co.uk
Posted by: Ben | June 01, 2006 at 04:18 PM
Sounds interesting, Cousin?
Posted by: Ann L McCloskey | July 01, 2006 at 11:01 PM