Burczak’s claim is quite persuasive until he adduces some historical evidence that common law reflected agrarian interests prior to the turn of the 19th century. According to Burczak (2006: 65), “judges came to identify with the industrial and merchant classes and began to decide cases in order to promote industrialization and economic growth.”
Burczak, here, it seems to me, mistakes effect for cause.
Shouldn’t Burczak, a trained and well-read economist, be hyperaware that the new industrial processes burst the bonds of obsolete laws, which fettered economic growth, not vice-versa?
Or, is this just another case of how empirical arguments, whether pro or anti, sustain the critique capitalism?
Greg Mankiw, the Harvard economist, has a well-known license plate. EC 10, for those of you who don’t know, is the course number for Intro to Economics at Harvard. It shows just how dedicated Mankiw is to teaching economics to young minds.
Yea. It’s true. Whoda thunk it? And I didn’t even realize it until last week.
I know this seems kind of strange for someone who identifies their approach to economics with the Austrian School and their political analysis with the Virginia School, but I’ve been reading a whole lot of orthodox and Neo-Marxist literature over the last year.
It first hit me last year when I was working on my MA thesis and stumbled upon Edna Bonacich’s idea that split labor markets can lead to racial antagonisms. Unlike more orthodox Marxists, she drops the presumption of a single dominant class interest and allows for the idea that there can be competing interests within a class. In this case, higher priced (usually white) labor and lower priced (usually black) labor can be at odds in certain situations. This leads the former to lobby for exclusionary legislation or laws that protect their “caste” in the labor hierarchy.
Then over the summer, I finally got around to reading some of Gabriel Kolko’s work on the Progressive Era. He argues that the era wasn’t really progressive at all. In fact, agitation for the regulation of corporate actions was led by none other than the corporations themselves.
This semester we read several perspectives on the enactment of Social Security including Jill Quadagno. According to her theory, social security was actually something desired by certain parts of the capitalist class. The “welfare capitalists” who were already paying for employer pensions (in part as a way to “control” the labor force), were in favor of social security while the smaller, more competitive industries opposed it because it meant higher costs for them. Monopoly industries could absorb the higher costs or pass them on to consumers while the others could not do so. The legislation would give the former industries a competitive advantage (or rather put the latter at a disadvantage), so it was in their interests to see it passed.
In all three cases, I absolutely loved the analysis being done by Bonacich, Kolko, and Quadagno. This made me wonder though: I thought Marxists were all about class interests, but if Neo-Marxists allow for competing interests within classes, what’s left exactly that makes it Marxist? I asked my professor. His response was “Well, there are Neo-Marxists and then there are Neo-Marxists.” It looks like Neo-Marxism is a label with a very wide applicability. Thus my conclusion that I’m a Neo-Marxist too.
And why not? I’d prefer to call myself a liberal, but that term was co-opted a long time ago. Dammit, why can’t we ever co-opt popular labels and make them mean the opposite of what their adherents mean? George Stigler once quipped, “If I am a Marxian, I am a better Marxian than Marx.”
Librarians are faced with the well-nigh impossible challenge of information storage and accessibility given the information explosion over the last generation. Hence, scholars can never be sure that they are conversant with most of the literature in their academic discipline.
Therefore, it seems pretty strange to me that in the field of residential management and treatment of children with major Axis I diagnoses, there is so little “how to” information around. It is certainly not due to public opinion not being in favor of government support of child welfare initiatives. Nor is the information dearth in residential management and treatment due to an absence of curiosity about children suffering from mental health disorders.
Why, then, is there so little information about “how to do,” especially with children residing in group homes, psychiatric community residences, and mental health hospitals?
In answering this question, it will be useful to invoke Professor Boettke regarding the fundamental difference between knowledge and information. But without delving into methodological discussions, it seems as though it is more satisfying for social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals of all stripes to simply describe behavior, and create “treatment plans,” rather than detail “how to” ameliorate the behaviors concomitant with major Axis I diagnoses.
Who really knows how to ameliorate the behaviors of pathologically angry children?
1.) Call for papers at Michigan Social Theory Conference. They’re looking for graduate student papers funky topics such as space/place, the body, time, memory, visuality and technology.
5.) GOP did well in yesterday’s election. We just read Theda Skocpol’s Boomerang for class. My Skocpolian prediction is that Obama’s healthcare plan is as good as dead now.
I just got back from the ASSC where my friend Ben Powell gave one of the keynote lectures on stateless Somalia. Ben is part of a small group of economist who are exploring anarchy as a research program (see the new issue of Public Choice for a survey. When most people think of free market economists studying anarchy, something like this comes to mind:
Ben actually showed this video during his lecture and it got it good chuckle from the audience. It’s an understandable new jerk reaction that many people have when some academic egghead starts talking about the benefits of anarchy but he showed the video for a good reason. Just as ridiculous as the idea of a libertarian magic dust that makes markets perfect is the idea that market failures will be fixed and the optimal solution found by bringing in the state. Harold Demsetz refered to this as the “nirvana fallacy.” Imagine a singing contest where upon hearing how bad the first guy is, the judges immediate declare the next guy as the winner without actually listening to him. This is essential how many people deal with the problem of “market failure.”
The correct approach is not “markets fail, therefore we should use government,” but rather a comparative institutional analysis. This is exactly what Ben does when he looks at Somalia after state collapse and asks whether there is chaos or an improvement. Pete Leeson, who has also looked at Somalia, does the same thing. So what do they find?
In a both cases, they find that there is actually an improvement with the collapse of the central government and the withdrawal of US and UN troops in the early 1990s according to many social and economic indicators. Not only that, but they find that when examined next to many other African countries that do have governments, Somalia still does comparatively better on many indicators. Is Somalia still a dirt poor country wrecked by what we consider as high levels of violence? Absolutely …but so is Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and the Sudan – all of whom have governments.
How can we explain this? Ben gives two primary explanations. The first is that the source of most of the violence and obstacles to development in Somalia’s case was the government. Even in the wake of state collapse, the bulk of the violence that followed stemmed from US/UN efforts to install another central government. Warlords jockeyed for power (read became most violent) when they thought there was a chance that a central government would be installed with which they could extract rents (read steal) from foreign nations in the form of aid and Somali citizens in the form of taxes. Why do people rob banks? Because that’s where the money is (duh). Why do warlords fight for control of the state? Because that’s where the money is! Once the Somali warlords realized that there was not going to be a central government, fighting died down in most of the country.
What explains the absence of chaos though? Ben’s explanation should be especially interesting to sociologists since he relies heavily on the works of anthropologist Peter Little and an ethnographer (since deceased) named Michael van Notten. (Little, if I’m not mistaken, is the student of some lady named Elinor Ostrom. I think she just won a prize or something.) Somalia, like most other African countries, is a fictitious entity created as a legacy of European colonialism. Before those Euro-shmucks came along, Somalia was governed by a form of customary law called the Xeer. It’s a decentralized, non-geographically confined, clan-based, enforceable legal system. While it was suppressed under colonial rule, it never actually went away. After state collapse, it became the main mechanism by which people enforced law and order – not just within local villages, but basically across the entire country. I’ve thought many a times trying to do some ethnographic work myself in Somalia and writing a dissertation on it, but something tells me I’d have a little trouble with my school’s IRB (and cholera).
People like Ben Powell, Pete Leeson, and Ed Stringham are great examples of the kind of work being done in the contemporary Austrian School paradigm. Unfortunately, I don’t think a lot of sociologists are even aware of their work. How many sociologists (especially ones interested in cultural issues) would have read the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization or the Journal of Comparative Economics? My guess is not many.
Assuming you’ve read this post (and even perused the papers), I want to know what do our sociologist readers think of such work? Is it interesting? Insightful? Irrelevant? Plain ol’ bullshit? As a young graduate student, I’m really interested in your answers.
Though I did not apply it, I agree with Fabio Rojas’ advice about prospective graduate students choosing the right graduate program. But where should prospective sociology graduate students, interested in the rational actor analytic, pursue their graduate education … Economics graduate programs … Political Science graduate programs?
From what I have noticed, rarely is a PhD. from economics or political science hired by a sociology department. So, if one is a prospective sociology graduate student, who wants to learn rational choice, and would like to work in a sociology graduate department, where should s/he apply?
It is pretty well known that Charles Darwin got some of his ideas on natural selection from Adam Smith. As Matt Ridley explains nicely:
Ideas evolve by descent with modification, just as bodies do, and Darwin at least partly got this idea from economists, who got it from empirical philosophers. Locke and Newton begat Hume and Voltaire who begat Hutcheson and Smith who begat Malthus and Ricardo who begat Darwin and Wallace. Before Darwin, the supreme example of an undesigned system was Adam Smith’s economy, spontaneously self-ordered through the actions of individuals, rather than ordained by a monarch or a parliament.
Not many people realize though (myself included until last night) that Marx was in turn a huge fan of Darwin’s work. From a footnote in Anthony Giddens’ Capitalism and Modern Social Theory:
The publication of The Origin of Species was also regarded by Marx and Engels as an event of major significance, offering a direct parallel to their own interpretation of social development. Marx wrote to Darwin offering to dedicate the first volume of Capital to him. (Darwin declined the offer.)
Burn! I wonder if Marx took it personally. But really, does this mean that Marx was a social Darwinist?
Peter Leeson’s superb article Two Cheers for Capitalism avers that there is simply no empirical argument against capitalism. I, undoubtedly, agree with the evidence Dr. Leeson provides. But, with such overwhelming evidence for capitalism what sustains its critique?
A close reading of Karl Marx engenders my belief that economists sustain the critique. Economic science studies the economic facts and laws of supply, demand, production possibilities, utilities, etc. which manifest, in Marx’s language, the “social form” (i.e., its price or exchange value). Hence, strictly speaking, use-value lies outside of economic science. In Grundrisse, Marx remarked that use-value is of “purely physical interest, … expressing no more than the relation of the individual in his natural quality to an object of his individual need.”
But, in the same work, Marx critiqued Ricardo’s diminishing marginal fertility of land due to Ricardo pontificating about the declining rate of profit due to material reasons (i.e., Ricardo’s pessimism about what would be physically possible). We all know that Marx was not always consistent, but in highlighting material processes he was, of course, no different than many classical and contemporary economists who use material and empirical arguments (i.e., arguments that suggest that capital accumulation and “quality of life” are improved under capitalism) in favor of capitalism. Unwittingly, economists sustain the revolutionary critique of capitalism because people come to believe that, with science and technology, anything is possible – even planning an economy.
Economists probably do not believe this to be the case, but each time they resort to material and empirical arguments in favor of capitalism, they invite revolutionary critiques of the capitalism.
"The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst." - C. Wright Mills
