image: Karl Marx by David Levine It is interesting to consider whether the principles of justice that Rawls describes in A Theory of Justice would in fact permit economic exploitation in Marx’s sense of the term. Do Rawls's two principles of justice permit what Marx would call systemic exploitation of one group of individuals by another? …
Rawls and classical political economy
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is highly relevant to the ways we think about our economic system. If we just read the citations, Rawls seems to be primarily influenced by "modern" economics -- Samuelson, equilibrium theory, game theory, and marginalist theory. And so we might suppose that his moral worldview reflects a neoclassical vision of …
Hempel after 70 years
Carl Hempel published his sole contribution to the philosophy of history in 1942, almost exactly 70 years ago. The article is "The Function of General Laws in History" (link), and it set the stage for several fruitless decades of debate within analytic philosophy about the nature of historical explanation. Hempel argued that all scientific explanation has …
Culture or jobs?
Stephen Steinberg contributed a provocative but important piece to Boston Review a year ago on current academic thinking about race and poverty. The piece is titled Poor Reason: Culture Still Doesn't Explain Poverty, and it is now available as a short Kindle publication. The topic Steinberg focuses on is deeply important -- fundamentally, how to explain and remediate …
Philosophy and social knowledge
Throughout this blog I’ve addressed a very large subject: what is involved in understanding society? What sorts of ontological assumptions do we need to make as we attempt to analyze and explain social processes? What is involved in explaining some of the social outcomes we are most interested in? How do we provide empirical confirmation …
Amartya Sen’s commitments
A recent post examined the Akerlof and Kranton formalization of identity within a rational choice framework. It is worth considering how this approach compares with Amartya Sen's arguments about "commitments" in "Rational Fools" (link). Sen's essay is a critique of the theory of narrow economic rationality to the extent that it is thought to realistically describe …
Mundane knowledge: Toronto street people
There is a lot of interesting stuff we encounter every day, if we stop to think. Often we don't have the knowledge necessary to make sense of it, so it remains interesting but opaque. And plainly each vignette has a dense set of social facts standing behind it that need to be teased out if …
Interdisciplinarity at the AAS
I'm attending the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Toronto, and it's a good working example of a non-discipline that brings together a wide range of disciplines and topics. But what is it that creates an affinity among all these scholars? It's certainly not methodology. There are financial specialists in attendance alongside …
Are mechanisms complex?
Source: D. Little, "Causal explanation in the social sciences" (link) A causal mechanism is (i) a particular configuration of conditions and processes that (ii) always or normally leads from one set of conditions to an outcome (iii) through the properties and powers of the events and entities in the domain of concern. This captures the …
Akerlof and Kranton on identity economics
George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton have collaborated for over ten years on a simple idea: is it possible to introduce the concept of social identity into the formal mechanics of mainstream economics? Can "identity" complement "interest" in the calculation of rational individual behavior? Their ideas were developed in several important articles: "Economics and Identity" (link), "Identity …
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