Forced to Choose: Capitalism as Existentialism

Interesting, but does this ‘economic situation’ differ from Rawls’ (and Hume’s) moderate scarcity/circumstances of justice? Are you saying that the economic situation grounds libertarian self-ownership?

An interesting insight, and it probably has some truth to it. But as phrased, it seems to suggest that the markets are what allow us to define and fulfill our lives.

Unfortunately, market decisions by themselves are not enough to let you express your fundamental self. They’re constrained, first, by the amount of money you are able to earn, and second, by the choices actually presented to you by the market.

I, for instance, choose to live in a small but comfortable house in a pretty neighborhood in a walkable city with safe streets, clean air, nearby countryside, excellent public transportation, numerous public amenities, and a well-educated and prosperous citizenry who enjoy equal access to an enlightened society’s opportunities for economic and personal growth.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to buy that anywhere. I’ve done the best I can by living in Toronto, which comes close in some ways.

In fact the market offers an extremely constrained set of choices — constrained by our ability to earn money, and even more by whether the choice is one someone else can offer us and still make a profit.

The semicolon is NOT an “l”. Let’s try that again:

la république du silence.

But how are economic choices in the Miesian model different from any other choices? It sounds to me like he’s privileging a particular kind of choice in order to get the ethical framework he wants, and I don’t think that’s defensible.

At the risk of posting a lightweight followup to Corey’s interesting observations about the Austrians, I refer you all to The Culture series of books by SF author Iain Banks. Banks describes the social, political and economic implications of a post-scarcity universe. What does it mean for humans when there is no scarcity? His universe is an anarcho-liberal paradise.

His is a universe populated by humans and AI sentient computers called Minds who play the role of resource managers ensuring that resources get to where they are needed. If there is a criticism to be leveled at Banks it’s that he’s made these Minds too good.

Star Trek is another post-scarcity society, though a somewhat more “governed” one than Banks imagined. The Federation is, after all, still a government. Banks defines a post-government universe.

My guess would be that the Austrians would view this universe as a form of hell.

Christians believe in an infinitely merciful God, and libertarians believe that capitalism creates abundance. . . but both groups believe that suffering is good for you. Neither is working to create a world without suffering or scarcity.

This is why there are no good conservatives.

How does this progress beyond Marx’s assertion that we’re free to sell our labor or starve?

Yes, those who defined themselves by their individual economic choices, somewhat against the tide of aristocratic/mercantilist/Christian traditional society, and became a prosperous vanguard would quite easily discover that they had discovered a spiritual principle that would testify to a reality beyond their particular experience.

But just as there is no absolutely individual economic choice, there is no way that Capitalism-as-Existentialism doesn’t become a political program for a collective social order. The task for the emboldened leaders of the new order then becomes (and remains) to skillfully edit which super-individual collectives will remain legitimate and which are “unnatural”.

“the moral secret of capitalism, its existential fundament, is not that we are free to choose but that we are forced to choose. ”

Someone will have to explain this to me. Worstall is lost (yes, I know, not unusual).

Why is this the fundament of capitalism? Life itself works that way: economics, and not just capitalist economics is one of the ways of studying this. Infinite desires and limited ability to satisfy them: choice is simply necessary.

What have I missed?

Market is about choices, capitalism is about individuals owning factories. These are different concepts.

The Hayek quote Andrew F. disinters is great.

There’s a related point Richard Hofstadter makes in _Social Darwinism in American Thought_ that a touchstone of U.S. conservatism has been the idea that moral worth is manifest in market success: either success in the labor market (get and keep a job) or in business. The logical consequences have been discussed in many CT threads. To pick up on b9 #14, you can see how this can be used as an argument against aristocratic privilege as well as humbler solidarities, so there are indeed implicit assumptions about which collectives are OK.

Tim @ 16:

The OP stressed it: not that, confronted by scarcity, we are defined by our choices, but that the We making the choice must be an I. There will be no banding together, there will be no collective (except, of course, where institutions and laws are necessary to implement this conception of society).

Umm. My Marxism says that the human becomes a subject, an individual, only under capitalism in a process of self-alienation as a commodity selling itself (labour-power), or the owner of said commodity. The late 19th century “subjectivists” or marginalists focus on freedom/choice but to paraphrase Friedman, they are really objectifying/othering themselves as a thing-that-chooses. A universal “freedom” foregrounds individual particularity (one of a class, a type) shared with many others of our type precisely to disguise and submerge singularity.

Marxists.org

“Contrary to individualism and bourgeois psychology, subjectivity cannot be viewed as something existing solely within the internal and inaccessible recesses of individuals, but is rather an aspect of a social activity in which three relations – knowledge, agency and identity – coincide.”

It’s even less interested in creating an environment where choices made without reference to some purely market valuation are even possible.

Capitalism has finally eaten everything. It’s all over, everything is marketed. Identity, personhood, value and subjectivity are no longer that which determines value but value itself, in themselves commodities. Think reality tv, facebook. You are what you buy.

Read tiqqun, “Theory of the Young Girl”

So, if we have 10 people on the island, one fisherman, one doctor, one cook, one builder, etc. – and they all exchange their products/services as they value them, that’ll satisfy Von Mises. He wouldn’t insist that someone other than the fisherman should own the boat. Why, it sounds like a reasonable basis, then. Trivial, even.

Capitalism is not a philosophy, it is a law of nature in complex environments. Right now there are monkeys trading sex for fruit. They are not (to my knowledge) practicing any particular philosophical belief. To say one is a “capitalist” is like saying you are a “gravitationalist” and believe in the merits of gravity by dint of its existence.

Thus, by analogy, when climbing a mountain to reach the top, some of the more skilled climbers will insist that any use of guide ropes or fall-prevention barriers is an insulting impediment to the philosophy of gravity and they are morally free to push competing climbers over the edge to their doom. The guide ropes and barriers symbolize the social safety net, of course.

Hidflect:

So all societies have everywhere always been Capitalist?

Right now there are apes sharing fruit only based on the sanction of the group’s leader, so Stalinism is a law of nature?

A doctrinaire methodological individualism is doing a lot of work, here.

Colin Danby: ” . . . the bleak solitude of constraint and choice. The constraints are yours alone, the choice yours alone . . .”

Hayek via Andrew F: “Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created in the free decision of the individual.”

And, so are essential, but selective acts of omission, concerning the nature of “capitalism” and the inevitability of collective choice and centralized control or management.

Mao Cheng Ji: “Market is about choices, capitalism is about individuals owning factories. These are different concepts.”

Stuart: “Time wouldn’t be abundant in the socialist utopia rendering the whole argument nonsense.”

Capitalism, by definition of the economic concept of “capital”, is about choice-thru-time, using the fiction of money-and-debt to make deals with the future, which allow the diversion of resources in the present from the satisfaction of acute needs, to the strategic structuring of future claims and means to satisfy those claims.

The promised cornucopia of capitalism, the increased abundance, is delivered by the dynamism of “real” investment: the creation of “real” (not financial) capital, which makes use of energy from the environment (e.g. fossil fuels) and embodying in its engineering design, scientific and technical knowledge applied to control of production processes, in ways that increase specialization and scale, and economize by reducing waste and error. The critical implication for human decision-making is that these “real” investments are sunk-cost investments. Sunk-costs can have no effect on subsequent market bargaining, and so, sunk-cost investments cannot be recovered, in the absence of political power — this is the essential political problem of capitalism: how to strategically structure the post-investment bargain, in ways that preserve or enhance the claims (i.e. the wealth) of the capitalist.

The Classical economists, in their hostility to the landed aristocracy, had inadvertently identified the concept of “economic rent” as an “unearned” and morally illegitimate claim, and, yet, it is a species of “economic rent” (sometimes excused as a “quasi-rent”), which the capitalist must attempt to collect, by means of “market power” (a neoclassical euphemism for political power, kept conveniently ill-defined so as to avoid sullying textbook analysis).

The Austrians were at pains to identify, and claim as a dominating virtue, the dynamism of capitalism. They started, with a Germanic affection for analysis by obscurity, with the round-aboutness of Bohm-Bawerk. Their parallel effort, at constructing a framework of moral analysis favorable to the old landed as well as the new capitalist elites, does adopt the market analysis of choice, but their distinctive masterwork is the way in which they make a bogeyman out of financial capital and tendencies to “overinvestment”, which must be redeemed by austerity.

The individual freedom to choose, in a static market governed by consumer sovereignty, is something the Austrians are taking from the neoclassical Marginalists, without acknowledging the inconsistency of vision this introduces. The neoclassical marginalists make financial interest rates — supposedly static market rates — do the work of extending choice into the future, in a way that maintains an “optimal” tradeoff, between present needs and future prospects. The intellectual effort, which encumbers mainstream economics today with Lucasian rational expectations, is all about maintaining the illusion that the market economy can be both statically optimal (static=equilibrium) and dynamically optimal over time, that somehow savings (=the willingness to forego the satisfaction of present needs) is brought into equilibrium with investment(=opportunities to improve expected income in the future) by a financial interest rate. The financial system uses money prices to bring the present and the future into stasis, into an equilibrium, and the economy, supposedly, follows an equilibrium Solow growth model path.

The neoclassical idea that the financial system works to accomplish this feat reliably is absolutely crazy, and maintaining this illusion requires that neoclassical economists know next to nothing about how an institutional money / financial system actually works, (or fails to work). Mainstream neoclassical economists literally assume away actual money and actual financial markets, as insane as that would seem, on its face, to be. (Yes, even Krugman does this.)

The Austrian tradition, which inherits a physiocrat’s instinctive hostility to the maya of financial capitalism, seems to find resonance and renewal in the moral framework of terms, developed by Public Choice (Mancur Olson, James Bucahanan, et alia), in which “economic rents” are the gift of a political process, prone to increasing, entropic corruption, and which drives the “malinvestment” so dear to the heart of an Austrian moralist, in full cry for the redemptive suffering of prolonged mass unemployment and impoverishment.

“Forced to Manage” would be the institutional liberal or social democratic response: the logical and practical necessity of the public good of managing markets, which do not, and cannot, adequately manage themselves. We are forced to manage conflict collectively, in order to get individual choice; we have to organize the economy, with an infrastructure of public goods (including active regulation of markets, which plainly do not regulate themselves) and socially efficient levels of (sunk-cost) investment, financed by the exercise of political power (everything from intellectual property or prosecution of fraud to the policing of externalities to property taxes).

We are “Forced to Manage” a fiat money, to take one example. Capitalism had to invent Central Banks and credit, and, then, economists had to invent rank incompetence to facilitate mismanagement against the public interest. Now, the world must manage the Climate. Socialism has been failing miserably and repeatedly since the French Revolution to come up with a workable understanding of how to manage money, which is why neoliberalism can use the Euro to grind the welfare state to dust. We might want to try to do better with the economics of the Climate and Peak Everything.

I guess the pygmies aren’t human.

From the post: “Only when we are confronted with the reality of scarcity, says the Austrian economist, only when we have to reckon with the finite resources at our disposal, are we brought face to face with ourselves. “

Maybe there was a failure of imagination here. Our limited lifespans, the requirements of health, our jaded appetites all militate to limit our consumption and force choices upon us even in a world of unlimited goods. There are only so many trips we can take, so many cigars we can smoke, so many bottles of single malt we can empty, so many hours we can spend at the poker table or in the company of attractive young women. There are only so many bespoke suits we can order, so many hours spent driving the Ferrari, so many parties we can attend. We still have to choose.

As the Debt The First 5K Years guy showed, even communist social relations are based on reciprocity. You can fish in the morning and criticize after dinner alright, but if refuse fishing and suck at criticizing, they’ll kick you out, even the pigmies will, I’m sure.

One way or another, you are exchanging something for something.

Mao, your 10-person economy has no women, no children, and no families. It is therefore not even possible in your model to address the human desire to pass wealth on to children, yet this is the basis of much competition.

hidflect writes:

Capitalism is not a philosophy, it is a law of nature in complex environments.

As Mao (the commenter, not the former Chairman) points out, there is a difference between “the market” and “capitalism”. Any time you have people trading things, you’re going to have market forces at work, so they are sort of like a law of nature (maybe in some ways it’s a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics). But capitalism I don’t think is so inevitable. Capitalism is specifically using money to make money through buying up “the means of production” and through lending money. I don’t think it necessarily arises spontaneously—you need to have a legal system that supports it.

Families, where they exist, are based on reciprocity too. Even the children, they are expected to reciprocate in the future. This can be viewed as a form of exchange. Tendentious and simplified model for sure, freakonomics-style, but nevertheless.

The standard short definition of economics, as offered by ‘mainstream’ texts at any rate, used to be (and I assume still is): the field that deals with the allocation of scarce resources. So what Mises calls “the economic situation” is also, afaik, what mainstream economics calls “the economic situation” (and also, per comment #1, more or less what Hume/Rawls call the circumstances of justice). The ‘subjectivist’ element about choice revealing basic moral values etc. may be peculiar to Mises/Hayek, but not the point about scarcity defining the “economic situation.”

This individual choice in a vacuum is a choice available only to aristocrats and rentiers. The rest of us must first prostrate ourselves to the well-being of some wealthy to survive, if we can find one, getting either debt or wage slavery. Then we must seek out what we need in a sea of bogus and dross, trying not to get scalped. Then even our desires are chosen for us.

Do Mises etc. view thıs “choıce” as being similar to Kıerkegaard’s “Leap of Faith”?

It’s not often enough pointed out that one absolutely key aspect of Austian thought ıs its distrust of “rationalism”. I’m just wondering ıf the Austrian “choice” really does have more in common wıth existentialism than “rational” neo-classical “choice”.

‘Forced to choose’: interestingly that’s also the position Christine Korsgaard (see her ‘Self-Constitution’, Oxford 2008, and the Constitution of Agency, Oxford 2009) takes up in her exposition of Plato and Kant. In her case it’s not so much the reality of scarcity we have to face in becoming our true selves as the discovery that we have only one body and cannot do two things at once. That’s what makes us face reality and face ourselves. So apart from Hayek and others, Kant and Plato would also seem to connect being facing reality and being forced to choose with the human condition.

It’s a long tradition, to say the least. Either, it semms, you face up to limitations and become someone, or you live in a world of abundance, in which case you don’t have to choose, or in which your choice becomes meaningless and you run the risk of never discovering who you really are. That’s part of the worry, I think, of living in world were enough is enough and there is no need for economic growth: too many that seems a world in which we grownups would become children again, never having to face ‘real’ choices. You could call it ‘the unease of abundance’, and I think it’s a form of unease wwhich has a typical conservative streak. It takes some work to show that ‘facing up too reality’ would still remain relevant in a world of abundance.

Corey, thanks, great post!

More choices
Kinglsey, The Heroes
‘I am Pallas Athene; and I know the thoughts of all men’s hearts, and discern their manhood or their baseness. And from the souls of clay I turn away, and they are blest, but not by me. They fatten at ease, like sheep in the pasture, and eat what they did not sow, like oxen in the stall. They grow and spread, like the gourd along the ground; but, like the gourd, they give no shade to the traveller, and when they are ripe death gathers them, and they go down unloved into hell, and their name vanishes out of the land.

‘But to the souls of fire I give more fire, and to those who are manful I give a might more than man’s. These are the heroes, the sons of the Immortals, who are blest, but not like the souls of clay. For I drive them forth by strange paths, Perseus, that they may fight the Titans and the monsters, the enemies of Gods and men. Through doubt and need, danger and battle, I drive them; and some of them are slain in the flower of youth, no man knows when or where; and some of them win noble names, and a fair and green old age; but what will be their latter end I know not, and none, save Zeus, the father of Gods and men. Tell me now, Perseus, which of these two sorts of men seem to you more blest?’
Then Perseus answered boldly: ‘Better to die in the flower of youth, on the chance of winning a noble name, than to live at ease like the sheep, and die unloved and unrenowned.’

Mises & Rothbard were both rationalists (claiming to have created an economics deduced from the “action axiom”), it is Hayek who distrusted rationalism.

As the Debt The First 5K Years guy showed, even communist social relations are based on reciprocity. You can fish in the morning and criticize after dinner alright, but if refuse fishing and suck at criticizing, they’ll kick you out, even the pigmies will, I’m sure.

One way or another, you are exchanging something for something.

I can’t let this one slide – this is exactly the opposite of the point that Graeber makes. He argues that economic relationships are embedded in social relationships that often have nothing to do with that sort of exchange. Yes, there are expectations of reciprocity, but they are often loose and embedded in relationships of kinship, affinity, communal relationships, etc. In a longhouse where everyone contributes to the survivial of the longhouse, and resources are distributed by a group of elder women according to various cultural traditions and kinship relationships, you are part of a community – you aren’t just exchanging deer meat for shelter, strength for sex, or whatever.

Graeber argues, correctly I think, that the imposition of a concept of tit-for-tat exchange on complex human social relationships is exactly what economists get wrong.

Tim @ 57:

Yes, as Milton Friedman told us in the states, “if you don’t like a racist sock-seller (who won’t hire black people, you are free to voluntarily, collectively, boycott his store”.

The argument is that choosing defines us, and being deprived of choice limits our human, individual, potential.   If I want to work 50 hours a week in my bakery and produce the best goods, I am choosing to eschew leisure for excellence.  But if I am told, by the State, that I must be closed on Sundays, the choice is less mine and I am coerced toward more leisure.  To this degree, i am denied self-knowledge.  Thus it is essential that my choice be preserved.

Now, what Corey Robin is saying is that this definition of freedom is the “center of gravity” of free-market economics.  Their’s is not simply a utilitarian argument for prosperity, it’s an argument that we can’t even know what prosperity is (is it increased leisure?, is it better biscuits?) absent this individual freedom to choose.

What is less than obvious here?  What’s the implicit criticism that Robin may be (& i certainly am) offering?  It’s less than obvious that the bakery is actually “his” the way his photography collection is.  With the “priveledge” of customers (possessing a currency, travelling on roads, etc…) comes the “responsibility” to trade with them in terms that do not solely concern his own personal quest for knowledge.  It’s not obvious at all times that the highest good for the collective is to nurture the opportunity to self-knowledge.  It’s not obvious that self-knowledge is always diminished by  collective action.

You want to say: yes but can’t such collective action be voluntary?  But don’t you see that you’re asking:  why can’t law be voluntary?  The realm of collective action, like so many individual choices, is necessarily coercive.  

What the Capitalist-Extentialists have actually done is rendered unto the self what is rightly society’s (& not for the self’s benefit, I think). They created a story in which society can be a passive background, a stage, for the Hero.  But in reality, their Hero is also the set-designer and script-editor.

I’m enjoying the way comments here alight in such various ways on the post and on one another.

Ragweed hits something really important (though not sure of its intended address to the OP — I haven’t been able to trace properly the pigmies thread — I have tried). Graeber distinguishes himself from most exchange/gift theorists by insisting on the difference between exchange, certainly as the motivation for acts of giving/doing (there’s the connection to the OP?), and an act’s (an act of giving? Graeber avoids such language, for reasons that elude me) effect (yes, gifts will prompt return, somehow to someone, but that prompting is not the intention of the act — excess? bounty?). The heart of Graeber, if you ask me. (Also the heart of the Iliadic hero’s actions, by some readings, as it happens.)

And I’ve enjoyed Harold’s Hercules. I’d add that Herakles/Hercules is a richly polysemic figure. Hesiod has him choosing between two paths, but the path of virtue (arete) for Herakles (as for the Roman Hercules’ path of virtus) is a very MANLY path. Interesting the way this man (god?) soon gets taken up by the demos as a hero of appetite (food, sex, farting, you name it), too! Without bounds! Aristophanes gets it. Plays end with invitations to feasts of plenty — even though there is no food.

@64, he defines communism as any human relationship based on the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each ac­cording to their needs.” That, I claim, can be interpreted as a form of exchange. Otherwise, there would be no need to stipulate the first part: “from each according to their abilities”.

@66

“You want to say: yes but can’t such collective action be voluntary? But don’t you see that you’re asking: why can’t law be voluntary? The realm of collective action, like so many individual choices, is necessarily coercive. ”

I’m fine with the idea that there is a realm where collective action is indeed necessarily coercive. As my limited reading of Hayek leads me to think that he would be too (and Smith most certainly is).

Just as I would insist that there’s a realm where collective action must not be coercive (having sex is often a collective action, even if only between two people, but we do rather complain if it’s coercive).

All I can see as a disagreement here is where is the dividing line between what is justly coercive and what is not. Hayek (and myself for what little that’s worth) would draw the line very differently from say, Mao. But it’s where the line is, not the existence of justly coercive or not coercive collective action.

Or have I missed the point again?

Um, assent is usually construed as an act of will. That is the whole point of the social contract — to which the citizens collectively and voluntarily consent, either explicitly or implicitly, through participation in the political process and obeying the laws.

If the account of what they believe given here is true, the Austrians ignore society, basic ethics, and law. They also use the concept of choice in a grossly vulgar and reductive way — they are outlaws, like the libertarians.

If Friedman had been arguing in good faith, or out of ignorance, all this hair-splitting might make some sense. From my perspective, however, he was suffering from a moderately severe case of narcissism, and should therefore be ignored in the context of arguments about what the one owes to the many, or the many to the one. The ground of the dialectic, in other words, has never been where he, or his soi-disant conservatives, have tried to place it.

But if Friedman were to explain Von Mises or Hayek, we’d need a time machine.

gordon @ 36: The implication of the post seems to be that only in an individualistic, capitalist framework can humans be humans.

Well, sure, if you are an existentialist, this is clearly true, for example: Only [under capitalism] are we brought face to face with ourselves. . . . That decision must not only remain free; it must also remain mine. Most important of all, . . . it must remain a decision. . . . [T]he disciplining agent of all ethical action [is] the necessity to choose among a limited set of options . . ., and finally, our “ends dominate economy and alone give it meaning.”

You drop back @39 to something like this; I’m not sure why.

OTOH I might guess he put more stress on “mine” than on “decision.” (Where “decision” is what makes it existentialist, IIRC.)

I mean my comment at 39 was a bit flippant.

To distract yourself rather than to – I don’t know – end world hunger or something, is a choice. They don’t have to, but they could.

Gordon at 81

I think what you are saying is that because their resources actually allow them to address the great dilemmas ( shall I buy a megayacht, or attempt to end HIV in Africa), that their choices are more harrowing.

And I think you are right. Contrast the behaviour of the Gates family with that of the Koch brothers.

I also think the track record of the rich in choosing the more ethical path in these dilemmas, is the best possible argument against the Austrian deification of choice and free markets. And probably the best possible argument against a system that even allows for the routine accumulation of great wealth by individuals.

People unthread have argued that markets are a law of nature. Perhaps this is true, but if we try a different analogy, markets are a law of physics, then economics and finance are the engineering disciplines that attempt to take practical advantage of those laws. In that case, capitalism is one way to engineer the market, but any engineer will tell you there is always more than one way to skin a cat, and most of the specs have to do with what is happening to the cat bits afterwards.

Should what he calls the “economic situation” disappear from the human world, the disciplining agent of all ethical action—the necessity to choose among a limited set of options—would go with it.
—

What Hayek means is that without artificial scarcity, the freedom of the rich to command the poor would evaporate. And since the freedom to oppress is his moral North Star, he’d be distressed.

Which would you rather choose? To not own a credit card/chop it up and throw it in the bin — or to own a credit card, and not use it. People I asked tonight swore by the latter. It gives them the choice they said — “it’s all about discipline”.

On average they all had $1000-1500 racked up. The ones with young kids I sympathise with — but I also know they’ve made false choices, and they’re paying for them. It’s costing them more, and what’s more, they can’t even be honest about it.

Once you’ve made those choices, it seems, you’re forced to believe in them. Meet true human self. Thankfully most people aren’t wholly defined by their financial decisions!

73: I’ll bite that bullet; I’m not a fully developed person, because I haven’t done those things. What unpleasant consequences must I therefore accept, if I hold that to be true?

“[Bank] His universe is an anarcho-liberal paradise.
[snip]
Banks defines a post-government universe.”

My arse he is. Bank’s utopia is run by the Minds, who are benign gods caring for humans as pets. While we have some idea on how aberrant behavior amongst humans is treated (slap-drones, i.e., minders), we don’t know how the Minds enforce ethical norms between each other, beyond shunning of and inventing nasty nicknames for ethically questionable Minds.

I think Orwell pointed out the weakness of such ideas of anarchism using social norms rather than laws in the following from “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels”:

“In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is
public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to
conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of
law. When human beings are governed by “thou shalt not”, the individual
can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly
governed by “love” or “reason”, he is under continuous pressure to make
him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else. ”

Also, you get little insight of how the Culture works internally in its novels or how it resolves differences (there have been splinters from the Culture, such as the Elench), because almost all his novels are about Contact or Special Circumstances (i.e. the Culture equivalents of a combined Department of State/Defense and the CIA/SOCOM, respectively).

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Culture novels and run out to buy ’em as soon as I can, but there’s real lacunas in them.

95: Heilbroner, Buccholz, Roncaglia (idiosyncratic heterodox, but as a Sraffan good on the classicals), Schumpeter (just kidding)

I just spent a few minutes in Wikipedia “History of Economic Thought” and if you followed the links you could probably learn enough

The New School HET Website was terrific but appears to be dead. Is it archived anywhere?

“A request to the Big Brains/Minds of Crooked Timber: I’d appreciate recommendations for a text(s) on economics, preferably with an emphasis on historic development.”

Heilbroner’s “The Worldly Philosophers” is probably a good starting point, or “New Ideas from Dead Economists” by Buchholz. After that, a decent macroeconomic text, like Krugman’s, DeLong’s, Coulter’s or even Mankiw’s. Or read the actual texts themselves – e.g. both Adam Smith and Keynes were good writers.

Also, don’t neglect microeconomics: once you go beyond the simplistic models that gLibertarians idolize and get into models of imperfect competition, and especially now with all the work that’s being done on behavioral economics and behavioral finance, you realise how off-base and outdated is most of what the Right-wing tries to pass off as be economic analysis.

Plus microeconomics is on a day-to-day basis more useful: e.g. knowing how you’re signaling your willingness to pay to vendors that are using price discrimination to sell similar product and services at radically different prices can save you a bundle by altering your behavior.

As a few other commenters have already said, but more bluntly:

How, exactly, does this supposed insight into some system, called here “capitalism”, diverge in any fundamental way from observations of previous societal structures? Kalahari Bushmen could not choose to “value” certain things over other certain things 20,000 years ago? Yes there is some added political hand waving as to “decision must not only remain free; it must also remain mine”, but what does that even mean? A Kalahari chief may have limited one’s “choice” of food by claiming the best meat just as any current owner of any property now could and does.

Daryl McCullough @8, you’ve really hit it on the head.

@anyone implying a salutary effect of scarcity:

Maybe we’re better off not being immortal. Maybe Beethoven would not have written those symphonies if he were immortal. But he certainly would not have written any symphonies if he had to choose between making music and working to feed himself.

If you want to say, as a matter of speculative philosophy, that the natural scarcity of time — that is, mortality — is of ultimate benefit to humans, then I won’t argue (although I think even immortal Beethoven might have gotten around to writing a symphony eventually). But as for the scarcity of material security (food scarcity, healthcare scarcity, etc.), it is simply a well-established fact of empirical psychology that such abject material insecurity does not help humans to realize their potentials, but rather impedes them severely. (Such effects can even be measured in cortisol levels.) No philosophy is necessary here, and any abstract nonsense which makes no reference to empirical literature is unworthy of attention.

Bruce Wilder @79
Wow – maybe this deserves a guest post. Not sure that it is all OT here though. Also you might need to expand YOUR theory of the financial a bit more. I’m not sure that I personally have a framework for understanding it. My guess is that the reason the FIRE sector has so expanded has something to do with Georgian type arguments (also omitted from neo-classicism – perhaps deliberately so) and something to do with a stealth increase in de-facto ownership of real resources (via increasing debt) by this sector.

Bruce Wilder’s comments on articles are often the best thing on this blog.