Review of D. Cohen (2012) The Prosperity of Vice: A Worried View of Economics, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
New Perspectives on Political Economy is a peer-reviewed semi-annual bilingual interdisci-plinary journal, published since 2005 in Prague. The journal aims at contributing to scholarship at the intersection of political science, political philosophy, political economy and law. The main objective of the journal is to enhance our understanding of private property-, market-and individual liberty-based perspectives in the respected sciences. We also belive that only via exchange among social scientists from different fields and cross-disciplinary research can we critically analyze and fully understand forces that drive policy-making and be able to spell out policy implications and consequences. The journal welcomes submissions of unpublished research papers, book reviews, and educational notes. A bilingual interdisciplinary journal 5 sNatchiNg the wroNg coNclusioNs from the Jaws of defeat: a resourceshiP PersPective oN Paul saBiN's the Bet: Paul ehrlich, JuliaN simoN, aNd our gamBle...
Book Review - Economic, Crime and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era -James G. Carrier
Nepal Institute for International Cooperation and Engagement (NIICE), 2021
The book exposes its readers to the past and current fraudulent and scandalous marketing practices, cost-benefits analysis, government oversight, government-corporate nexus, and most importantly the changing face of economic behavior and expectations.
Development and Change, 2009
disintegration of historical analysis based on scientific approaches, however, leaves a largely unhistorical neoclassical construct dominant, despite the lack of attention to the philosophical delicacies of choosing efficiency and exclusion as the main forces in human relations. More importantly, while researchers argue amongst themselves, policies based on neoliberal priorities or neoclassical interpretations continue, due perhaps to the fact that they are the only concrete sets of theory left to guide policy. The author's analysis points to the above, especially as he finds that 'post-development' fails to articulate with sufficient clarity or purpose the ways in which its visions of local self-sufficiency and global solidarity can challenge the dominant development paradigm (p. 107).
Legal Vices and Civic Virtue: Vice Crimes, Republicanism and the Corruption of Lawfulness
Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2013
Vice crimes, crimes prohibited in part because they are viewed as morally corrupting, engage legal theorists because they reveal importantly contrasting views between liberals and virtue-centered theorists on the very limits of legitimate state action. Yet advocates and opponents alike focus on the role law can play in suppressing personal vice; the role of law is seen as suppressing licentiousness, sloth, greed etc. The most powerful advocates of the position that the law must nurture good character often draw on Aristotelian theories of virtue to ground the connection between law and virtue. While Aristotle believed that law and character were linked, it is ironic to note that he did not argue for the position evidenced in our vice laws that law was likely to succeed in instilling virtue. Indeed, Aristotle thought the project of using law to instill private virtue was nearly certain to fail. Aristotle's deep concern was not for the way law protected private virtue within each person but the way law had to protect civic virtue between citizens. This article argues that even from its foundations, the project of vice crimes as moral instruction is misconceived. The use of law for overly instrumental or narrow reasons opens law and legal institutions to abuse and factionalism. Lawyers, judges and others specially connected to law must first and foremost aim at addressing ''legal vices,'' vices internal to the institutions of law. Particularly, increasing factionalism and instrumentalism which disconnects law from the pursuit of the common good threatens our civic bonds. Most importantly, where civic bonds are disrupted, citizens have no reason to remain law abiding. The striking lesson, captured both in ancient philosophy and modern history, is that when legal vices grow unchecked and factions use the law to pursue narrow interests, ultimately law abidingness is corrupted and interest groups harm themselves as much as others.
Book Review: The Quest for Prosperity: Reframing Political Economy
Review of Radical Political Economics, 2019
In The Quest for Prosperity Raphael Sassower combines elements of postmodernism, Marxian analysis, and Popperian philosophy to mount a unique, three-pronged investigation of the theoretical and practical foundations of capitalism and an inquiry into new conceptualizations of capitalism that promise novel solutions to its perennial problems; problems inherent in its foundations but perhaps most evident in implemented and ramified mainstream liberal political economy. Sassower canvasses the ideological, philosophical, and even mythological origins of the foundational concepts of capitalism from historical and systematic points of view, emphasizing capitalism's most recent twists and turns. The author attempts to reconceptualize much of political economy, with varying degrees of success, and further suggests some provisional solutions to the problems of capitalism on this newly articulated basis. Throughout, Sassower vividly illustrates how flawed ideas and dangerous assumptions perpetuate flawed and dangerous systems no matter the changes in "optics." Sassower's critique is "radical" in the sense that it draws into question the very roots of capitalist political economy: individual property rights, the efficiency of markets, the scarcity assumption, the insatiability of human acquisitiveness, and the global scalability of an economic monoculture. The book could serve as a good, mid-level text for introductory courses on the radical critique of liberal political economy or on philosophy of economics from a radical point of view. The unusual combination of often-opposing analytical orientations adds an interesting dimension lacking in many similar but more traditional texts. Sassower's ambitious and wide-ranging but generally responsible sampling of relevant ideas from philosophy, economics, and other disciplines also adds to its richness. Part I, "Assumptions Underlying Theories," offers a penetrating analysis of the conceptual bases of general capitalist political economy, covering scarcity and abundance, the state of nature and the social contract, human nature and the human condition, individual versus communal property rights, markets, and economic growth. Sassower stresses how the framing of foundational concepts affects the concepts built upon them. To take a familiar instance, a society's view of human nature (e.g., that it is essentially good, bad, or a moral blank slate), which may be set by religious or ideological factors, will largely dictate how that society organizes itself in the politico-economic sphere, determining, for example, the relative prevalence of individual versus communal property rights, biases built into regulatory frameworks, etc. Sassower's analysis of scarcity in Part I is one of the most interesting in the book. For many on both Left and Right, scarcity is a concept that is presupposed, and hopes of a post-scarcity world seem fanciful. Sassower, however, argues that the grain of truth in the so-called "law of scarcity" is something rather trivial. The law merely entails that we are always restricted to a finite level of resources. This finitude does not, by itself, entail that there is "not enough to go around." In fact, in most cases, conditions of scarcity are only a function of distributional 820958R RPXXX10.
Democratic Sentiment and Cyclical Markets in Vice
British Journal of Criminology, 2006
Aggressive tax planning is found to be a cyclical phenomenon in Australia and the United States. While people strongly disapprove of it, mass participation in aggressive tax planning occurs during cyclical upswings, probably at a level involving well over 100,000 Australians in illegal schemes during the late 1990s. We analyse these cycles as a market in the vice of tax scheme promotion that is countered by widespread virtuous sentiments in the democracy. Community attitudes to tax cheating are therefore not seen as the problem, but as crucial to its solution. There is a democratic demand for tax system integrity. This demand creates a market for honest tax advice professionalism. Sophisticated regulators can use these community attitudes as the crucial resource for flipping markets in vice to markets in virtue. Cycles occur because markets in virtue and vice dominate at different periods of history.
Published by the Chair of Economics and Ethics
2002
The funding of political parties raises interesting economic, political, social and ethical problems. This paper seeks to address these problems with the intention of contributing to the general debate, but, above all, of understanding the issue from the company's viewpoint, since companies are directly implicated in political party finance, as donors, as supposed beneficiaries of political activity, or as the sufferers of the consequences of illegal party funding. The analysis shall be focused in economic, political and, above all, ethical terms, first on a general level and then from the company's viewpoint. POLITICAL PARTY FUNDING AND BUSINESS CORRUPTION* 4 (4) Cf. Pope (1996), chap. 5. (5) From this point onwards, I will not always distinguish between funding a party's day-today activities and the exceptional expenses incurred by the party or by its candidates in election campaigns. This distinction is important from the legal and political viewpoint, but not so much for companies. In any case, it is not always easy to draw a dividing line between funding for ordinary and extraordinary operations. 5 (6) Cf. Shugarman (1997).
Forthcoming, Journal of Economic Literature
2011
A new meta-field of "forensic economics " has begun to emerge, uncovering evidence of hidden behavior in a variety of domains. Examples include teachers cheating on exams, road builders skimping on materials, violations of U.N. sanctions, unnecessary heart surgeries, and racial biases in employment decisions, traffic stops, auto retailing, and even sports judging. In each case, part of the contribution of economic analysis is in uncovering evidence of wrongdoing. Although research questions differ, forensic economic work shares commonalities in approaches and limitations. This article seeks to draw out the common threads, with the hope of stimulating further research across fields. 1 Dartmouth College. I am grateful first to Justin Wolfers, who worked on the initial outline of this article with me but withdrew from the project due to competing time commitments. Thanks also to Janet Currie, Stefano