| Thomas (Tim) Leonard |
|
||
|
Recent Writing
Prophet of Innovation
manages the Schumpeterian feat of synthesizing history, economics and
biography, all of which were needed to produce this fully realized,
beautifully drawn portrait of a complex man, and his great
subject, capitalism -- its economics, its social institutions, and,
first among equals, its historical record.
History of Economics
Abstract: The influence of eugenics upon Progressive Era economics has been neglected in the history of economic thought. Why? Without rejecting other historiographic explanations, this essay argues that an influentual strand of Progressive-Era historiography -- one with its origins in Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought -- has misled with respect to the influence of biological thought upon the Progressive-Era sciences of society. It has done so by treating eugenics as social Darwinism and by making "social Darwinism" into a synecdoche for what, in retrospect, progressivism is seen to oppose -- individualism, laissez-faire economics, racism and imperialism. Though neither social Darwinism nor eugenics are quite what this influential strand of historiography makes them out be, and though eugenics and social Darwinism are as different as they are alike, the influence of the Hofstaderian interpretation has, among its several consequences, obscured the influence of eugenics on Progressive Era American economics. Abstract: In the Progressive Era, reform-minded economists argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers—whom they labeled “unemployables,” “parasites,” "low-wage races," and the “industrial residuum”—so as to uplift superior, deserving workers. Women were also frequently classified as unemployable. Leading progressives, including women at the forefront of labor reform, justified exclusionary labor legislation for women on grounds that it would (1) protect the biologically weaker sex from the hazards of market work; (2) protect working women from the temptation of prostitution; (3) protect male heads of household from the economic competition of women; and (4) ensure that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as “mothers of the race.” What united these heterogeneous rationales was the reformers’ aim of discouraging women’s labor-force participation. Abstract: Distribution concerns who gets what. But does “who” refer to the personal distribution of income among individuals or the functional distribution of income among suppliers of productive factors? For nearly 150 years, Anglophone distribution theory followed the Ricardian emphasis on functional distribution – the income shares of labor, land, and capital. Only beginning in the 1960s, and consolidated by a research outpouring in the early 1970s, does mainstream economics turn to the personal conception of distribution. This essay documents Anglophone (primarily American) economics’ move from functional to personal distribution, and tries to illuminate something of its causes and timing. Abstract: John Bates Clark was not a laissez-faire apologist for capital, as his contemporary critics (such as Thorstein Veblen) sometimes claimed, but neither was he a progressive, as some revisionist history has lately claimed. Clark is better regarded as a pioneering neoclassical economist. He rejected laissez-faire, which he believed would sometimes fail to realize competitive prices (including wages), but, as a champion of competition, he also rejected progressive theories of wage- and price-determination, which judged competition to be economically and morally destructive. In labor relations and anti-trust, Clark argued, the state should remedy departures from competitive pricing. Clark’s conception of the state’s role in the economy -- market failure remedy -- is not laissez-faire, for it justifies intervention, but neither is it progressive, for it regards competition as the end rather than as the cause of intervention. Abstract: David Card and Alan Krueger’s influential 1995 book, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, created controversy when it argued, among other claims, that moderate increases in legal minimum wages do not lead to adverse employment outcomes for low-wage workers. An examination of the history of minimum-wage economics suggets that today's controversy is a modern-dress version of two old (and related) methodological quarrels within economics: (1) can a general theory of markets be applied to wage and employment determination, that is, is it the case, as Adam Smith said, that the market for men is like the market for goods, and (2) what should be the role of empirical evidence in testing theories and their implications? The disemployment effects of minimum wages are recognizable at least as early as John Stuart Mill's (1848) text, and the question of how labor-market structure determines the employment effects of wage floors is present in the century-old debate between H.B. Lees Smith and Beatrice & Sidney Webb. The occasion for the mid-20th century methodological dispute known as "marginalist controversy" was Richard Lester's evidence that firms do not profit maximize and that labor markets are not competitive. Economics of Science
Abstract: The economics of science treats the process by which scientific knowledge is created as a market process, that is, as one where scientists respond to incentives that promote (or hinder) the creation of scientific knowledge. Science retains its epistemological distinction, but economics depicts the process of producing scientific knowledge as no less partisan, grubby and shallow than the market processes that produce breakfast cereals or broadcast television. The sociology of science, especially Critical Science Studies, denies science its epistemological distinction by denying that empirical evidence plays any substantive role in science. Science-Studies epistemology -- the Position -- asserts that non-evidential considerations determine which among rival theories will prevail. In the history of economics, the radical skepticism of the Position arrived bundled with the wholesome injunction that historical writing in the history of economics should be thicker, richer . . . and creamier -- Betty Crocker historiography. But critical perspectives on the history and organization of science not only don’t require the Position—they cannot go forward when burdened with the Position. Abstract: An economic theory of science accommodates both a realistic conception of scientific motivation and the possibility of genuine scientific success. It offers an intellectual means to address a central question in the theory of science: how do self-interested scientists, who have wordly goals, come to produce the socially beneficial outcome of reliable scientific knowledge. Ethics and Economics
Abstract: Critics of commodification object to sales but not gifts of some goods, such as human blood or human organs, on grounds that such trade wrongly coerces, morally corrupts, and crowds out altruism. This essay takes issue with each of these claims. It disputes Michael Sandel’s claim that voluntary exchange coerces, arguing that he confuses what is unfair with what is unfree. It argues, where trade does create moral costs, that these costs should be weighed against the moral costs of trade bans, such as the loss of human life, and the harms endemic to illegal markets. The essay also quarrels with Richard Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship, arguing that compensation for blood need not crowd out blood donation, that compensation does not preclude a charitable impulse, and that some important gift relationships (e.g., philanthropy) possess elements of both altruism and exchange. Abstract: Professor New rightly distinguishes paternalistic policies from policies that remedy market failures, but then argues that paternalism is justified when the state is better placed to know what is in the paternalized person's best interest. We argue that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for paternalism. In addition, the state should be better placed than alternative interveners. Sophisticated actors (Ulysses) may already have made provisions that enable self-restraint or provide expertise. And, naive actors, those who do not know they will need self-restraint or expertise, will be very difficult to distinguish from others who do not require paternalistic intervention, but whose behavior is identical. As such, the benefits of a paternalistic policy must be weighed against the costs imposed on non-targeted persons, costs imposed on targeted persons, and enforcement costs. Philosophy of Economics/Economic Methodology
Abstract: Some empirically minded philosophers of science argue that the evidence should choose the best theory from among theoretical rivals. However, the evidence may not speak clearly, a problem of ‘underdetermination of theory by data’. We examine this problem in a concrete setting, rival theories of smoking behavior. We investigate whether several uncontested pieces of empirical evidence allow us to choose between two competing theoretical perspectives on smoking, rational choice and non-rational choice, respectively. Next, we develop a more refined taxonomy of smoking theories, and consider the consequences for theory testing. Finally, we examine some normative aspects of theory choice involving the appropriate scope of government action. Foundations of Rational Choice Theory; Addiction
Abstract: We try to explain several behaviors associated with cigarette addiction, using a model in which boundedly rational individuals maximize lifetime utility, but in dynamically inconsistent fashion. The model explicitly accounts for the costs of withdrawal (when smokers attempt to quit smoking), and recognizes that the adverse effects of smoking appear late in an individual’s life. Among the things we use the model to explain are: 1) how individuals can become trapped in their prior decision to smoke -- smokling is bad but quitting is worse; 2) the conditions under which cold-turkey quitting is preferrable to more gradual reduction; and 3) an explanation for the existence of quit-smoking treatments.
Book Reviews
|
|||
| Thomas (Tim) Leonard |
|