Political Economy: Utopianism or Practicality?

One of the saddest loses has been a general shift away from provision of economic history. Too much neoclassical stuff where time is irrelevant (except for the prance over factors production and equilibrium ponce over the short term, long term and very long term)

 

Ok, I'll take a stab and hopefully naivety can be excused.

I'm going to say influence costs and I say that because of incentives. Agency costs often arise from misaligned objectives cutting into effeciency for the sake of personal gain, influence and transaction costs on the other hand can sometimes reflect the real costs associated with aggregating knowledge.

Hopefully that wasn't total gibberish.

 

I figured you would. Although I disagree with you are one of the people on the forum who's opinion i respect.

What I am against is rapid government spending and government sponsored plans.

Uncontrolled government spending and the works of May and Mac have been a major factor in why we are in the S**T storm we are in today. we try to fix the problem with bank bailouts then the bank just sits on the money that they are suppose to be spending.

I look at the exchanges between hayek and keynes and although i wouldn't call my self a strict austrian school economist I think hayek has the upper hand.

An example of what I see as wasteful is in my area of town part of the Obama recovery act was that they were going to rip up and repave a highway however the thing is that there was nothing wrong with the highway in the first place. The money spent on that project could be put to much better use elsewhere.

This is how I see it as a central planner that knows 1. The most efficient way to spend the money 2. Knows his limits and will not overspend and send us into mass debt 3. holds moral values in his spending 4. will know when to draw back so we dont follow the boom and bust cycle and 5. doesn't hold a political agenda is very utopian.

 

There isn't a correct answer! Here is the first lesson for economics. It must be pluralistic

 

In my opinion, the theory of supply and demand is sufficient to achieve a StateTopia on Earth, especially with the excellent job our Founding Fathers ordained and established for us at the Convention.

 

Hayek couldn't actually explain the existence of the firm! That's a bleedin big hole in understanding if you ask me. Keynesianism, in contrast, refers to the difficulties in decision making and an appreciation of the innate failures of the market. Far from utopian.

I can respect the suspicion over government expense but I reckon you need a better theoretical backbone for it.

 

In our case, I would think it would be agency costs since we have a written mission statement and federal Constitution. Influence cost should be tempered by those providing an agency.

 

What?

 

But thinking "Hayekian" we can explain their existence. It reduces the transaction costs associated with information gathering. It's emergent order.

 

The attempt to use Hayekian information within the context of the Coasian firm is a slight of hand that I don't particularly respect

 

Our Founding Fathers gave us all the political tools we need to Secure the Blessings of Liberty on Earth, in the US, to ourselves and our posterity; is that cool or what.

 

You must give me permission to offend you.

I don't understand your militancy regarding their mutual exclusivity.

 

Here's here to pollute another thread with sentence fragments and hollow rhetoric, just do what everyone else does and ignore it.

 

Its two-fold. First, the use of hierarchy is alien to the Austrian school (especially as that hierarchy is ultimately motivated by benefiting from coercive relations). Second, whilst they won't admit it as they're trying to eliminate neoclassical error, new institutionalism is actually closer to Marxist analysis

 

Still don't understand the issue, Hayek was a thinker outside of the Austrian school, his insights on knowledge and the costs of acquiring can be celebrated by all.

Well, no one wants to use the M word anymore. I still don't understand why this would be offensive.

 

You only say that because you lost all of your arguments.

 

It can't be used as part of the understanding of the firm, for reasons I've already mentioned. We can of course acknowledge the information surrogate role of prices, but the whole approach fails to acknowledge the importance of hierarchy. Its his biggest output, but ultimately it only describes the ideological limitation of the Austrian approach.

 

Seems like an eventuality of that line of thinking, moreover Austrians do embrace emergent order and the firm is precisely that and oddly enough went on to be their undoing.

Hierarchy creates an information funnel, pumping information upward, it's an aggregator throttled by competition.

I'm not interested at all in defending an Austrian position, but as an objective outsider incorporating multiple schools of thought to better understand the whole shouldn't be bounded by what to me appear to be arbitrary barriers.

 

I'm happy, say, for a socialist to refer to the consistency of market socialism with Austrian thought. Fine with me! I'm not fine with theory that its innately hypocritical. We have coercion within the Coasian firm, twinning it with Hayekian information makes no sense. Might as well ignore them totally and stick to what Williamson and co did: focus on influence and agency costs as a break on the boundaries of economic planning

 

So you mean enslaved Black people, disenfranchised women, disenfranchised minorities, disenfranchised unpropertied white men, and a largely agrarian and mercantile economy? That sounds sort of counter-intuitive if you ask me!!

 

You are mistaking, misguided States' rights for the excellent job our Founding Fathers did at the convention. In case you haven't noticed, our original federal Constitution and Bill of Rights was gender and race neutral.

 

You mean the constitution that counted black people as 3/5 of a person? That constitution? The one that gave only propertied white men the right to vote? How about the fugitive slave clause? You are obviously highly confused over what was actually in the constitution!!

 

you mean like history?

 

I'd respect some use of economic history, certainly! You're not going to get far with the Hayek vs Keynesian malarkey; its ultimately about misunderstanding both sides in order to peddle a convenient simplicity

 

Why do you believe that our federal Constitution was intelligently designed to be gender an race neutral, if not to solve for those issues, eventually?

Those were all legacy States' rights issues that should have been resolved in a more equitable manner than they were, but for politics as usual.