The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today) — Eric Schliesser

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The University of Chicago Press of Road to Serfdom.) But Knight articulated several major challenges to liberal self-reflection in his review of Lippmann. And some of Hayek's major contributions to the liberal self-imagine, for good and ill, can be fruitfully interpreted as responses to that review.

Digressions&Impressions
The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today)
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Julian Baggini — Book clinic: which books best explain why life is worth living?

Short.

These excerpts summarize the answer I would have given, too.

Q. Which books can tell me, from a philosophical standpoint, what makes life worthwhile or worth living?

A. Philosopher and author Julian Baggini writes: 

Surprisingly, few of the world’s great philosophers have directly addressed this question. Instead, they have focused on a subtly different question: what does it mean to live well?

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasised the need to cultivate good character, finding the sweet spot between harmful extremes. For example, generosity lies between the extremes of meanness and profligacy, courage between cowardice and rashness. A remarkably similar vision is presented in the Chinese classics The Analects of Confucius and Mencius.…

Should all else fail, there is my own What’s It All About?, which aims to shows how philosophy does not so much answer the big questions as help provide us with the resources to answer them for ourselves.

Some of the most important questions are "the enduring questions" that have to be approach anew in every era and also answered personally.

One of these enduring questions is, what does it mean to live a good life as an individual in a good society.

The Guardian
Book clinic: which books best explain why life is worth living?

Julian Baggini

See also

Good review that reconciles opposing viewpoints. Ibn Khaldun was a precursor of modern sociology and economics. Longish.

3:AM Magazine — Whatever It Is, We Are Against It
Good Orientalism: Robert Irwin vs Ernest Gellner on Ibn Khaldun. Boom!
Richard Marshall

David Fields — New Book: The Good Life Beyond Growth – New Perspectives

New book on living a good life in a good society.

Radical Political Economy
New Book: The Good Life Beyond Growth – New Perspectives
David Fields

Nick Johnson — Reflections on ethics and the good society

Tony Lawson, a professor of economics and philosophy at Cambridge University, has researched and championed the role of social ontology, that is, the study of the basic subject matter and constitution of social reality, in economics. From a paper of his discussing the role of ethics, in which I found much of interest and inspiration, here are a few choice quotes, which are implicitly critical of mainstream economics and supportive of a different approach to economics as a truly social science:

The Political Economy of Development

Reflections on ethics and the good society

Nick Johnson

Alexander Douglas — Some explanation on my last post

Alex Douglas thanks all for their support and asks for suggestions.

My suggestion is to take John Kenneth Galbraith's The Good Society: The Humane Agenda and Economics and the Public Purpose and update them in light of MMT. Of course, these books segue into lots of other relevant contributions No need to reinvent the wheel, just return the conversation from the trivial to the important. However, I think that "the good society" and "public purpose" are a good lede. 

As Alex notes this is essentially a philosophical issue. As I have said, it goes back to ancient Greece in the Western intellectual tradition. The Greeks were absorbed in the question of what it means to live a good life as an individual in a good society. Aristotle observed that humans are social animals and therefore the good life must include citizenship.

The Greeks also introduced liberalism as the prioritizing of freedom. Freedom from constraint and freedom to choose are necessary for freedom for self-actualization as an individual and self-determination as a state (Gk: polis).

In my experience, ethics and aesthetics rest on ontology and epistemology as a foundation, and social and political philosophy rests on ethics. For example, one's world view ("philosophy" in the broadest sense) is foundational since one's world view is the conceptual model of reality that one employs. 

A key fundamental in a world view is the conception of human nature, for example. One's conception of human nature greatly influences one's world view both individually and socially. See, for instance, Twelve Theories of Human Nature, which is hardly exhaustive.

Here is a comment I left at The Multidisciplinarian yesterday that speaks to this:

“Philosophy” has many different meanings and to hold out one as the meaning would difficult to impossible to defend. Yes, I have those three letters after my name.

In the broadest sense philosophy is summarized in the colloquial question, “What’s your philosophy?” Philosophy in this sense it is reflection on one’s fundamental assumptions and those of society not only in particular but as a world view, that is, a conceptual system that models reality in symbols expressed as words rather than numbers.

Philosophy deals with quality as well as quantity and other uses of language than purely descriptive, as well as modality. The primary tool is logic and the method is reasoning. Just as mathematics is the language of science and accounting the language of business, logic is the language of philosophy.

Most people’s world view is acquired through socialization and education. Much of it remains implicit, and most people don’t endeavor to make it explicit or reflect on foundational matters much or even at all. Plato attributes to Socrates the observation that a life not reflected upon is not worth the living. This is generally taken to be the earliest and clearest definition of philosophy. Philosophy is reflection using reason in this broad view. What’s not to like about that?

Since there are many fields of life and knowledge, philosophy has many branches that attempt to make the implicit explicit and to subject it to a rigorous logical critique through debate. This is the Socratic dialectic. This post and comment thread is an example of it in action.

Moreover, philosophy isnt’ just shooting the bull over beers, although a lot of philosophizing is done that way. But philosophy is concerned with foundations rather than trivia. Philosophy of science can also be called “foundations of science,” for example. This involves the attempt to reflect on key fundamentals such as causality in order to clarify them, as well as to uncover inconsistencies in assumptions and presuppositions.

Philosophy in the broadest sense is the attempt to reflect on the foundations of a world view, making as much of it explicit as possible and then critiquing it rigorously using reason. This is pretty much the objective of Phil 101, which is about the basics of reasoning, logic and critical thinking, usually with reference to some of the “enduring questions” that continue to be debated since no resolution has been arrived at that compels assent since agreed upon criteria are lacking.

These questions used to be studied in terms of the great thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition and some professors still follow this course. Many others chose to seat the questions in current affairs and controversies such as medical ethics, liberal democracy, and other matters that are sure to result in spirited debate.

• #2 by Bill Storage on June 19, 2016 - 9:42 pm

  Thanks for the those well-expressed thoughts on logic, reasoning, and their application, Tom. I fear that spirited debate may be out of fashion in my neighborhood, where critical thinking is believed to kill creativity and most skepticism is viewed with skepticism.
  
  • 

    #3 by Tom Hickey on June 19, 2016 - 9:51 pm

    Some would say critical thinking went out of fashion along with liberal education. I would be one of them.
    

I also came to the conclusion over the years that it's not possible to deal with social and political philosophy without also dealing with both the philosophical foundations of economics and political economy. Since economics now concerns monetary production economies that also involves money & banking, and finance.

This is a big chunk and no one person is going to resolve the issues. But some people need to get the ball rolling if this debate is to take place.

The world badly needs an undated theory of liberalism made practical as an antidote to the faux liberalism that is actually illiberal, or, in the criticism of Karl Marx, bourgeois liberalism grounded in the freedom for accumulators to accumulate based institutional power and the power of the captured state.

Origin of Specious
Some explanation on my last post
Alexander Douglas | Lecturer in Philosophy at Heythrop College, London

Robert Kuttner — Karl Polanyi Explains It All

Robert Kuttner provides an excellent summary of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (download).

In the 1944 catalog of publisher Farrar & Rinehart, the entry for The Great Transformation appropriately compares it to Keynes’s succinct 1919 classic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. But while Keynes’s book was a best-seller, turning its author into a celebrity, The Great Transformation sold just 1,701 copies in 1944 and 1945.

The New York Times reviewer, John Chamberlain, was savage: “This beautifully written essay in the revaluation of a hundred and fifty years of history adds up to a subtle appeal for a new feudalism, a new slavery, a new status of economy that will tie men to their places of abode and their jobs.” If that sounds just like Polanyi’s nemesis, Hayek, it was for good reason. Chamberlain had just written the foreword to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, also published in 1944. While Hayek’s book was adapted in Reader’s Digest and became a best-seller, Polanyi’s languished.

By 1946, however, Polanyi had been reviewed, mostly favorably, in major newspapers and social-science journals, and he was slowly attracting a following. At 61, Polanyi was offered his first real academic job in 1947 at Columbia, where he taught until 1953. But in the Cold War chill, the State Department refused to give a permanent visa to Ilona, and she relocated to Canada. After attempting to commute from Toronto, Polanyi spent his final years settled there, returning to an early scholarly interest in economic anthropology.

Comparison of The Great Transformation with The Road to Serfdom is in a sense the story of what would lead in Anglo-American economics to the conflict between Keynes and Friedman, mediated by Paul Samuelson. The first textbook of Keynesianism was Lorie Tarshis's The Elements of Economics (1947), which was pilloried as "pink" if not "red." Samuelson published his textbook that would become the standard in 1948. Eventually, even Samuelson's "bastard Keynesian," the purported synthesis of Keynes and neoclassical economics was over turned, which was largely attributed to the Chicago School and Milton Friedman. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation was relegated to a footnote whereas the economic liberalism of Hayek and Friedman became dominant. As result, few are familiar with Polanyi's work and fewer still read him.

Now, with economic liberalism in retreat and the moral economy and the good society reentering the debate forcefully, Polanyi's work is also experiencing a resurrection in social and political theory and political economy. Polanyi favored managed capitalism (social democracy) over laissez-faire capitalism based on free market fundamentalism (economic liberalism).

Karl Polanyi is not to be confused with his brother Michael, a chemist and libertarian social and political philosopher. Friedrich Hayek got the concept of spontaneous order from Michael Polanyi. In fairness to Michael, he was, like Hayek, no Murray Rothbard either. Michael made contributions to chemistry for which he is better known than as a political philosopher, and Michael's son John was awarded a Nobel in chemistry. Talented family.

Both Michael and Karl reacted the extremes of Marxism. But Karl rejected Michael's assumption that free market fundamentalism results in spontaneous order that is socially beneficial. Karl attempted to navigate between the free market fundamentalism that conflated economic liberalism with social and political liberalism, and the Marxism that had resulted in totalitarian communism. 

Like Marx, Karl Polanyi's approach was historical, but unlike Marx he did not postulate "iron laws," which he criticized liberal economist for doing also in seeking to model "the market" with purportedly universal laws of a natural system like 18th and 19th century classical physics. Being unnatural such attempts at universalization would naturally lead not only misunderstanding theoretically but also to economic crisis and social discord if applied rigidly. In fact, it led to domestic conflict and war historically.

Looking backward from 1944 to the 18th century, Polanyi saw the catastrophe of the interwar period, the Great Depression, fascism, and World War II as the logical culmination of laissez-faire taken to an extreme. “The origins of the cataclysm,” he wrote, “lay in the Utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.”

Contrary to libertarian economists from Adam Smith to Hayek, Polanyi argued, there was nothing “natural” about the free market. Primitive economies were built on social obligations. Modern commercial society depended on “deliberate State action” by and for elites. “Laissez-faire” he writes, savoring the oxymoron, “was planned.”…

Libertarian economists, who treat the market as universal—disengaged from local cultures and historic time—are fanatics whose ideas end in tragedy. Their prescription means “no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”…

Longish but detailed and a good read. If you don't have time to get to it now, save it for the weekend. We are going to hearing a lot more about Polanyi, Keynes, Lerner, and Minsky, etc. as the debate shifts and people wake up to the facts that history rhymes and many of the issues of today have already been analyzed in the past to good effect. There are shoulders of giants to stand on.

The American Prospect
Karl Polanyi Explains It All

Robert Kuttner | co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and Meyer and Ida Kirstein Visiting Professor in Social Planning and Administration at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management

ht Dan Lynch in the comments

Eric Schliesser — On Plato's System of Natural Liberty (and Adam Smith's True Religion)

Weekend reading.

The issue in The Republic is living a good life in a good society.

Digressions&Impressions
On Plato's System of Natural Liberty (and Adam Smith's True Religion)
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Marc Lee — Climate Justice and the Good Life, for Everyone

If there is one phrase that sums up what's wrong with economics, it is "specious assumptions." The most specious assumption is that science is an independent disciple that investigates reality in order to discover natural invariances that can be modeled formally, similar to physics.

This involves denial that economics is a social science with emphasis on social. The social aspect of economics implies, first, that the subject matter is different from natural science, which also implies the need to employ different methodology in approaching it. 

Secondly, as an implication of the assumption that economics is natural science, it is also assumed that outcomes are "natural" as long as natural processes, here market forces, are not interfered with artificially. 

This is based on a concept of human being, called homo economicus, that does not accord with the findings of other disciplines about human being as homo socialis. It also puts economics at odds with widely accepted norms of social justice based on liberal principles grounded in equality of persons and the fairness this implies as the basis for rights.

There are good argument against government imposing any particular moral code in a liberal society. But to conclude from this that society is therefore immoral would be a violation of the fundamental principles of liberalism, which include egality and solidarity along with freedom.

Morality and ethics are imposed socially by political decisions taken democratically in a liberal society and promulaged through positive law and rights based on a concept of justice that is founded on the liberal principles of equality of persons before the law and due process. This implies lack of privilege and social fairness.

A growing body of research into well-being and happiness tells us to look beyond money and consumption. While income matters a great deal at lower levels – when one is poor, a little money makes a big difference – but once basic needs are met, higher income does not necessarily translate into gains in happiness. Research points to substantial benefits to be had from a more equitable distribution of wealth – inequality manifests in weaker performance on a range of social and health indicators. Social fairness in terms of income and employment distribution may, in fact, be vital for achieving the changes required for a transition to a sustainable economy. 

Some key insights into well-being relevant to a new conception of “the good life” include (key references at end): 

• Full employment and decent work....
• Time use and work-life balance....
• Community and social cohesion.... 

One major report to the French government from two Nobel laureates [Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen] in economics argues that progress should be understood by assessing a diverse array of well-being indicators to capture a more comprehensive understanding of people’s lives, spanning key areas of: health, education, environment, employment, material comfort, interpersonal connectedness and political engagement. 

The Canadian Index for Wellbeing (CIW) was launched only recently in 2010 as a counterweight to the gross domestic product numbers. It aims to measure and track the quality of life of Canadians and is comprised of 64 indicators. The CIW has demonstrated that Canadians’ quality of life has not kept pace with the country’s economic growth from 1994 to 2008, where although GDP grew 31%, CIW rose only 11% in the same period. A key reason is that Canadians are spending less and less time on healthy social and leisure activities, and the state of the environment has declined.
This growing body of research is broadly consistent with the notion of climate action and climate justice....

The Progressive Economics Forum

Climate Justice and the Good Life, for Everyone
Marc Lee

Jonathan Denn — The Politics of MMT (Strange Bedfellows)

I don’t think these two premises, MMT and ideology, are mutually exclusive. What I propose is there are issues and contexts where a majority, perhaps even a supermajority of Americans, could agree on—where, how, and when—public spending can decouple from the restraints of taxing and borrowing.

New Economic Perspectives
The Politics of MMT (Strange Bedfellows)
Jonathan Denn

Miles Kimball — Liberty and the Golden Rule

A paradox of liberalism:

Part of the problem is in the limitations of the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That is all well and good if they have the same preferences, but not if they want something different from what you would want in the same circumstances. Until further advances in technology, we are shut out of knowing directly what the world looks like from inside someone else’s mind, and have to guess based on how we would feel. But that sometimes steers us badly off target. Giving everyone personal liberty is a safeguard against our blind meddling.

Of course, applying the golden rule at a meta-level would say “I want liberty, so I should give others liberty as well.” But there are many times when liberty is a higher law than the applying the golden rule at the detailed level.

Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal
Liberty and the Golden Rule

Miles Kimball | Professor of Economics and Survey Research at the University of Michigan

Diane Coyle — Walter Lipmann, public economist

A new biography, Walter Lippmann: Public Economist by Craufurd Goodwin, is a very interesting portrait of someone not all that well known now. I ended it appreciating that Lippmann was a more important figure in early 20th century America than I’d realised, perhaps a Martin Wolf of his day. The mixture of intellectual rigour and status with an ability and urge to communicate with the wider public is relatively rare, and important in modern democracies, with all their political and economic complexities. Lippmann was probably the first ‘public economist’.… 

Throughout the decades, however, in an era when the old order was dying, Lippmann challenged the attractive certainties of the extremes, observing that ‘free’ markets had never existed, and that collectivism relied on censorship, spying and terror. This search for a way to manage the modern economy, and deliver to voters in democracies the economic well-being or assurance they demanded, while safeguarding liberty, remained his theme throughout, above all in The Good Society. 

Lippmann sounded (in The Method of Freedom) rather like a modern behavioural economist: “The classical economists over-estimated the enlightenment which is based on self-interest and the fortitude based on self-reliance. … Imitation, the herd instinct, the contagion of numbers, fashions, moods, rather than enlightened self-interest, have tended to govern the economy.” And elsewhere, he emphasised the importance of institutions, regretting the fact that economists had not combined their powerful analysis with a ‘humanly satisfactory’ social philosophy.…

The Enlightened Economist
Walter Lipmann, public economist
Diane Coyle

Lars P. Syll — Arrow on flawed markets, involuntary unemployment and rational expectations

Quote by Kenneth Arrow on the good society, involuntary unemployment and rational expectations that you may wish to have for future reference.

I think the idea that a society has to be responsible for all of its citizens, those who do well and those who do not, is really a precondition of a good society.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog

Arrow on flawed markets, involuntary unemployment and rational expectations
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Noam Chomsky — What Is the Common Good?

This article is adapted from a Dewey Lecture by Noam Chomsky at Columbia University in New York on Dec. 6, 2013

Truthout
Noam Chomsky | What Is the Common Good?
Noam Chomsky | Dewey Lecture, Columbia University, 2013

Nick Hanauer & Eric Beinhocker — Capitalism Redefined

It isn’t the amount of money that a society has in circulation, whether dollars, euros, beads, or wampum. Rather, it is the availability of the things that create well-being—like antibiotics, air conditioning, safe food, the ability to travel, and even frivolous things like video games. It is the availability of these “solutions” to human problems—things that make life better on a relative basis—that makes us prosperous.

This is why prosperity in human societies can’t be properly understood by just looking at monetary measures of income or wealth. Prosperity in a society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems.

These solutions run from the prosaic, like a crunchier potato chip, to the profound, like cures for deadly diseases. Ultimately, the measure of a society’s wealth is the range of human problems that it has found a way to solve and how available it has made those solutions to its citizens. Every item in the huge retail stores that Americans shop in can be thought of as a solution to a different kind of problem—how to eat, clothe ourselves, make our homes more comfortable, get around, entertain ourselves, and so on. The more and better solutions available to us, the more prosperity we have.

The long arc of human progress can be thought of as an accumulation of such solutions, embodied in the products and services of the economy. The Yanomami economy, typical of our hunter-gatherer ancestors 15,000 years ago, has a variety of products and services measured in the hundreds or thousands at most. The variety of modern America’s economy can be measured in the tens or even hundreds of billions. Measured in dollars, Americans are more than 500 times richer than the Yanomami. Measured in access to products and services that provide solutions to human problems, we are hundreds of millions of times more prosperous.

Growth as the Rate of Solution Creation

If the true measure of the prosperity of a society is the availability of solutions to human problems, then growth cannot simply be measured by changes in GDP. Rather, growth must be a measure of the rate at which new solutions to human problems become available. Additionally, since problems differ in importance, a new view of growth also must take this into account; finding a universal flu vaccine is more important than creating a crunchier potato chip. But in general, economic growth is the actual experience of having one’s life improved. Going from fearing death from a sinus infection one day to having access to life-saving antibiotics the next isgrowth. Going from sweltering in the heat one day to living with air conditioning the next is growth. Going from walking long distances to driving is growth. Going from needing to go to a library to look up basic information to having all the information in the world instantly available to you on your phone is growth. (Obviously, some solutions, like air conditioning, may create other problems, like global warming. How to make the trade-offs between solutions and problems is one of the central challenges of any society—an issue we will return to later in this essay.)

This all implies that we must find new ways to measure progress….

Democracy — A Journal of Ideas

Capitalism Redefined

Nick Hanauer & Eric Beinhocker

See also Eric Beinhocker, A Truer Form of Capitalism [points out that Ayn Rand was down on economic rent as market distorting]

This is making a splash. The frame is beginning to change with pretty remarkable speed.

Nigel Warburton — Talk With Me

...Conversation without critical judgment becomes mere chatter and airing of different opinions — as William Empson wrote in his poem ‘Let It Go’ (1949):

"The contradictions cover such a range.The talk would talk and go so far aslant.You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there."

However, it was John Stuart Mill who crystallised the importance of having your ideas challenged through engagement with others who disagree with you. In the second chapter of On Liberty (1859), he argued for the immense value of dissenting voices. It is the dissenters who force us to think, who challenge received opinion, who nudge us away from dead dogma to beliefs that have survived critical challenge, the best that we can hope for. Dissenters are of great value even when they are largely or even totally mistaken in their beliefs. As he put it: ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.’

Whenever philosophical education lapses into learning facts about history and texts, regurgitating an instructor’s views, or learning from a textbook, it moves away from its Socratic roots in conversation. Then it becomes so much the worse for philosophy and for the students on the receiving end of what the radical educationalist Paolo Freire referred to pejoratively in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) as the ‘banking’ of knowledge. The point of philosophy is not to have a range of facts at your disposal, though that might be useful, nor to become a walking Wikipedia or ambulant data bank: rather, it is to develop the skills and sensitivity to be able to argue about some of the most significant questions we can ask ourselves, questions about reality and appearance, life and death, god and society. As Plato’s Socrates tells us, ‘These are not trivial questions we are discussing here, we are discussing how to live.’

Aeon
Talk with me
Nigel Warburton

INET — The Philosophy of Economics: The Institute Kicks Off Event in China

The Institute for New Economic Thinking and China’s Tsinghua University today kicked off their seminar in Shenzhen, China, called “The Good Life: The Challenges of Progress in China.”...

[Robert] Johnson set the tone for the conversation by stating that the goal of the conference was to address the elements and mechanisms needed to create “the good life” and how society can achieve it....

The good life has an ancient and modern meaning. In modern terms, "the good life" means material prosperity. The ancient meaning signified a life that unfolded maximum potential as both as a human being and as an individual — as a human being in terms of achieving the good for man or the summum bonum, and as unique person in terms of using personal endowment to optimal advantage individually and socially. 

Plato and Aristotle held that the good life as the human ideal included the good society, since human beings are inherently social and cannot find full expression exclusive of social relationships. Thus, living a good life implies a good society.

Kaletsky then followed with a discussion of the economic lessons from the most recent financial crisis. He said that the meltdown revealed that economics provided no theories to help us understand what had happened or what our next step should be. This failure has resulted in questions about the role of economic policy and the proper division of macro and microeconomics. Kaletsky urged society to recognize the imperfections in current economic theories and to go beyond traditional thought to come up with new ways of thinking about economies.

Johnson closed the evening by noting that the economic theories that have been predominant over the past few decades have broken down, and we now have to start creating a new economics that reflects the realities of today.

Let's hope that INET realizes that Kaletsky's assertion, "the meltdown revealed that economics provided no theories to help us understand what had happened or what our next step should be," is incorrect. It should read, "the meltdown revealed that [conventional] economics provided no theories...." Nor is Johnson's assertion that it is necessary "to start creating a new economics that reflects the realities of today" completely correct either, in that it is not necessary to start from scratch. The first step is to jettison the dead weight of conventional economics and the second is to turn the focus on existing heterodox solutions that predicted the global financial crisis and warned about the euro debacle, and so provided solutions. 

Hopefully,  the MMT analysis and prescription will be presented. If not, why not?

And will they actually integrate the philosophy of economics with traditional philosophical investigation of the good life in a good society that has been central since ancient times? Or will "the good life" be seen as only a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage?

INET
The Philosophy of Economics: The Institute Kicks Off Event in China

Stephanie Kelton — The Good Society: Lessons Not (Yet) Learned

John Kenneth Galbriath’s book, The Good Society: The Humane Agenda, creates a blueprint for a more just, prosperous and stable world. I’m re-reading it for the nth time because I continue to believe we might just get there one day. Indeed, I’m convinced we must.

Here are some excerpts....

New Economic Perspectives
The Good Society: Lessons Not (Yet) Learned
Stephanie Kelton | Associate Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department, UMKC

A fundamental question of the global intellectual tradition and perennial wisdom is, What is the good life for individuals in a good society, and how to achieve it. The history of thought is about the different answers based on different ontological, epistemological, ethics, aesthetic assumptions about reality, experience, and the place of humanity in it. These assumptions underlie social and political thought.

Economics generally presupposes foundational assumptions and makes theoretical and methodological assumptions based on such implicit prior assumptions that frame the enquiry.

Since the Enlightenment, the design problem has been reconciling social, political and economic liberalism, along with developing institutions and policy based on different design solutions. These solutions differ based on both normative assumptions for example, that serve as criteria, as well as differences in worldview that frame reality differently.

In The Good Society (1996), John Kenneth Galbraith presents his summation of a 20th century liberal position eloquently, and, if one shares his values and worldview, convincingly.

Contrasting positions are developed by: 

• Ludwig Mises in Liberalism 
• Friedrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973)
• Murray Rothbard in Man, Economy, and State (1962), For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (1973), and The Ethics of Liberty, Humanities Press (1982)
• Ayn Rand in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1979), and Philosophy: Who Needs It? (1982)
• Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose (1980), which was a response to John Kenneth Galbraith's book and television series, The Age of Uncertainty. 

These positions are now the dominant subject of discussion in American political economy today rather than Galbraith's The Good Society.

Notable is that there is nothing on the right that mentions society.This is unsurprising since the underlying assumption of these works is methodological individualism grounded in the implicit assumption of ontological individualism.

The exception to this is journalist Walter Lippmann's The Good Society (1937). Lippmann is remembered, however, more for A Preface to Morals (1929) and The Public Philosophy (1955). While very influential in presenting the conservative viewpoint in the last century, he is hardly cited today, like his then famous opponent on the left, American educator and philosopher John Dewey. "... [Dewey] wrote in The Public and its Problems: "Till the Great Society is converted in to a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community" (p. 142).

Time to again shine the light on the living a good life in a good society and the great community of humanity as we enter the age of globalization and a rising collective awareness of humanity, as well as ecological interdependence in the community of being.

Sandra LaFave — The Marxist Critique of Consumer Culture

Sunday evening reading. Particularly significant is section III, on "the good life," which analyzes Marx's debt to Aristotle on the good life.


The Marxist Critique of Consumer Culture
Sandra LaFave
 | West Valley College

Dirk Ehnts — The Good Economist

AEN: I take it that you don’t hold much confidence or faith in attempts at economic prediction through econometric techniques.

SHACKLE: No, frankly I don’t. I shall be shot out of the profession even further than I have been already; this will be the end of my career, if it hasn’t ended many years ago. However, I will be honest and say that I don’t think that economics can yield constants of the kind that physics does. Physicists have constants, e.g., the acceleration due to gravity, the table of atomic weights. I don’t believe that economics can have constants like that, You might make measurements which are all right for today. But, there are countless people whose interest it is to make nonsense of those measurements tomorrow. Well, now I have really been quite honest.

AEN: If one takes that position, then a question could be asked of you: Given what you have said, what should economists do? 

SHACKLE: I think they should give up giving advice, except on the most hesitant, the most broad grounds. I think they should introduce an ethical element, a more than ethical element. If a man is asked whether public expenditure should be cut or not, he perhaps should say, “Well, if we cut it, we shall cause a great deal of misery; if we don’t cut it, we don’t know what the consequences will be, but we can’t at least have this misery on our consciences”. This sort of argument is not an economic argument, it’s an argument with one’s conscience.

econoblog101
The Good Economist
Dirk Ehnts | Berlin School of Economics and Law

Ian Welsh — The Keys to Prosperity

I’ve mentioned before that I’m writing a book on how to create prosperity. Let’s run through the basics. 

First, you have to produce enough. Goods and services. Everything from food and shelter, to music and philosophy.
Second, because prosperity means widespread affluence, you have to take what you produce and get it to everyone or as many people as possible.

Third, you have to be sure you’re producing the right stuff – food that makes people healthy, philosophy that doesn’t turn people evil, housing that keeps people healthy and in good social contact with each other, and producing in a way which doesn’t destroy the bases of prosperity, whether that’s the soil, water and climate you need to grow food, or the ethics which make prosperity possible.

The principles behind this aren’t that difficult, really. Use the free market for what it’s good at (creating and distributing certain types of goods and services.) Discourage rent-seeking. Understand that how much money people get is largely unrelated to their contribution to society. Remove bottlenecks to growth. Don’t destroy your sinks (like carbon in the atmosphere), don’t overuse renewable resources, understand the obsolesence of non-renewable resources. Keep the rich poor, so they don’t buy the political system, keep influentials independent as much as possible, keep the interests of the powerful alligned with the mass of society. Don’t financialize.

Oh, to be sure, there are technical details, but the core is ethical. The people who make up society must want to do the right thing, must believe in a particular conception of kindness and fairness....

Ian Welsh
The Keys to Prosperity