Archive for 3 April 2007
My Redesigned Site
| Nicolai Foss |
Check it out. I have dropped the quasi-blog feature of the old version (I hadn’t maintained it for almost a year anyway), so now I can concentrate on O&M and this one. I will soon upload talks and work in progress.
More on Socialist Calculation
| Nicolai Foss |
In an excellent book review of GC Archibald’s Information, Incentives and the Economics of Control, Tyler Cowen raised a number of neglected points concerning the socialist calculation debate. (The review is published in the apparently now closed Journal of International and Comparative Economics 5: 243-249 (1995) and unfortunately isn’t online).
Cowen argued out that the victors in the socialist calculation debate “… have shied away from the hard questions,” and that it is necessary to “push the boundaries of the calculation argument.” For example, what if a dictator who has read Mises instructed his managers to compete as in a regular market economy (i.e., not as in an Oskar Lange-economy), with the dictator being the residual claimant monitor? Would that work? It might not — but that would primarily be because of excessive monitoring costs.
Cowen also indirectly questions the Misesian emphasis on calculating prices. Experience shows that socialist managers systematically set prices too low (because they can gain from creating excess demand, while they cannot gain from setting the right prices). But this would seem to presuppose that socialist “managers are in fact very good at calculating the proper price.” In other words, there is really no “calculational chaos,” as predicted by Mises.
Pomo Periscope XI: Clive James on Sartre
| Peter Klein |
Clive James on Jean-Paul Sartre, from Slate’s series of excerpts from James’s book Cultural Amnesia.
Skeptics might say that a knack for making duplicity look profound was inherent in Sartre’s style of argument. Students who tackle his creative prose in the novel sequence The Road to Freedom or the play Kean (his most convincing illustration of existentialism as a living philosophy) will find clear moments of narrative, but all clarity evaporates when it comes to the discursive prose of his avowedly philosophical works. But it should be said in fairnesss that even English philosopher Roger Scruton, otherwise a severe critic of Sartre, finds Sartre’s keystone work Being and Nothingness a substantial work; and Jean-François Revel, who took Sartre’s political philosophy apart brick by brick, still admired him as a philosopher who earned his own credentials, without depending on the university system for his prestige. But those of us unfettered by being either professional philosophers or patriotic Frenchmen can surely suggest that even Sartre’s first and most famous treatise shows all the signs of his later mummery. Where Sartre got it from is a mystery begging to be explained. It could have had something to do with his prewar period in Berlin, and especially with the influence of his admired Heidegger. In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.
Sartre’s admiration for Communist regimes, even after their atrocities were laid bare, is also emphasized. And there’s this: “After Camus died prematurely in a car crash, Sartre’s gauchiste vision was the style setter of French political thought, founding an orthodoxy that still saturates French intellectual life today and, to a certain extent, continues to set a standard of engagement for intellectual life all over the world.” (HT: Right Reason)
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