Archive for October, 2007
What Is a Capability and What Does It Matter?
| David Hoopes |
I am often surprised when I present or submit papers because audience members and reviewers find my construct definitions problematic. Often, people find my definitions are too narrow. Also, sometimes others don’t find the scholars whose work I would like to develop merit the attention I give them. This attention sometimes comes in the form of using their definition. Case in point: Sid Winter and capabilities. In a couple of papers I’m working on my co-authors and I have based our definition of capabilities on one Sid Winter has used in an SMJ paper and a book he edited. Tammy Madsen and I have stuck with Sid’s definition. Steve Postrel and I have taken Sid’s definition and made it more specific to our work. Some readers and listeners have had a hard time with this (and given me a hard time). Now, there’s one “school,” that generally does not like definitions or theoretical constructs to be very narrow. Thus, “can’t X, Y, or Z also be a capability?” “Well, it could be. Just not in this paper.” “Aren’t capabilities just resources?” “Sure. So and So big shot thinks so. We just think of resource and capabilities as being two different things.” Another “school” doesn’t understand why we should care about Sid’s opinion. “Shouldn’t you use Other Big Shot’s definition?” “Well, I don’t really understand her definition. Sid has been doing this capability thing for a while.” “Isn’t it the same as Selznick?” “I don’t think so. Sid doesn’t think so” (see Intro to edited volume with Dosi).
I don’t mind that people prefer other definitions. Yet, I am surprised by how agitated people get. I get agitated by definitions when 1) There aren’t any; 2) I don’t understand what the author/presenter is saying; 3) The definition includes everything and the kitchen sink (presumably because that’s the way life is, “complex”).
So, I stumble along with my narrow definitions and hope not to get yelled at too much.
Mises and Mises (and Knight and Hoppe) on Probability
| Nicolai Foss |
O&M has featured a number of posts on uncertainty as a phenomenon that, in some sense, goes beyond risk. Contributors to these kind of discussions often delight in employing notions such as “Knightian uncertainty,” “genuine, real, true . . . uncertainty,” “the unlistability problem,” “surprise functions,” etc., and they debate whether so-called Knightian uncertainty really is inconsistent with a Bayesian perspective, whether Shackle’s notion of uncertainty is in some sense deeper than Knight’s, etc.
Much of the debate is, if perhaps not a quagmire, then certainly an area where conceptual clarification and some serious formal work would seem to be much needed (with respect to the latter, see this). Conceptual clarification may occasionally involve going back to important figures in the debates and consider what they (really) said. (more…)
Budapest: The Golden Years
| Peter Klein |
My paternal grandparents were Hungarian émigrés so I tend to take an interest in all things Magyar. I was pleased to hear (from Marshall Jevons) about “Budapest: The Golden Years,” a panel discussion at this year’s Neumann Memorial Lectures at Princeton. “The panel will use their familiarity with the life, times, and person of John von Neumann to explore the circumstances of his education and upbringing, as well as those of the many other creative and productive mathematicians and scientists from that time and place.” The discussion revolves around Tibor Frank’s paper on Hungarian exiles, “The Social Construction of Hungarian Genius, 1867–1930,” exploring the background of famous twentieth-century Hungarian scientists like von Neumann, Edward Teller, and Leo Szilard, along with Karl and Michael Polanyi and many others.
Hungary has produced some decent economists too: John Harsányi and Janos Kornai come to mind. George Stigler was half Hungarian, and both of Milton Friedman’s parents were born in Carpatho-Ruthenia, then part of Hungary (now in Ukraine).
Here’s a page celebrating Hungarian Nobel Laureates. Here are some von Neumann jokes. Here is Oskar Morgenstern’s account of his collaboration with von Neumann (but see this third-party account which gives Morgenstern a smaller role).
Spam Filtering and Academic Research
| Peter Klein |
You may or may not like the discussion of sexual identity spawned by Nicolai’s post, but our spam filter definitely does not like it. Quite a few of the comments on that thread have been recovered from the spam queue; presumably anything with the word “sex” or its derivatives is per se suspicious. (If you posted a serious comment and it didn’t appear, let me know; it may be stuck in the queue.)
So I’m wondering: What if someone is doing legitimate academic research on erectile dysfunction, refinancing, lottery tickets, or the inheritance practices of Nigerian dictators? How do such people communicate their research results to colleagues? How do they send emails to grant agencies, conference organizers, and journal editors? “Dear Bob: Here is the latest draft of my paper on Ci@li$.” Perhaps such papers deserve extra credit for degree of difficulty.
Institutions: It’s All Greek to Me
| Peter Klein |
The relationship between formal institutions (e.g., the legal environment) and informal rules (norms, culture, social conventions) is one of the least-well understood areas of the New Institutional Economics. Do norms create “order without law,” to borrow Robert Ellickson’s phrase, or should we understand private arrangements and law as complements, rather than substitutes (Cooter, Marks, and Mnookin, 1982)?
To understand all this, suggest Anastassios Karayiannis and Aristides Hatzis, we should turn to the ancient Greeks. Karayiannis and Hatzis’s paper, “Morality, Social Norms and Rule of Law as Transaction Cost-Saving Devices: The Case of Ancient Athens,” argues for a close relationship between Athenian legal institutions and supporting social norms:
Athenians developed a highly sophisticated legal framework for the protection of private property, the enforcement of contracts and the efficient resolution of disputes. Such an institutional framework functioned effectively, cultivating trust and protecting the security of transactions. This entire system however was based on social norms such as reciprocity, the value of reputation and business ethics. Conformity to social norms as well as moral behavior was fostered by social-sanction mechanisms (such as stigma) and moral education. The Athenian example is a further proof of the importance of morality and social norms as transaction cost-saving devices even in quite sophisticated legal systems. Their absence or decline leads inevitably to the need for more regulation, clear-cut rules, less judicial discretionary power and more litigation.
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