Understanding the culture of markets

By -
I'm reviewing the book by Virgil Storr with the above title And so, as usual, I'll be blogging some remarks upon it as I go along.

The first thing I wish to note is that Storr has set himself an interesting challenge. On the one hand, he wants to take culture into account in a more robust fashion than current economics tends to do. He must do more than simply treat culture as another variable in a consumption or production function, because if he does not the reaction will be "Well, yes, we already do that."

On the other hand, by doing more with culture, he risks leaving the field of economics altogether and beginning to write what Eric Voeglin would call "philosophical anthropology." In fact, as related in the introduction, this is exactly what Israel Kirzner wrote to Storr about his work: Very good and interesting work, but it's just not economics.

As I am only in chapter 1 at present I don't yet know if Storr succeeds in steering his ship between this Scylla and that Charybdis. I will report back as I read more.

Comments

  1. Scott3:37 PM

    I thought Thorstein Veblen already wrote that book. It was called The Theory of Business Enterprise.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more