This paper outlines the “fundamental myth” about the structure of property rights in a capitalist economy, namely the idea that being the residual claimant in a productive opportunity is part of a bundle of property rights known as the “ownership of the firm.” Residual claimancy is contractually determined so there is no such “ownership.” The fundamental myth exposes a basic fallacy in capital theory that has hitherto escaped attention in the capital theory debates. (Reprint from: Review of Radical Political Economics, Winter 2007)
Translatio versus Concessio: Retrieving the debate about contracts of alienation with an application to today’s employment contract
December 10, 2012 by
Liberal thought is based on the fundamental question of consent versus coercion. The autocracies and slavery systems of the past were based on coercion whereas today’s democracy in the political sphere and employment system in the economy are based on consent. This paper retrieves an almost forgotten contractarian tradition, dating from at least the Middle Ages, that based political autocracy and economic slavery on explicit or implicit voluntary contracts. Hence the democratic and antislavery movements had to hammer out arguments not simply in favor of consent and against coercion, but arguments based on the distinction between contracts to alienate (translatio) sovereignty versus contracts to only delegate (concessio) self-governance rights.
Should Development Agencies Have Official Views?
December 10, 2012 by
The major development agencies have ex cathedra “Official Views” (with varying degrees of explicitness) on the complex and controversial questions of development. At the same time, knowledge is now more than ever recognized as key to development—in the idea of a “knowledge bank” or knowledge-based development assistance. I argue that these two practices are in direct conflict—much as making Lysenko’s views as “Official Soviet Science” was in conflict with the progress of the science of genetics in the Soviet Union. When an agency attaches its “brand name” to certain Official Views, then it is very difficult for the agency to also be a learning organization or to foster genuine learning in the clients.
Helping People Help Themselves: Towards a Theory of Autonomy-Compatible Help
December 10, 2012 by
This is a presis of my book Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. (U. of Michigan Press, 2005) I explore several principles or themes of a theory of autonomy-compatible assistance and show how these themes arise in the work of various authors in rather different fields.
Jane Jacobs on the Nature of Development
December 10, 2012 by
Jane Jacobs is best known as a writer about cities and as a vigorous critic of urban planning. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that she should be read as a writer on economic development who focuses on cities as the principal sites of development. The recently upsurge of interest in migration policies and development is taken as the entry point into her work, e.g., to explain why “poverty reduction” through remittances will tend to be nondevelopmental. Her ecologically-inspired “tangled bank” conception of development as growth through differentiation is used to elucidate a number of developmental issues. It also shows how the “spin-off conundrum” of multiproduct diversification is important to industrial development policies. Several examples are outlined of how that problem has been approached.
Review of Thomas Dichter’s “Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World has Failed”
December 10, 2012 by
Development in Practice. August 2003.
Rethinking Development Assistance: An Approach Based on Autonomy-Respecting Assistance
December 10, 2012 by
Today, development agencies are actively rethinking the effectiveness of development assistance. There have been many small or local successes but the goal of sustainable scaling-up has been more illusive. What are the linkages that can be changed by policy-makers that will help scale up micro-successes to have an impact at the macro level? This paper argues that autonomy-respecting assistance both in the cognitive and volitional dimensions is the sort of macro-micro development linkage that will best support not only genuine reforms but the scaling up of those reforms.
The Indirect Approach
December 10, 2012 by
Aid and conditionalities are the “carrots and sticks” of the conventional direct approach to fostering economic development. The economic theory of agency is the most sophisticated theoretical treatment of the direct carrots and sticks approach to influencing human behavior. In view of the outcomes of the conventional approach, it might be worthwhile to explore alternative indirect approaches that focus on enabling clients to act more autonomously rather than overriding or undercutting the clients’ actions (or “agents’ behavior”) with improved “carrots and sticks.” Are there inherent limitations on the direct approach that will not be solved with better crafted “agency contracts” or closer monitoring of the agents? This paper traces the intellectual history of indirect approaches from Socrates to modern thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Gandhi, and McGregor. One of themes is that constructivist and active learning pedagogies constitute an indirect approach wherein the teacher does not directly transmit knowledge to the learner through training and instruction. These pedagogies translated into social and economic development viewed as learning-writ-large form the basis for an alternative indirect approach to fostering development.
Goodwill: Not a Present Property Right
December 9, 2012 by
This is a small article in a Dutch finance and accounting journal that makes a big point.
The Democratic Firm: An Argument based on Ordinary Jurisprudence
December 9, 2012 by
This is an article in the Journal of Business Ethics treating a more fundamental topic than the usual fare on business ethics.