(Download) "Robust Political Economy and the Question of Motivations (Report)" by The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details

Title: Robust Political Economy and the Question of Motivations (Report)
Author : The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics
Release Date : January 22, 2011
Genre: Finance,Books,Business & Personal Finance,
Pages : * pages
Size : 252 KB

Description

Institutional robustness is the ability of a given system of social organization to stand up to the test of the so-called "hard cases," i.e., hypothetical scenarios under which the ideal assumptions concerning, e.g., information and motivation possessed by the members of a given society are relaxed (Boettke and Leeson, 2004; Leeson and Subrick, 2006). Drawing on the above notion and the attendant framework of testing various forms of political economy against scenarios involving less-than-optimal conditions, the aforesaid authors argue that (classical) liberalism is always more robust than socialism, even if the former prevails in a community populated by agents that are selfish and ignorant, while the latter prevails in a community controlled by benevolent and wise planners. I am in substantial agreement with that part of the abovementioned argument which focuses on the inability of the socialist commonwealth to allocate resources rationally due to the nonexistence of a genuine price system, generated by the interplay of the subjective valuations of the totality of market participants (Mises, 1920, 1966). The only small reservation I might have in this context is that Ludwig von Mises is probably even more of a practitioner of the "robustness approach" than the aforementioned authors suggest--it seems to me that he not so much "grants the socialists part of the solution to the information problem" (Boettke and Leeson, 2004, p. 108), as grants them total solution to this problem. He allows them to know everything about consumer valuations (and their future shape) as well as about the available supply of capital goods and technological knowledge (Mises, 1920, pp. 25-26). Thus, their information is essentially complete.