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Tendenze recenti del pensiero economico italiano
No full textAnalisi dei nessi tra teoria e politica economica dal dopoguerra ad oggi
The Political Economy of Civil Society
Get PDFThe dichotomy between intended and unintended outcomes of individual and collective action is central to political economy. It concerns the relationship of markets and states and their link to the constitution of society. As such, this dichotomy points to the patterns of connectivity that provide the social embedding of markets and states. The present paper argues that civil society is best understood as the principal locus of connectivity in which markets and states operate. Civil society so configured is neither separate from the body politic and commercial society nor subordinate to them but instead constitutes the primary objective structure of the social domain. It embeds the causal arrangements that determine the crisscrossing of both intended and unintended outcomes in specific contexts.
Within the social domain, dispositions of the means-end type interact with non-instrumental dispositions. One important implication is that civil society is compatible with a range of different political economies and specific socio-economic arrangements. Based on a typology of three distinct paradigms of civil society, we argue that the proximity paradigm is conducive to the discovery of political economies that foster greater openness and specificity compared with the political and the economic paradigm.
This paper suggests that the theory of civil society in general and the proximity paradigm in particular are indispensable heuristic tools to identity the unrealized capacities inherent in any given social configuration. A proximity heuristic is applied to the discussion of credit arrangements and policy. We conclude that a hierarchy of policy principles is necessary to preserve both the primacy of social connectivity over means-end relationships and also the need for context-specific arrangements and policy options
Coordination, Context and Patterns of Reasoning
No full textThe paper develops a theory of partial similarity and outlines on that basis a new conceptual framework for the analysis of social distance and coordination. In particular, it is argued that the individual filtering of information may be significantly different from one subject (or social group) to another, so that the likelihood of social congruence is enhanced by individuals’ ability to spot features of partial similarity across a variety of contexts. (A social context is informally described as the set of conditions under which any specific co-ordination pattern, or set of coordination
patterns, is feasible.) A remarkable consequence of this shift of
emphasis to co-ordination contexts is that, in a social universe characterized by a sufficient degree of internal differentiation, limited rationality makes congruence more likely. A necessary condition for that is that individuals should be skilled social actors, so as to be able to identify similar attributes across a large number of individual (or social) types. This suggests that social equilibrium may be the unintended outcome of multiple cases of ‘niche co-ordination’. In this case, however, the different niches
should belong to a social continuum in which individuals (or groups) share certain features with adjacent individuals (or groups) though by no means with all agents in the same social set. Social congruence may be differently construed depending upon the rationality framework in which interaction takes place. A cognitive setting characterized by the ability to detect unusual
connections in a diverse social universe is one in which rationality is
local and practical rather than ‘universal’. In this case, multiple foci breed distinct perspectives from which co-ordination may be sought. Circumscribed rationalitys suggests inferential diversity. The latter expresses itself by means of manifold attitudes to similarity and conceptual association. Indirect social knowledge may be derived from direct experiences as a result of lateral exploration
(exploration within a continuum of partial similarities). And this
process normally follows a different route depending upon the specific context in which each individual elaborates her (his) own cognitive endowment.
This approach makes congruence an unintended outcome of social
diversity, provided the latter follows the pattern of partial similarity and limited (local) difference described above
Causal Medical Reasoning. Therapies and Pre-emption
No full textThis paper tackles some very specific aspects of the debate on causation, no doubt one of the most fertile and diversified discussions in contemporary philosophy of science. After sketchily recalling the main features of the counterfactual approach, I focus on the notion of pre-emption and its implications. The paper aims to show how such a notion can help us grasp some aspects of causal medical reasoning as implemented in certain therapeutic situations
Capital Structure and Economic Transition
No full textThis paper discusses the general theory of capital structure by distinguishing between technological constraints and behavioural (or institutional) conditions. In particular, the paper examines the relationship between length of time period and capital structure, and considers the relationship between complementarities, bottlenecks and constrained transitions. The Hicksian prototype of the analysis of constrained transitions is compared with alternative approaches to traverse theory , and in particuloar with Lowe's and Quadrio Curzio's theoretical schemes
A critical evaluation of comparative probability
No full textAbstract: It seems that from an epistemological point of view comparative probability has many advantages with respect to a probability measure. It is more reasonable as an evaluation of degrees of rational beliefs. It allows the formulation of a comparative indifference principle free from well known paradoxes. Moreover it makes it possible to weaken the principal principle, so that it becomes more reasonable. But the logical systems of comparative probability do not admit an adequate probability updating, which on the contrary is possible for a probability measure. Therefore we are faced with a true epistemological dilemma between comparative and quantitative probability
Sapere economico e metodo scientifico nell’Illuminismo lombardo : note da "Il Caffè"
Get PDFEconomic knowledge and scientific method in the lombard enlightenment. Notes from «Il caffè». The connections, emerging between the 16th and the 18th century, between the evolution of economic knowledge and the rise of the scientific method, are important research topics for historians of economic ideas. However, further research on the application of the scientific method is still needed, especially when we come to the analysis of how economic principles took shape in Lombardy during the Enlightenment. The same need for further research concerns the debates on economic policy during the Age of Reforms in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This is even more necessary for Milanese Enlightenment scholars, who have been relatively neglected in comparison to the contemporary Neapolitan writers. A first aspect, enphasized in this paper, is the admiration expressed by the Lombard authors toward achievements coming from elsewhere, and particularly from outside Italy. Reading “Il Caffè”, together with the works and correspondence of Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, Paolo Frisi and many other scholars, gives immediate and clear evidence of the Lombard attraction for the scientific tradition in mathematics, physics, astronomy, and, more generally, for the western tradition of epistemology and philosophy of science rooted in the works of Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Petty, Harvey and others. However, admiration and attraction never boil down to a passive acceptance of ready-made recipes, nor do they lead to mechanistic interpretations of the working of social and economic systems. It must be said that one of the original traits of the Lombard contribution during the enlightenment is the inclination to draw the appropriate epistemic distinction between the natural sciences on one side and the social and political sciences on the other side. The Lombard writers were precocious in keeping aloof from any acritical scientistic drift
Traverse, division of labour and emerging structures
No full textEconomic development is basically an evolutionary process of structural transformation. Observing an economy that is yet not developed, it is seen that the depth of the production process is shallow, the final product being mainly the result of direct labour. As development unfolds, the economy is subject to deepening by the application of productive capital: it becomes more mechanised as a result of innovation and technical progress. Hicks and other authors have investigated the transition when a change in techniques occurs or when the economy is involved in the transformation of structural characteristics highlighting the trade-off's and social costs implied by the traverse as a consequence of the economy's inherent rigidities. Yet these models are not sufficiently general since they dodge the question of simultaneity of the production process. To deal with these issues, a Sraffa-Von Neuman model can be used highlighting the simultaneity of production processes but retaining the crucial features of neo-Austrian ones. It can be shown that technical progress subjects changing economies to continuous traverse causing increasing complexity: division of labour is then the analytically appropriate answer. Section one is the introduction. Section two sets out Hicks' main analytical framework. Section three is devoted to an analysis of how vertically integrated production undergoes traverse and lengthens . Section four proposes a model of diffusion of technological paradigms as a process of local search on random landscapes from which division of labour emerges. Section five draws the conclusions
Moral Good and Righ Conduct: A General Theory of Welfare under Fundamental Uncertainty
No full textThis essay deals with social or moral competitive systems, and aims to reply to the following question: From the point of view of rationality which characteristics a General Theory of Welfare (GTW) must have? Welfare economics is composed by a certain number of theories that we distinguish according to the moral value on which they are based and the right conduct they suggest. As regards moral value, two conceptions exist which justify two different models of welfare economics: the ethics of motives which makes reference to subjective values and the ethics of ends which also admits objective values. As regards right conduct, Bayesian reductionism and rational dualism are two different ways of considering uncertainty about economic phenomena. Bayesian reductionism assumes that agents are always able to establish a numerical probability and only admits the maximisation procedure, while rational dualism also admits non-measurable probabilities and procedures other than the maximisation. Since a rational choice between competitive moral systems cannot be made, this awareness lead us to think in terms of a GTW. From the point of view of moral values, a GTW must admit all the possible values in which a society can believe; while from the point of view of instrumental rationality, it must not only admit situations where decision-makers have all the information and computing capabilities for applying the maximisation procedure, but also situations where they do not have adequate information and behave in condition of true uncertainty
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