Financial bubbles and their magic: asset price as a heroic journey in the financial markets

Author(s): Alexandru Bălăşescu,Jain Apurv / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

Why do financial crises appear unprecedented in spite of being a rather regular occurrence across countries and time? There are many answers from various schools of finance and economics, including Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis in which systemic stability endogenously results in instability. We explore the inclusion of observed human behavior in an endogenous framework by engaging with anthropological concepts such as myth, ritual and magic that structure and explain our behaviour, and by extending the concept of agency from human to non-human. We also point to the possibility of better understanding our position in the mythological cycle using the new social media data. The aim of the article is to offer a holistic framework of interpretation of causes and circumstances of economic crises, using the tools of economy, semiotics, and economic anthropology that would account for both the universality of these crises and for their particular occurrences that always seem unique.

Negative and positive liberty and the freedom to choose in Isaiah Berlin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Author(s): Stefan Collignon / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

Berlin has made the famous distinction between negative and positive liberty. For many liberals, negative liberty is modern individual liberty manifested in markets, while interference by the State is a form of positive liberty. Berlin was also repelled by Rousseau’s concept of the general will, which he considered as a form of collectivist holism. The paper argues that this philosophy is a mistaken interpretation of Berlin’s two concepts of liberty and of Rousseau’s general will. In a simple model of individual and collective choice under conditions of bounded rationality, it is shown that positive and negative liberty are interdependent. The collective choices made under positive liberty can be modeled as the stochastic version of Rousseau’s general will, provided that liberal democracy enables the conditions of free public deliberation. In that case, the individual freedom cherished by Berlin is compatible with positive liberty.

Classical economics must not become history

Author(s): Ion Pohoaţă,Delia-Elena Diaconaşu,Vladimir-Mihai Crupenschi / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

This paper is meant as a clear statement that things can no longer continue the way they have gone so far. If analyzed critically, the classical heritage, enshrined in fundamental rules and theories, the result of a massive abstraction effort, has not always been consolidated and developed properly in modern times. Therefore, compared to other sciences, economics has been losing ground, exactly where it should have been reinforced by those who serve it –, the economists. Its main core, the classical heritage, has been enriched, but the additions, knowingly or not, have in fact weakened and transformed it into a loose collection of feeble causalities and verbosity. It is imperative that such deviations be stopped. We suggest a two-step solution: a) an inventory of the elements that define the hard core of Economics; b) a review of the circumstances that show what happened with said hard core. The conclusions point to a necessary return to classical ideas.

Ecce Homo-Economicus? The Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hide syndrome of the economic man in the context of natural resources scarcity and environmental externalities

Author(s): Panos Kalimeris / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

Indeed, the artificial entity ‘Homo-Economicus’ plays a central role in modern neoclassical economic theory. Maybe an illegitimate child of markets’ self-regulation doctrine and the emerging rationalism - professed by the post-modern realms of neoliberalism and the ongoing globalization process - this theoretical abstraction is promoted as a potential prototype of human behavior. It is firmly believed, that this individualistic, self-motivated, and above all, perfectly informed ‘entity’ could, theoretically, lead the economic system into profound balance between supply and demand, consumption and production, utility maximization, and so on. The present paper consists of a criticism to the mainstream prototype of Homo-Economicus, with further extensions to the neoclassical paradigm. Placing this criticism in the context of ecological economics, the paper argues that the notorious rationality of Homo-Economicus seems to be vanished in the deadlock of a futile race towards non-renewable natural resources depletion and increasing environmental externalities. Finally, a brief review of alternative theoretical frameworks and evidence from institutional and behavioral economics, delineates an emerging pressing request for a paradigm change.

Editorial

Author(s): Valentin Cojanu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Collective beliefs and horizontal interactions between groups: the case of political parties

Author(s): Olivier Ouzilou / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Groups matter in our ordinary folk psychology because a part of our social interactions is done with collective entities. In our everyday life, we indeed sometimes ascribe mental states to social groups as a whole or to individuals as members of groups in order to understand and predict their behavior. The aim of this paper is to explore this aspect of social interactions by focusing on the concept of ‘collective belief’ in a non-summative sense and, more precisely, on collective belief of a specific kind of group: the political party. How can the concept of ‘collective belief’ help to understand the interactions which involve these kinds of collective entities? After providing an epistemic description of political parties, this paper focuses on the collective belief in a non-summative sense. As Gilbert says, a group believes that p, if its members are jointly committed to believe that p as a body. It is argued, with the help of an example from the political history of France, that this view can enable us to understand the interaction between political parties. More precisely, it can help clarify the way in which a political party use the rational constraints on the party as a whole and/or the social and epistemic constraints on the behavior of the group's members in order to destabilize or weaken other political parties.

Work, recognition and subjectivization: some remarks about the modernity of Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel

Author(s): Richard Sobel / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

From the analytical point of view of Hegel's philosophical anthropology, in Kojève's interpretation, work is an existential structure through which the dual process of subjectification and socialization unfolds. For Hegel, however, this process is not taken for granted: its possibility is understood in terms of the culmination of man's conquest of humanity, taking as a point of departure the relation of mastery to servitude and the undertaking to transform this relation precisely from within the perspective of servitude. The goal of this article is to reconstruct the conceptual framework of this philosophical moment, to our mind an indispensible precondition for the apperception of our modern societies' functioning at the most fundamental level, to the extent that they consider themselves to be ‘work based societies.’

Expiration of private property rights: a note

Author(s): Walter E. Block / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

According to libertarian law, upon what occasions may a person’s private property rights in goods, commodities, in himself, be alienated from him? The present paper is an attempt to wrestle with this question. We consider abandonment, punishment, salvage, misplacement, liberation of property.

Ups’ and ‘downs’ in metaphor use: the case of increase / decrease metaphors in Spanish economic discourse

Author(s): Anca Pecican / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

The purpose of the present article is to analyze the use of evaluative metaphors in two economic discourse genres displaying different degrees of specialization: business media and the central bank report. The article points out the differences in terms of metaphor use between the two types of discourses ranging from lexical choices to the way evaluation is assumed. Metaphor use is also a result of specific textual goals. The research is intended to provide a detailed insight into matters related to hidden subjective content present in metaphors. The extended use of the lexical items in focus both in the media as well as in specialized discourse tends to generate readers’ over familiarization with them and consequently the possibility of value neutralization. That is why people are usually not aware of the opinion forming effects metaphors have in communication.

A review of the Granger-causality fallacy

Author(s): Mariusz Maziarz / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Methods used to infer causal relations from data rather than knowledge of mechanisms are most helpful and exploited only if the theoretical background is insufficient or experimentation impossible. The review of literature shows that when an investigator has no prior knowledge of the researched phenomenon, no result of the Granger-causality test has any epistemic utility due to different possible interpretations. (1) Rejecting the null in one of the tests can be interpreted as either a true causal relation, opposite direction of the true causation, instant causality, time series cointegration, not frequent enough sampling, etc. (2) Bi-directional Granger causality can be read either as instant causality or common cause fallacy. (3) Non-rejection of both nulls possibly means either indirect or nonlinear causality, or no causal relation.

A brief history of international trade thought: From pre-doctrinal contributions to the 21st century heterodox international economics

Author(s): Carmen Elena Dorobăţ / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

The present paper outlines the development of international trade thought, from the pre-doctrinal contributions of Greek philosophers and scholastic theologians, through the theories of the first schools of economic thought, and up to modern and contemporary trade theories. I follow filiations of ideas in a chronological order, and show how theoretical investigation into the causes and effects of international trade—and the rationale for government intervention—has evolved over the last two centuries.

Review of Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, New York, Verso, 1st edition, 2013, ISBN: 978-1-781-68079-7, 384 pages

Author(s): Şerban Brebenel / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Review of Abdul Azim Islahi, History of Islamic Economic Thought: Contributions of Muslim Scholars to Economic Thought and Analysis, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham (UK), hb, 2014, ISBN 9781784711375, viii+125 page

Author(s): Valentin Cojanu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Review of Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald, Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development and Social Progress, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014, hb, 34.95$, 680 pp., ISBN 978-0-231-15214-3

Author(s): Alina Toarna / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2014

Unusual Humean issues in materialistic political economy

Author(s): Andrea Micocci / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

Capitalism as we know it presents typical dialectical features that isolate it from nature, in which real oppositions make evolution revolutionary: A dialectical metaphysics replaces the free flow of events allowing capitalist relationships but preventing the practice of materialism. Some radically sceptical issues in Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and A Treatise of Human Nature come useful here. A materialistic approach with complete (i.e., non-dialectical) ruptures in fact dovetails with Hume’s argument on the unpredictability of nature and the predictability of human social activities. As a consequence, a thus renewed materialistic political economy concerned with the concrete must work out its own categories dynamically, to discard them once they have been proved metaphysical.

Growth theory after Keynes, part II: 75 years of obstruction by the mainstream economics culture

Author(s): Hendrik Van den Berg / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

Part I of this essay explained the sequence of events that enabled the neoclassical paradigm to regain its dominant position in mainstream economics following serious challenges by ‘Keynesian’ economists. This second essay seeks to answer the question of why the economics profession was so willing to sustain the neoclassical paradigm in the face of the reality-based challenges by ‘Keynesian’ economists like Harrod and Domar. The answer is sought in the culture of economics, the history of science in general, and the study of power in the field of political economy. This article draws heavily on the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who divides culture into habitus (procedures and dispositions) and doxa (more abstract beliefs and philosophies), in order to provide insight into how culture affects economic thinking. Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence helps to explain how a narrower neoclassical growth model was enthusiastically accepted as a replacement for the ‘Keynesian’ Harrod-Domar growth model. Financial and business interests clearly understood the power of culture and they used their accumulated wealth to support the neoliberal doxa and neoclassical habitus that would induce economists to willingly provide intellectual cover for policies that benefitted those financial and business interests. We conclude with a discussion on how the history of thought on economic development might have evolved if the Keynesian paradigm, and its dynamic Harrod-Domar model, had prevailed.

Behavioural controversy concerning homo economicus: a Humean perspective

Author(s): Khandakar Elahi / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

In his monumental masterpiece, A Treatise on Human Nature, which explains the methodology of human reasoning concerning matters of fact and describes the roles that passions and morals play in it, Hume arrives at an enormously interesting maxim: An academic controversy cannot continue for long unless the disputants assign different meanings to the major terms employed in the debate. This theory has been applied in this paper to examine the behavioural criticisms about Homo Economicus (HE), the pivotal perception in the neoclassical microeconomic model.To achieve this objective, the paper discusses the origin and evolution of the concept, reviews behavioural criticisms, summarises the main tenets of Hume’s philosophy of human knowledge and finally examines the behavioural opinions from Hume’s perspective. The paper concludes that Hume’s theory convincingly explains the reason why the HE controversy is continuing for over half century- a fact that both the mainstream and behavioural economists are ignoring

Review of Cheryle Desha and Karlso ‘Charlie’ Hargroves, Higher Education and Sustainable Development: A model for curriculum renewal, London: Routledge, 2014, 268 pp., hb, $180.00, 9781844078592, pb, $49.95, ISBN 9781844078608

Author(s): R. Edward Di Collalto / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

Review of Ole Bjerg, Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism, London: Verso, 2014, 256 pp., pb, £19.99, ISBN 9781781682654

Author(s): Georgios Papadopoulos / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014

Review of David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, New York, Basic Books, 2013, hb, 240 pp., $26.99, ISBN 9780465063987

Author(s): Jorge Tamames / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2014