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"The lesson of economics is clear. If we want to promote human flourishing, we need social institutions that foster the division of labor, capital formation, and wise entrepreneurship. The common condition that is necessary for all of the above is the institution of private property. The more the right to property is embraced and defended, the more empowered are people to participate in fulfilling the cultural mandate God gave our first parents in the beginning." (Source:   Institute of Faith, Work and Economics ) That line of thinking is misguided because it has not taken on board the fact that the "right to property" can be argued to be a man made one. Therefore very much a second best. A more serious point is that no one has a right to property as such because God owns everything. Though property rights have their benefit, it is also arguable that in a fallen world, pushing people to embrace "property rights" could simply promote idolatry. We need ...

"The lesson of economics is clear. If we want to promote human flourishing, we need social institutions that foster the division of labor, capital formation, and wise entrepreneurship. The common condition that is necessary for all of the above is the institution of private property. The more the right to property is embraced and defended, the more empowered are people to participate in fulfilling the cultural mandate God gave our first parents in the beginning." (Source:   Institute of Faith, Work and Economics ) That line of thinking is misguided because it has not taken on board the fact that the "right to property" ican be argued to be a man made one. Therefore very much a second best. A more serious point is that no one has a right to property as such because God owns everything. Though property rights have their benefit, it is also arguable that in a fallen world, pushing people to embrace "property rights" could simply promote idolatry. We need...

Will Hatton writing in the Guardian on the "collapse in shared culture" makes some interesting observations :    "....an all-encompassing big-tent culture to which we all belong and which has the power to stigmatise and make individuals shamed is fragmenting into mini subcultures, defining themselves by loyalty to their own and opposition and hatred of the other. Arsenal and Tottenham fans define themselves by mutual detestation; men define their masculinity by objectifying women. Generosity and respect for political opponents grows weaker......Parallel, and reinforcing this cultural fragmentation, is a social fragmentation: the ties that bind communities and neighbourhoods are fraying. Long hours and long commutes make civic and social engagement harder. Our crowded lives offer less chance for friendship, association and the creation of a social life that you would not want to put at risk by being stigmatised for bad behaviour. Together, this collapse in a shared ...

The desire for wealth does not need to be taught; it is an integral part of all human nature. Hence, when young men in the army attack cities and scale back walls, break through the enemy lines and drive back the foe … it is because they are spurred on by the prospect of rich reward... In like manner, when the women of Chao and the maidens of Cheng paint their faces and play upon the large lute, flutter their long sleeves and trip about in pointed slippers, invite with their eyes and beckon with their hearts, considering it no distance at all to travel a thousand miles to meet a patron, not caring whether he is old or young, it is because they are after riches … When officials in the government juggle with phrases and twist the letter of the law, carve fake seals and forge documents, heedless of the mutilating punishments of the knife and saw that await them if they are discovered, it is because they are drowned in bribes and gifts … Thus men apply all their knowledge and...

This is a rather late comment on an important book I read earlier in the year : ' How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life ' by the brothers Robert and Edward Skidelsky. I say late because there's a long gap between when I read it and now, so my thoughts may be loose in places. For the same reason, this is a comment rather than a review, though the difference is subjective.  The book is exactly as its title suggests. It is offered as a contribution to rethinking what we want out of life: what money is for and what is meant by ‘the good life’. To make their point, the authors reanimate certain philosophical and ethical ideas which they believe "have long been out of favour but which are by no means extinct".

Martin Parker has  a fascinating piece   where he explores what London's rising skyscrapers says about society. This quote is particularly interesting : Skyscrapers are terrifying and beautiful at the same time. They are both monuments to human ingenuity, and to massive inequality, as their occupants look down on the people living in cardboard on the city streets. The question they provoke is not really about boom or slump, but about the nature of an economic system which makes such projects possible.

Kelvin Albertson has an interesting article  where he argues that neoliberalism focus on self interest (expansion of economic freedoms) inevitably leads to increasing surveillance (reduction in social freedoms). In other words although society may be becoming economically freer it comes at the expense of less social freedoms. It turns out the free market actually imprisons : The need for self-interested but free individuals to be constantly regulating each other to promote social good explains the seeming paradox that, as the state withdraws from the economy in line with neoliberal theory,  its role in criminal justice expands . Where the actions of some have adverse social consequences, the state must attempt to disincentivise them through  regulation  and punishment. And this, of course, requires rigorous detection and monitoring.  

In 2003 Nigerian President Olusengun Obasanjo invited Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to return to Nigeria from the World Bank and become the country’s Finance Minister. Her primary task was to sort out Nigeria’s economic mess which had been inherited from previous successive military regimes. The country was practically on its knees after years of rampant inequality, pervasive corruption and power struggles at the top. What was previously a diversified economy had increasingly become a mono economy perpetually dependent on a poorly run oil sector. Economic growth was excessively volatile, with spending largely tracking changes in oil prices. The Obasanjo administration was saddled with inefficient state-owned enterprises crippled by rising debts and pension liabilities. Political patronage was rife, with over 5,000 boards’ seats in state enterprises maintained purely for political expedience. Nigeria was virtually bankrupt. Okonjo-Iweala’s Reforming the Unreformable is a narrative of how ...

Michael Sandel’s What Money Can't Buy : The Moral Limits of Markets aims to awaken the public to the increasingly perverse role prices play in our lives. Everything appears to be up for sale. We appear to have moved from having a market to being a market. This triumphal encroachment of the price mechanism in every facet of life has been defended by its proponents as necessary for our “social good”. Sandel believes it’s precisely the opposite. Far from being neutral, as usually assumed by economists, prices corrupt the good things we value and care about in life. Reliance on prices diminishes social value hence the urgent need for everyone to take a step back and decide the moral limits of markets. For in doing so we are ultimately defining what society we want to live in. According to Sandel, the increasing reliance on the price mechanism could be socially tolerated if it was a true measure of value. Unfortunately not only is it broadly accepted that prices can be a poor ...

International migration debate has risen on the global public agenda in the last few years. Sluggish global economic performance has given a platform for nationalistic forces to agitate for stronger limits on migration, largely fuelled by concerns that foreigners may take away local jobs and impose costs on public services with little benefit to domestic European economies. Such arguments, usually made without any empirical evidence, in practice have only served to highlight the inherent inconsistency in current migration policies being pursued by western governments. While most continue to preach global liberalisation of economies and poverty reduction, they erect borders that diminish competition and reduce labour choices available to the poor. Goldin, Cameron and Balarajan’s Exceptional People represents a challenge to this inconsistency by seeking to demonstrate that properly considered the historical, contemporary and future case for migration is strong.

The economics of underdevelopment is big business. Books increasingly litter our shelves advising donors and poor governments alike on the best way to address the blight of global poverty. It is usually the case that the more negative and radical the message, the more the book sells. In recent memory we have become accustomed to negative views of the current state of global development, perhaps best exemplified by such pejorative phrases as “bottom billion”, “global south”, “new age primitivity"  and, most recently ,“dead aid”. An underlying narrative in many of these books is that current development policies are not working and something more radical is needed. Some extreme voices have even urged aid freezes to break perpetual dependency on foreign aid. Charles Kenny’s Getting Better is a refreshing departure from the current pessimism and offers a more grounded perspective on global development. According to Kenny despite many negative assessments, the developing w...

It is usually the case that books on "distributive justice" either tend to be abstract yet detailed, or largely empirical but unsatisfactorily brief. Economic Justice in an Unfair World aims to narrow the divide by offering a model of international justice that is both theoretically credible and realistic enough to be applied by the undefined "international community". According to Kapstein, approaches to economic justice typically falls between two extremes that influence competing nations’ attitude towards international engagement. “Communitarians” approach international relations largely from a “national perspective”. Within this framework nations prioritise domestic social and economic arrangements, engaging the international community only in line with what is purely good domestically. “Cosmopolitans” adopt a “global citizens” approach, viewing economic justice as fundamentally being about individuals. This view has tended to dominate thinking among inter...

Nine big ideas from economics that can help you live as a good steward every day : 1. For everything you do, there is something you are choosing to leave undone . Attending one church means you cannot attend another one at the same time. Giving your money to the poor in one nation means that you will not be giving it to the poor in another. There are lots of good things we could be doing, but we cannot accomplish them all simultaneously. Choose carefully, and choose prayerfully. 2. The anticipated social benefit of any policy proposal must be seriously weighed against every likely social opportunity cost . Where either positive or negative externalities arise, carefully designed and implemented public policy has the potential to nudge suboptimal market outcomes toward more socially preferred ones. However, policy action should be undertaken only in instances where the anticipated social benefit exceeds the possible social opportunity cost. Careful and wise stewardship of our r...

Robert Skildesky has an interesting piece on the limits of using Gross Domestic Product (national income or output) as a measure of social wellbeing (or welfare). There has been a renewed push following the credit crisis for alternative measures to underpin policy direction of governments. For many years many governments have focused on increasing GDP but many a calling for a shift in think – wealth is proving not to be enough. Part of the problem is not only that money can’t buy happiness but also that how money is distributed affects many people’s happiness: Another finding has...started to influence the current debate on growth: poor people within a country are less happy than rich people. In other words, above a low level of sufficiency, peoples’ happiness levels are determined much less by their absolute income than by their income relative to some reference group. We constantly compare our lot with that of others, feeling either superior or inferior, whatever our income l...

A recent paper on the economics of new media flags an interesting moral assumption inbuilt in most market based relations. It has echoes of Michael Sandel's recent arguments on the moral limits of markets. At a superficial level, it is apparent that people act differently, and are expected to act differently, in the context of relationships mediated by money than in other contexts. Behaviour that would be regarded favourably in a non-monetary context is regarded as foolish or even reprehensible in a monetary context. One of the most important general differences relates to rationality and calculated reciprocity. In a non-market context, careful calculation of costs and benefits and an insistence on exact reciprocity is generally deprecated. By contrast, in market contexts, the first rule is never to give more than you get. Why is it more important to observe this rule in market contexts? One reason is that markets create opportunities for systematic arbitrage that do not ...

Economists suggest that the Catholic Church has been losing adherents not because people stopped believing in God but because membership became too cheap compared with evangelical Christianity, which demands a bigger investment in its churches from members and thus inspire more loyalty. From The Price of Everything by Eduardo Porter. Actually this explanation is not necessarily 'rational' because if the investment upfront is sunk it is not obvious why it should have a bearing on church attendance, unless the expected return is also high. Explaining it purely on the cost side suggests some irrationality on the part of the attendants. One possibility of course is that "price of attendance" may act as a screening out device (i.e. evangelical churches only getting committed people) but that would only explain why evangelical churches may be stable not necessarily increase over time! 

Smith did manage to do in the Wealth of Nations, and for the first time, was to examine in a systematic way what much of the earlier literature of political economy had approached in a piecemeal manner-as a set of individual, largely disparate or unconnected economic phenomena and problems. From After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy (Princeton Univerity Press, 2009)   by Murray Milgate and Shannon C. Stimson.