There are such strong debates about evaluations in the field of economic development that it sometimes seems like a civil war. I would like to suggest that there is a rather different way to approach this problem that renders the debate about evaluation rather secondary and ill-posed. The real alternative to some imagined “scientific evaluations” to foster social learning is peer-to-peer networks of the doers facing similar problems and searching for solutions.
The fatal flaw in finance theory: Capitalizing “goodwill”
February 5, 2010 by
The fatal flaw at the root of today’s post is really what might be called “the fundamental myth” about the current property system, namely that the market-contractual role of being the residual claimant in a productive opportunity is treated as a “property right” that is currently owned by some legal party (e.g., the corporation having the contractual role) and that may be bought and sold as well as capitalized into the party’s current valuation.
Development or just poverty reduction?
February 3, 2010 by
Many of the debates about foreign aid and development assistance seem to pivot on different visions of the goal: development or just poverty reduction.
The Fatal Flaw in Cost-Benefit Analysis
January 31, 2010 by
In Part I of this commentary on the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, the focus was on the social engineering perspective underlying the search for such an index. But at the end of that commentary, I noted that the Commission’s discussion of different indices was rather “academic” since there is one dominant index used in governmental decision-making: the monetized gains minus the monetized losses of cost-benefit analysis. A proponent of cost-benefit (CB) analysis would roll up all the Commission’s discussion into the question of the better “costing out” of all the direct and indirect impacts of a social decision.
Obama needs new job creation ideas
January 29, 2010 by
The Obama economics team seems trapped by rather conventional job-creation ideas, e.g., Keynesian pump-priming or tax breaks for small businesses, ideas whose main virtue is that they are better than the opposition’s ideas of more tax breaks for the rich. But there are other ways to increase job creation and entrepreneurship that have been hindered by the size-maximizing tendencies of American corporations.
Associational speech: Citizens United vs. FEC
January 28, 2010 by
What is the basis for the liberal-progressive anathema to corporate speech?
Property Theory and Value Theory 1980
June 18, 2000 by
This is an old (1980) paper published in the Yugoslav journal Economic Analysis and Workers’ Management. It shows essentially all the ideas in the modern treatment of the labor theory of property (i.e., using the juridical principle of imputation) coming together by that date.