Economic Freedom and Human Flourishing

Description

Is economic liberty necessary for individuals to lead truly flourishing lives? Whether your immediate answer is yes or no, this question is deceptively simple. What do we mean by liberty? What constitutes the flourishing life? How are these related? How is economic liberty related to other goods that affect human flourishing? To answer these questions—and more—this volume brings to bear some of history’s greatest thinkers, interpreted by some of today’s leading scholars of their thought. How might Aristotle have understood the relationship between economic liberty and human flourishing? Hobbes and Locke, Mill, Rousseau, Burke, Adam Smith, Kant, de Tocqueville, and Marx? So much of the policy and political debates around issues of economic liberty are often cast in somewhat narrow terms. What is the precise magnitude of this elasticity? Is a certain policy popular among key constituencies? Of course, economic and political analysis have a vital role to play in shaping and understanding public policy. But it is

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophy
• Philosophie et théologie
• Political
• Political Science

Informations

• Publié par: AEI Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780844750033
• Langue: English

Extrait

ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND HUMAN FLOURISHING
PERSPECTIVES FROM POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Steven Bilakovics • Richard Boyd Ryan Patrick Hanley • Peter B. Josephson Yuval Levin • Harvey C. Mansfield Deirdre Nansen McCloskey • John T. Scott Susan Meld Shell
Edited by Michael R. Strain and Stan A. Veuger

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-5001-9 (hardback)
ISBN-10: 0-8447-5001-8 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-5002-6 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 0-8447-5002-6 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-5003-3 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 0-8447-5003-4 (ebook)
© 2016 by the American Enterprise Institute. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute except in the case of brief quotations embodied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI. The American Enterprise Institute is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational organization and does not take institutional positions on any issues.
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Contents
Preface
Michael R. Strain and Stan A. Veuger
Aristotle on Economics and the Flourishing Life
Harvey C. Mansfield
Hobbes, Locke, and the Problems of Political Economy
Peter B. Josephson
Rousseau on Economic Liberty and Human Flourishing
John T. Scott
Adam Smith and Human Flourishing
Ryan Patrick Hanley
Economic Liberty and Human Flourishing: Kant on Society, Citizenship, and Redistributive Justice
Susan Meld Shell
Edmund Burke’s Economics of Flourishing
Yuval Levin
Capitalism as a Road to Serfdom? Tocqueville on Economic Liberty and Human Flourishing
Steven Bilakovics
John Stuart Mill on Economic Liberty and Human Flourishing
Richard Boyd
Economic Liberty as Anti-Flourishing: Marx and Especially His Followers
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
About the Authors
Preface
I t is easy to forget the broader context in which public policy is placed. So much attention is paid to the means by which policy is conceived and implemented—politics—that it is easy to focus on the game and to lose sight of the reason the game exists in the first place. Conversely, in the world of public policy research, your view can easily become dominated by minutia: Is a particular elasticity equal to –0.1 or –0.2? Should a tax credit be capped at $500 per year or $750?
It is helpful and refreshing to broaden the lens from time to time. This collection seeks to do that.
Our subject is whether economic liberty is necessary for individuals to lead truly flourishing lives. This question underlies—or, at least, it should underlie—many of our most important policy debates. But it is harder to answer than it may seem. What do we mean by liberty? What is the flourishing life? And once settled on definitions, how are the two related?
To answer these questions, we rely on some of history’s greatest thinkers, interpreted by some of today’s leading scholars of their thought. Their essays are valuable—it turns out that Aristotle and Burke and Mill, and philosophers in their class, have much to offer today’s public debate. And we still have much to learn from Marx’s mistakes as well.
Politics is important. A deeper understanding of technical questions of economics and social science are important. Both are critical, even. But so too is an understanding of why these endeavors matter—or even exist.
M.R.S. & S.A.V. Washington, DC June 2016
Aristotle on Economics and the Flourishing Life
HARVEY C. MANSFIELD Harvard University and the Hoover Institution
T o introduce this large topic, it is fitting to consider Aristotle, for centuries “the master of those who know” (as Dante called him). By contrast to our thinking, Aristotle wrote comprehensively on both economics and the flourishing life. Modern economics makes its way without study of the “flourishing life,” which is one translation of what Aristotle meant by happiness. For him, as for common sense, happiness is the goal of ethics and politics, and ultimately of economics. At present, however, economics contents itself with the “pursuit of happiness” (to borrow from the Declaration of Independence), a catchall category that specifies at great length how to pursue but hardly at all what to pursue.
If we follow Aristotle’s method of beginning from what is familiar, we must begin from modern economics, which is more familiar to us than Aristotle. Every college student has taken, or should have taken, Economics 101, and those who have been deprived of this advantage have to learn what is taught in that course, perhaps more cheaply, perhaps not, in the School of Hard Knocks. Whether the study of economics is worth its cost is an example of a typical economic calculation, for economics is about calculation. A calculation is a deliberation that focuses on a number, a “metric,” of more, of a greater quantity. It avoids the question of how much more is needed before one can decide that one can stop acquiring and turn to enjoyment. Originally—and this is in Aristotle as well as in the founders of modern economics—economics supposed that it could define needs or necessities as opposed to surplus or superfluities. But necessities have a way of expanding from survival to comfort and from comfort to perfect assurance, so that it seems safer, and scientifically more exact, to consider them infinite and thus decline to define them.
Economics becomes the science of getting more without ever saying how much more. It is because of its exactness that science requires this vagueness. Economics must either be exact or fall silent; it disdains and rejects the possibility of an inexact statement that is merely probable and better than nothing. It may attempt to evade the difficulty by defining “probability” exactly. The result would be either a vague definition of exact or an exact definition of vague—which leaves the common sense “probable” in charge. So the science of more, of “growth,” drops the utilitarian posture that requires a definition of utility—possibly contestable—and turns to “preferences” that are admittedly quite subjective. Thus does the objectivity of economics require that it surrender totally to human subjectivity. And as the measuring of preferences becomes increasingly sophisticated, which means increasingly mathematical, economics becomes increasingly vague as to its end and continually further from defining the “flourishing life.”
At the same time the boundary of economics becomes increasingly uncertain. It used to be that economists, when pressured with a question hard to answer, would frequently resort to a boundary statement and say: “That’s a noneconomic question.” That distinguished an economist from a political scientist, who could never say “that’s a nonpolitical question” because politics admits no sanctuary from politics. But now economists have invaded political science, for example with game theory, reducing political questions to economic ones, and with the same increasing exactness that promotes increasing vagueness. It is true that many political scientists today, as distinguished from Aristotle, welcome these invaders as saviors of their science.
The discussion so far has a skeptical tone you will not find in Economics 101. But perhaps economics does have, despite its scientific pretensions, an end in view—and thus a contribution to the question of what is happiness. My father, a professor, used to rent his house in the summer to other professors who needed to live in the city he wanted to leave. This was an economic transaction. But he soon learned from hard experience that it was far preferable to rent to an economist than to a sociologist. His lesson was that economists believe in bourgeois virtue and sociologists do not. This is not a matter of calculation but of difference of habit, even of way of life, that he observed. Or it was calculation over the long term, never actually tested, that unkept promises and slovenly behavior would eventually be punished in this world: this is calculation not much different from virtue.
A problem of how to live can be seen within economic calculation. Which is better, to spend or to save? In the recent economic crisis, the American government passed a “stimulus” bill, meaning a stimulus on the consumer to spend. But it could also be said that in difficult times it is better to save—as many people did, not responding to the stimulus. Economic calculation might say that it is better sometimes to save, sometimes to spend, that to be rational one should have no predisposition for one or the other. But to spend or to save is a life choice; each way has habits of its own that are hard to change quickly in accordance with calculation, as when buying or selling a stock. A calculator is always ready to adjust and finds habit, which is fixed and not calculated, to be irrational (as in a way it is). Here, within economic rationality, we see two opposing ways of life, two opposite souls, the easy spender and the tightwad, both economic, but not determined solely by economic advantage.
Turning to Aristotle, we see him considering ways of life with a view to which is best rather than calculation of what brings in more. More what, he wants to know, and how much more? For him the “pursuit” of happiness implies an end to the pursuit, since endless pursuit is futile and irrational. All human beings pursue happiness; everything else is instrumental to happiness and pursued because it brings happiness. Even virtue, though an end in itself and often involving sacrifice, is also pursued as the means to happiness. Virtue won’t, or at least shouldn’t, make you miserable, Aristotle says, somewhat optimistically. To be happy is to be at rest, a