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GETTING HISTORY INTO THE EQUATION

GETTING HISTORY INTO THE EQUATION. Thoughts on Social Capital and on Social Science. General Background. Systemic failures Agency – third world development Deregulation – transition in Eastern Europe Oversight – global financial crisis Focus on institutions

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GETTING HISTORY INTO THE EQUATION

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  1. GETTING HISTORY INTO THE EQUATION Thoughts on Social Capital and on Social Science

  2. General Background • Systemic failures • Agency – third world development • Deregulation – transition in Eastern Europe • Oversight – global financial crisis • Focus on institutions • New institutionalism, coherent theory • Not a “school” as such • No definition of “institutions”

  3. History Matters • Neoclassical economics • Forward looking instrumental rationality • History the carrier of institutions • Institutions matter – and history does not? • Role of economic man • Veblen and chess computers • Anathema to sociology • Core conflict

  4. Dealing with Specificity • Seeming contradiction • All countries and peoples are the same • All countries and peoples are unique • Which story to tell? • Economic man, background noise • When is uniqueness relevant? • Must theory be adjusted? • Russia a “normal” country • Clouds the issue

  5. Correlations over Time • Inglehart et al. • Quality of economic performance • Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant traditions • LaPorta et al. • Quality of government • Common, civil, socialist law • Core problem • Correlations looking for explanations • Not all relations are causal relations

  6. Demonstrating Causality • Pathways of institutional reproduction • Rational choice vs. culture • EU Catholics and Protestants • Pope was corrupt 500 years ago? • Hierarchical religion, corrupt politics • Meiji restoration in Japan • Tokugawa, enemy within, xenophobia • Meiji, enemy without, close ranks

  7. Turning to Economics • Deductive modeling • Queen of social science (Comte) • Sociology, fiction and nonsense • The transaction is a cultural thing • Habits, customs, beliefs, expectations • Legal, moral and social norms • Trust, values, guile • Price of success • An ahistoric science • Hirschman, hands tied, not decode

  8. Not Always the Case • Kuhn, scientific revolutions • Winning paradigm, rewrite history • Neoclassical economics • German historicism • Inductive approach • Political economy an historical science • American institutionalism • Influenced by historicism • Orthodoxy in 1930s • New institutional economics • Broadly dismissive • Nothing to be learned

  9. The Scottish Enlightenment • Core of the liberal tradition • Invisible hand, inherited • Kant, Mandeville • Role of norms • Smith, Hume, Ferguson • Ethics, Arrow, Buchanan, North • Role of intervention • Visible hand • Mandeville, Robbins …

  10. The Free Market • Social science neglects the market as such • Economics takes it for given • Sociology abandoned it to economics • New economic sociology • Granovetter, embeddedness • Polanyi contradicted himself • Definitions plentiful and vague • New institutionalism • Coherent approach?

  11. Problems with Deductive Modeling • Powerful track record • Nobel Prize in economics • “Economics imperialism” • Predictive power • Restrictive assumptions • Great Experiments • Tocqueville, systemic change, dislocations • Rules suspended (Przeworski) • “Natural experiments” and “great laboratory”

  12. Methodology • Marginal revolution • Methodological individualism • Trivially true (Elster) • Capstone of economics (Arrow) • Methodological holism • Rejection of economic man • Embeddedness a replacement? • Richness of detail vs. power of prediction

  13. Back to History • Arguments abound that history matters • Historical economics (Kindleberger, Snooks) • Historical institutionalism (Pierson, Thelen) • Historical sociology (Mahoney) • Challenges to methodological individualism • The whole greater than sum of the parts • Collective memories and norms • Public to private culture and norms

  14. Social Capital • Shorthand for the missing link • Instrumental rationality • Embedded norms • Policy implications • Limits to agency • Handle evolution • Overall • Need a theory of norms, human action

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