Deirdre McCloskey is the perfect
choice to give the Inaugural Buchanan Lecture. Two major themes in her
research also figure prominently in the research of Professor Buchanan and
the Center.
First and foremost,
there is Deirdre’s celebration of trade. Not so much for the notion that
economics is everywhere – whether there’s an explicit market or not –
ideas that led Buchanan and Gordon Tullock to develop their seminal
analysis in the Calculus of Consent. Nor, quite, for all the
usual properties associated with markets, for the increment to physical
stuff that we read about in Tyler Cowen’s and Alex Taborrok’s "markets for
everything", or speculate about with Robin Hansen’s market for ideas. ...
Adam Smith – whose great
books figure prominently in the work of both McCloskey and Buchanan – said
that all of us are capable of imaginatively changing places with one
another, a sort of "sympathetic exchange". That act of imagination takes
place whenever we exchange, trading physical or imaginative stuff – goods
or approbation – and it comes to temper pure self interest with a
reciprocity norm that has been so important to Professor Buchanan’s
argument for eliminating the off-diagonals in prisoner’s dilemma games.
Only recently, with the development of experimental economics and
neuroeconomics, have economists come to fully appreciate the subtlety and
power of Smith’s sympathy. For Smith, the process of sympathetic exchange
makes us generous beings, sometimes compelled to act in ways that violate
self interest narrowly construed, as when Smith’s European gives up his
finger to save those he has never seen and never will see.
McCloskey’s forthcoming
book, Bourgeois Virtues, celebrates the virtues that market
interactions give rise to, notably among them, "Prudence". In it, she
writes:
"Any society,
religious or not, has a sacred sphere and a profane, a sphere in which
love and justice determine largely who gets what as against a sphere in
which prudence and courage largely do so. But "largely" is not
"exclusively". Life in a market is not exclusively a matter of the
profane. Buyers and sellers show their sacred qualities too. The economy
is .. not a sphere of Prudence Only independent of other ethical
considerations."
So, we can be devout and
virtuous and bourgeois withal. Professor Buchanan has also pressed the
ethical norms associated with market interactions. In a conversation with
Warren Samuels at the Center 2 summers ago, Buchanan reiterated his
longstanding politics as exchange position and the reciprocity norm this
entails:
"...one half of
public choice is politics as exchange, in this ultimate sense – that
people are getting together to... try to accomplish shared purposes that
they couldn’t accomplish on their own. ... One thing that has driven me
in a normative sense more strongly than anything else is I can’t
stand unfairness; and I can’t stand people
getting ahead of the game unfairly. ... And somehow or other, it seems
to me that I, personally, have a kind of moral obligation, if you want
to call it that, to look at the world from a window that does, in fact,
emphasize the positive features..."
... Buchanan’s
motivational homogeneity argument – those who make policy decisions are
neither more nor less self interested than the rest of us. What David Levy
and I have done, is to push motivational homogeneity to yet another
sphere, that of the economist himself/herself, to argue that we
economists/experts, too, are under Jim’s moral obligation to theorize
about our subjects as the same as us.
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