The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674058132

Just as today’s observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world.

Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mont Pèlerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood.

It was only in the 1960s and ’70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United States in the ensuing decades. Burgin’s brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind.

Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America

Listen to the author:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674047488

Until the early nineteenth century, “risk” was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain capitalist future. ,p. Focusing on the hopes and anxieties of ordinary people, Jonathan Levy shows how risk developed through the extraordinary growth of new financial institutions—insurance corporations, savings banks, mortgage-backed securities markets, commodities futures markets, and securities markets—while posing inescapable moral questions. For at the heart of risk’s rise was a new vision of freedom. To be a free individual, whether an emancipated slave, a plains farmer, or a Wall Street financier, was to take, assume, and manage one’s own personal risk. Yet this often meant offloading that same risk onto a series of new financial institutions, which together have only recently acquired the name “financial services industry.” Levy traces the fate of a new vision of personal freedom, as it unfolded in the new economic reality created by the American financial system. ,p. Amid the nineteenth-century’s waning faith in God’s providence, Americans increasingly confronted unanticipated challenges to their independence and security in the boom and bust chance-world of capitalism. Freaks of Fortune is one of the first books to excavate the historical origins of our own financialized times and risk-defined lives.

2 Possible ASET books

http://exchange-bhc.blogspot.com/2013/05/oah-book-prizes-go-to-business-history.html

Jonathan Levy's Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard University Press, 2012) garnered several major book prizes at this year's Organization of American Historians meeting. Levy's work was the recipient of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the Avery O. Craven Award, and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize. Readers can find a review of Freaks of Fortune by Kim Phillips-Fein at Public Books, and listen to Levy discuss the book during a HUP podcast.

At the same meeting, the OAH presented the Merle Curti Award for the best book in American social history to Angus Burgin of Johns Hopkins University for The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression (Harvard University Press, 2012). Readers can find a video of Burgin discussing the book, as well as links to various other interviews and reviews, at the HUP website. Burgin's book has also been awarded the Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Prize by the History of Economics Society.

Jonathon Haidt on The Righteous Mind

Worth a listen, if you haven't read this book. Haidt has a talent for highlighting moral psychology and the moral sense in a memorable manner - for example, is it immoral to have sex with a dead chicken?

Excerpts from Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", Part 2

Excerpts from Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", Part 2

Excerpts from "The Righteous Mind", Part 1

http://www.cis.org/kammer/excerpts-righteous-mind-part-1

Today we present the first of two sets of excerpts from the book, which The Guardian called "a compelling study of the morality of those on the left and right [that] reaches some surprising conclusions." Haidt, by the way, describes himself as a life-long liberal whose research has led him to respect the values of social conservatives.

•We circle around sacred values and then share post hoc arguments about why we are so right and they are so wrong. We think the other side is blind to truth, reason, science, and common sense, but in fact everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects.

•If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.

•If you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, then you're asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism — which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity — is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change.

•Liberals stand up for victims of oppression and exclusion. They fight to break down arbitrary barriers (such as those based on race and, more recently, on sexual orientation). But their zeal to help victims, combined with their low scores on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, often leads them to push for changes that weaken groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital. The urge to help Hispanic immigrants in the 1980s led to multicultural education programs that emphasized the differences among Americans rather than their shared values and identity.

•Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods, but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.

Is this a fair reading of Hayek's view of liberty?

http://baselinescenario.com/2013/05/20/liberty-for-whom-nietzsche-hayek-conservatism/