On Explaining Why the (Human) World is Rich

The wealth of the modern world is a natural historical marvel.  Explaining it has traditionally been the purview of economic historians, as exemplified by the recent book How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin.  But economic historians tend to only ask process-oriented “how” questions and “by what means” questions of the Great Enrichment. The eight co-authors of Explaining Technology, who are not economic historians, engage in the debate asking a different question.  Their goal is to explain the exponential shape of our enrichment with a model of the combinatorial evolution of technology.  With an eye toward how we ask questions of the Great Enrichment, I propose broadening our inquiries to include questions typically overlooked in modern economic science, namely, “What form does it take? and “For what purpose?”

The Symbolic Work of Prices

We posit that prices are signs, not just signals, that work in the same symbolic way as words. Both are complex, generative systems of meaning shared in human societies that rely on a web of intricate symbolic references. Just like the meaning of a word is a product of our social and linguistic action, the meaning of a price is a product of our relationship to the physical world phenomena of people in markets for goods and services. The fundamental conception of both is to communicate and construct worlds with ourselves and others, enabling us to act in the world. Prices, like words, do symbolic work.

Property Rights Aren’t Primary; Ideas Are

The Primacy of Property; Or, The Subordination of Property Rights

A property right, the standard view maintains, is a proper subset of the most complete and comprehensive set of incidents for full ownership of a thing. The subsidiary assumption is that the pieces that are property rights compose the whole that is ownership or property, i.e., that property rights explain property. In reversing the standard view I argue that (1) a custom of intelligent and meaningful human action explains property and that (2) as a custom, property is a historical process of selecting actions conditional on the context. My task is to explain how a physical world of human bodies with minds that feel, think, know, and want gives rise to a custom of property with meaning and purpose. Property is primary because ideas are primary.

Rule-Following

How We Think about Economics

The Meaning of Deceive in Experimental Economic Science

Contra Private Fairness

Social Preferences Aren’t Preferences

Language Games of Reciprocity