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Showing posts from October, 2020

John Locke and John R Commons Part 1

In Chapter 2 of Institutional Economics entitled "Methods", Commons spends a significant amount of time on the English philosopher and political thinker John Locke. It is important to spend with Commons thinking on Locke to understand his overall project. Commons is keen to emphasize how Locke things about knowledge and the human brain.  As a side point, I still think for those who claim Commons had no real theory of human cognition and human behavior just aren't actually reading Commons in full but only bits and parts or reading summaries of Commons.  Again for Commons context matters.  Locke was writing in response to an absolute monarch and church and so wanted to emphasize the role of the individuals and not talk so much about collective action.  Locke talks about reflections and sensations.  Reflections are the external stimulus we take in from the outside world through our senses.  Sensations are how our internal mind understands and thinks about thes...

Ch. 5 Adam Smith, Abundance and Sympathy

Commons spent almost fifty pages on Adam Smith in chapter five.  Obviously part of the reason for this is the importance of Adam Smith in the history of economic thought and his continuing importance in the discipline. According to Commons, Smith based his economics on abundance and divine beneficence. It meant that one person could use their labor power to gain some commodity and that would not take away from what another person could achieve by their labor power.  The abundance of nature is provided by the divine.  This labor power is what gives value to a commodity and its exchange value is based on the labor required to obtain a commodity from nature.  This is the general economic tradition of Smith that Commons takes away in very short form. Besides this abundance, there are important innate human characteristics that help motivate and provide guide rails on human behavior.  Smith believes our inherent "sympathy" is what drives is to self-restraint and prud...

Hume and Peirce: Chapter 4 of Institutional Economics

Chapter 4 of Common's Institutional Economics is about the english philosopher David Hume and Charles Sanders Peirce the scientist and pragmatist philosopher.  The main point of this chapter is to present Commons conception of the human mind and human behavior in the context of these two thinkers.  Upon re-reading this section recently, I realized the importance of this chapter, which is a relatively short one for Commons, on his whole project. The chapter started with his understanding of David’s Hume's conception of the human mind.  Hume is well known for his extreme skepticism in breaking down that the human intellect is not as real as we think and further that the soul isn't real either.  Some accused Hume of trying to demolish both science and religion. Hume was also known for stating that cause and effect were not real but only real in our mind in that we inferred cause and effect and we did not actually observe it in reality. I will leave it to the reader to d...