Thursday, February 11, 2010

God v Mammon: tonight's debate

Tonight's event is a 'God and Mammon' debate in which we are discussing the theme around Adam Smith's views in 20-minute slots plsu a Q & A session.

I plan to include the so-called 'hand of god' version of the invisible hand, if its raised (I speak second), and/or Smith's writings on bargaining (WN I.ii), which were remarkably clear -'give me that which I want and you shall have that which you want' - also kmown today as the conditional proposition. He supports this approach in TMS too.

Remarkably, most neoclassical 'bargaining' models are completely misconstrued. They are based on conflict and zero-sum coercion (Zeuthen, Hicks, Harsani, &co) in strike threats and 'wafare', which is not how people actually bargain. John Nash dropped trying to model bargaining as a process and opted for modelling bargaining as an outcome.

Smith made exchange a ratio, like value - what we give/what we get. I have done my bit over the past 40 years to encourage exchange-bargaining across business and government agencies.

Well, we'll see how we go.

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