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政治经济学经典导读 第四讲 自由主义的政治经济 上海交通大学国际与公共事务学院 黄琪轩 sjtuhuangqixuan@gmail.com 助教 姚炬 yao.ju@foxmail.com. 本周阅读. 亚当·斯密著：《国富论》，第 1-3 章。 复习. Outline. 1, Cases 2, Brief Ideas of Liberalism 3, Great Men with Great Ideas. 1, Cases Case1 Assisted suicide. 1,Cases Case2 Assisted suicide. 1, Cases.
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政治经济学经典导读 第四讲 • 自由主义的政治经济 • 上海交通大学国际与公共事务学院 • 黄琪轩 • sjtuhuangqixuan@gmail.com • 助教 姚炬 yao.ju@foxmail.com
本周阅读 • 亚当·斯密著：《国富论》，第1-3章。 • 复习
Outline • 1, Cases • 2, Brief Ideas of Liberalism • 3, Great Men with Great Ideas
1, Cases • Case3 • Pregnancy for Pay
Do you support the following policies? • 1, Legalization of drugs • 2, Legalization of prostitution • 3, Prohibition of censorship of books and movies • 4, Legalization of suicide • 5, Support for abortion rights • 6, Support for gay rights
2, Brief Ideas of Liberalism • A, Human Nature. • Humans are self-interested and rational. • They are capable of acting autonomously by using their capacity for reason to discover the most efficient means to satisfy their needs and desires. • They can make their own decisions and they are capable of autonomy and self-government.
2, Brief Ideas of Liberalism Cont’d • B, Society. • Society is an aggregation of individuals and has no goals or purposes of its own. • The good society permits individuals to pursue their private interests free from arbitrary constraint.
2, Brief Ideas of Liberalism Cont’d • C, Government. • Individuals create government only through consent, for the purpose of protecting their rights as established by a constitution. • The individual is more important than the state. • Beyond this function, government is best when it governs least.
Compulsory Purchase of Annuities • Those of us who believe in freedom must believe also in the freedom of individuals to make their own mistakes. If a man knowingly prefers to live for today, to use his resources for current enjoyment, deliberately choosing a penurious old age, by what right do we prevent him from doing so? ……are we entitled to use coercion to prevent him from doing what he chooses to do? Is there not always the possibility that he is right and that we are wrong?———— Milton Friedman
And • Minimum wage laws • Farm price supports
Forbes magazine publishes a list of the four hundred richest Americans each fall. • For over a decade, Microsoft founder Bill Gates III has topped the list.In 2008, when Forbes estimated his net worth at $57 billion.
2, Brief Ideas of Liberalism Cont’d • So vast is the wealth at the top of the American economy. • In fact, the richest 1 percent of Americans possess over a third of the country’s wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent of American families.
2, Brief Ideas of Liberalism Cont’d • D, Equality • Equality means that all citizens have the same opportunity to engage in economic activity and the same civil rights as established by the constitution. • Economic inequality is not necessarily bad. Economic freedom is more important than economic equality.
Michael Jordan’s Money • Suppose that, the Chicago City Council, or Congress, sought to ease the distress of Chicago Bulls fans by voting to require Jordan to play basketball for one-third of the next season. • But if Congress may not force Jordan to return to the basketball court (for even a third of the season), by what right does it force him to give up one-third of the money he makes playing basketball?
2, Brief Ideas of Liberalism Cont’d • Morality • Religion • Ontology • Epistemology • Methodology • Individualism individuality
Mill：On Individuality • He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. • Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
Mill：On Individuality • One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character. • Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.
Mill：On Individuality • We have a warning example in China — a nation of much talent, and, in some respects, even wisdom…… • They have become stationary — have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas • Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) • John Locke (1632-1704) • Adam Smith (1723-1790) • Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) • Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) • Milton Friedman (1912-2006) • Robert Nozick (1938-) ……
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Adam Smith (1723-1790) • The Wealth of Nations in 1776 • Historian Arnold Toynbee: “The Wealth of Nations and the steam engine destroyed the old world and built a new one” • Adam Smith's legacy has been his defense of free markets and nonintervention by government.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • For centuries and millennia, men were constantly guarding against premature death, disease, famine, war, and subsistence wages. • For the common man, little changed over the centuries. Real per capita wages were virtually the same, year after year, decade after decade.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Adam Smith asked, what could bring about the “greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor”? • A favorable balance of trade? More gold and silver? • No, it was “division of labor.”
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. • I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Adam Smith • Chapter1 • A workman not educated to this, could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. • One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Adam Smith • In this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands. • Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Adam Smith • Chapter2 • This division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom. • Consequence of a certain propensity in human nature.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Adam Smith • It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. • We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Adam Smith • Chapter3 • When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment. • George Stigler called Smith’s model of competitive free enterprise the “crown jewel” of The Wealth of Nations.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Adam Smith • “He…intends only his own gain…[but] is…led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” • That unintended end was economic growth and improved living standards for the nation as a whole.
3, Great Men with Great Ideas Cont’d • Adam Smith • Smith said that competition was absolutely essential to turning self-interest into benevolence in a self-regulating society. • “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
