Co-sponsored by Liberty Fund, Inc.
Expert panel, featuring: Lee Alston Ph.D. Director, Environment and Society Program, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado;Research Associate, National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) | Gary Libecap Ph.D. Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California at Santa Barbara;Fellow, Hoover Institution |
When: October 22-24, 2009
Where: Scottsdale, AZ-Scottsdale Marriott Suites
Sessions and readings
Session 1: Large Group activity
Session 2: Why Are Some Nations Rich and Others Poor?
North, Douglass C. “Institutions, Ideology, and Economic Performance, “ Cato Journal, 11(3), 1992. pp. 477-88.
Easterly, William. “Planners Versus Searchers.” The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin, 2006. pp. 3-37.
Session 3: The Philosophy of Property Rights
Hume, David. “Of the Origin of Justice and Property.” A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Oxford University Press, 1896. pp. 176-194.
Locke, John. “Of Property.” in The Founders Constitution, Vol. 1, ed. By Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1987. pp. 580-85.
Session 4: Property Rights and Markets
Alchian, Armen with Harold Demsetz. “The Property Rights Paradigm.” The Collected Works of Armen Alchian, Volume 2: Property Rights and Economic Behavior. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc., 2006. pp. 84-96.
Alchian, Armen. “Market Prices, Property, and Behavior,” The Collected Works of Armen Alchian, Volume 2: Property Rights and Economic Behavior. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc., 2006. pp. 460-80.
Lawson, Robert. “Economic Freedom and Property Rights: The Institutional Environment of Productive Entrepreneurship,” in Making Poor Countries Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Economic Development, ed. by Benjamin Powell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. pp. 112-133.
Session 6: Institutional Weakness, Characteristics and Consequences
DeSoto, Hernando. “The Mystery of Legal Failure,” The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books, 2000. pp. 153-206.
Easterly, William. “You Can’t Plan a Market,” The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin, 2006. pp. 60-112.
Session 7: Property Rights and the Future of Economic Development
Leeson, Peter. “Escaping Poverty: Foreign Aid, Private Property, and Economic Development.” The Journal of Private Enterprise, Spring, 2008. pp. 39–60.
Sachs, Jeffrey. “Making the Investment Needed to End Poverty.” The End of Poverty. New York: Penguin, 2005. pp. 244–265.
Posts
2 comments:
Adaptive efficiency - Our first reading in session 2 presents Douglass North's view of the process of economic change and the concept of adaptive efficiency.
Arnold Kling has 2 very useful posts (the first long, the second short) on adaptive efficiency.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=061807A
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/adaptive_effici.html
Click on Econ Talk to hear Bill Easterly talk about these ideas:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/02/easterly_on_gro.html
Planners v searchers - in our second reading Easterly contrasts tops down with bottoms up institutional perspectives:
Easterly draws 2 different kinds of people when they look at global poverty: The 'planners' vs the 'searchers' -
"The Planners: determine what to supply, Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints, Searches adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom, Searches find out what the reality is at the bottom. Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed, Searches find out if the customer is satisfied...."
This is what I really like --
"The Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answer will solve. A Searcher admints he doesn't know the answers in advance: he believers that poverty is a complicated tangle of social, political, historical, institutional, and technological factors...".
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