Тег: Kapelyushnikov

The Debate Between Kagarlitsky and Kapelyushnikov

I listened with great pleasure to the debates between Kagarlitsky and Kapelyushnikov on SVTV.

Of course, Kapelyushnikov’s position was closer to me from the start, so I didn’t expect anything particularly interesting from him, but I was wrong: there were many witty phrases that could be broken down into quotes. It was known that Kagarlitsky is a strong polemicist; he proved himself to be a strong polemicist here as well. The most amusing thing to me was that his position largely echoes the position of Ekaterina Schulmann expressed in the program Status, when she was talking about Hayek:

Essentially, put your liberalism in the background; democracy is more important.

Of course, if one strictly follows the terms of the “two chairs” problem, both options are bad: both an authoritarian ruler who first liberalizes the economy but gradually turns to bronze and goes mad, and a democratic big state acting as a means for everyone to parasitize everyone else, and thus falling into a positive feedback loop.

In the debates, Kagarlitsky actively pushed for democracy instead of state planning; his interlocutor was not prepared for this, and as a result, there wasn’t much room for the critique of democracy in the debates. However, there was one good take regarding the fact that decentralized democratic planning would simply bind private initiative with others’ plans even more tightly than if it were centralized, and practicing pure economics without politics would prove simply impossible.

And yet, I didn’t quite understand: if both participants in the debate were not thrilled with the topic they were discussing and considered the subject of the discussion to be outdated by about seventy years—then what topic could they have argued about with more sense and pleasure, and what stopped them?

Behavioral economics shatters the idea of libertarianism, no?

анонимный вопрос

The Austrian School of economics asserts that values are subjective; a person always makes choices based on their own personal preferences, which are unknown to anyone else, immeasurable, and unpredictable. Even within such strict frameworks of ignorance, a number of general statements can be made based on praxeology, that is, the logic of human action.

The Neoclassical school took a different path. It consistently and diligently approximated human behavior using mathematical models. Starting with the simplest model of homo economicus—the omniscient, dispassionate utility maximizer—it gradually released new patches to describe the behavior of real people in the language of models, so that it would correlate somehow with actual observed human activity.

Within this approach, various cognitive biases, the influence of different emotions, and so on, were described, extending even to the phases of the moon and blood glucose levels. Did this help in any way to learn how to predict the behavior of economic agents? Only for some special cases, and only at the level of probabilities, which, in general, remains within the bounds of common sense. I believe the achievements of behavioral economics can be helpful in creating realistic human emulators conducting some economic activity in the information space.

At the tenth Adam Smith readings, Rostislav Kapelyushnikov gave a very interesting lecture on how the achievements of behavioral economics in studying bounded rationality are used as a justification for paternalism. The idea is that since a person makes a certain choice anyway, and makes it irrationally, why not gently nudge them toward a choice that is more beneficial both for themselves and for society. In other words, there is still an attempt to decide for the person what is best for them, and behavioral economists give their approval for this, whereas classical economists, who proceeded from the presumption of the rationality of human choice, did not give the state such sanction. Thus, the state received a scientific indulgence for even greater intervention in the economy in terms of regulations.

Does behavioral economics shatter the idea of libertarianism? Rather, it provides new arguments to continue ignoring libertarianism, while practice still turns out to be on the side of freer societies where there is less regulation, no matter how scientific that regulation may be.

https://youtu.be/tA4xNn-xV8c