🚀 go-pugleaf

Paul Marks:

Excellent comments -- I hope you don't mind that I 've posted them for
everyone else to see (see below).

On handing down the enterprise to one's children, I have to disagree.  Read
the section(s) on China in Fukuyama's book.  He says that this is the main
reason why Chinese firms collapse when they hit a certain level.  If they
brought in professional management from the outside, they might not have
this problem.

Why are the Chinese doing so well then, despite the size impediments?
Fukuyama discusses this at length.  They pick industries where smaller is
better.  They create networks among fellow Chinese businessmen to
facilitate trade. etc. etc.

As to culture and the "Chicago school", again I have to disagree.  Don't
get me wrong -- I'm a firm believer in the essential truth of the
neoclassical economics as well.  But you have to admit that the Chicago
School can't explain cultural phenomena all that well.

Look at Becker's book on the family.  While I agree with a lot of what he
says there, he forgot one major variable in his model of rational, economic
man: the passions!  Men and women are passionate, loving, hating, creatures
with big egos that hurt when they're stepped on.  This is something that my
Straussian education has helped me to appreciate.

Again, thanks for your comments.

Chris

-- Your message was:   (from ""P. Marks"")
  
  Small point.

  Whilst it is true that the cultural tradition of trying to hand on an 
  enterprise to one's children can go wrong (such as in the Wang case) it 
  generally is a beneficial tradition.

  .....................................

  On the general point of whether culture effects economic development - of 
  course it does. Only an economist blinded by equations would say otherwise.

  However there are a lot of that sort of economist out there. Alfred 
  Marshall would not have fallen into this trap and PERHAPS Walras would not 
  have fallen for it either - but they did start a trend which has led some 
  people into error. Mathematics can never be more than a tool - it is not 
  a substitute for economic understanding.

  Finally I must confess a bias. As someone sympathetic to the Austrian 
  school I have to be careful to be fair regarding Neoclassical economics. 
  Any tradition that has produced such people as George Stigler, Milton and 
  David Friedman, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell [spelling], Yale Brozon...... 
  (  what ever one thinks of their politics) can hardly be accused of being 
  all addicted to mathematics and ignoring such things as culture.

  Paul Marks.
  ------------------

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