I mean "logical" in the sense of being able to do a reasonable job of making choices that further one's own self interest. The above is a standard justification for the "rational man" assumption of economics. It has nothing to do with whether the "big picture" is logical by some standard, only with whether an individual's choices make sense in furthering his/her self-interest, given that he/she can only control his/her own actions and not those of others.Logical actors dominate in the economy
because those prone to excessive irrationality end up with little money
to play with.
Perhaps you aren't joking... I would be forced to agree with you is you defined `logical' in this context to mean actors following the logic of the current economic status quo.
Now one could suppose that some people place such a high value on nurturing their own bigotry that they value it more than wealth, so that they are still acting logically when they sacrifice wealth in order to maintain their bigotry, but such people will also have minimal economic impact because they will have minimal wealth.
For of how money trumps bigotry, look at the history of Citibank. They used to tell their recruiters to go to the top business schools and recruit the top MALE graduates. At some point in the early 70's their recruiters began to report that increasing numbers of the top graduates were female. Citibank management decided that making money was more important than humoring their own prejudices, and instructed their recruiters to go after these women. Peter Drucker ascribes a large part of Citibank's success to this choice, as for a period of time they had exclusive access to a pool of talent nobody else was tapping... until their competitors finally caught on.
Don't you mean our present political order? There have been pretty drastic changes in the economy over the last twenty-five years, far dwarfing any political changes. (Hint: microcomputer revolution, the Internet, the effect of "quicksilver capital," etc.)Obviously, our present economic order resists (strongly!) fundamental change;
You still haven't told me what you mean by "social fabric." I don't like to be rude, but I am highly suspicious of terms such as "social fabric"; it's one of those vague, often semantically vacuous terms that obscure more than enlighten.What in the world is "overall social fabric" supposed to mean?
I suppose I could have merely said `social fabric' and it would have been better English,
Opinions count for nothing; facts do. We have the actual documents. We also have a pretty thorough record of the discussions that went on in the Constitutional Convention and the debates during ratification, and we have a wealth of original writings from the time indicating what the political thought of the day was. None of these, to my knowledge, contain any trace of a notion of "equality of the commons." The only notion of equality that I am aware of appearing in these is equality before the law.You won't find any trace of any notion of "equality
in the commons" -- whatever the phrase is supposed to mean -- in the
U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, nor any of the discussions involved
in the drafting and ratification of these documents.
I would think that the idea of `equality in the commons' is implicit in the motivation for such documents, whether or not it is stated in so many words.
