> Barkley wrote:
> > Basically they do a very careful review of past
> >approaches to growth theory and show that many
> >of the classical writers, starting with Adam Smith,
> >had essentially fully developed models of growth
> >that incorporate the essential ideas of "new
> >endogenous growth theory."
> > The new guys just fool around with coefficients
> >on production functions, kind of like the way you did
> >in that technical appendix on "salience" (aka "social
> >capital effect"), :-).
>
> Barkley, people on pen-l don't know what you're talking about, so why are
> you posting this? It's okay to rib me, but why do it to an audience that
> doesn't comprehend?
*******
This is extremely patronizing. Just because people aren't responding doesn't
mean they don't know...
> If anyone cares, "salience" does not refer to anything to do with "social
> capital." Rather, it refers to the relative importance of external effects.
> I assume that one person's production has an external effect on other
> people's production. I have one coefficient which determines whether it's a
> beneficial externality or a detrimental one (it can't be both, by
> assumption) and another coefficient -- the salience -- which determines the
> degree of the external effect, whether positive or negative. Different
> resources differ in these two ways. It's purely a technical relationship,
> not a social one, though it has societal effects.
>
> When I do talk about "social capital," it's when I talk about Smithian
> theories of "fellow feeling" (or Rousseauean public spiritedness) as
> shoring up an individualistic society's stability, avoiding rampant
> free-riding. I don't actually use the phrase "social capital," which seems
> unduly obfuscatory. I also talk about forces -- such as social inequality
> arising from Lockean unlimited accumulation of (private) capital -- that
> undermine fellow feeling and public spiritedness. One of my conclusions is
> that the latter-day "communitarians" who wish to wed Lockean capitalism
> with Rousseauean or Smithian community feelings are fooling themselves.
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
********
Social inequality is force? Mmmmmmm
Ian
