Social Limits to Growth by Fred Hirsch

Author:Fred Hirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-134-81217-2
Publisher: Routledge

1 D.H.Robertson, “What Does the Economist Economize?” in his Economic Commentaries (London: Staples, 1956). In the same spirit, Arrow has written: “We do not wish to use up recklessly the scarce resources of altruistic motivation.” “Gifts and Exchanges,” p. 355. This conception rests on the questionable premise that altruism is a depleting stock rather than a self-generating flow feeding partly on itself. Contrast John Stuart Mill, a propos unselfish feelings: “the only mode in which any active principle in human nature can be effectually cultivated is by habitual exercise.” “Utility of Religion” (1874), Collected Works, X (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 423. The Titmuss school in Britain a century later took essentially the same view.

2 Paul A.Samuelson, “Social Indifference Curves,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (February 1956).

3 G.A.Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Qualitative Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (August 1970).

4 Compare Staffan Linder’s lament for the passing of the cinq à sept (Linder, The Harried Leisure Class, p. 85) and Wilfred Beckerman’s economic explanation of ministerial demand for call girls (“Sex and the Falling Rate of Profit,” New Statesman, July 20, 1973).

5 Becker, “A Theory of Marriage.” Becker cites this influence as an economic explanation of the greater instability of marriages of blacks in the United States, as against Moynihan’s more familiar cultural/historical explanation. Rather than as cultural hangover for a deprived group, the more frequent break-up of black families appears on this analysis as a precursor of what economic advance and reduced sexual discrimination has in store for us all.

6 Hugo G.Beigel, “Romantic Love,” American Sociological Review (June 1951).

7 Sen, On Economic Inequality.

8 One of the few references to this aspect that I have found in the literature occurs as an endpiece to Arrow’s well-known analysis of the inefficiency of commercial provision of health insurance: “The economic importance of personal and especially family relationships…is based on non-market relations that create guarantees of behavior which would otherwise be afflicted with excessive uncertainty.” Kenneth J.Arrow, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care,” American Economic Review (December 1963), pp. 941–973.

9 John H.Gagnon, “Prostitution,” International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 12 ( London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 592–597.

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