Reviews for Foundations of the Economic Approach to Law

The average rating for Foundations of the Economic Approach to Law based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-09-05 00:00:00 John Santa Cruz This book is an attempt to generate dialogue and demonstrate affinities between work in social psychology and economics. David Messick's article argues it is not the case that "people carry utility functions around in their minds that they can simply refer to whenever a decision problem arises" (p. 28); that is, he argues against the view that people have fixed desires related to goods and services, and he proposes instead that the desires people have toward goods and services varies depending on contextual factors, such as, for example, how much someone else might have. In the next article, Andrew Schotter's thesis is that human beings' actions conform to conventions (in the sense of a regularity) to deal with complicated problems, especially for those "recurrent problems that do not always have obvious solutions" (p. 53). In the following article, Carsten de Dreu and Wolfgang Steinel argue that dominant psychological types such as being prosocial or proself help determine the kinds of decisions people will make, and so do whether a person processes the information critically or shallowly. Next, E. Tory Higgins' thesis is that people make decisions and value certain goods relative to how they judge these decisions and goods to fit in with their overall life plan. In the sixth article, Timothy Ketelaar devises an ingenious hypothesis for reconciling the differences in social decision making with the idea that some underlying economic behavior must have been evolutionarily adaptive for the human species, and his way of reconciling these positions is that cost-benefit parameters for each individual in the species could have been set to vary relative to how certain parameters were adjusted in a formula such as "IF X then Y, but only IF B > C" (p. 110), where X is some condition that could produce some other condition Y, but only if the benefits B of doing X to produce Y would exceed the costs C of doing X to produce Y; even if you disagree with the hypothesis, there is something parsimonious and elegant about the proposal. In the seventh article, Marcel Zeelenberg and Rik Pieters propose that the "variety of feeling states exists for the sake of behavioral guidance," that "[t:]he specific emotion felt in a situation indicates a particular problem and prioritizes behavior that deals with this problem" (p. 127). Eric van Dijk and David de Cremer's article is interesting because they find that when people are presented with situations to divide up a finite number of resources, they tend to want to divide them up equally, hinting that humans have an innate tendency toward fairness, yet when those same people are presented with situations to divide up a resource for which it is unclear whether the resource is scarce or plentiful, people choose to divide it up in accordance with whatever their psychological disposition, being either prosocial or proself, is, meaning that the prosocials take fewer shares, and the proselves take larger shares. In the next article by Tom Tyler and David de Cremer, they argue that people are socially motivated by the following external factors: 1) whether the procedures to reach decisions are just, 2) the ability to trust that people will behave as expected, 3) the personal responsibility people feel to make group decisions, and 4) feelings people have about their own social identity. Kevin McCabe's article argues for more research into connections between economics and neuroscience. The next article by Kentaro Fujita, Yaacov Trope, and Nira Liberman argues that self-control when faced with difficult decisions depends on whether someone construes a situation at a high level or low level, where "high-level construals often involve more deliberate, rational, cool, and long-term thinking, whereas low-level construals are often more automatic, visceral, hot, and short-term thinking" (p. 197). Iris Bohnet's article relates human behavior with institutions, whose role, she writes, is to "motivate, coordinate, select, and influence behavior through procedural preferences, attributions about causes of actions [e.g., whether an impartial system brought about some change or whether someone deliberately or partially caused the change:], and crowding in or out of preferences [i.e., creating the range of preferences for people" (p. 231). Linda Babcock, Michele Gelfand, Deborah Small, and Heidi Stayn then have a paper that concludes from their data that women are less likely to initiate negotiations in business settings, providing one reason for the gender inequality in the salaries of folk in the workplace. Max Bazerman's and Deepak's Malhotra's essay is about how governments could benefit significantly, especially the U.S. government, if it took into account psychological theories as it does economic theory. C. Daniel Batson argues that people are as often to be motivated for altruistic reasons as egoistic reasons. And finally, Rachel Croson shows that the difference between the disciplines of economics and psychology are largely a matter of a tradeoff between parsimony and accuracy, whereas economists would prefer to create theories that produce the same general results (and hence the theories are parsimonious), whereas psychologists would prefer to create theories that are more accurate to account for data. I feel like a learned a lot from the book, even though a lot of the book was difficult because I have no formal background in economics. And hey, to show you that economics and psychology readers like this can be fun, I'll add a joke here that one of the authors put in the book (p. 331, fn. 1):The president comes to his Council of Psychological Advisors and says to them, "I've got this situation developing tomorrow, and I'd like some advice." They carefully get all the information they can from him about his problem and tell him, "Mr. President, you've come to the right place. But this is a bit different than any situation we've studied before, we'll have to do some new experiments. Come back in 6 months." Then he goes across the hall to his Council of Economic Advisors and say the same thing to them. They say, "Mr. President, you've come to the right place. We have a theory that addresses exactly your situation. By the way, what is your situation?"

Review # 2 was written on 2019-05-24 00:00:00 Kamsiah Yaakub This was a lecture that Russell wrote during the first world war, and thus, contained vital tokens of his political thought along with romantic language he used to encourage. I chose to read this because I am endlessly interested in Russell's critique of BOTH ideologies of conservatism and socialism. In these pages, one can find Russell's explicit denunciation of capitalism and the wage system (as he calls for it to be abolished) as well as his complete disregard for any form social organization resembling anarchy. He makes sweeping phycological observations about human nature (narrowing our desires down as humans to either Possessive vs. Creative) as well as unsubstantiated sociological observations about human interactions. Russell also does not find time to punctuate which institutions he feels are necessary or which aren't which could contribute effectively to his argument. As a statist and a liberal, Russell does little to add to contemporary thought regarding social democracy or welfare state promotion and instead perpetuates thinking along the lines of John Locke and Wilhelm Von Humboldt. The only difference, and its the reason why I love to read anything Russell wrote, is that he uses such beautiful, hopeful language for his visions of a future society. In short but poignant sections, he always finds conclusive sentences to mark this eloquent departure: "There can be no final goal for human institutions; the best are those that most encourage progress toward others still better. Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active" (17).