Challenging Mooreanism

‘Challenging Mooreanism’ puts forward some arguments against Mooreanism, the formal view that either final good-for is an incoherent value notion or, ultimately, at best a disguised reference to what is finally good. The chapter concludes that Mooreans bar us from making some evaluations, which, in principle, we should be able to endorse or reject on substantive grounds. Mooreanism is therefore in at least some respects, inferior to value dualism. The arguments focus on the so-called ‘localisation manoeuvre’, which Mooreans tend to employ in order to argue that they can in fact make sense of some uses of ‘good for someone’. The general idea behind this manoeuvre is to reduce claims such as ‘x is good for a’ to claims about non-relational goodness located in a, or at least related to a in some relevant way. Mooreans will not insist that this is always possible. Sometimes people are linguistically confused when they maintain that something is finally good for someone. However, sometimes speakers make sense even if they express themselves in terms of what is finally good for a person, and when that happens, they locate a non-relational good to the person. Or so the Mooreans argue. The arguments against Mooreanism turn on some evaluations referring to overall and pro tanto values that Mooreanism qua formal value theory should be able to analyse. However, it is argued that the localisation manoeuvre cannot be applied to these evaluations.

Good and Good-For

‘Good and Good-For’ introduces three views concerning the distinction between final goodness and final goodness-for. These two value notions mark the divide between the impersonally (non-relationally) and personally (relationally) valuable—the value gap which this book is about. Two of the views—‘Mooreanism’ and ‘good-for monism’—deny there is any gap at all. Both reject value dualism, the theory that final goodness and final goodness-for are independent value notions that cannot be fully understood in terms of one another. The book’s discussion of good and good-for depicts these as being about two kinds of property (not necessarily in a realistic sense). According to Mooreanism, either final good-for is an incoherent value notion or, ultimately, at best a disguised reference to what is finally good. Good-for monists reverse this, and insist that either final good is an incoherent value notion or, ultimately, at best one referring to what is finally good for someone or something. Dualism in its turn does not imply that anything that is good-for someone is also good, or vice versa. Intuitively, there could be things that are good for a person which do not carry any impersonal value, or vice versa.

Effect of Feed-In Tariff with Deregulation on Directed Technical Change in the Energy Sector

In this study, we examine how a feed-in tariff (FIT) accompanied with deregulation in the energy sector affects the direction of technical change along the balanced growth path. A final good is composed of resource-saving (such as renewable) energy and traditional resource-intensive energy. The government introduces a FIT scheme for promoting resource-saving energy, while it deregulates the traditional energy sector for efficiency improvement. The implementation of the scheme positively affects directed technical change toward the resource-saving energy technology and economic growth. Meanwhile, the biased technical change leads to an upsurge in the surcharge. Associated deregulation not only accelerates the biased technical change but also drives the surge in the surcharge rate, unless the initial market structure of the traditional energy sector is highly concentrated.

Automation and sectoral reallocation

Empirical evidence in Dauth et al. (J Eur Econ Assoc, 2021) suggests that industrial robot adoption in Germany has led to a sectoral reallocation of employment from manufacturing to services, leaving total employment unaffected. We rationalize this evidence through the lens of a general equilibrium model with two sectors, matching frictions and endogenous participation. Automation induces firms to create fewer vacancies and job seekers to search less in the automatable sector (manufacturing). The service sector expands due to the sectoral complementarity in the production of the final good and a positive wealth effect for the household. Analysis across steady states shows that the reduction in manufacturing employment can be offset by the increase in service employment. The model can also replicate the magnitude of the decline in the ratio of manufacturing employment to service employment in Germany between 1994 and 2014.

Outsourcing versus technology transfer: Hotelling meets Stackelberg

This paper considers a Hotelling duopoly with two firms A and B in the final good market. Both A and $B$ can produce the required intermediate good, firm B having a lower cost due to a superior technology. We compare two contracts: outsourcing (A orders the intermediate good from B) and technology transfer (B transfers its technology to A). First we show that an outsourcing order acts as a credible commitment on part of A to maintain a certain market share in the final good market. This generates an indirect Stackelberg leadership effect, which is absent in a technology transfer contract. We show that compared to the situation of no contracts, there are always Pareto improving outsourcing contracts but no Pareto improving technology transfer contracts. Finally, it is shown that whenever both firms prefer one of the two contracts, all consumers prefer the other contract.

Interregional Competition for Mobile Creative Capital with and Without Physical Capital Mobility

A lacuna in the extant literature and our desire to contribute to the theoretical literature on how tax/subsidy policies can be used by regions to attract the creative class together provide the motivation for this paper. The paper’s basic contribution is that it is the first to theoretically analyze competition between two regions (1 and 2) for mobile creative capital, the key attribute possessed by the creative class. Both regions produce a final good using creative and physical capital. In the first case, physical capital is immobile and only region 2 uses tax policy to attract the mobile creative capital. We compute the equilibrium returns to creative and physical capital, we specify a key condition for creative capital in the aggregate economy, and we show which of three tax policies gives region 2 the highest income. In the second case, creative and physical capital are mobile and both regions pursue tax policies to attract mobile creative capital. Once again, we compute the equilibrium returns to creative and physical capital and then describe the optimal taxes for the two regions given that they wish to maximize regional income.

Testing for the emergence of spontaneous order

We report on an experimental investigation of the emergence of Spontaneous Order, the idea that societies can co-ordinate, without government intervention, on a form of society that is good for its citizens, as described by Adam Smith. Our experimental design is based on a production game with a convex input provision possibility frontier, where subjects have to choose a point on this frontier. We start with a simple society consisting of just two people, two inputs, one final good and in which the production process exhibits returns to specialisation. We then study more complex societies by increasing the size of the society (groups of 6 and 9 subjects) and the number of inputs (6 and 9 inputs respectively), as well as the combinations of inputs that each subject can provide. This form of production can be characterised as a cooperative game, where the Nash equilibrium predicts that the optimal outcome is achieved when each member of this society specialises in the provision of a single input. Based on this framework, we investigate whether Spontaneous Order can emerge, without it being imposed by the government. We find strong evidence in favour of the emergence of Spontaneous Order, with communication being an important factor. Using text classification algorithms (Multinomial Naive Bayes) we quantitatively analyse the available chat data and we provide insight into the kind of communication that fosters specialisation in the absence of external involvement. We note that, while communication has been shown to foster coordination in other contexts (for example, in public goods games, market entry games and competitive coordination games) this contribution is in the context of a production game where specialisation is crucial.

Distortions, Misallocation and the Endogenous Determination of the Size of the Financial Sector

We present a model of heterogeneous firms and misallocation in which financial frictions are partially overcome if more human resources are devoted to intermediation, at the cost of having fewer resources employed in directly productive activities. Not only does an inefficient financial sector result in an inefficient final good sector; an inefficient final good sector results in an inefficient financial sector. Exogenous inefficiencies in the productive sector generate decreased demand for financial services, which translates into a smaller and less efficient financial sector, worsening the resource allocation in the productive sector. This direction of causality seems in line with cross-country evidence.

The new macroeconometrics: A Bayesian approach

This article examines the dynamics of the US economy over the last five decades using Bayesian analysis of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models. It highlights an example application in what is commonly referred to as the new macroeconometrics, which combines macroeconomics with econometrics. The article describes a benchmark New Keynesian DSGE model that incorporates four types of agents: households that consume, save, and supply labour to a labour ‘packer’; a labour ‘packer’ that puts together the labour supplied by different households into an homogeneous labour unit; intermediate good producers, who produce goods using capital and aggregated labour; and a final good producer that mixes all the intermediate goods. It also considers the application of the model in policy analysis for public institutions such as central banks, along with private organizations and businesses. Finally, it discusses three avenues for further research in the estimation of DSGE models.

The affective economy of transnational surrogacy

The booming business of global surrogacy has come to a halt: one surrogacy hub after the other has started to regulate the incremental flow of intended parents to the Global South hoping to fulfill their desire for a baby with the help of a foreign surrogate laborer. Thailand and Nepal have banned surrogacy altogether; India and Mexico insist on the altruistic nature of their surrogacy arrangements. As the drive for altruistic surrogacy suggests, the baby holds an exceptional position in many societies: ideas about the ‘unique’ maternal bond create public unease about the commercialization of babies in surrogacy markets. Drawing on economic sociology and theories of affect, this paper argues that multiple processes of affective attachment, detachment and reattachment shape transnational surrogacy journeys. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico’s surrogacy industry, the paper studies processes of commodification and decommodification in three instances of market-making: (1) the assignment of value and a price to reproductive laborers’ bodies on the basis of affective postcolonial geographies of beauty; (2) the affective/effective organization of the market encounter through contracts and communication rules and (3) the detachment of the final ‘good’ of the baby from the surrogate laborer. Transnational surrogacy arrangements, the paper concludes, are always forms of partial commodification – no matter whether they are framed as altruistic or commercial – because processes of affective/effective attachment and detachment are fundamental for delineating the intimate boundaries of families that come into life with the assistance of the globally operating surrogacy industry.