Morals From Rationality Alone? Some Doubts

Contractarians aim to derive moral principles from the dictates of instrumental rationality alone. But it is well-known that contractarian moral theories struggle to identify normative principles that are both uniquely rational and morally compelling. Michael Moehler's recent book, *Minimal Morality* seeks to avoid these difficulties by developing a novel "two-level" social contract theory, which restricts the scope of contractarian morality to cases of deep and persistent moral disagreement. Yet Moehler remains ambitious, arguing that a restricted version of Kant's categorical imperative is a uniquely rational principle of conflict resolution. We develop a formal model of Moehler's informal game-theoretic argument, which reconstructs a valid argument for Moehler's conclusion. This model, in turn, enables us to expose how a successful argument for Moehler's contractarian principle rests on assumptions that can only be justified by subtle yet significant departures from the standard conception of rationality. We thus extend our understanding of familiar contractarian difficulties by showing how they arise even if we restrict the scope of contractarian morality to a domain where its application seems both promising and necessary. We show that the problem lies not in contractarians' immodest ambitions but in the modest resources rationality can offer to satisfy them

Privatization: Selling America To the Lowest Bidder

[Excerpt] Elected officials and citizens are now learning in hundreds of communities that privatization is not the way to improve the quality and efficiency of public services. Cities such as New York and Phoenix, where privatization proliferated in the early 1980s, are now bringing work back in-house. And in the federal government, despite a massive privatization campaign waged by the Reagan Administration, resistance by agency directors has resulted in a job loss of only 0.7% of all nondefense federal jobs. (The job loss rises to 2.1% if civilian defease department jobs are included.) A recent report by the U.S. Government Accounting Office concludes that privatization of federal employees\u27 jobs is neither cheaper nor better

Product differentiation in a linear city and wage bargaining

Economides (1986) has shown that within a linear city an equilibrium exists in a two-stage location-price game when the curvature of the transportation cost function is sufficiently high. One important point is that not all of these equilibria are at maximal differentiation. In this paper we include an additional stage with decentralized wage bargaining. This intensifies price competition resulting in locations that are nearer to the extremes of the city. The magnitude of this effect depends on the bargaining power of the unions.Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Serie

On the recognizability of money

This paper develops a model of currency circulation under asymmetric information. Agents are heterogeneous and trade in bilateral matches. Coins are intrinsically valuable and are available in two weights, light and heavy. We characterize the equilibrium under complete information and under imperfect information about the quality of coins. We determine a set of conditions under which the two currencies circulate and are traded according to different terms of trade. We study how output, welfare, and the velocity of currency are affected by the recognizability of coins. We show that society's welfare increases as coins become more easily recognizable.Money

Euro Zone Crisis Management and the New Social Europe

This article analyzes the changes in European governance since the beginning of the euro crisis in relation to the project of constructing Social Europe. The article tracks the incorporation of a structural reform agenda originally designed as bailout conditionality for countries on the verge of default into EU economic governance as a strategy for growth. Beyond the contestable grounds of this reform agenda, its adoption by the EU in the mode of crisis management poses serious questions of legitimacy. The new enhanced economic coordination process includes obligatory guidelines in domains under the legislative competence of Member States, such as labor regulation and taxation, under the guise of a technocratic imperative. The article also shows that despite the intensely neoliberal character of the proposed structural reforms, the Commission has foregrounded the protection of Europe’s welfare regimes as a key reason for reform. In reality, such reforms would dramatically alter welfare regimes, emptying out traditional welfarist goals such as the decommodification of labor without appropriate political processes. This article argues that these developments are likely to challenge the already weakened legitimacy of the European Union

Statement of Samuel Estreicher Before the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations

Includes correspondence between the author and Senate Labor Committee counsel on topic of testimony.Testimony_Estreicher_011994.pdf: 344 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020