Economics of Regulation

Estefanía Campos  | 13 de junio de 2019  | Vistas: 45

Andrew Young talks about two tales of the Great Enrichment, one from Violence and Social Orders, North (2009) and the other one from McCloskey on The Bourgeois Trilogy.

On one side, Douglas North discusses that for any society to have development it needs to control violence. The only way people can effectively interact and create wealth is by keeping violence low with limited access order.This means that elites have political power and have to keep their rents at minimal violence.

Limited access order can get you so far in terms of providing an environment where people can be more productive and have reasonable levels of wealth and wellbeing but you are not going to have a great enrichment scenario”.

Andrew explains that McCloskey on the other side, rejects “materialist” institutional explanations and believes that Enlightenment ideas of liberty and dignity caused the Great Enrichment.

Later Young talks about the problems or gaps on both perspectives. On the ideas of North, he says that mechanisms through which expansion of access occur are not elaborated on. With McCloskey the problem is that development of liberty/dignity is a historical accident.

Finally he talks about the institutional environments in these proposals. Explains that the institutions (self-governing cities; universities) allowed the development and spread of ideas, which were a critical part of allowing for extensions of access. Also the development of a market for political property rights. The question is, how do you have constitutional arrangements such that allows that access to be expanded?

Understand from these two perspectives, que problems of the developing world today.