301. How to proceed with this blog

As I did after 100 and after 200 items on this blog, here, at 300, I want to give a preview of  what I intend to write.

A priority is to analyse the populist upheaval, on the political right and on the political left, and look for answers. For that, I will focus on economics and politics. Populist grievances concerning injustice done to lower classes by globalisation are legitimate and cry out for a response. I do not, however want to abolish free trade and markets, but rather to re-direct them. Populist complaints about politics being too far removed from ‘the people’ are also legitimate, I think, and I want to see how politics could be brought closer to the people.

However, philosophical reflection on other issues will continue to crop up.

For this endeavour, I summarize my credentials below.    

I will employ what was developed previously in this blog. I want to explore the possibilities for a ‘new economics’ and a ‘new politics’. The latter I started to attempt in item 287 in this blog. For the former I will use a recent book of mine: How markets work and fail, and what to make of them (2014).

An important element in economics and politics will be a virtue ethics, to replace the utility ethics of the liberalism that over many years has dominated economics and politics. I accept its values of (negative) liberty, utility and efficiency, but there are also other values, of positive liberty, justice, excellence, moderation, friendship, and creativity, among others. Here, I will engage in the debate on ‘the moral limits of markets’.   

A second key element is the view of the individual not as fully rational and autonomous but as having limited rationality and being socially constituted. As argued in this blog, the individual needs the other to develop itself and have some chance of being freed from its prejudices. Next to individual motivation and action, I will look at network effects and system effects, including the ‘system tragedy’ that I discussed in this blog.

While I do not believe objective truth is attainable, because thought, including facts, are shaped by perspective, I will not go along with the rejection of truth altogether (in ‘post truth’), and I uphold the notion of truth as ‘warranted assertibility’, as argued in this blog.

I accept universals, in concepts, truth and ethics, as needed but also temporary, trumped by individuality and local specifics, and subject to revision.

Unlike most economists, I will accept that in economies and human relations more widely there is pervasive ‘radical uncertainty’ that precludes the assignment of probabilities for calculating optimal choice.    

I will oppose the libertarian side of liberalism, while upholding liberal democracy, with its constitutional constraints on government, such as the rule of law, equality under the law, being innocent until proven guilty, freedom of speech, association, and religion, separation of powers (legislative, executive, judicial), etc.

A challenge to a new economics is how to combine competition with collaboration, and self interest with altruism, prudence with trust. I will discuss market failures as well as government failures.

I will look at virtues as needed to achieve ‘the good life’, and at the task of government to provide a basis for them. However, I want to maintain freedom of choice of what one takes to be the good life. Next to maximum negative freedom, freedom of interference, in striving for the good life, I will consider minimal positive freedom, in giving access to what is needed for it. While accepting the need for minimal negative power, in constraining choice, I want to maximise positive power, in widening choice.

In much of this, trust plays an important role, but trust should not be blind, and at its boundaries there needs to be control.

All this is Aristotelian, in adopting a virtue ethics and seeking the middle between extremes, in search of practical wisdom, phronesis, as I have done throughout this blog.