Search results

Bloomington scholars are critical of the rather wide-spread “Model Platonism” of both Austrian and Chicago economists. Their empirical, B, perspective avoids the more extreme views of both Austrian “mindful economics,” A, and Chicago “mindless economics,” C. Yet the B is not a mere convex combination of A and C. It is rather a psychologically grounded empirical evidence-oriented approach that keeps clear of the non-empirical spirit of von Mises’ and Selten’s methodological dualism on one hand and the instrumentalist and behaviorist spirit of much of neo-classical economics on the other hand.

Journalists construct a public image through each of their produced texts. Regarding cinema journalism, the feature stories are the result of multiple semiotic relationships established between the cinematographic products, the artists involved with the cinema production, and the possible expectations of the readers related to the journalistic texts, as well as viewers of the films and the depicted artistic contexts. A semiotic analysis of a feature story on the documentary Todos os Paulos do Mundo, written by the journalist Luiz Carlos Merten, reveals the construction of what semiotics calls signic actions. Such actions recover the film creation process and its produced meaning related to contemporary Brazilian production of cinematography.

Does the classical liberal emphasis on freedom of association provide an intellectual cover for bigotry? We formulate this question in economic terms using James Buchanan’s economic approach to ethics, according to which moral values can be understood as preferences about other people’s behaviors. We discuss two possible market failures associated with freedom of association: inter-group externalities and Schelling-type emergent segregation. We show that the classical liberal position about freedom of association, as elaborated in Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent, is fully equipped to deal with the first one, but not with the second. The progressive view that some preferences are so offensive that they should be dismissed rather than engaged or negotiated with can be reframed as an attempt to solve the emergent segregation problem, but it is vulnerable to political economy problems of its own, in particular to an inherent tendency to over-expand the meaning of “bigotry.”