David Rose on the Moral Foundations of Economic Behavior

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🗓️ 23 January 2012

⏱️ 72 minutes

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Summary

David Rose of the University of Missouri, St. Louis and the author of The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the book and the role morality plays in prosperity. Rose argues that morality plays a crucial role in prosperity and economic development. Knowing that the people you trade with have a principled aversion to exploiting opportunities for cheating in dealing with others allows economic actors to trust one another. That in turn allows for the widespread specialization and interaction through markets with strangers that creates prosperity. In this conversation, Rose explores the nature of the principles that work best to engender trust. The conversation closes with a discussion of the current trend in morality in America and the implications for trust and prosperity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:36.5	Today is January 11, 2012, and my guest is David Rose, Professor of Economics at the University
0:45.0	of Missouri St. Louis, an author of the Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior, David
0:50.4	Welk Deacon Talk. Thank you for having me. Our topic for today, we're going to talk about
0:57.5	the ideas in your new book, the Moral Foundations of Economic Behavior. You frame the book
1:03.0	around an interesting thought experiment to help us understand the nature of prosperity.
1:08.0	What's that thought experiment? Well, the basic thought experiment was this. If a society
1:14.4	sole objective was to maximize general prosperity and it could choose the moral beliefs of the
1:21.5	people that comprise it. What kind of moral beliefs would it pick? What would they look like?
1:28.8	What kind of characteristics would they have? The reason for doing that is I had become
1:37.2	disenchanted with the progress that we've been making as a profession on what's commonly
1:45.6	now known as the development puzzle. I like a lot of work on it.
1:51.6	Well, basically, economics did really well through the 19th century and beginning of the
1:57.7	20th century, working out the essential logic of the price system. That was a huge triumph
2:03.0	and it was great gift to mankind. I think we basically got that right. But as Koon
2:09.6	has pointed out, when you have a new paradigm at early stages, things are great. You're
2:16.8	able to answer all the questions. But over time, you start to peter out. The usefulness
2:22.0	of a paradigm starts to peter out and that happened with the neoclassical paradigm. What
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