Abstract
Deirdre McCloskey challenges economists to take talk seriously. Public choice economics, like most economics, typically assigns only a small role to various forms of talk between individuals. By contrast, throughout Richard Wagner’s oeuvre, there is an undercurrent of talk about talk. This essay argues that talk matters because of two keep assumptions in Wagner’s approach to public choice. First, talk matters to the extent that individuals are ignorant. There are different forms of ignorance in economic theory which allow talk to communicate different sorts of information. Knightian uncertainty, however, also opens up the possibility that talk can do more. Second, talk matters when individuals have tuistic motivations. When individuals are moved to act based on the actions and judgments of others, talk becomes motivating as well as informative. I illustrate the power of talk in Wagner’s approach by examining the classic arguments put forward in Democracy in Deficit.
Thanks to Dave Hebert and Diana Thomas for organizing this symposium, to Justin Callais for research assistance, to Deirdre McCloskey for helpful feedback, and to Richard Wagner for years of inspiring mentorship.
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Notes
- 1.
I do not claim that these are necessary conditions for talk to matter. They are sufficient, even if they are not exhaustive.
- 2.
Epstein and Wang mistakenly refer to their model as one of Knightian uncertainty, but it is clear upon examination that they are really discussing ambiguity: unknown probability distributions (c.f. Langlois 1994).
- 3.
At least ideally. Few things are worse than a chatty toothpaste monger. Talk is not always a good thing. Hence Wagner’s frequent appeal to Sartre, “Hell is other people” (Wagner 2007, p. 48).
- 4.
A Stigler and Becker (1977) approach to this might be to argue that talk is simply providing information about which forms of human capital to invest in. Again, I do not wish to settle any dispute about how fruitful this approach is compared to the one I am proposing. I will simply say that it should enjoy at best presumptive status based on the success of its predictions rather than unquestioned status because it is neat. And it is neat
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Martin, A. (2021). From Taciturn to Talkative Political Economy. In: Hebert, D.J., Thomas, D.W. (eds) Emergence, Entanglement, and Political Economy. Studies in Public Choice, vol 38. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56088-1_6
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