The Mystery of Capital and the Social Construction of Reality
I have never taken a philosophy class in my life. Ditto economics.
It might therefore seem odd that I should want to read and comment on a book by professional economists and philosophers, based on an academic meeting held in Buffalo 15 years ago. But if you scroll through my Steemit posts, there's an ongoing theme of What the hell is this money thing all about? I'd like to take a deeper dive into some of those topics, for my own edification, and this free book, downloaded from the editor Barry Smith's website, seems like a way to do that.
Why not bring the Steemit community along for the ride?
I did a similar thing (in person) last year with the Greensboro Science Cafe's Big Scary Book Club, where we read one chapter a month of Steven Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for about a decade.
I have actually read de Soto's The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, and I pretty much agree with Smith's basic assessment of the book.
His thesis is simple. The poor in developing countries often have many assets—homes, informal businesses, plots of land. What they lack is formal property rights to these assets. This deficiency diminishes their potential worth as financial assets (for example, by blocking their use as collateral for borrowing) or even as real assets (for example, by preventing utilities such as gas and electricity from being legally connected to them.)
After last week's post about TradeCoin and asset-backed securities, I think the discussion will be relevant to the Steemit audience. What we're all about is monetizing information, as a practical process. These people are interested in the same process from a different angle. At least that's what I get from reading the introduction.
Contributions to this book also expand de Soto’s approach to “capitalization” of tangible assets to include the capitalization of intangible assets such as information and knowledge, or human capital, which are identified as the long-term engine of growth ...
So, my plan is to do a post on each chapter, and to link those individual posts to this table of contents.
1. What I Do, and How Philosophy Has Helped Me - Hernando de Soto
2. Social Ontology and Political Power - John Searle
3. Searle and de Soto: The New Ontology of the Social World - Barry Smith
4. The Construction of Social Reality: Searle, de Soto, and Disney - Jeremy Shearmur
5. How Philosophy and Science May Interact: A Case Study of Works by John Searle and Hernando de Soto - Ingvar Johansson
6. Language and Institutions in Searle’s The Constructionof Social Reality - Iosef Moural
7. The Mystery of Human Capital as Engine of Growth, or Why the U.S. became the Economic Superpower in the Twentieth Century - Isaac Ehrlich
8. Allocation and Misallocation of Human Capital: Some Lessons from Japan and Russia - Serguey Braguinsky
9. On the Essential Nature of Human Capital - Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo
10. Property Law for Development Policy and Institutional Theory: Problems of Structure, Choice, and Change - Errol Meidinger
11. The Institutionalization of Real Property Rights: The Case of Denmark - Erik Stubkjær
12. A Case for Simple Laws - Andrew U. Frank; Postscript by Carlos Alejandro Cabrera Del Valle
13. Sovereigns, Squatters, and Property Rights: From Guano Islands to the Moon - David R. Koepsell
14. The Property Rights Prescription and Urba Migrant vs. Rural Customary Land Tenure in the Developing World - Jon D. Unruh
15. Geographic Regions as Brute Facts, Social Facts, and Institutional Facts - Daniel R. Montello
16. Collective Intentionality, Documentation, and Real Estate - Dan Fitzpatrick
17. Real Institutions, and Really Legitimate Institutions - Eric Palmer
Join me on this voyage of discovery!
Hopefully it will end better than that of the other Hernando de Soto, whose body (wrapped in the sheet below) was dumped into the Mississippi at night by his own men, so the natives wouldn't figure out that he was not an immortal sun god, as he had claimed.
![[image link]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Burial_of_de_Soto_-_engraving.jpg/640px-Burial_of_de_Soto_-_engraving.jpg){kind=link}
Very interesting. I don't think it's unusual at all to immerse oneself in philosophy and economics for anyone; in fact, I think it's imperative for everyone to do so. These things exist at the highest level of world processes and understanding, and the only way I can find solace and stability in any of the chaos is through deep self-education and understanding.
Yeah, but I'm a scientist, and scientists don't think much of thinking, unless there's an experiment to go along with it. Thoughts by themselves have no necessary connection to reality.
Hm, depends on what you mean by "thoughts" I'd say! I don't believe everyone has the same interchangeable notion of what "thinking" is, but rather that there's a few components to cognition that variously are or are not considered "thinking." On some level, I think thoughts actually must be necessarily connected to reality - that's to say nothing, however, of to what degree the connection is relevant, insightful, or pragmatic, as that's heavily context dependent.
I read this really interesting article a while ago about the ties between philosophy and science, I think you might like it. Don't let the snarky headline deter you, the article itself isn't actually as backhanded in its tone towards science as the title might imply:
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/philosophy-simply-harder-science/
You were right; I did like that. Thanks!
Never heard the "spin-off" argument before, but it makes a lot of sense. I'd say that modern neuroscience is making pretty good headway on all five of those topics: "morality, knowledge, free will, consciousness and so on," or at least on how humans treat those concepts.
Part of the implied criticism of philosophy in literature, like those two in Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy is the general intuition (not just mine) that philosophers don't actually want answers. What they want is to continue the battle so that they can display their own linguistic cleverness, like rap battlers or virtuoso jazz musicians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_characters#Majikthise_and_Vroomfondel
'Majikthise and Vroomfondel may or may not be philosophers. They quite definitely appear as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and other Professional Thinking Persons. When the supercomputer Deep Thought is being programmed to determine the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, they declare a demarcation dispute since the search for ultimate truth is the "inalienable prerogative of your professional working thinkers". They insist on rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty, and demand Deep Thought be switched off immediately. They are disarmed when Deep Thought, already committed to its seven and a half million years' calculation, suggests that a great deal of money can be made by philosophers willing to exploit the expected media interest. It is later apparent that their distant descendants revere them as "the greatest and most truly interesting pundits the universe has ever known." '
Not to say that scientists aren't also prone to that showmanship-type behavior. The quote below from the article is only relatively true.
"When scientists are invited to give research talks, they aren’t allowed simply to stand up and theorize, however interesting that would be."
Well, it looks as though I can no longer edit this master post. That's awkward. In any case, here's the link to Chapter 1.
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@plotbot2015/roaches-not-cheetahs-chapter-1-of-the-mystery-of-capital-and-the-social-construction-of-reality