I've harped on about this before, but was interested in Bryan Caplan's critique of the Levy-Peart project:
I'm going after analytical egalitarians because they're wasting their talent and energy defending the undefendable.
Caplan views analytical egalitarianism entirely within the classic "nature vs. nurture" debate (my view on which is here), which baffles me because the word "analytical" implies the very opposite: Levy-Peart are introducing an analytical assumption about the relationship between expert and layman, rather than an empirical claim about the difference between the two. I'm not alone, commentator Scott Clark sums up my view:
The way I viewed analytical egalitarianism when i was in Levy's class was not that everyone is the same as everyone else. But when analyzing and making policy decisions, it best to act as if everyone were equal.
... If Dr. Levy is pushing anything more sweeping than that, I must have missed it.
I'm excited by the Levy-Peart work because it's a claim entirely missing from UK politics, where the basic principles of Public Choice don't exist. We still rely on assumptions of benevolence and omniscience (which were most forceably defeated by Buchanan & Tullock, and Hayek respectively). Where Peart-Levy come in is to extend the analysis beyond politicians to "experts", and thereby illuminate the coalition of interests that exist between state and academia. Their working paper "Public Choice and the Expert: The Endogenous Past" illustrates this majestically:
One can always make a forecast “right” by changing the past. We now know this was a characteristic of Soviet accounts of their economic performance. Our question is whether American accounts of Soviet economic growth also retold the past?
As I say, majestic work, so check it out.
Update:
Bryan's added two other posts, here and here; and Sandra Peart has responded.
Oh no, not "check it out"; and such a civilised site, too.
Posted by: dearieme | October 27, 2006 at 07:25 PM