Introduction, Dan Bromley, 2014 Coss Dialogues Invited Speaker

the coss dialogues were initiated in 1995 to foster cross talk between philosophers working in the classical American tradition modeled by C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and others, on the one hand, and contemporary representatives from other traditions, especially disciplines other than philosophy, on the other. The format for the Coss Dialogues was originally conceived as a plenary presentation at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) by an invited speaker representing the alternative intellectual tradition, followed by a response from philosophers more traditionally associated with the SAAP. The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy itself was formed to encourage both scholarship on the classical figures of American thought and their milieu and also contemporary work that continues in that tradition. Of our respondents, Kenneth Stikkers represents a scholar with a long and distinguished involvement with the history of pragmatism, while Evelyn Brister is bringing the pragmatist tradition into engagement with feminist philosophy of science.

The invited speaker for the 2014 Coss Dialogues was Daniel Bromley, Professor Emeritus in Economics of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Dr. Bromley is perhaps the foremost living exponent of what has sometimes been called “traditional” institutional economics. The qualifier distinguishes this school of thought from “new institutional economics,” an approach inspired by Ronald Coase (1910–2013) and now prominently associated with the work of Douglass North and Oliver Williamson. In one sense, the “new” institutional economics stands to “traditional” institutional economics as the neo-pragmatism of Donald Davidson or Richard Rorty stands with respect to the paleo-pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey. In both cases, the new and old schools share certain crucial features, yet there are compelling reasons to regard the more recent work as failing to capture important insights that were essential to the original. A Wikipedia article defines “traditional” institutional economics as an approach that

rejects the reduction of institutions to simply tastes, technology, and nature (see naturalistic fallacy). Tastes, along with expectations of the future, habits, and motivations, not only determine the nature of institutions but are limited and shaped by them. If people live and work in institutions on a regular basis, it shapes their world-views. Fundamentally, this traditional institutionalism (and its modern counterpart institutionalist political economy) emphasizes the legal foundations of an economy (see John R. Commons) and the evolutionary, habituated, and volitional processes by which institutions are erected and then changed (see John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Daniel Bromley).

(“Institutional Economics”)

This alone should be sufficient to pique the interest of readers of The Pluralist.

However, a little more stage-setting may help readers unfamiliar with internal debates among economists to appreciate Dr. Bromley’s standing and accomplishments. When economists use the word “institutions,” they are, in almost all cases, referring to rule-like habits or to formal (usually governmental) structures that prescribe and enforce patterns of conduct. One debate in the history of economics concerned the nature of economic rationality, with some holding that rational choice was in all cases a simple matter of optimizing the value that a decision maker could expect to realize from selecting among the given options. Decision makers who seemingly fail to optimize are, on this view, simply irrational. However, all institutionalists have held that actual decision making will be shaped profoundly by the structure of options presented to any decision maker, and the main thrust of institutional economics has been to bring the question of how behavior differs according to the way that options are structured into the purvey of economic analysis. Bromley begins the essay that follows by drawing the contrast with Milton Friedman’s emphasis on prediction. Prediction misses the point if it fails to consider how alternative ways of structuring the options influence economic agents’ behavior. But key concepts in welfare economics become relativized once such considerations are in play. In particular, the idea of allocative efficiency—allocating resources to their most valued use—depends wholly on the existing distribution of resources and “the rules of the game”: the legal structure for holding, utilizing, and exchanging property, including the...