Modern Social Science Concepts, Proportionate Reciprocity, Modesty, and Democracy

Soldatos, Gerasimos T. (2013): Modern Social Science Concepts, Proportionate Reciprocity, Modesty, and Democracy. Published in: European Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies , Vol. 6, No. 1 (2014): pp. 15-27.

Abstract

Proportionate Reciprocity, Modesty, and Democracy, are the key concepts in Aristotle’s economics of exchange. The following correspondence of these concepts with modern social science may be contemplated: (a) Ideally, reciprocal justice in bilateral bargaining to minimize expenditure given utility levels results in Pareto-efficient, envy-free, equitable outcomes. (b) Practically, bargaining under the threat or actual recontracting may act as a surrogate of reciprocal justice, leading to an N-person contract topology. (c) But, recontracting is subject to practical limitations too, in which case near-reciprocal justice/general equilibrium outcomes may be fostered if, as a surrogate of recontracting, modesty in interaction is exhibited in an evolutionarily-stable-strategy fashion. (d) That is, incomplete recontracting amounts to asymmetric agent-type information, which in turn lays the ground for injustices; the same lack of information prevents rectificatory justice from being efficient and hence, modesty can be efficient only if it operates as a social norm and hence, only in a modest polity, which can be no other than democracy.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: reciprocal justice, reciprocal figures, general equilibrium, modesty
• Subjects: B - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches > B1 - History of Economic Thought through 1925 > B11 - Preclassical (Ancient, Medieval, Mercantilist, Physiocratic); D - Microeconomics > D5 - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium > D51 - Exchange and Production Economies; D - Microeconomics > D6 - Welfare Economics > D63 - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement; D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D71 - Social Choice ; Clubs ; Committees ; Associations; P - Economic Systems > P1 - Capitalist Systems > P16 - Political Economy

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