For Instance, Which Cultures Encourage or Hinder Economic Development or Political Democracy, and Why?
Thanks to a hacker attack, the initial version of this article — published May 10, 2003 — is wandering restlessly amid the pitch dark of a distant and dismal CPU-Purgatory, no reprieve in sight, along with all the other articles that appeared between April 18th and July 1. Revised and updated, that article now makes a re-run appearance here. Of the 120 articles or so published since the buggy prof site went into operation in late January this year, it’s probably the most challenging intellectually . . . though, let us hope, not beyond the ability of university students or graduates to follow and either agree or disagree with. Introductory Comments As a discipline with aspirations to to being a science — or even claims that it already is — economics encounters a horde of problems that play havoc with the claims and frustrate the aspirations. In the past. Right now. And very likely way into the future. Two such problems stand out, one theoretical, the other practical: [1] The lim
