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Like the old Marxists, and the older Christians, the neo-institutionalists among Samuelsonian economists want a theory that would, if it were true, have allowed them in 1700 to lay down the future.1They want the story of the Great Enrichment - the utterly strange magnitude of which they of course acknowledge, being competent economists and economic historians - to be a story of what they call 'institutions'.
Yet by 'institutions' the economists do not mean what other social scientists mean by institutions, such as marriage or the market - which is to say the good or bad dance of human lives, full of human meanings and improvisations. As May West said, 'I admire the institution of marriage. But I'm not ready for an institution'. Norms are ethical persuasions, bendable, arguable, and interpretable. Rules are, well, rules, such as that bribes are illegal in India, or that jaywalking is illegal in downtown Evanston. The rules of bribery in Sweden are probably the same as in India, and the jaywalking rules in Germany are the same as in Evanston. The difference is ethics. The English novelist and essayist Parks, who has taught at university in Italy since 1981, notes that 'it is extraordinary how regularly Italy creates . . . areas of uncertainty: How is the law [of, say, train travel with a valid ticket] to be applied?' The 'culture of ambiguous rules' seems, 'to serve the purpose of drawing you into a mindset of vendetta and resentment. . . . You become a member of [Italian] society insofar as you feel hard done by, . . . [playing in] a gaudy theatre of mimed tribal conflict'. He gives the example of il furbo, the crafty one, who jumps the queue to buy a ticket at the train station, in a way that would get him assaulted by grandmothers in Germany and by handgun licensees in the United States. The law-abiding Italians groan, but do not act effectively to protect the public good of queues. They would rather be resentful, and therefore be justified in taking advantage sometime of their own acts of furbismo.2
Economists call ethics often by another name, 'enforcement'. The new word, with its whiff of third-party intervention somehow...