Carl Dassbach wrote,
1. > . . . capitalism historically promotes democracy . . ..It
> promotes formal equality to overcome the feudal inequalities .
I agree this is a TENDENCY, although I'm not sure this is true in
all cases. My concern in my last posting was not about the transition
between f-ism and c-ism, but was about the impact of democracy within
already existing capitalist countries.
2. > if these propositions were interesting (and they are NOT)
But I think they are interesting. One reason is this: one aspect of
the social democratic project is to expand democracy within
capitalism. The idea is that people within a democratic
environment will demand things like a social wage. The hope
is that as people see the social wage is kinda nice, they might
be more open to socialism. But, what if democracy (or the expansion
of the social wage) harms the performance of a country? Will
people say a) lets dump the social wage to stimulate the
economy or b) hey, this social wage seems a good thing, but
capitalism can't handle it--lets dump capitalism.
But if democracy stimulates the economy, what then? Other issues
arise.
3. >how would you differentiate between them - make up some
> indicators, crunch some numbers and prove nothing or prove
> what we want to prove.
This way of looking at empirical research is very common. And,
certainly some people do empirical research in this way. But many
people don't. But in any case, what is most interesting in empirical
research is finding something you didn't anticipate.
I'm not sure that empirical research "proves"
or "disproves" theoretical statements. However, empirical
research can help shed light on issues that is not gained in other
forms of inquiry. For instance, the simple attempt to measure
something qualitative in order to "crunch numbers" leads one
to more fully think about what is being measured and the
various weaknesses of various different approaches. This sort
of thinking is less likely to go on in other forms of inquiry.
Further, if one anticipates a certain result and you don't get it,
this leads you to think, "what's wrong here?--is my theory
wrong, or is something else going on that I did not previously
think about (interactions, etc)" Such thinking is also less likely
to go on in other forms of inquiry, although it might lead to
new interesting insights.
I'm not a simple falsificationist, but I wonder why some people
reject empirical research as strongly as they do. Yes, most empirical
work is sloppy and bad and only proved what the writer set out
to prove. But this is likely also true of "theorists."
Eric
..
Eric Nilsson
Department of Economics
California State University
San Bernardino, CA 92407
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
