 First of all, I'd like to introduce Roderick Long. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. His most recent article he informs me is Aristotle's Conception of Freedom in the Review of Metaphysics. And he recently also published an article called The Justice Society, or the article was called Imminent Liberalism, the Politics of Mutual Consent. And it appeared in social philosophy and policy, as well as in a collection of essays entitled The Justice Society, edited by Ellen Frankel-Paul, Fred Miller, and Jeffrey Paul. Roderick, thank you. My topic today is why classical liberalism needs a theory of class. More particularly, why classical liberalism needs a theory of a ruling class. Now when I say this, to classical liberals, often their first reaction is one of two things. What do we need a theory of class for? A ruling class, class struggle? That's a Marxist concept. It doesn't seem to fit in with what we're interested in. The other reaction I get is, well, yes, it is perfectly appropriate for classical liberals to be concerned with issues of class, but we don't need a theory of class. We've already got one. Well, to this I want to say, yes, there is a theory of class that classical liberalism has traditionally had. But A, it hasn't always been made use of. And I think that we could do more both in understanding society and in persuading people if we made more use of the theory of class that we've inherited. And B, the theory of class we've inherited isn't completely adequate. It needs further work. And I want in this talk to point to some of the further work that it needs. OK, what is a theory of class? Theories of class actually are much older than either classical liberals and more Karl Marx. They go back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who by and large saw class as an economic category. They saw societies divided largely into two classes, the rich and the poor. Many of these societies did have an emerging middle class, but they still often were not fully politically conscious of it, although some of them were. But basically the way they saw the political relevance of class is they were worried about the possibility of the rich minority trampling on the rights of the poor majority and of the poor majority trampling on the rights of the rich minority. They saw one of the tasks of political theory as trying to design some kind of constitutional structure that would balance the interests of the rich and the poor. This was partly for pragmatic reasons, for reasons of stability. If the rich don't like a constitutional regime, if they're not satisfied, they can make trouble in it because they've got money. If the poor aren't satisfied, they can make trouble because they've got the numbers. So partly it was in order to avoid civil war, that they wanted to come up with some kind of regime that would accommodate the interests of both. But also many of them saw it as an issue of justice, that it's not fair for the rich minority to be able to impose its will unrestrictedly on the poor majority, but also not fair vice versa. And so they developed this concept of a constitutional structure to balance the interests of both. And this was a very influential model going on down through later centuries. And you can still see the shadow of it in the Federalist Papers. However, in more recent times, there have developed two somewhat more radical approaches to class. And what was more radical about these approaches, as I see it, is that they rejected the idea that you can balance off the interests of at least certain classes. These two theories both came to the conclusion that there is at least one class that, by its nature, is, as long as it exists, is almost certain to be a ruling class. And that there's no way that you can constitutionally constrain its power. The only way that you can solve the problem is to eliminate the class, not necessarily by shooting the members of it, although that's been suggested, but by altering the conditions that make it possible to class. These two theories, one is the socialist theory of class, and the other is a theory that emerged within classical liberalism, which I'll call the radical liberal theory of class. And basically, what they disagree is the socialist sees the ruling class as an economic phenomenon. The ruling class are those who own the means of production. And because they own the means of production and the proletarians don't, this puts them in an unfair bargaining position of greater advantage. And they're able to translate into political power. So they end up with political power, but it's an economic category. They're differential access to the means of production that makes them the ruling class. Traditionally, classical liberals saw it a bit differently. They saw the ruling class as a political category. What made you remember the ruling class was the extent to which you had access to and influence over political power and the political process. So just having wealth is not enough to make you remember the ruling class. On this classical liberal theory, two people could be equally wealthy, but one of them is using that wealth to buy special favors from the government, get special monopoly privileges, that sort of thing. The other one isn't. And so the first one would be a member of the ruling class, and the second would be one of the unfortunate ruled and taxed. And the radical liberal theory, basically, it gets its start with Adam Smith worrying about the mercantile interest and the influence of merchants on the political process, trying to get special favors and protection. It develops more fully in the 18th century French classical liberals, in the 19th century American individualist anarchists. And to some extent, today's public choice there is a development of this idea, of seeing the source of the problem of groups having excessive control from the fact that they've got some kind of access to political power. And so because these classical liberals saw the ruling class primarily as a political phenomenon and saw the source of their power as being the state, generally they thought that if you radically reduced state power, that would be the solution to the problem of a class having excessive dominance. And therefore, classical liberals traditionally weren't too worried about the influence of special interests once you get rid of the special favors that government has to give away. The socialists, on the other hand, saw things differently. The socialist theory in a way, you might say, starts with Rousseau in his discourse on the origins of inequality. But then it goes on through Marx. The way that the socialists saw it, they saw the source of the ruling class's power as being not the state, but the market. It's through competition on the market that certain groups get dominance. Socioeconomic stratification occurs. You get some people who are very rich. Their wealth leads to political power, and therefore they are able, as a result of their wealth, to capture the political process. But really the source of the problem is the socioeconomic inequality to begin with. And so the socialists saw the problem as you've got, instead of eliminating access to political power, they thought the thing to do was to eliminate access to socioeconomic inequalities and get rid of the ability of people to have wealth. And so the Marxists, for example, although in the long run they wanted the state to wither away, were willing to favor a very powerful state during the socialist period. And they were afraid that the state would become tyrannical because they saw the source of oppression as being not the state but private wealth. And if once you abolish capitalism, then the state isn't inherently a dangerous thing. It's not inherently the kind of thing that becomes oppressive. It only does that when it is a tool of a ruling class. And once you eliminate the ruling class by eliminating the economic conditions that make it possible, then the state is safe, which is sort of the mirror image of the classical liberal view that the market is safe once you eliminate the state power that leads the wealthy to be able to capture special privileges. So Marxists and libertarians each tend to regard the other one as naive. Marxists think that libertarians are naive about the power of wealth in the private market. And libertarians think Marxists are naive about the power of the state. OK, so who's right? Well, it might make things a little bit easier if we divide the concept of a ruling class. If we keep in mind that a ruling class is not necessarily going to be a unified thing. It's a name for a group of special interests that benefit from and have differential power in a given political system and are able to use that power to exert control over others. But it doesn't necessarily mean there's anything unified about such a class, although they may share interests in common and cooperate on some things and disagree on others. We can make a broad distinction between people who are actually in positions of political power. People are actually holding office or existing in state bureaucracies and so forth, versus people who aren't actually in part of the workings of the state but are in the private market but are somehow beneficiaries of state power. You could say bureaucrats and plutocrats to make it a little simpler. Well, to some extent, you could see these two groups as being allied in certain respects. By the plutocrats, I don't mean everyone who's rich, but the people who are rich and use that in order to get special favors from the state. You can see reasons that these two groups would want to work together in some respects, but also ways in which they would want to disagree and fight. Now, the Marxist idea that everything in our society is run for the interests of big business won't stand up to certain facts, such as the fact that if really the entire political process were completely controlled by big business, we'd have a capital gains tax cut by now. On the other hand, if the view of some right-wingers that the entire political process is out to get big business and that big business is simply a persecuted minority, then we wouldn't have corporate welfare. The fact that we have both those things shows that there is this uneasy alliance and each side wants to be the dominant partner in the alliance and so they'll be both working together and fighting. Now, we put it that way. I think there's reason to think that the libertarian or classical liberal version of class theory is closer to the truth than the Marxist one. First of all, if you consider the bureaucratic side of the ruling class, obviously they get their power from the state. Without state power, they wouldn't have the positions that they're in. So the real dispute is about when I'm calling the plutocratic side of the ruling class. Well, I think there's good reason to think that the state greatly magnifies the political power that unscrupulous, wealthy people or groups can have. Suppose that I'm someone who wants to get something done by the government that costs a million dollars. And so let's say I want to bribe them, either directly or indirectly. Now, if they were controlling their own money, then in order to bribe them, I'd have to give them as much money as it would take for them to do whatever they're going to do. But instead, I have to, since they control tax money that isn't theirs, I can only bribe them $1,000 for them to divert $1 million to my favorite policy. And so there are various ways in which filters work to benefit the powerful. So I think that the libertarian version of the story is better, but I don't think it's the whole story. Because if you look at the history of early societies, Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, you find that there was very little in the way of centralized state power, but wealthy people, nevertheless, did manage to get a lot of power through patronage, through sort of buying off the opposition. And so we need to think about ways in which libertarians can try and solve and address that problem. Thank you, Roderick. Our second speaker this morning is Jacob Levy. He's a PhD candidate in politics at Princeton. He's had several scholarly publications, mainly concerning nationalism and the notion of cultural rights. His most recent article, The Multiculturalism of Fear, appeared in critical review last year. Jacob. I'm nominally meant to talk about individual versus group rights. In fact, I'm going to talk about why it seems to me that a strict dichotomy between individual and group rights is inadequate to a liberal political theory of ethnicity and culture and nationalism. Before, I suppose, I can tell you that story. First, I need to tell you a prior story about political theory. Political theory has, for a generation at least, been, I think, dominated by two strands of thought that are in competition but are also mutually complementary. Neoclassical economics and Kantian individual rights based applied moral philosophy. Both of these schools of thought have contributed crucial insights are very important to keep in mind. And they are complemented in turn by Anglo-American jurisprudence and law, which tends to be methodologically individualist in important ways focused on the rights that an individual could conclusively demonstrate. Neoclassical economics is, of course, methodologically individualist, taking individuals and their preferences as given and asking the question, how might those preferences best be satisfied? Applied Kantian moral philosophy is also strictly individualist in important ways. The question is, what rights do persons have? And when you have answered that question and you have respected those rights or satisfied those rights, then in some way you have finished your job of doing political philosophy. But political theory as social theory was not always like that. And there are traditions of political theory which are neither about economics nor about applied moral philosophy strictly speaking, that somewhere in them have an account of what politics is like, about what the relationship between state and society are like, about what the conditions of politics and the activities of politics in states of this kind or in societies of that kind are like. What I study myself are ethnic conflict, ethnic nationalism, cultural rights. There is an important stream in liberal thought about these matters, both classical liberal thought and modern liberal thought, that says, the way to answer a question about whether a particular policy to meet the fact of cultural pluralism is justified or not is to ask whether it is an instantiation of individual rights. Individuals have rights. Only individuals can have rights. Groups are not the kinds of things that can have rights. Therefore, if we can characterize something adequately as an individual right, then it is both justified and mandatory. If we cannot so characterize it, then it is neither necessary nor permissible. In particular, if something can only be characterized as a group right, then it is morally out of bounds. That dichotomy is, I think, a product of a generation of thinking in the terms of neoclassical economics and applied Kantian moral philosophy. But it's not actually true to what we find when we look at the world of politics, of cultural pluralism and of ethnic conflict. One example that I relied on in some part in my multiculturalism of fear article and critical review recently is that the city government of Bombay has been electrically taken over by a Hindu fundamentalist party by the BJP, which has changed the name of the city to Mumbai. Mumbai, for a variety of local distinctive historical reasons, has much stronger connotations of being a city of Hindus and Hindi speakers than does the British name of Bombay. Libertarians and modern liberals alike have a temptation to look at that and say, well, has anyone been put in jail? No. Has anyone had their free speech suppressed? No. Has anyone had their property taken away? No. There is nothing for a political philosopher to say about that matter. I think that's an important mistake. The danger of ethnic conflict, the danger of ethnic civil war, like the danger of religious civil war three centuries ago that was a part of the impetus for the birth of liberalism is a crucial fact about politics in the modern world. And to look at a phenomenon like that, which is a precursor to or an incident of ethnic conflict, it is not as though the BJP forgot that there were people who were not Hindus and not Hindis in Bombay when they made this change. They made the change because there were people in Bombay who were not Hindus and were not Hindi speakers. To look at that and say, we can't say a thing about it. We can't think a thing about it until a person's rights are violated. Seems to me to be an important mistake. And as we try to develop or redevelop a liberal social theory, a liberal political theory, which has not just applied moral philosophy, one aspect of politics that will be crucial to look at is that of ethnic conflict. And the conditions of ethnic conflict and the government policies which tend to promote ethnic conflict. I hear a libertarian voice in my mind that says, well, but the problem is that there's a government in Bombay. Well, yes, that on one account is the problem, but absent the most thoroughgoing anarchist solution possible. The fact is there will be government bodies, state bodies, that assign names to cities. If we abolish federal governments, if we have laissez-faire markets, as long as there is any kind of government left, there will be that kind of government left. And if the libertarian, if the classical liberal, has nothing to say pending the revolution, pending the day when there is no more government, has nothing to say about actually mitigating and alleviating ethnic conflict about reducing the possibility of ethnic civil war in the here and now, then it has consigned itself to an important kind of irrelevance, which is untrue to the liberal tradition, which is untrue to liberalism's genesis, is untrue to our history of liberal thought. It's a mistake of the last generation. Another example that I rely on in a different article is the legal recognition of customary marriages of indigenous and aboriginal groups in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, places where there is an indigenous or aboriginal population whose cultural mores, whose religious way of life, is radically at odds with that of the settler society and for whom marriage means something different from what it means in the dominant society by and large and from the forms of creating a marriage are different. Australia is the clearest case. Upon settlement, the British government in Australia said the common law now rules in Australia. There is no other law in Australia. And any activity that anyone already here happens to think is law just isn't. Therefore, the aborigines who live in the middle of the Outback, far from our little colony at Sydney, who think they are married, in fact, aren't. In fact, if we have a fornication statute, we can prosecute them under that. In fact, if one of them dies, the other has no claim of recourse in our courts to the property of the others, and we can freely treat the property as unowned upon the death of another. And for 150 years, this was in effect all the British government had to say or the Australian government had to say about Aboriginal marriage. They're not married unless they come to the city and get married by a proper civil official. This, I think, it's not hard to see is a mistake, is a mistake, both in terms of any substantive notion of equality before the law, is a mistake in terms of respecting the rights of persons to follow out their life plans. Aha, says the libertarian voice. The problem is that government is doing marriage. Well, yes. Government is doing marriage, but government was doing marriage in a biased way. And I think the classical liberal should not forsake the grounds to the modern liberal of being able to say anything at all about governments behaving unequally and whether or not to recognize Indigenous marriage or whether to try to read some other accommodation. That's the kind of question that actually needs to be hashed out by incorporating some social theory in addition to some applied moral philosophy in addition to some talk about individuals and their preferences. And it's the kind of question that is not adequately answered by looking at it and saying, would it be an individual right or group right if we recognized this kind of marriage? Well, it would be a group differentiated right of individuals to form partnerships with one another. The terms that were given strictly by moral philosophy aren't adequate even to talk about the problem, much less to solve it. David Bernstein is a professor of law at George Mason University Law School. He's had roughly a dozen published articles on subjects as diverse as tort reform, junk science in the courtroom, and the effect of labor legislation on minorities. David? Thank you. I'm going to be talking about the role of government in the oppression of minorities, but I actually do this from a perspective of legal history rather than political theory. And I've been working on this for about eight years on and off, so I'll try something up in 10 minutes and we'll see how I do. Essentially, my work arises out of a very basic public choice insight, so basic that when I gave a presentation along these lines at my law school at George Mason, where everyone pretty much is familiar with public choice, they all say, well, isn't that obvious? What are you really telling us that we didn't already know or wouldn't have known if we thought about it for two seconds, really? And I say, well, that's true, except that no one, except me, has actually bothered to take that public choice insight and actually write about it. So I think that actually doing the work and whatnot is useful because, well, it's obvious to us, it's obviously not obvious to everyone or someone else would have written it already. And the basic public choice insight is that, very, very basic, is that if you go back 100 years or less and you figure that blacks were disenfranchised, immigrants could not vote till they became citizens, that's still true, of course, that women could not vote. Women are sort of beyond the scope of what I'm talking about today, but women come into play too, that if certain groups were not allowed to vote, that the legislative process would not take their interest into account, some cases just ignoring their interests because they weren't there, and in some cases actually, you would assume that the legislative process would be affirmatively used against these groups. And actually everyone pretty much recognizes that, but what is not recognized is that this does not mean that the only laws that would have discriminated against blacks or Chinese immigrants is another group I'm working on would be laws that explicitly discriminated against those groups that facially neutral economic regulations would also discriminate against these groups. So, and that's what I've been, and I've been trying to find, and this was my hypothesis actually when I started, and there was almost no literature on this, but I decided to just start doing the historical spade work, and I've written several articles and I'm working on several others, tried to flesh this out historically. The first article I wrote, which I have reprints available for everyone who's interested on the table, American University Law Review 1993, is about labor legislation. I talk about the Davis Bacon Act, which requires the prevailing wage to be paid to construction workers. The Davis Bacon Act was explicitly passed with the intent of keeping southern blacks from coming up north and competing with white construction workers who were unionized on Depression-era construction projects. The Railway Labor Act was passed in 1920s and amended in 1930s. The railroad unions like the construction unions excluded blacks, and while the Railway Labor Act was just meant to generally give unions a monopoly, once they got the law passed, they explicitly used it, intentionally used it with the consent of the federal government to throw blacks off the railroads, essentially, where blacks had had a fair number of good jobs. And then I discussed New Deal labor legislation, the NRA, then its successors, the Wagner Act and the Fair Labor Standard Act, and most of you are probably familiar with, at least, something about how minimum wage laws discriminated against low-skilled workers, particularly in the south where wages were lower, and the Wagner Act again gave unions monopoly power, which was used to exclude blacks from certain fields. The second paper I wrote, which actually was originally in the first paper, but didn't really fit into my thesis for that one, so I made a separate paper, was about licensing laws, and the way that the labor unions used licensing laws starting around the turn of the century to monopolize various fields and exclude blacks from those fields, and I talk about medical licensing, plumbers licensing, and barbers licensing, and again there's sort of a pretty much a equal admixture of cases where you could show where the licensing was purposely used to exclude people and other examples where the unions were just essentially trying to get a monopoly, race wasn't really on their minds, but what the heck, once we have the laws, we might as well use them to keep out our competitors and these people who you'll only want to associate with. The third paper is one that I've just pretty much finished writing, I'm going to send it out this spring. By the way, the second paper on licensing laws, if anyone has any particular interest, I do have some reprints not with me, but I'd be happy to send it to you. Law professors tend to get hundreds of reprints of these things, so don't feel too bad about asking. Immigrant agent, the paper I'm working on now, just about finished with is about immigrant agent laws, which were laws passed in the south in the 19th century and then early 20th century after the Civil War to try to stop labor recruiters from coming from other parts of the south and later from the north to recruit black workers from the southeastern states where they were generally ill-paid and ill-treated to places like Mississippi, believe it or not, where blacks for a long time were much better treated than they were in other parts of the country because there was such a labor shortage. Finally, I've started to work last year in a paper about Chinese laundries, getting to a different ethnic group and the way that states in the west passed laws that were all facially neutral, but directly aimed at Chinese laundries, nevertheless, to try to throw the Chinese out of the laundry trade, which was one of the few strongholds they were able to get in the American economy. And throughout all these papers, I also talk about the way the courts reacted to these things and whatnot. Like Randy Krosner, as a law professor, probably as an economist, no one just wants to hear legal history. They wanna know what does this have to do with any current issues, and it's worth talking about anyway, but you really have to do it or you won't get published in a law review. And I've essentially focused on three themes. The first is that my research shows the role of state action in discrimination. Most law professors, they know about segregation laws, they know about some Jim Crow laws, but that's as far as their knowledge goes, and that's probably true of most people and most academics for that matter, the vast majority, in fact, and they assume that if people were badly off, say, in the employment context, it was solely a result of private discrimination. Now Richard Epstein, his book, Forbidden Grounds, has a couple of chapters where he alleges that actually violence and state action play a much larger role than has been generally acknowledged, but Epstein himself, unfortunately, does not provide a tremendous amount of historical support for that thesis, and I'm not purposely trying to support Epstein by doing this, but that is where the academic debate in legal circles is, is Epstein right or is Epstein wrong, and all the reviews of his book say he's wrong. Various very prominent professors from the University of Texas, Stanford, Yale, all wrote in their reviews, oh, this is all nonsense, there were no employment laws against blacks that restricted the free labor market in the South after the Civil War, they just didn't exist, except for the black codes, which were all declared unconstitutional. So I give the example of immigrant agent laws, well, you're wrong, and I wrote and I sent, I mentioned that to one of these professors who wrote one of these reviews in the letter, and he said, well, you may be right about that, but what about after the agricultural economy started declining, when blacks started moving north, there was nothing there that restricted the labor market, I said, well, what about all these new deal laws that you're clearly not aware of their effects, and he said, well, I didn't know about that either. Yeah, this isn't really his fault, he's not a historian, but someone needs to be doing this work to show that our preconceptions about what really happened in American history with regard to race are really incomplete, and I understand that in effect, you could take two things out of my research, and that regard, one is, well, if state action was such a big deal, maybe the private market wouldn't be so bad, and maybe massive government interventions to labor markets is not necessary to allow minorities to succeed economically. I mean, on the other hand, if I was a leftist and I read my history, I'd say, well, the role of state action was even greater than we knew, therefore perhaps we should have even more state action to counter it, and that's a perfectly respectable position if that's what your ideology is, I don't expect this to change anyone's ideology, but certainly preconceived notions about history do affect our current political views. Second thing I talk about is laissez-faire jurisprudence. It struck me very hard in law school, the way everyone was so concerned about the oppression of minorities, which was fine, but they were also so hostile to the idea that courts should restrict economic regulation, and particularly that courts should have been doing it around the turn of the century, so oh my God, the unions were so great, and they were helping the workers, and all this stuff, and how could those evil Supreme Court justices who were so reactionary strike down all this wonderful progressive labor legislation, and it was a very obvious insight to me, well, geez, these unions didn't let blacks in, did they, and this labor legislation therefore was, would have been passed at the behest of the politically powerful workers who were not blacks, and who were not Chinese, and who were not women, so wouldn't you expect that these court decisions would have actually benefited disenfranchised minorities, and in fact I talk a lot about that in my work, and I think again, I don't expect to change anyone's mind, but perhaps to some degree they will reassess their views on at least the historical nature of laissez-faire jurisprudence, and perhaps even recognize that current economic regulation is not always a question of protecting the poor against the rich and whatnot, but there are various interest groups in society, all of whom are fighting each other for a piece of the pie, and that keeping the government neutral in economic matters could benefit excluded groups, particularly since they tend to have less political power. Finally, I discuss federalism, and I don't mean federalism in the sense that conservatives tend to use it, that the state should be able to do whatever they want, but more federalism in the sense that it's not such a bad thing to have states exist, which believe it or not is a pretty unpopular thesis within law schools, several of my law professors say, well, I don't think we should have states, we should just have the federal government, and particularly the race issue is how they justify this. Look how terrible the state's records always were in race, and look how great the federal government has always been compared to the states. And the point I try to make in some of these papers is that the federal government was not necessarily so great always. The federal government gave monopoly power to labor unions and was only a stroke of luck in American history that by the time the New Deal came around, racial liberalism had also started to become a intellectually respectable and popular matter, and that we only had essentially 30 years of cartilized labor markets between 1930s and 1964, and had the progressives won 20 or 30 years earlier, we had at least 60 years of it, and it may have been, you may have not been able to undo it. And also in the context of these immigrant Asian laws and migration within the South, among African-Americans, it's very interesting that at a time around the term of the century when the federal government was at best indifferent, and at times hostile to the rights of blacks, and most history books written by experts in the area will tell you that the period from about 1895 to 1915 was the worst period for blacks politically since after the Civil War. Given that, it's amazing that those same historians will tell you on a different page, and they don't notice that there's some seeming contradiction here, that at the same time, this was a great period of educational and economic progress among blacks, and this cries out for an explanation, and the explanation is that there were lots of different states, the federal government stayed out of it, so there was no national oppression, and if people in Georgia were treating you poorly, you moved to Mississippi, and if people in one part of Mississippi were treating you poorly, you moved to a different part of Mississippi, and this doesn't excuse the states and the federal government from not enforcing the Equal Protection Clause, but it does show that there are some dangers to centralized power and some benefits of having some decentralization, even for oppressed minorities. So those are the various issues I've been dealing with. I should point out one pet peeve of mine, if there are any American history graduate students out in the audience who need a PhD thesis topic. This whole thing about this whole area of black migration within the South from the Civil War until World War I or so, which involved millions of people and was just as great as the much more famous migration of blacks to the North starting during World War I is almost entirely not written about. I mean, how did blacks wind up in Mississippi? There were very few in 1865, and there were lots by 1900, and there was no slavery anymore, so they went there voluntarily. It's never occurred to anyone to ask, well, why did it happen and how did it happen? Same with Texas, Arkansas, et cetera. So there's this whole, and this was frustrating to me, trying to do research on these laws banning migration, restricting migration, and there's so little history available on that subject. So if any of you need an interesting topic that's barely been written about, that's one for you. Thank you. Our final speaker for the first panel this morning is Rick Geddes. He's a professor of economics at Fordham University. His article, A Historical Perspective on Electric Utility Regulation, appeared in regulation. He's currently researching the growth of women's rights over the past 200 years. So coming from the far right today, I'll be discussing the economics of women's rights, but I'll try to keep it short so that we have some time for discussion after this. But if you could briefly go back in time with me a little bit and think about what this meeting might have been like had it been held in 1850. Of course, there would be many differences here. We wouldn't have this technology, like the mic that is stuck in my face here. There may, most likely, probably would not have been any women in the audience whatsoever. But if there were women in the audience, there would have had a very significantly different set of rights than the women here today. They wouldn't have the right to own property, for example. They wouldn't have the right to bind themselves in contract at all. They wouldn't have the right to sue or be sued in their own names. They wouldn't have the right to vote. They wouldn't have the right to hold political office. They certainly wouldn't have the right to serve in the military. They couldn't sit on a jury. If they worked outside the home for a wage, they wouldn't own their wage. The husband would own the wage. They couldn't join the clergy. And most professions would not allow women to join. To put it mildly, those are some severe restrictions, just 10 that I have picked out. And today, virtually all of these restrictions on women's legal status have been removed. The majority of all college law and medical school graduates today are women. So clearly there is a massive change in both legal systems and in the social norms governing women's choices. This suggests a massive institutional change in the constraints on women of the nature that Professor Buchanan was discussing in his talk the other day. It's a massive and extremely important institutional change that affects over half of the total population. But the institutional change has escaped the purview of most economists who should normally be concerned about these things. You might respond well, the neoclassical economists have made a big point of stressing the importance of private property rights, of having property rights, well-established and well-defined and enforced. That's true, they have made that point. The neoclassical labor economists like Alchin, well, economists, Alchin, Demsitz, labor people like Becker are very big on property rights and pointing out their importance. And then they go on to assume that they're constant in their models. In other words, their models leave the change in the institution of property rights outside of the model and say, well, that's not something we wanna deal with. And that's fair enough because they wanna focus on other things, but obviously this is a crucial issue that hopefully the tools of economics can help us to understand. So the focus of the research here is the massive change in the whole vector of property rights that women in the United States have held over the past 150 years. So we're talking about quite a major institutional change here. So how do we go about this substantial task? My co-author and I on this project who is Professor Dean Luke at North Carolina State, we use a property rights model to model this major institutional change. There is some work that has been done on this, particularly by Yoram Barzel at the University of Washington and also Doug North who Professor Buchanan also mentioned. We borrow from the principal agent literature which anyone who has studied corporate law is familiar with and of course in economics, this is a big area. And let me just briefly sketch the theory for you. Here, as opposed to the strict neoclassicals, we're viewing the property rights arrangement as endogenous. That is the property rights structure responds to the costs and benefits of having that property rights structure. So we have to think about what are those costs and benefits? Well, we all know that one of the major benefits of increasing the property rights extended to a particular individual is the incentives structure that that individual has. If you are the property rights holder, you bear the costs and benefits of the decisions that you make, that's fairly well known. You then have the incentive to take the correct amount of care and effort if you have these property rights assigned to you. In other words, property rights as we well know internalize the decisions that you yourself make about how much effort to take, how much education to get, et cetera. Well, why don't we all have infinite amounts of property rights if they're so good? Well, they're costly. They're costly to design, they're costly to enforce, they're costly to record. So we only assign them when the benefits of doing so exceed these costs that are incurred. So what we wanna look at is in what cases are the benefits of extending property rights to individuals going to be relatively high, okay? There's a fairly well established theory on this. They're high when the costs of monitoring the tasks that you do by someone else are very high. When monitoring costs are high, okay? When are those costs high? Well, they're likely to be high when you're performing relatively complex tasks. Let's go back and think about the property rights arrangements within the family in 1850 that I mentioned earlier. All those rights that I enumerated were held by the husband. That system was called Coverture. We borrowed it from the English Common Law System. Therefore, in our model, the person having all the rights, we model as the principal in a principal agent type framework. The wife is then his agent, the agent of the husband, and he directs her tasks. He collects the residual claim, he has a residual claim on the household if she earns wage, he owns the wage, et cetera. This arrangement, however, becomes extremely costly as the cost to the husband of monitoring the wife increase. Okay, we can make some predictions then about when that's gonna occur. What sort of technological changes in the economy might drive that? Well, first, if she moves off the farm and undertakes market work, but doesn't own her own wage, obviously that's a distorted incentive structure, the monitoring costs are gonna increase. As the extent of the market grows and tasks become more specialized, particularly with the growth of large cities, she's gonna undertake more complicated tasks, and again, it's gonna be more difficult for the husband to monitor those activities. Third, as tasks require more education, as they become more complex, the returns to education go up, it's gonna be more difficult for the husband to monitor that intensive activity, and thus, there's gonna be more inefficiencies under the old system of coverage. So what we're really looking for is when does the system of coverage where the husband has all the rights, the legal identity of wife is subsumed under the husband, when does that become economically untenable? When does the dead weight loss from that grow? This theory that I've just briefly outlined is fairly well known. You can think about a couple of examples. First, in ancient Greece and Rome, and there's been some economic history on this, it's fairly well known that slaves that did highly complex tasks had more rights than slaves that did simple tasks. So if you have one slave who's a cabinet maker, it's hard to tell how much care and effort that cabinet maker is putting into making that cabinet. You can't tell by simple observation. So they tended to give those slaves more rights, more control over their hours worked, et cetera. If you have a slave who's saying digging ditches, it's very easy to tell how much effort that slave is putting into the task. So you don't give that slave a lot of rights, or historically you didn't. So there is some evidence, a good body of evidence that this theoretical approach has some validity. So what we've done is collected a data set, and the data set records the dates at which different states, all the states, gave women the various different property rights throughout from the 1850s to around 1900. This includes the right to own property separate from the husband, the right to contract separate from the husband, the right to own earnings, as well as state voting laws. And what we've done is, of course, this is what we're trying to explain, the rights changes, and correlated this to a number of independent variables that we believe would affect the date at which a state gave a woman a particular property right. We found that there is a big effect of, say, population density, for example, when you have a large city in a state, more specialized tasks, the extent of the market is bigger. This is something that Mark was, Pennington was talking about in the growth of cities. Tasks tend to be more complex, so women tend to be given rights earlier. We found a number of effects also with the growth of output, things like this. So the evidence is fairly suggestive that this theory can be applied to women across time. Let me just sum up the implications of this before going in, rather than going into any additional detail. First of all, it's important, I think, just to note that the techniques of economics, the tools of economics can be used to explain changes in property rights to humans or human rights, which I think is what that term should really mean, across time, okay? You can explain it using these social scientific methods. Second of all, this theory doesn't only hold for property rights changes to women. It's property rights changes to people. So hopefully we can extend this framework to help explain property, say, the end of the Lourdes-Surf relationship, which you could also model as a principal agent relationship. Euron Barzell has also been applying this a little bit to the formation of parliament in England. Third, feminists shouldn't be treating market development as some sort of biohazard, right? It's actually something that the interaction between market and technological development and women's legal status over time is something that should objectively try to be understood. There's complex interactions, but there's clearly some positive effect that we're working out here. So that's the goal of the research. And there seems to be some preliminary indications that the theory has predictive power. Thank you. Should be time for a couple quick questions. Yeah, I have a question that's addressed to Rod Long and Jacob Levy. It seems to me that there's a tension between what the two of you are saying. And my question is, do you think the tension exists as well or is that just me? Rod says that he's against plutocrats and plutocrats are people who, in conjunction with other people with like-minded economic interests, ask for special privileges from the state. Jacob says that he doesn't think that there should be a dichotomy or a strict dichotomy between individual rights and group rights. But it seems to me that one of the ways in which plutocrats remain plutocrats or get-to-be plutocrats is precisely that they organize themselves into quasi-ethnic groups and then claim group rights. So it seems to me that one reason a classical liberal might be suspicious of the idea of group rights is precisely for all the reasons that Rod is against plutocrats. That is, group rights are the principal tool by which plutocrats become plutocrats. I don't really see a major conflict between Jacob's views and mine because there's a difference between, I mean, there's a difference between the kind of group rights I think that Jacob was talking about and rights that are, rights to oppress some other group. Now, I'm against rights to oppress people whether they're individual rights or group rights. But it seemed that to me that what Jacob was talking about was ways, he was talking about group rights as ways to correct for biases by the state, biases against some particular group and the group right as being some form of, in a way, self-defense against that. And it's true that group rights can be used as an excuse for oppression, but so can individual rights. I mean, the slave owners claimed individual property rights as their justification for what they're doing. So any genuine right can be twisted around by someone to use it, repression. But I don't see an inherent conflict. I would add only that Rod's defense of a class analysis made me wonder whether that's a case where I do what I charge others with doing in the case of ethnicity of saying, an analysis that isn't methodologically individualist has no validity. A class analysis says you have to look at the existence of groups. You have to look at the social phenomena which happened when persons band together in particular ways. And it's something that I'm not accustomed to doing with classes, but since I am claiming needs to be done sometimes, I think there's an affinity there. Richard, there's been some debate among economic historians as to whether American slavery was on its way out anyways because the economic forces made it no longer profitable prior to the Civil War. And at least the evidence that I've read about suggests that in fact it was not on its way out at that time and that there was other forces that ended slavery in the United States. To what extent do you think your theory can shed more light on that debate and how does it differ from what's been done there? I'm familiar with the debate about the rents that were associated with slavery towards the end of the, prior to the Civil War and the methods that are used there are sort of to, at least what Fogel did was to calculate the extent of the rent in slavery and whether that was growing. We do in our paper make some analogies between slavery and women's legal status under Coverture. The analogy of course isn't complete but there are some interesting parallels. Some women were able to become, they were able to contract out of Coverture. They really become what we call Femmesole traders where they could get the rights to own a business and to trade even if they were married under particular legal structures. And it's sort of similar to a slave, say a high human capital slave typically gaining manumission, something like that. We don't try to push that analogy too far because although there were wife sales in England actually, so transferability, there was no such evidence of anything like that in the United States. So there are some parallels but I think it's fairly weak and I think we wanna try to downplay that actually. Brian assures me that this will be quick. Oh, Rod, there seems to me to be one very important difference between classical liberal and Marxist class theories. Namely, there doesn't seem to be any element of heritability in your theory. Whereas in most other class theories, there's an emphasis not only on this person does something which we don't like now but also all this person's descendants are going to be opposed to us and their descendants after them and we've got to therefore stop not only this person but we've gotta do things to their descendants. So I think this is an important element you need to be thinking about because I think this could easily be, although much of what you're saying may be right can very easily be turned into a tool of really horrendous oppression. Do you have any ideas on that? I'm not sure I completely understand the question. Are you saying that, or maybe understand it, you're saying if you're defining class not in terms of what people do but of what status they have then anyone with that status counts as being a member of that class. If that's the case then I think that what I've been talking about is not so vulnerable to that because I've been talking more about what people do. So for example, two equally rich people whether one of them is a member of the ruling class or not depends not on just the fact that they have wealth but what they do with that wealth and what the government enables them to do with it. I'm not sure that I'm fully zoning in on what your question was. Well since the classical liberal approach to getting rid of ruling class is not to go after the class directly but to get rid of the state power once you've done that it's not clear what apparatus you have left to oppress those people with. I suppose there could be private discrimination against them. Ooh, you're the son of a senator we're not associating with you but I doubt that a boycott like that would be very robust because it's one of your concepts it's not really a self-interested boycott. We'll take a quick break and reconvene at 10.15.