Paretian Fiscal Sociology

Abstract

This work is a draft chapter for the forthcoming book "James Buchanan: A Theorist of Political Economy and Social Philosophy", which is being edited by Ricard E Wagner for Palgrave Macmillan. It considers Pareto's treatment of fiscal issues, first as a middle age economist and subsequently as a mature age sociologist. It establishes that Pareto never regarded fiscal studies as a purely theoretical exercise. Even as an economist, he relegated 'fiscal effects' to the aspect of applied economics that he called the 'concrete economic phenomenon'. Pareto's fiscal sociology takes his observations from applied economics and subjects them to further analysis using his division between logical and non-logical action, with fiscal effects falling within the category of non-logical action. This chapter reviews those enhancements and subjects Paretian fiscal sociology to critical assessment. While the Paretian episode in fiscal sociology has now long passed, the study concludes by noting a number of its attributes that have continuing relevance.

Reconciling Agn-Star Formation, the Soltan Argument, and Meier’s Paradox

“…Note how cosmic downsizing implies that fewer FRII quasars will form at low redshift since FRII quasars require retrograde accretion in the paradigm which occurs only if the following conditions apply: 1) They occur statistically only in a -26subset of major mergers but the merger function drops with decrease in redshift (Bertone & Conselice 2009;Treister et al 2012); 2) retrograde accretion is unstable unless the black hole is massive (Perego et al 2009;Garofalo 2013b), so less massive black holes are less likely to live long in retrograde configurations. And the observations in fact support this idea (Dunlop et al 2003;McLure & Jarvis 2004;Floyd et al 2013). This drop in the density of FRII objects as the redshift decreases is captured in Figure 1, with the smaller size of the FRII boxes.…”