Public Forum -- Economic Democracy and Economic Freedom

Author: Chief Editor: Xia Qian
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: Excerpt: Selections from Symposium Speeches
Editor's Note: The world after the Cold War is a world of clashing ideologies. The Western academic community has also seen new trends. In this context, contemporary China, during its transition to a socialist market economy, is inevitably influenced by these trends. However, the various concepts proposed by Western scholars out of their "pursuit of novelty" may not align with the meaning of the linguistic context in present-day China. Therefore, the primary issue is to clarify the semantics, analyze the assumptions, and seek genuine dialogue. To this end, the editorial board of Public Forum and the Beijing Tianze Economic Research Institute jointly held an academic symposium on "Economic Democracy and Economic Freedom." Here, we select some of the speeches from the conference for readers interested in this issue to reference.
The journey of economics has gone through two phases—first with Samuelson and now to where it stands today. Its fundamental assumptions have remained unchanged throughout, always the "rational person" assumption, even as the rationalist movement in economics today faces its own crisis. When we discuss "economic democracy" and "economic freedom," we inevitably touch upon topics outside the field of economics, particularly those related to political philosophy or moral philosophy. Therefore, in our "dialogue," to understand the other side and clarify the respective positions, it is necessary to revisit the three underlying assumptions that have always run through economics since the classical era. Some of these assumptions are clearly visible, while others have long been obscured in the "neoclassical" development of economics, only fully emerging in contemporary institutional economics.