Herb Gintis

07 Dec 2025 - 07 Dec 2025

Economist, died in 2023 Herbert Gintis - Wikipedia I had some interchange with him on Amazon comments which are now mostly lost, here's what I have left of our conversation, just my side. Some of it is a bit cringe; imagine me accusing a notable economist of being "confused". It was good of him to interact with a random on the internet, I wish I had thought to save his side of the conversation.

His Amazon Reviews (but not apparently the ones I was responding to – lotta bit rot going on)

2008? Interesting to me that I was arguing against expansionist Zionism back then

We aren't arguing about the morality or the root causes of Israel's policy, we are arguing about what motivates the left's criticism of Israel. I would not deploy those loaded terms myself, at least, not without a lot of hedging and qualification, but it is hard to say that they are wholly unjustified. Whether or not Israel has legitimate security reasons for their actions, in practice their policy is certainly expansionist, at least -- I don't see what else you can call moving your population into occupied territories. Trying to maintain an ethnically pure state in a hostile and impure environment inevitably shades over into racism.

First, I don't think even its most enthusiastic proponents believe that open source will entirely replace capitalist production. But it already has come close to replacing it in industries that are amenable to its approach. It's almost certainly the case that open source software powers a large majority of web servers, including Google and Amazon.

You are confused about the role of profit. Nothing in open source prevents profit-making companies from springing up and offering support services, in fact that was part of the plan from the outset (computer programmers still have to eat somehow). But they don't OWN the software they produce, it is now a public rather than an excludible good (if you'll forgive me using economist's lingo without a license).

It's not clear to me that open source is good for computer programmers; it means that we lose income (and in return, get free access to the tools we need to build upon). Programmers are now expected to work for free and consitute an exploiited labor class (see Omniorthogonal: Real Labor Day; Technical Work; Open Source Economics ). It is manifestly good for the world at large though.

Your example of your personal software reveals a more serious gap in understanding. The thing that makes it possible for open source to compete with commercial software is that the web permits large, far-flung teams of collaborators to work on a single project, such as Linux or Apache (the most common web server). Ths type of coordination used to take a corporation or government; now self-assembling teams of random citizens can do it.

Anyway, I don't want to be a booster for open source, there are plenty of those, but I do think it's a damn interesting phenonmenon from an economic and sociological point of view, and makes me wish I could go back to grad school to study it. And there are some aspects of it that are quite socialistic.

I was actually around when the free software movement was getting started, and I asked Richard Stallman how, if software was free, would programmers get money to buy food and other non-free goods? The world has come up with a number of answers to that, but it's still a tough question. Roughly similar issues are devouring the newspaper business, which had a model for extracting payment for informational goods that no longer works.

I just said it's plausible. And conversely it seems implausible that the culture of RAND did not influence the theory. Scientific theories are always influenced by the cultural milieu in which they are developed. This is true even for the physical sciences but all the more so for human sciences in which the assumptions about the nature of action, individuals, preference, choice, etc are all going to be colored by cultural biases.

Or is your position that rational choice theory is some sort of Platonic truth that would be the same for anyone everywhere, like the Pythagorean theorem?

Is ethnomethodology really subjectivist? That's not my understanding of it, which admittedly is not that deep. Wikipedia has this to say: "Even though ethnomethodology has been characterized as having a "phenomenological sensibility", orthodox adherents to the discipline - those who follow the teachings of Garfinkel - know better than to represent it as a branch, or form, of phenomenology, or phenomenological sociology....Another way of convincing yourself of the difference between these two disciplines is to read, Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), and try to find any reference to: a subject [other than experimental], consciousness, intentionality, or phenomenological methodology, etc. There are no such references."

I haven't read Bourdieu. What I know about this stuff comes from people within AI and cognitive science who were attempting to make practical theories of routines and routine evolution, ie here: CiteSeerX Ethnomethodology was a major influence on this work. And not because it was subjectivist, but because it provided a novel view of the nature intelligent action; one that at least promised to get AI out of some intellectual holes it had dug itself into. Whether that view is powerful enough to be a good theory is another question.

OK. I don't want to quibble about what "subjectivist" means. But to me, the interesting thing about ethnomethodology is the particular way it is different from "objectivism", which is not quite the same as being subjectivist. "...in contrast to certain version of Durkheim that teach that the objective reality of social facts is sociology's fundamnetal principle, the lesson is taken instead, and used as a study policy, that the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment of the concerted activities of daily life, with the ordinary, artful ways of that accomplishment being by members known, used, and taken for granted, is, for members doing sociology, a fundamental phenomenon." (Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology)

If you untwist that sentence, I believe it means that objective social facts are not given but instead are continously constructed by participants, and the process of doing so is something sociologists ought to be studying. Part of this process is internal (subjective), but it seems like the bulk of work in the field focuses on conversation analysis and other artifacts that are external to the individual.