Mapping Mainstream Economics: Genealogical Foundations of Alternativity seeks to establish a definition of the mainstream, and by extension the alternatives to it, by adopting a genealogical approach: tracing the methodological development of the economic mainstream through its ancestry, which allows for a definition of the mainstream which is separate from politically charged categories or gridlocked academic arguments between received schools of thought. The book follows the evolution of the economic mainstream through four major transformations (...) of the discipline: from political to analytical economics, debates around a logical empiricist economics, the consolidation of neoclassical economics and the recent expansion of the mainstream. For each of these steps, the key point of departure is explored, illustrated through the work of leading authors at the time. Thus, the book draws on recent research from the history of economic thought and debates the crucial role of historic concepts of economics for alternativity in the field. Finally, to put the approach into practice, the book examines the relation between today's mainstream and two of its relatives: ecological economics and degrowth. Finally, the book reflects on recent exciting developments in the discourse on alternativity and sheds light on some distant relatives of today's mainstream. This book marks a significant contribution to the literature on the debates around the state and nature of mainstream, alternative and heterodox economics. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare the methodology of the Austrian school to two alternative methodologies from the economic mainstream: the ‘orthodox’ and revealed preference methodologies. I argue that Austrian school theorists should stop describing themselves as ‘extreme apriorists’ (or writing suggestively to that effect), and should start giving greater acknowledgement to the importance of empirical work within their research program. The motivation for this dialectical shift is threefold: the approach is more faithful to their actual practices, it better illustrates (...) the underlying similarities between the mainstream and Austrian research paradigms, and it provides a philosophical foundation that is much more plausible in itself. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with the special difficulties that arise in testing and appraising mainstream economic theory. I argue that, like other theories designed to apply to complex open systems, it is very hard to confirm mainsteam economics. Parts can be tested and appraised, but the theory is only very weakly supported by evidence.

This essay is concerned with the special difficulties that arise in testing and appraising mainstream economic theory. I argue that, like other theories designed to apply to complex open systems, it is very hard to confirm mainsteam economics. Parts can be tested and appraised, but the theory is only very weakly supported by evidence.

I identify and resolve an internal tension in Critical Contextual Empiricism (CCE) – the normative account of science developed by Helen Longino. CCE includes two seemingly conflicting principles: on one hand, the cognitive goals of epistemic communities should be open to critical discussion (the openness of goals to criticism principle, OGC); on the other hand, criticism must be aligned with the cognitive goals of that community to count as “relevant” and thus require a response (the goal-relativity of response-requiring criticism principle, (...) GRC). The co-existence of OGC and GRC enables one to draw both approving and condemning judgments about a situation in which an epistemic community ignores criticism against its goals. This tension results from conflating two contexts of argumentation that require different regulative standards. In the first-level scientific discussion, GRC is a reasonable principle but OGC is not; in the meta-level discussion about science, the reverse holds. In meta-level discussion, the relevance of criticism can be established by appealing to goals of science that are more general than the goals of a specific epistemic community. To illustrate my revision of CCE, I discuss why feminist economists’ criticism of the narrowness of the goals pursued in mainstream economics is relevant criticism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe concept of Methodenstreits is used to analyse the relationship between behavioral and mainstream economics. A Methodenstreit is understood by the authors as a dispute between the more a...

Meaning and Purpose of Life are perhaps the most thought about, if not talked about, issues on the planet since human beings have walked on earth. This book is another attempt to understand the Meaning and Purpose of Life using ideas of Vedanta in Indian philosophy, and of mainstream economics. Starting from first principles, Dr Agarwal explores the core concept of Brahman in Vedanta, and builds an axiomatic foundation for understanding the meaning and purpose of life using the (...) fundamental ideas of the Prasthana Traya, and in particular of The Bhagavad Gita and The Principal Upanishads. Dr Agarwal adheres to the philosophy of Karma Yoga as his chosen area of interest for the exploration of meaning and purpose, which allows him to seek linkages between the concepts of social welfare in Vedanta and economics. Ideas of lokasamgraha in Indian Philosophy and of externalities in economics provide a clear common ground between the two apparently disparate disciplines. Throughout the book, he emphasizes simple practical approaches for making life more meaningful and happier, while relying fundamentally on the basic ideas of Vedanta. (shrink)

The paper contends that neoclassical ideology stems, to a great extent, from mathematical analysis. It is suggested that mainstream economic thought can be comprehensively revisited if both histories of mathematical and economic thought are to be taken collaboratively into account. Ideology is understood as a 'social construction of reality' that prevents us from evaluating our own standpoint, and impedes us from realising our value judgments as well as our theories of society and nature. However, the mid-19th century's intellectual controversies (...) about the validity of mathematical thought, truth and knowledge can procure new interesting insights concerning the ideological stance of the first marginalists. In this respect, the methodological categories of analysis and synthesis serve as the basis for the crucial distinction between old geometry and mathematical analysis, indicating that the discipline of mathematics has its own history of fundamentally unresolved disputes. Lastly, this may also shed some light on Alfred Marshall's peculiarly reluctant attitude towards the use of mathematical analysis in his work. (shrink)

Abstract Many of Boettke's criticisms of formalist economics are justified. However, he defines formalism so broadly that it becomes practically synonymous with mainstream economics, while his criticisms primarily target the sins of formalist economics more narrowly defined. And since he treats Austrian economics as the only viable alternative to mainstream economics, he incorrectly awards victory to Austrian economics. While Austrian economics has some valuable ideas to contribute to mainstream economics, (...) it has serious deficiencies of its own. (shrink)

Theoretical economics should not be divorced from real life. If theoretical research cannot provide a good explanation for real-world economic phenomena, then we have to question the appropriateness of the paradigm that our theoretical research follows. The battle between neoclassical macroeconomics and Keynesian economics has exposed the inadequacy of the paradigm that modern mainstream economics has followed. Neoclassical macroeconomics and Keynesian economics have the same microeconomic basis. However, the paradigm of the microeconomics on which they (...) are based has serious flaws—the scarcity hypothesis and the economic man hypothesis—do not conform to the facts. These two hypotheses are the basis for other hypotheses and principles, but neither of these two hypotheses holds up to scrutiny. Then the economics edifice built on this foundation is certainly unstable, and the corresponding economic policies are certainly not perfect. (shrink)

Abstract: The paper argues that mainstream economics and mainstream philosophy of natural science had much in common during the period 1945-1965. It examines seven common features of the two fields and suggests a number of historical developments that might help explain these similarities. The historical developments include: the Vienna Circle connection, the Samuelson-Harvard-Foundations connection, and the Cold War operations research connection.

An individual's preferences are interdependent when they can be influenced by the behaviour of other agents. This paper analyzes the internal dynamics of an approach in contemporary economics allowing for interdependent preferences, the extended utility approach, which presents itself as a mild reform of neoclassical economics. I contend that this approach succeeds in broadening the policy perspectives of mainstream economics by challenging neoclassical policy stances. However, this success comes with a limitation: the EUA is unable to (...) supply new consensual policy stances as alternatives to the challenged ones. The reason for this limitation is that the EUA opens the possibility of a wide variety of specifications for the utility function, and policy conclusions are sensitive to the details of these specifications. (shrink)

Aristotle warned against a 'missing middle' in logic (Gk Mesos – middle; intermediate). This paper submits that one of the reasons why there has been no major breakthrough in macroeconomics since the financial crisis of 2007-08 has been a missing middle in mainstream micro-macro syntheses, constrained by partial and general equilibrium premises. It maintains that transcending this needs recognition that large and dominant multinational corporations between small micro firms and macro outcomes – while also influencing both – merit the (...) conceptual paradigm of mesoeconomics. Drawing on a range of uses of the concept, it relates this to reasons for 'too big to fail' and suggests implications for policies to gain accountability of big business, including how a meso dimension to input-output could yield transparency on risk-prone financial transactions by banks, and of corporations contributing to climate change. It also critiques misrepresentation of Walras and Pareto, as well as suggesting areas for research which could address, and potentially redress, 'missing middles' in mainstream micro-macro syntheses. (shrink)

Recent pleas for more heterodoxy in explaining economic action have been defending a pluralism for economics. In this article, I analyse these defences by scrutinizing the pluralistic qualities in the work of one of the major voices of heterodoxy, Tony Lawson. This scrutiny will focus on Lawson's alternatives concerning ontology and explanation to mainstream economics. Subsequently, I will raise some doubts about Lawson's pluralism, and identify questions that will have to be addressed by heterodox economists in order (...) to maintain the claim of pluralism. (shrink)

Indigenous language bilingual schooling, introduced in Australia's Northern Territory (NT) in 1973, was a reality for over twenty-five schools at the program's height. Today, the language-of-instruction in these same settings is English only, with only 7 state schools operating bilingual programs. Overt Government hostility began with an attempt to defund Indigenous bilingual education in 1998-99. This paper argues that the discursive techniques used to justify these cuts were crucial to developing key themes in ‘mainstreaming discourses’ in Indigenous politics, which has (...) rehabilitated assimilationist thinking in a neoliberal context through the 2000s and since. Using a discourse-historical method, this paper elucidates how mainstreaming discourses were constructed against bilingual education in the 1998–99 debate, and how they emphasized English-only education geared towards neoliberal assimilation for remote Indigenous communities. Indigenous bilingual education was conceived as part of ‘failed’ self-determination in remote Australia. This paper enhances understanding of the patterns and themes of mainstreaming discourses by tracing their genealogical development in this debate. (shrink)

There is an increasingly widespread belief, both within and outside the discipline, that modern economics is irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. Economics and Reality traces this irrelevance to the failure of economists to match their methods with their subject, showing that formal, mathematical models are unsuitable to the social realities economists purport to address. Tony Lawson examines the various ways in which mainstream economics is rooted in positivist philosophy and examines the problems this (...) causes. It focuses on human agency, social structure and their interaction and explores how the understanding of this social phenomena can be used to transform the nature of economic practice. Economics and Reality concludes by showing how this newly transformed economics might set about shaping economic policy. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by Davis’ [14] theory of the individual in economics. Davis’ analysis is applied to health economics, where the individual is conceived as a utility maximiser, although capable of regarding others’ welfare through interdependent utility functions. Nonetheless, this provides a restrictive and flawed account, engendering a narrow and abstract conception of care grounded in Paretian value and Cartesian analytical frames. Instead, a richer account of the socially embedded individual is advocated, which employs collective intentionality analysis. (...) This provides a sound foundation for research into an approach to health policy that promotes health as a basic human right. (shrink)

Critics of mainstream economics typically rest important weight on the differences between people and the 'agents' that populate economic theory and economic models. Hollis and Nell (1975) is both representative of and ancestral to many more recent variations on the theme. Lately, the upgraded status of behavioral economics (BE) within the discipline's mainstream has encouraged a number of writers to use revolutionary rhetoric in promotion of a 'paradigm shift' that includes the rejection of 'rational economic man' (...) (Ormerod 1994, Heilbroner and Milburg 1995, Fullbrook 2003). The current leading developers of BE are generally more circumspect, claiming that their approach complements standard theory rather than promising to supplant it (Camerer and Loewenstein 2004, Angner and Loewenstein this volume). However, they generally join the more florid critics in supposing that microeconomics is bound to improve its empirical relevance to the extent that it substitutes the study of people for that of abstract economic agents. Another body of thought that promotes this view stems from Sen's (1977) attack on standard economic agents as 'rational fools', amplified in Davis's (2003) argument that since economic agents lack some essential properties of human individuals, economic theory requires fundamental reform if it is to make progress in explaining human behavior. (shrink)

Opponents of mainstream economics have not yet called attention to the lack of in-depth examination of the general scientific conception of modern economics. However, economic science cannot consistently fulfil the epistemological and ontological requirements of the scientific standards underlying this conception. What can be scientifically recognized as true cannot be answered, neither through the actual ontological structure of the object of observation nor through a methodological demarcation. These limitations necessarily lead to the claim for both a pragmatic (...) and a radical methodological pluralism. (shrink)

Research in the cognitive sciences indicates that metaphors significantly shape perceptions and approaches to problem solving. With this in mind, this essay argues that it is problematic for ethicists that mainstream economics and other social scientific literature relies on naturalistic metaphors to describe markets. These imply an inaccurate picture of economic phenomena and rhetorically frame many solutions to problems such as inequality as interventionist. This essay proposes that religious ethicists may find resources for avoiding this conceptual hazard in (...) emerging fields of heterodox economics that are attentive to the role of culture and human agency in shaping markets. It introduces feminist, behavioral, institutional, and Austrian economics in particular and highlights some of the specific approaches to inequality adopted in these fields. It then suggests that engaging heterodox perspectives more generally may help ethicists keep in view the full complexity and social nature of the economic problems they analyze. (shrink)

Mainstream economics has been accused of excessive mathematization, whereas the rejection of mathematical and other formal methods is often cited as a crucial trait of Austrian economics. Based on a systematic discussion of potential benefits and drawbacks of formalization, this paper corroborates legitimate concerns that predominant types of mathematization induce a shift of attention away from the key concepts of Austrian economics. Taking this shift to the extreme, predominant modes of mathematization tend to accompany a detachment (...) from ‘reality’ incompatible with Austrian pleas for realisticness. Contrary to popular prejudice however, the most prominent representatives of the Austrian School including Carl Menger, Ludwig Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Israel Kirzner, and Peter Boettke neither provide a justification for a wholesale rejection of formalization nor actually reject it. Adequate formalization can serve as a remedy for lacking logical and semantic rigor in standard mathematical economics as well as in murky verbal chains of reasoning. (shrink)

This book introduces the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant—in particular, the concepts of autonomy, dignity, and character—to economic theory, explaining the importance of integrating these two streams of intellectual thought. Mainstream economics is rooted in classical utilitarianism, recommending that decision makers choose the options that are expected to generate the largest net benefits. For individuals, the standard economic model fails to incorporate the role of principles in decision-making, and also denies the possibility of true choice, which can be (...) independent of preferences and principles altogether. For policymakers, standard decision-making frameworks recommend tradeoffs that are beneficial in terms of material goods or wealth, but may be morally questionable from a more person-centered perspective. Integrating Kantian ethics affects economics in three important ways. This integration allows for a more complete understanding of human choice, incorporating not just preferences and constraints, but also principles and strength of will or character. It demonstrates the broader impact of welfare economics, which generates policies that affect not only persons' well-being, but also their dignity and autonomy. Finally, it reconciles the traditional, individualist stance in economic models of choice with the social responsibility emphasized by many systems of philosophical ethics and heterodox schools of economics. (shrink)

Contemporary mainstream economics cannot be seen as disconnected from philosophical concerns. On the contrary, it should be understood as a defence for a specific philosophy, namely, crude quantitative hedonism where money would measure pleasure and pain. Disguised among a great mathematical apparatus involving utility functions, supply, and demand, lies a specific hedonist philosophy that every year is lectured to thousands of economic and business students around the world. This hedonist philosophy is much less sophisticated than that in ancient (...) hedonist philosophers as Epicurus or Lucretius. Furthermore, it does not solve any of the systematic difficulties regularly faced by hedonist philosophy. However, the argument that economics is detached from philosophy works as a rhetorical artifice to protect its dominant underlying philosophy: Philosophical disputes would have to be addressed within the biased mathematical apparatus of quantitative hedonism. Economists and business students must learn to identify the underlying philosophy in mainstream economics and alternative philosophical systems. (shrink)

There are two fundamentally different approaches to innovation: incremental and radical. In Economics as Anatomy, G.M. Peter Swann argues that economics as a discipline needs both perspectives in order to create the maximum beneficial effect for the economy. Chapters explore how and why mainstream economics is very good at incremental innovation but seems uncomfortable with radical innovation. Swann argues that economics should follow the example of many other disciplines, transitioning from one field to a range (...) of semi-autonomous sub-disciplines. In this book, he compares the missing link in empirical economics to being the economic equivalent of anatomy, the basis of medical discourse. Working as a sequel to Swann's Putting Econometrics in its Place, this book will be a vital resource to those who are discontent with the state of mainstream economics, especially those actively seeking to promote change in the discipline. Students wishing to see progress in the teaching of economics will also benefit from this timely book. (shrink)

Within the discipline of economics critical realism has thus far been advocated to a large extent through a sustained critique of the position of mainstream economics. This article questions these critical endeavours for their analytical shortcomings and suggests an alternative and more constructive approach for developing and arguing critical realism within economics. It is argued that the critique of mainstream economics is wanting due to the fact that it focuses on modes of inference rather (...) than on questions of ontology and that the scope of the analysis is too wide. The consequences of these shortcomings are considered for the future prospects of the critical realist project within economics. Drawing on advances made within the discipline of sociology, a somewhat different strategy is suggested for the task of arguing and developing critical realist approaches within the field of economics. The hallmark of this approach is advocacy of critical realism by way of substantive analyses of relevant questions and issues rather than by critical assessment of competing positions. As it happens, however, although the main focus of this approach is constructive rather than critical, a more fruitful and sustainable critique of mainstream economics and other schools of thought is part and parcel of these endeavours. The argument developed, moreover, indicates the prospects of cross-fertilisation between disciplines in which the critical realist project has now gained a foothold. (shrink)

There is a growing perception among economists that their field is becoming increasingly irrelevant due to its disregard for reality. Critical realism addresses the failure of mainstream economics to explain economic reality and proposes an alternative approach. This book debates the relative strengths and weaknesses of critical realism, in the hopes of developing a more fruitful and relevant socio-economic ontology and methodology. With contributions from some of the leading authorities in economic philosophy, it includes the work of theorists (...) critical of this approach. In the first part, contributors develop and deepen economics as a realist social theory by considering the work of individuals, various schools of thought, socio- economic phenomena and methodology. In the second part, contributors weigh the strengths and weaknesses of critical realism. (shrink)

Gender mainstreaming has been prioritised within the national agricultural policies of many countries, including Nepal. Yet gender mainstreaming at the national policy level does not always work to effect change when policies are implemented at the local scale. In less-developed nations such as Nepal, it is rare to find a critical analysis of the mainstreaming process and its successes or failures. This paper employs a critical gender analysis approach to examine the gender mainstreaming efforts in Nepal as they move from (...) agricultural policies to practices. The research involved a structured review of 10 key national agricultural policy documents, 14 key informant interviews, and two focus group discussions with female and male smallholder farmers. Results suggest that gender mainstreaming in national agricultural policy and practice has largely failed. The creation of the Gender Equity and Social Inclusion (GESI) section within the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development is paradoxical to gender-responsive agricultural innovation because it has received limited human and financial resources with an expectation for women to manage this policy development in informal and largely unrecognized ways. At the regional and local levels, implementation of fundamental gender equity and social inclusion procedures—such as gender-responsive planning and budgeting—has become staff responsibility without requisite formal training, gender sensitization, and follow-up. In Nepal, women as smallholder farmers or agricultural labourers are recognized as a vulnerable group in need of social protection, but the welfare approach to gender mainstreaming has achieved little in terms of gender equity, social inclusion, and agricultural sustainability. This paper concludes that what is generally missing is a systemic transformation of gender roles and relations in agriculture, with policies that would support rural women's empowerment through the provision of economic and political rights and entitlement to productive resources. (shrink)

A guide to the pluralist movement threatening to revolutionise mainstream economics. It looks at how neoclassical economics gained its stranglehold, particularly in the United States, and how the social and intellectual underpinnings of economics have enabled it to maintain this in the face of inconsistent evidence from the real world.

Economics has long been the ‘dismal science’. The crisis in classical political economy at the end of the nineteenth century produced radically differing intellectual responses: Marx’s reconstitution of value theory on the basis of his dialectical method, the marginalists’ development of subjective value theory, and the historical school’s advocacy of inductive and historical reasoning. It is against this background that economics was established as a discrete academic discipline, consciously modelling itself on maths and physics and developing its focus (...) on theorising exchange. This entailed extraordinary reductionism, with humans regarded as rational, self-interested actors, and class, society, history and ‘the social’ being excised from economic analysis. On the basis of this narrowing of its concerns, particularly from the 1980s onwards, economics has sought to expand its sphere of influence through a form of imperialism which seeks to apply mainstream economic approaches to other social sciences and sees economics as ‘the universal grammar of social science’. The implications of this shift are discussed in Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis’s two volumes, where they analyse the fate of the social, the political and the historical in economic thought, and assess the future for an inter-disciplinary critique of economic reason. (shrink)

From the perspective of a realist philosophy of social science, the recent explosion of criticisms of mainstream economics, including reinvigorated Austrian criticism, provides what seems like a rich opportunity to join what are too often disjoined disciplinary interests and inquirers, and also to extend the arguments not only as regards the realist theory of social science, but also as regards the implications of this approach for economics. I begin with a minimum sketch of key features of realist (...) philosophy of science as I understand it. The central difference turns on the role and nature of explanation and of theory, between what is frequently termed ‘deductivism’, and on an alternative in which explanation requires the articulation of a causal mechanism, for example, the mechanism provided by molecular chemistry that gives us an understanding of oxidation. I take the position that in social science, explanation requires social causal mechanisms. I consider the Austrian contribution from this point of view and conclude with some hints regarding how the foregoing bears on our understanding of capitalism and socialism. (shrink)

The theme of this issue of the St. Gallen Business Review is "Harmony". For this reason, we would like to discuss whether two aspects of our life- world are in harmony, namely economic optimization and morality. What is the relation between them? According to a widely shared view, which is one aspect of the doctrine of "mainstream economics", the functioning of an economic system does not require moral behaviour on the part of the individual economic agent. In what (...) follows, we will try to convince you that this is false. If all economic agents – managers, employees, bankers, consumers and so on – were purely self-interested, as mainstream economics assumes, our economic practice would fail. There are various reasons for this. Here we will focus on one of them, namely the pivotal role of interpersonal communication. (shrink)

This paper argues that mainstream economics has never before been more influential, that this threatens the future of humanity, and provides a history and defence of ecological economics and human ecology founded on process philosophy showing how these can and should replace mainstream economics.

The term neoclassical economics delineates a distinct and relatively homogenous school of thought in economic theory that became prominent in the late nineteenth century and that now dominates mainstream economics. The term was originally introduced by Thorstein Veblen to describe developments in the discipline (of which Veblen did not entirely approve) associated with the work of such figures as William Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras. The ambition of these figures, the first neoclassicists, was to formalize and (...) mathematize the subject in the aftermath of the so-called marginalist revolution. Economics is, according to one definition, the science that studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means that have alternative uses. Neoclassical economics pursues this study by means of supply and demand models that determine prices based on the subjective preferences of producers and consumers. Neoclassical economics relies on subjective preferences for determining prices in order to escape from the so-called objective value theory of classical economics, according to which the value of goods could be established by reference to some basic commodity (usually corn) or the labor input required to produce a good. Neoclassicists hoped that by jettisoning objective value, economics could be placed on a more scientific basis as an essentially descriptive and predictive theory of human behavior. Political theory, by contrast, involves both positive and normative elements. It is a positive science to the extent to which it aims to describe and predict political behavior. It is a normative science to the extent to which it prescribes how agents should behave in the political arena and what the best political institutions are. Neoclassical economics is relevant to both of these elements. (shrink)

When I lectured on Lonergan’s economic writings at Boston College, Fordham, or Woodstock, people asked the same questions: What’s the big deal about Lonergan’s economics? How does it differ from mainstream economics? What’s Lonergan’s solution to poverty? This paper is a move towards answering those questions.

Mainstream economics was founded on many strong assumptions. Institutions and politics were treated as irrelevant, government as exogenous, social norms as epiphenomena. As an initial gambit this was fine. But as the horizons of economic inquiry have broadened, these assumptions have become hindrances rather than aids. If we want to understand why some economies succeed and some fail, why some governments are effective and others not, why some communities prosper while others stagnate, it is essential to view (...) class='Hi'>economics as embedded in politics and society. Prelude to Political Economy is a study of this embeddedness; it argues for an 'inclusive' approach to institutions and the state.Modern economics recognizes that individuals' pursuit of their own selfish ends can result in socially suboptimal outcomes -- the Prisoner's Dilemma being the stark example. It has been suggested that what we need in such an eventuality is 'third-party' intervention, which can take the form of imposing punishment on players. Kaushik Basu objects to this method of wishing third parties out of thin air. He argues that if a third party that could impose its will on others were available, then it should have been modeled as a player to start with.The adoption of such an inclusive approach has implications for our conception of the state and the law. It means that the law cannot be construed as a factor that changes the game that citizens play. It is instead simply a set of beliefs of citizens; and, as such, it is similar to social norms. What the law does for an economy, so can social norms. The book discusses how the nature of policy advice and our conception of state power are affected by this altered view of the state and the law.As corollaries, the book addresses a variety of important social and philosophical questions, such as whether the state should guarantee freedom of speech, whether determinism is compatible with free will, and whether the free market can lead to coercion. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this polemical book, Francesco Boldizzoni argues that economic history is so moribund as to require resurrection. He maintains that economic history has been converted into a subfield of economics and has embraced the antihistorical and a priori intellectual style of mainstream economics departments: it has, in effect, ceased to be a form of history. Boldizzoni hopes to force a recognition of contemporary economic history's bankruptcy and to show the way toward a revitalization.He criticizes both economic history (...) as retrospective econometrics, as in the work of Robert Fogel, and economic history as a branch of the new institutional economics, as in the work of Douglas North. Boldizzoni suggests that economic history should return to the sort of research and models that prevailed earlier in its own history—models based on induction from observed economic life rather than on deduction from the theories of contemporary microeconomics. He particularly singles out the work of Witold Kula, Moses Finley, and the Annales historians for emulation, but also praises the perspectives of economic sociology and economic anthropology.Boldizzoni's call for a return to a more inductive form of economic history is welcome, and his discussions of his heroes should remind us that economic history was once a vibrant and creative part of the history profession. But the book's advice is more useful for historians working on premodern than on modern economic life. The claim that self‐governing markets and interest‐maximizing individual actors are pure figments of economists' imaginations seems far less certain for recent than for premodern times. And his insistence that each society has its own distinct form of economic life that must be discovered inductively leaves unconceptualized the world‐spanning forces of capitalist development that increasingly shape societies everywhere. Boldizzoni's critique and his positive suggestions are certainly valuable, but he by no means supplies a sufficient recipe for economic history's resurrection as a vibrant field. (shrink)

Mainstream risk analysis deviates in at least two important respects from the rationality ideal of mainstream economics. First, expected utility maximization is not applied in a consistent way. It is applied to endodoxastic uncertainty, i.e. the uncertainty (or risk) expressed in a risk assessment, but in many cases not to metadoxastic uncertainty, i.e. uncertainty about which of several competing assessments is correct. Instead, a common approach to metadoxastic uncertainty is to only take the most plausible assessment into (...) account. This will typically lead to risk-prone deviations from risk-neutrality. Secondly, risks and benefits for different persons are added to form a total value of risk. Such calculations are used to support the view that one should accept being exposed to a risk if it brings greater benefits for others. This is in stark contrast to modern Paretian welfare economics, that refrains from interindividual comparisons and does not require people to accept a disadvantage because it brings a larger advantage for others. (Published Online July 11 2006). (shrink)

THE ECONOMICS OF TIME AND IGNORANCE by Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. and Mario J. Rizzo New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985. 261pp., $34.95 O'Driscoll and Rizzo, two leading exponents of the Austrian subjectivist school of economics, claim to provide an original and powerful challenge to mainstream neoclassical economics. They also argue that there is much common ground between the Austrian approach and the recent development of Post Keynesian analysis. In this essay, the validity of such claims is (...) analyzed, and the shortcomings of the Austrian school's approach vis?à?vis Post Keynesian and neoclassical analysis is developed. (shrink)

The development of technology is unbelievably rapid. From limited local networks to high speed Internet, from crude computing machines to powerful semi-conductors, the world had changed drastically compared to just a few decades ago. In the constantly renewing process of adapting to such an unnaturally high-entropy setting, innovations as well as entirely new concepts, were often born. In the business world, one such phenomenon was the creation of a new type of entrepreneurship. This paper proposes a new academic discipline of (...) computational entrepreneurship, which centers on: (i) an exponentially growing (and less expensive) computing power, to the extent that almost everybody in a modern society can own and use that; (ii) omnipresent high-speed Internet connectivity, wired or wireless, representing our modern day’s economic connectomics; (iii) growing concern of exploiting “serendipity” for a strategic commercial advantage; and (iv) growing capabilities of lay people in performing calculations for their informed decisions in taking fast-moving entrepreneurial opportunities. Computational entrepreneurship has slowly become a new mode of operation for business ventures and will likely bring the academic discipline of entrepreneurship back to mainstream economics. (shrink)

This book presents a concise introduction to the epistemology and methodology of the Austrian School of economics as defended by Ludwig von Mises. The author provides an innovative interpretation of Mises’ arguments in favour of the a priori truth of praxeology, the received view of which contributed to the academic marginalisation of the Austrian School. The study puts forward a unique argument that Mises – perhaps unintentionally – defends a form of conventionalism. Chapters in the book include detailed discussions (...) of individualism, historicism, epistemological positions, and essentialism. The author goes on to discuss Mises’ justification of the fundamental axiom and proposes a conventionalist interpretation. By presenting praxeology as a conventionalist research programme, the author aims to reinvigorate the interaction between the Austrian School, mainstream economics, and the philosophy of science. This comprehensive reconstruction is suitable for economists interested in the history and philosophy of their discipline, as well as for philosophers of science. (shrink)