The Irreconcilable Inconsistencies of Neoclassical Macroeconomics


Book Description

In the course of this book it is argued that the loss of what is essentially "macro" in Keynes is the result of a preference for a form of equilibrium analysis that gives unqualified support to the ideology of free markets. In the case of Marx, his theory of exploitation and from this the stress on class struggle, led to an almost complete neglect of his contribution to the analysis of the aggregate demand and supply of commodities.




Ownership Economics


Book Description

This book presents the first full-length explanation in English of Heinsohn and Steiger's groundbreaking theory of money and interest, which emphasizes the role played by private property rights. Ownership economics gives an alternative explanation of money and interest, proposing that operations enabled by property lead to interest and money, rather than exchange of goods. Like any other approach, it has to answer economic theory's core question: what is the loss that has to be compensated by interest? Ownership economics accepts neither a temporary loss of goods, as in neoclassical economics, nor Keynes's temporary loss of already existing, exogenous money as the cause of interest. Rather, money is created as a non-physical title to property in a credit contract secured by a debtor's collateral and the creditor's net worth. This book is an edited English translation of a highly successful German text, and offers the first book-length treatment of a theory which has received much interest since its first appearance in articles in the late 1970s.




Freedom, Responsibility and Economics of the Person


Book Description

The capability approach has developed significantly since Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998. It is now recognised as being highly beneficial in the analysis of poverty and inequality, but also in the redefinition of policies aimed at improving the well-being of individuals. The approach has been applied within numerous sectors, from health and education to sustainable development, but beyond the obvious interest that it represents for the classical economics tradition, it has also encountered certain limitations. While acknowledging the undeniable progress that the approach has made in renewing the thinking on the development and well-being of a population, this book takes a critical stance. It focuses particularly on the approach’s inadequacy vis-à-vis the continental phenomenological tradition and draws conclusions about the economic analysis of development. In a more specific sense, it highlights the fact that the approach is too bound by standard economic logic, which has prevented it from taking account of a key ‘person’ dimension — namely, the ability of an individual to assume responsibility. As a result, this book advocates the notion that if the approach is used carelessly in relation to development policies, it can cause a number of pernicious effects, some of which may lead to disastrous consequences. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, this book will be of interest to those working in the fields of economics, philosophy, development studies and sociology.




Economics of the 1%


Book Description

How much do economists really know? In most cases, they claim to have profound knowledge but in fact understand little and obscure almost everything. Most people are convinced that economics should be left to the ‘experts’, when they themselves are perfectly capable of understanding it. This book explains that mainstream economics serves the interests of the rich through its logical inconsistency and unabashedly reactionary conclusions. John F. Weeks exposes the myths of mainstream economics and explains in straightforward language why current policies fail to serve the vast majority of people in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. Their failure to serve the interests of the many results from their devoted service to the few.




Hegel, Institutions and Economics


Book Description

Hegel’s philosophy has witnessed periods of revival and oblivion, at times considered to be an unrivalled and all-embracing system of thought, but often renounced with no less ardour. This book renews the dialogue with Hegel by looking at his legacy as a source of insight and judgement that helps us rethink contemporary economics. This book focuses on a concept of institution which is equally important for Hegel's political philosophy and for economic theory to date. The key contributions of this Hegelian perspective on economics lead us to the synthesis of traditional approaches and new ideas gained in economic experiments and advanced by neuroeconomists, sociologists and cognitive scientists. The proper account of contemporary 'civil society' involves comprehending it as a historically evolving totality of individual minds, ideas and intersubjective structures that are mutually dependent, tied by recognitive relations, and assert themselves as a whole in the ongoing performative movement of 'objective spitit'. The ethics of recognition is paired with the ethics of associations that supports moral principles and gives them true, concrete universality. This unusual constellation of seemingly remote fields suggests that Hegel, read in a pragmatist mode, anticipated the new theories and philosophies of extended mind, social cognition and performativity. By providing a new conceptual apparatus and reformulating the theory of institutions in the light of this new synthesis, this book claims to give new meaning both to Hegel as interpreted from today, and to the social sciences. Seen from this perspective, such phenomena as cooperation in games, personal identity or justice in the version of Amartya Sen's 'realization-focused comparisons' are reinscribed into the logic of institutional theory. This 'Hegel' clearly goes beyond the limits of philosophical discussion and becomes a decisive reference for economists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars who study the foundations and consequences of human sociality and try to explore and design the institutions necessary for a worthy common life.




Economic Policies, Governance and the New Economics


Book Description

This volume concentrates on international issues that relate to economic policies and governance. It is essential reading for all postgraduates and scholars looking for expert discussion and debate of the issues surrounding the case for new economic policies at the global level.




Social Fairness and Economics


Book Description

This volume brings together papers inspired by the work of Duncan Foley, an extraordinarily productive economist who has made seminal contributions to a wide variety of areas. Foley’s work cannot be easily classified, but one thread that runs through it is a critical examination (along both ethical and analytical lines) of conventional neoclassical economic theory, particularly involving general equilibrium theories of value and money. Foley was a pioneer of complexity economics as well, which adopts approaches to these questions drawn from natural sciences, so the collection therefore has an interdisciplinary quality that will interest a wide variety of readers. Some of the chapters are intellectual biographies that contextualize and identify Foley’s contributions to Keynesian macroeconomics, Marxian value theory, and complexity theory in economics. The topics covered include the economics of complexity; the ethics of general equilibrium theory; the economics of climate change; applications of Keynesian, Marxian and Ricardian political economy; and money and financial crises. The collection should be useful to scholars who work in various economic traditions critical of the currently dominant free-market approach, but it also speaks to scholars of critical theory in various disciplines beyond economics such as the mathematicians, physicists, and other natural scientists who are interested in understanding the complexity of social processes using their analytical frameworks. This book should also appeal to graduate students in economics who are working in these traditions, as well as scholars (including current graduate students in orthodox programs) who are dissatisfied with the current state of economic theory and would like to satisfy their intellectual curiosity by sampling the contributions of critical theorists.




Against Utility-Based Economics


Book Description

Utility-based theory and the fallback choice-theoretic framework are shown to be biased, irremediably flawed and misleading. A radically different theory of value and of consumer behaviour is proposed based on existential interpretations of scarcity, value and self-interest. For self-conscious mortals, only time is scarce. All other is derivative scarcity. Value is in the life, as a knowledge extract of time, which goes into commodities as direct human labour and depreciated capital, through their production. By structuring their preferences, consumers try to confiscate more of such value per unit of expended income, extending their social presence, soothing their angst and gaining power over each other. This raises output and makes gains cancel out. Negative psychological externalities preclude any well-being or social-welfare type conclusion. These resolve a number of long-standing issues: endogenously generated growth, the micro-macro connection, the price mechanism, crises, unemployment, etc. Equilibrium is of a low-potential kind, not of a force-balancing one, and it is unique, reachable and stable. The relevant analytics involve purely economic, non-psychological entities. Consumer behaviour is grounded on a well-defined, structure-based decision criterion and on observably measurable magnitudes, only. The social ramifications of the two juxtaposed perspectives are discussed at length.




Support-bargaining, Economics, and Society


Book Description

'Support-Bargaining, Economics and Society links support-bargaining to Darwin's theory of natural selection and traces the implications of support-bargaining and money-bargaining across society. It provides a wholly different account of the functioning of human societies from anything that has gone before. Social scientists, ever since there have been such people, have missed the crucial human characteristic - the propensity to seek support - that has given rise to group formation and the myriad activities that are feasible in groups.




Facts, Values and Objectivity in Economics


Book Description

Is Economics an ‘objective’ or ‘positive’ science, independent of ethical and political positions? The financial crisis that began in 2007 gave rise to renewed doubts regarding the ‘objectivity’ of economics and brought into the public arena a debate that was previously confined to academia. A remarkable feature of the public debate on the value neutrality of economics since then was that it not only involved indictments of ideological biases in economic theory, but also the attribution of the crisis itself to the unethical orientation of economic agents, of economists acting as experts and of ‘economic science’ itself. The contributors to this volume believe that economists of all persuasions are once again compelled to probe the normative foundations of their discipline and give a public account of their doubts and conclusions.