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The critical dimension and the one that can unify knowledge through systemic interrelationships, is unification of the purely a priori with the purely a posteriori parts of total reality into a congruous whole. This is a circular cause and effect interrelationship between premises. The emerging kind of world view may also be substantively called the epistemic‐ontic circular causation and continuity model of unified reality. The essence of this order is to ground philosophy of science in both the natural and social sciences, in a perpetually interactive and integrative mould of deriving, evolving and enhancing or revising change. Knowledge is then defined as the output of every such interaction. Interaction arises first from purely epistemological roots to form ontological reality. This is the passage from the a priori to the a posteriori realms in the traditions of Kant and Heidegger. Conversely, the passage from the a posteriori to a priori reality is the approach to knowledge in the natural sciences proferred by Cartesian meditations, David Hume, A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, as examples. Yet the continuity and renewal of knowledge by interaction and integration of these two premises are not rooted in the philosophy of western science. Husserl tried for it through his critique of western civilization and philosophical methods in the Crisis of Western Civilization. The unified field theory of Relativity‐Quantum physics is being tried for. A theory of everything has been imagined. Yet after all is done, scientific research program remains in a limbo. Unification of knowledge appears to be methodologically impossible in occidental philosophy of science.

Focuses on the approach to interpreting earnings equality found in the writings of a variety of economists and in particular, technological change and its effects on the demand skill resulting in earning inequality. Argues that the evidence in favour of the technological effect is weak and presents some alternatives for further consideration.

Context is known to affect evaluation for many goods. For example, a house of any given size is more likely to be viewed as adequate the larger it is relative to other houses in the same locale. If evaluations of some goods are more sensitive to context than others, there is no presumption that privately optimal consumption patterns will be socially optimal. Rather, consumers will spend too much on goods whose evaluations depend most strongly on context and too little on those whose evaluations depend least strongly on context. For instance, if evaluations of houses are more sensitive to context than evaluations of leisure, then people will spend too much money on houses and too little time with family and friends. But if context sensitivity is the same for all goods, no distortions result.

This paper suggests theoretical grounds for expecting context sensitivity to differ across goods. Evaluations should be more sensitive to context for goods whose consumption is more readily observed by others and also for goods for which relative consumption is linked to other important payoffs. The quality of school that a child attends, for example, is often strongly linked to its parents’ relative expenditures on housing.

A survey of empirical evidence suggests that observed differences in context sensitivity track the differences predicted on theoretical grounds.

Confidence, trust and loyalty are three social emotions necessary respectively for the social processes of agency, cooperation and organization. In addition to the centrality of emotion in social life, an examination of these emotions demonstrates the importance of future‐time in social structure. Temporality is seldom discussed in the sociological literature, but unavoidable in a consideration of confidence, trust and loyalty. An examination of confidence, trust and loyalty from the perspective of temporality clarifies issues of social rationality and indicates some of the limitations of rational choice theory.

This chapter attempts to explicitly integrate the idea of reference group when measuring relative deprivation. It assumes that in assessing his situation in society an individual compares himself with individuals whose environment can be considered as being similar to his. By environment we mean the set of people with a similar set of observable characteristics such as human capital, household attributes, and location. We therefore propose to measure relative deprivation by comparing the actual income of an individual with the one he could have expected on the basis of the level of these characteristics. We then aggregate these individual comparisons by computing an index of “distributional change” that compares, on a non anonymous basis, the distributions of the actual and “expected” incomes. At the difference of other approaches to relative deprivation, our measure takes into account not only the difference between the actual and “expected” individual incomes but also that between the actual and “expected” individual ranks. We applied our approach to Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, using a survey that covered a period of six years (from 2000 to 2005). We then observed that our measure of deprivation is well suited to study wage deprivation across genders and is able to proxy subjective deprivation in living standards reported by survey respondents better than conventional measures of relative deprivation.

This paper offers a critical commentary on Mark Bevirʼs recent book A Theory of Governance from the perspective of normative political philosophy. It explores three ways in which Bevirʼs analysis can be brought into dialogue with political philosophy. First, it considers the role of generalizations in successful explanations of social phenomena. Second, it explores how a decentred theory of governance can help identify solutions to important social problems. Third, it explores the relation between Bevirʼs account of governance and theories of deliberative democracy.

I. Introduction The emphasis on the concept of ‘economic man’ for a long period of time has led to important outcomes each of which has serious welfare implications. First, there has been a relentless glorification of the principle of pursuit of self‐interest. It is only now that all the negative spillover effects of our wealth creating and consuming activities are being acknowledged and evaluated. Since most of these costs are costs to society rather than to a particular individual, these costs do not play any role in our production or consumption decisions. As a result, quality of life has not improved as much as the recent rise in per capita real income suggests. Second, for a long time welfare has been treated as a monotonically increasing function of the amounts of goods and services consumed. There has been a total disregard for the fact that at a given point in time an individual can afford only a fraction of the total amount of goods and services available in the society. This explains at least in part why even in the most affluent societies people are no happier today than they were in the past. And third, although the idea of interdependent welfare is not new in economics as evidenced by relative income hypothesis which shows that present consumption and hence welfare is also a function of one's past consumption and consumption of others in the society, economic analysis by and large has been carried out on the assumption of independence. Feelings like envy, jealousy, and avarice are real and powerful and play an important role in the way people perceive their welfare. Just because they cannot be conveniently incorporated in simple analytical model is a poor excuse for neglecting them.

Renewable energy is at the forefront of countries’ concerns due to its global economic and environmental impacts. Previous studies have thoroughly examined the impact of renewable energy on overall national income, and this paper aims to shed light on an indicator that has received insufficient attention in research regarding its impact on economic growth, using data from 2000 to 2018.

This study examines the causal relationship between trade balance, renewable energy consumption and CO₂ emissions per capita in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries using an auto regression distributed lag model (ARDL) and Johansen Cointegration Test.

The findings reveal that there is evidence of a long-run and short-run cointegrating relationship and that renewable energy consumption in the long run impacts the trade balance positively and in the short run negatively.

Therefore, bioenergy trade between countries and local investment should be prioritized to increase the trade balance surplus, since many of OECD countries suffer from deficit problems.