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1 – 10 of over 2000William McColloch and Matías Vernengo
The rise of the regulatory state during the Gilded Age was closely associated with the development of institutionalist ideas in American academia. In their analysis of the…
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The rise of the regulatory state during the Gilded Age was closely associated with the development of institutionalist ideas in American academia. In their analysis of the emergent regulatory environment, institutionalists like John Commons operated with a fundamentally marginalist theory of value and distribution. This engagement is a central explanation for the ultimate ascendancy of neoclassical economics, and the limitations of the regulatory environment that emerged in the Progressive Era. The eventual rise of the Chicago School and its deregulatory ambitions did constitute a rupture, but one achieved without rejecting preceding conceptions of competition and value. The substantial compatibility of the view of markets underlying both the regulatory and deregulatory periods is stressed, casting doubt about the transformative potential of the resurgent regulatory impulse in the New Gilded Age.
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Sandra Peart and David Levy's “The Vanity of the Philosopher” is an enlightening look into a potentially embarrassing (and certainly neglected by modern economists) period in the…
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Sandra Peart and David Levy's “The Vanity of the Philosopher” is an enlightening look into a potentially embarrassing (and certainly neglected by modern economists) period in the history of economic thought. It provides a plausible argument that classical economics was transformed in the mid-Nineteenth Century from a discipline that took for granted the equal capacity for judgment of every individual actor to one that placed a premium on the judgment of economic experts. They identify the turning point as when economists began to reject sympathy as something that should factor into our judgments. The loss of sympathy makes the move to hierarchicalism much easier to achieve. In the Twentieth Century, hierarchicalism was overturned by the new egalitarian free market ideology of the Austrian and Chicago Schools, but the authors point out that sympathy did not come back with it. The result is that people now treat economic inequalities as a consequence of the market, but not as something that they need to worry about (since the assumption is that everyone has the power to change the market, if they so desire). The book ends on a hopeful note: now that the elements missing from current economic theory have been identified, it is possible that they can be revived in order to create an economic theory that is more attentive to the demands of social justice and offer mechanisms that might better motivate people to respond to those demands.
Modern mainstream economics is a plurocracy in which there is no orthodoxy of ideas, only an orthodoxy of method. Given the training it provides its students, mainstream…
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Modern mainstream economics is a plurocracy in which there is no orthodoxy of ideas, only an orthodoxy of method. Given the training it provides its students, mainstream economics' natural domain is science. With the mainstream's acceptance of complexity views of the economy, Austrian economist's views can now get a hearing within the mainstream. Thus, within the science of economics, there is no need for a separate Austrian economics. However, there is a need for Austrian economics in political economy, the branch of economics that takes the insights of science and relates them to policy. The paper urges Austrian economics to embrace political economy as its domain and to position its work within political economy.
Adam Smith, it is generally acknowledged, founded the modern discipline of political economy with the study entitled An Inquiry into The Wealth of Nations (1776) which he built…
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Adam Smith, it is generally acknowledged, founded the modern discipline of political economy with the study entitled An Inquiry into The Wealth of Nations (1776) which he built upon the ethical system he presumed to exist in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Ricardo took Smith's observations somewhat further with his publication of On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). When John Stuart Mill wrote his Principles of Political Economy in 1848, his considerations of economic processes were intimately connected with the political. By the time Marx published Das Kapital as a critique of political economy in 1867 the term was entrenched in both academic life and in common parlance and political circles. The study of economics was an integral part of the study of the state. Ironically, however, political economy was about to be upstaged by the development of economics as a separate and positivist discipline. William Stanley Jevons had published his “Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy” in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society in the previous year. This was much more widely read at the time than Das Kapital. By 1890, Alfred Marshall had published his Principles of Economics. The book began with these words: “Political economy or economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” The great tradition of seeing economics as an integral part of politics and vice versa was disappearing. However, though economists were anxious to convert that part of political economy known as economics and see it as a scientific discipline, the reality, that is the integrated nature of the state and the economy, remained. Simply because certain ideologues decided to separate politics from economics did not mean that the state in any sense disentangled itself from the economy or the economy from the state.
Being a relatively newer member to the school of Austrian economics, I have seen the world of the economics profession and its many schools of thought through many lenses. Having…
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Being a relatively newer member to the school of Austrian economics, I have seen the world of the economics profession and its many schools of thought through many lenses. Having this different perspective, I disagree with Pete Boettke on his ideas for ways to change the procedural way the Austrian school does economics. We need to be empirical about not just the economy, but of the history of economic thought. I believe the main goal should not be higher impact factors, but true progression of scientific knowledge. More focus on what we are doing, and less on counting articles.
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Business is any legally permissible economic activity for gain. The first relation between government and business is that government determines by law what are the illegal…
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Business is any legally permissible economic activity for gain. The first relation between government and business is that government determines by law what are the illegal activities, e.g. fraud, crime, violence. Government is the rule maker.
Bhavya Advani, Anshita Sachan, Udit Kumar Sahu and Ashis Kumar Pradhan
A major concern for policymakers and researchers is to ascertain the movement of price levels and employment rates. Predicting the trends of these variables will assist the…
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A major concern for policymakers and researchers is to ascertain the movement of price levels and employment rates. Predicting the trends of these variables will assist the government in making policies to stabilize the economy. The objective of this chapter is to forecast the unemployment rate and Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the period 2022 to 2031 for the Indian economy. For this purpose, the authors analyse the prediction capability of the univariate auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and the vector autoregressive (VAR) model. The dataset for India's annual CPI and unemployment rate pertains to a 30-year time period from 1991 to 2021. The result shows that the inflation forecasts derived from the ARIMA model are more precise than that of the VAR model. Whereas, unemployment rate forecasts obtained from the VAR model are more reliable than that of the ARIMA model. It is also observed that predicted unemployment rates hover around 5.7% in the forthcoming years, while the forecasted inflation rate witnesses an increasing trend.
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This article provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis revisited classical and Marxian concepts such as productive/unproductive labor, economic surplus, subsistence wages…
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This article provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis revisited classical and Marxian concepts such as productive/unproductive labor, economic surplus, subsistence wages, reserve army, and capital accumulation in his investigation of economic development. The Lewis 1954 development model is compared to other models advanced at the time by Harrod, Domar, Swan, Kaldor, Solow, von Neumann, Nurkse, Rosenstein-Rodan, Myint, and others. Lewis applied the notion of economic duality to open and closed economies.
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