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The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The purpose of this paper is to critically assess the assumptions regarding human behaviour in orthodox neoclassical economic theory. The orthodox neoclassical economic theory prescribes rational models of human behaviour, but the strictness of the criteria, developed to promote theoretical consistency and conceptual elegance, commonly fails to fully accommodate all of the empirical material. To save the core of the orthodox neoclassical economic theory research program and to neutralize and mute criticism regarding its predictive failures, its proponents engage in expedient theorizing, the expansion of the initial theoretical framework by adding ad hoc hypotheses and/or including additional explanatory factors; in many cases, dismissed as “unnecessary complications” (as in the case of morality and ethics – two conspicuously “non-economic” concepts) in the initial formulation of theoretical propositions of the core theories.

The paper reviews a body of heterogeneous literature to introduce and examine the use of expedient theorizing in economic thinking.

In the present case, the hyperrationalist axiom regarding the efficacy of calculative practices to maximize individual utility is accompanied by moralist concerns (and, by implication, corrective and disciplinary action) regarding the failure to adhere to such prescriptions. Expedient theorizing, thus, becomes a key mechanism in the political economy of truth that currently grants orthodox neoclassical economic theory significant authority to inform policy-making in substantial ways and considerable prestige.

The orthodox neoclassical economic theory constitutes the blueprint for policy-making and institutional change, and, therefore, the key economic ideas being the constitutive elements of the contemporary economy demand scholarly attention. The paper thus points at theoretical inconsistencies in the orthodox neoclassical economic theory and introduces the concept of expedient theorizing as its remedy.

The Neoclassical approach to analysing personal choice is compared with an approach contained in a Biblical Christian mode of analysis. This paper compares the Neoclassical and Christian positions via analysis of characteristics of the Neoclassical rational choice model. The main characteristic examined is a basic assumption of the rational choice model that human choice is explained as the optimisation of utility via rational self‐interest. The two positions are compared in terms of how they treat self‐interest and rationality, the degree to which basic assumptions about human behaviour are specified, the importance they attach to the realism of assumptions underlying their models, and the explanatory and predictive purposes for which the models are used. The conclusion of the comparison is that the Biblical Christian perspective encompasses the variables regarded as important in Neoclassical explanation, but presents them in the context of a more embracing worldview perspective than the Neoclassical. This Christian belief perspective is applicable to human behaviour in both “economic” and “non‐economic” domains.

Societies highly value economic growth because economic growth results in increase in societal standards of living. This paper addresses the issue of why economies grow and what public policy makers should favor in order to increase economic growth.

This paper reviews and contrasts the two major, rival ways to account for economic growth: the neoclassical model, which maintains that growth results from increases in investment, and the dynamic competition model, which maintains that growth results from the innovations that stem from the process of competition.

The paper finds that the dynamic‐competition model, as represented by resource‐advantage (R‐A) theory, best explains economic growth.

Public policy should focus on promoting R‐A competition in order to foster economic growth.

This issue of which approach best accounts for economic growth is important because the two approaches imply very different decisions in the public policy arena.

This chapter will address (only) one issue from the 1960s substantivist/formalist debate, the treatment of choice. The substantivists rejected the economic universality of the neoclassical axioms of choice under scarcity and the isolated and selfish nature of the choice process. A common formalist response was that their model based on these axioms could be modified to include whatever specific conditions economic choice was being made under. This chapter rejects that claim, based on a consideration not included in the debate. It is argued that the mathematical structure of the standard formal neoclassical model prevents it from incorporating the substantivist criticisms, and that to modify it in accord with these criticisms would necessarily result in a model that is outside the neoclassical approach to economic decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the compatibility of Rawls's account of justice with neoclassical economic theory, upon which Rawls relies strongly.

This question is approached via a comparison of the implicit account of society and social relations adopted in Rawl's work with that that can be perceived to underly neoclassical economic theory. The purpose of this comparison is to assess how compatible these social visions are.

It is argued that neoclassical economic theory presupposes a social structure and a social reality that is radically less cooperative than that which underpins Rawls's theory of justice. Rawls presupposes a world in which cooperation is necessary – a specialised world – whereas the equilibrium requirements of neoclassical theory run into severe technical difficulties in such a context, with the result that they are assumed away via a series of theoretical contrivances, along with the role for cooperation that is central to Rawls's theory.

The paper illustrates clearly the pitfalls associated with uncritical reliance in one discipline on theoretical frameworks imported from another. Where there is debate concerning the fundamental bases of theory, a form of sensitivity analysis must be performed to ensure that the final argument does not demand too much of, or become excessively tied to, the imported framework.

The paper provides the beginnings of such a sensitivity analysis on the Rawlsian project and its relationship to economic theory, and shows that the field is open for a reconstitution of the liberal theory of justice on grounds other than its traditional ally, the exchange paradigm as represented by neoclassical theory.

Considers two main strands of literature. The first deals with the tension between the falsificationist view of how economic know‐ledge could or should be acquired, and the view that economics is a separate, deductive science. The second concerns the metaphors used in economic analysis, the main contrast being between metaphors which involve homeostasis and time reversibility, and those that involve hysteresis and time irreversibility.

The article makes a comprehensive study of the development of social economic thought in the history of economic doctrines. Traces of social economic development are dated back to the Physiocrats and moral philosophers and reference is made to the early Arab works in the developments of these social economic doctrines. The social economic thought in the classical school of economic theory is critically studied. It is shown that with the advancement of economic theory in the hands of the neoclassical school and its latter‐day developments social economic doctrines receded from mainstream economics. The contemporary social economists in North America have fallen into the trap of these neoclassical approaches applied to the study of social economic phenomena. The article also shows that similar neoclassical and ethically neutral traces continue in the works of the mixed economy theorists, institutionalists, macroeconomists, monetarists, rational expectations hypothesists, public and social choice theorists of all types. Thus, the whole gamut of mainstream economics is shown to be trapped in an epistemological and methodological quandary as to how ethical phenomena are to be treated rationally in the framework of economic theory.

Addresses the question: “Are Christian values reflected in contemporary American economic ethics?” Compares the ethics dictated by neoclassical production theory with the Christian production values found in Pope John Paul II′s encyclical, Laborem Exercens . The encyclical rejects the notion that output is the primary goal of production. The implication is that neoclassical production theory is necessary, but not sufficient. Public policy in the United States has long been based on neoclassical production theory. In the last decade, the downsizing and restructuring of production has heightened emphasis on neoclassical production efficiencies. During this period, prevailing economic ethics were largely in conflict with Christian values. The fledgling policy initiatives of the Clinton administration suggest a commitment to reshape policy in ways which more positively incorporate a number of the reforms suggested by Laborem Exercens. If a new economic (production) ethic evolves out of these commitments, the compatibility between economic ethics and Christian values will be greater a decade from now.

Explains the exogenous and endogenous types of relationships between ethics and economics in neoclassical and non‐neoclassical framework. Studies market consequentialism, deontological preferences and polity‐market (ecology) interactions in recent developments in economic theory and political philosophy. A review of literature is covered. From these studies, bordering ethics and economics, is evolved the contrasting methodology and world view of an endogenous theory underlying the interface between ethics and economics. The underlying principle of ethical endogeneity of this new paradigm is treated with an institution‐economy interface by addressing the issue of sustainability. A simple mathematical formulation is done to show how ethics can be methodologically endogenized in a scientific framework for theory, policy development and institutionalism. Examines Canada′s Green Plan in light of the exogenous and endogenous ethical relationships. The critique is developed and ethico‐economic policy‐theory alternatives are proposed.