Search results

The first Wisconsin Ph.D.s who came to MSU with an institutional bent were agricultural economists and included Henry Larzalere (Ph.D. 1938) whose major professor was Asher Hobson. Larzalere recalls the influence of Commons who retired in 1933. Upon graduation, Larzalere worked a short time for Wisconsin Governor Phillip Fox LaFollette who won passage of the nation’s first unemployment compensation act. Commons had earlier helped LaFollette’s father, Robert, to a number of institutional innovations.⁴ Larzalere continued the Commons’ tradition of contributing to the development of new institutions rather than being content to provide an efficiency apologia for existing private governance structures. He helped Michigan farmers form cooperatives. He taught land economics prior to Barlowe’s arrival in 1948, but primarily taught agricultural marketing. One of his Master’s degree students was Glenn Johnson (see below). Larzalere retired in 1977.

This chapter explores social enterprises as an alternative and addition to traditional entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs). It reviews the substantial social enterprise literature in order to identify the myriad of competing tensions constraining development and success of social EEs in areas of significant poverty and economic deprivation. Following this, the findings of several contemporary and novel studies are discussed. These collectively evidence ways social enterprises are overcoming the seemingly immutable constraints they operate under. In particular, the Social Enterprise Places initiative has been highly effective in supporting the development of flourishing social EEs in many locations in the UK. However, the growth of social enterprises, both in number and economic importance, presents further challenges that social enterprise owners and managers will have to contend with. Consequently, these organisations and their allied ecosystems require continued structural, financial and skills support.

Technological and cultural changes of the past decade have revealed new ways to use the object of the car as demand responsive yet not private. Cars are increasingly able to fulfil the aims of demand responsive transport (DRT), by providing equitable access to flexible, yet sustainable, transport. This chapter outlines the conceptual and empirical case for this increasingly dynamic form of DRT and labels it ‘cars on demand’.

A review of literature and practice is used to detail characteristics of cars on demand, and the reasons for its emergence. Key features are illustrated using examples from around the world.

Cars on demand is a rapidly changing field. New economic models of provision are emerging, yet not all are designed to fulfil the aims of DRT by making transport more sustainable or equitable. These models do, however, contribute to making cars on demand work by encouraging transition from a culture of private-car ownership, to one where the car is an object ‘just’ for use. Cars on demand can therefore contribute to the fracturing of the powerful system of private-car use. Its relationship with decreased vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) and transport disadvantage is, however, complex and vulnerable to erosion. This vulnerability can be mitigated by regulation and better understanding through research.

This chapter provides a novel conceptualisation of the way the object of the car is used in a demand responsive way. It contributes to understandings of regulatory issues surrounding shared mobility, and provides directions for future research.

X = multiple interpretations

I. Introduction to the Study of the Economic Role of Government: Alternative Approaches to Law and Economics

Samuels always saw the history of economics as intellectual history (Samuels, 1974). The history of economics could not be confined to a record of doctrines economists have advanced, particularly as found in a handful of key written texts, since these doctrines had to be understood in their historical context along with many other types of historical evidence and materials. That is, economic doctrines do not stand on their own, however plausible and well-argued they may appear to be, but have their meaning and credibility according to how well they along with many other historical materials speak to the issues of their time. While this seems an obvious and correct point to make about how to understand the history of economics, Samuels argued that it turns out to be more far-reaching than it initially appears when one considers the character of the world which economic doctrines must somehow explain together with the problem of representation.First, social reality is itself heterogeneous and ambiguous … [which] permits a complex and heterogeneous body of knowledge thereof. Second, our modes of intellectualizing and interpreting social reality are complex and heterogeneous: there are diverse epistemological credentials, diverse modes of thought, and diverse systems of rationality. (Samuels, 1974, p. 306)

One important discussion comes under Knight’s heading of “Social Control.” To appreciate his argument, one has to understand that Knight’s social theory is developed within a tension between: (1) his knowledge that social control is both inevitable and necessary; and (2) his correlative desire for individual autonomy. One could add to that a hatred of social control, some of which is relevant. But what Knight dislikes is, first, selective elements of existing social control and, second, change of social control, e.g. change of the law by law, except for those changes of the law that remove the selective elements he dislikes; Knight is not opposed to all change of social control. In any event, the problem of social control is also for Knight (as it was for Vilfredo Pareto) the problems of social change and of the status of the status quo as well as of hierarchy.

Published below are the course reading list and student notes taken by F. Taylor Ostrander in Frank H. Knight’s course, Current Tendencies, Economics 303, at the University of Chicago during Winter term of the 1933–1934 academic year. The reading list is surprisingly casual and uneven in detail among items. The notes are assumed, as usual in these volumes, to be a reasonably accurate summary account of what Knight said.