Geoff Hodgson's innovative and important new book is about the future of economics as a viable discipline. It examines not only evolutionary economics but the development of economic theory during the twentieth century. The book reflects on the origins and consequences of the narrowing and increasing irrelevance of mainstream economics, suggesting that it will be inadequate to cope with the complex ideas of the new millennium. Geoff Hodgson analyses some of the attempts to redirect theoretical economics to real world issues. He proposes a move away from mathematical formalization, greater tolerance given to different approaches and the possibility of learning from other sciences especially biology. He suggests that the toleration of a plurality of theoretical approaches in economics - including institutional and evolutionary approaches - based on a common orientation towards real world economies is the best overall strategy for future theoretical advance. A unique and important contribution to our understanding, it will be welcomed by academics and researchers working in all fields of economics, especially evolutionary economics as well as by other social scientists.

A timely revisitation of renowned urbanist-activist Jane Jacobs' lifework, What We See invites thirty pundits and practitioners across fields to refresh Jacobs' economic, social and urban planning theories for the present day. Combining personal and professional observations with meditations on Jacobs' insights, essayists bring their diverse experience to bear to sketch the blueprints for the living city.

The book models itself after Jacobs' collaborative approach to city and community building, asking community members and niche specialists to share their knowledge with a broader community, to work together toward a common goal of building the 21st-century city.

The resulting collection of original essays expounds and expands Jacobs' ideas on the qualities of a vibrant, robust urban area. It offers the generalist, the activist, and the urban planner practical examples of the benefits of planning that encourages community participation, pedestrianism, diversity, environmental responsibility, and self-sufficiency.

Bob Sirman, director of the Canada Council for the Arts, describes how built form should be an embodiment of a community narrative. Daniel Kemmis, former Mayor of Missoula, shares an imagined dialog with Jacobs, discussing the delicate interconnection between cities and their surrounding rural areas. And Roberta Brandes Gratz urban critic, author, and former head of Public Policy of the New York State Preservation League asserts the importance of architectural preservation to environmentally sound urban planning practices.

What We See asks us all to join the conversation about next steps for shaping socially just, environmentally friendly, and economically prosperous urban communities.

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First published in 1991 this text provides an incisive analysis of theories concerning the origins of economic inequality between nations. Central to the authora (TM)s investigation is the concept of underdevelopment, and a focus on successive Western a ~systems of conceptualisationa (TM) of the relationship between the west and the rest of the world. The first part of the book concerns the Marx/Engels theory of the Asiatic mode of production, and the anti-Imperialist reaction against Eurocentrisim initiated by the theoretical synthesis of J. A. Hobson. This is followed by an examination of the post-World War II era, particularly the evolution of development studies and the differing versions of dependency theory.

The author concludes with an analysis of the most recent reactions against economic imperialism and dependency theory, and concludes with an assessment of their implications for the further economic development of todaya (TM)s Third World.

This volume, first published in 1982, is a collection of original essays written to honour Professor W. Arthur Lewis, 1979 co-winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. The authors, an international group of distinguished scholars, address a varied set of specific issues reflecting Professor Lewis' research interests, covering topics which include: technological change in agriculture, analyses of unemployment and income distribution, the role of government policy in the development process, the historical record of development, and the relationship between developed and developing nations. The book will be of interest to both the academic researcher and practicing professionals in the international organisations and national governments, and are particularly appropriate to graduate courses in economic development, cost-benefit analysis and economic history.

This volume rests on three thematic pillars: the limits of conventional macroeconomics; the long-run agenda of structural transformation and the development of capabilities. Islam and Kucera highlight the tenuous links of conventional macroeconomics with core development concerns. The chapters of this book enunciate an empirical approach to track the various sources of structural transformation and nurture the thesis that investment in infrastructure leads to the inculcation of capabilities, broadly defined to include knowledge accumulation, dissemination and application. The editors reinterpret social protection from the perspective of inclusive development and structural transformation. The volume examines secular trends in the functional distribution of income and explores their possible macroeconomic consequences by developing a two-country macroeconomic model for open economies. It seeks to establish whether growing inequality in many countries combined with stagnant real incomes is one of the sources of the global and financial crisis of 2007-2009.

Agent-based modeling/simulation is an emergent approach to the analysis of social and economic systems. It provides a bottom-up experimental method to be applied to social sciences such as economics, management, sociology, and politics as well as some engineering fields dealing with social activities. This book includes selected papers presented at the Fifth International Workshop on Agent-Based Approaches in Economic and Social Complex Systems held in Tokyo in 2007. It contains two invited papers given as the plenary and invited talks in the workshop and 21 papers presented in the six regular sessions: Organization and Management; Fundamentals of Agent-Based and Evolutionary Approaches; Production, Services and Urban Systems; Agent-Based Approaches to Social Systems; and Market and Economics I and II. The research presented here shows the state of the art in this rapidly growing field.

Celebrating twenty years of transition from socialism to capitalism, this book is designed to be the core textbook for undergraduate courses in transition economics and comparative economic systems. Given the passage of time, Transition Economics: Two Decades On reviews and accounts for the outcomes in the so-called transition economies and, from an academic perspective, takes the reader through developments and issues in the twenty years of transition from plan to market.

Treating its subject matter thematically, the book incorporates much of the transition economics literature and evidence that have evolved over the past two decades. In particular, the authors focus on the most important aspects of economic transition, including:

• the initial conditions at the outset of transition
• paradigms and patterns of transition
• the main transition policies and economic reforms
• the performance of transition countries and firms
• the lessons from transition.

The textbook covers a wide range of both contemporary microeconomic and macroeconomic issues, in over thirty ex-socialist European and Asian countries, including Russia and China.

Transition Economics: Two Decades On is more than just a book about a particular part of the world or the transformation that was experienced at a particular time in history. The authors believe that the study of the economics of transition gives the reader an insight into theories, policies, reforms, legacies, institutions, processes and lessons that have application and relevance, beyond the specific transition from plan to market, to other parts of the world and to other times in history.

The Political Economy of Bureaucracy applies Public Choice theory and a complex systems view of government institutions to analyze policy implementation as an economic process. It addresses the common and vexing question of why managing federal agencies for results is so difficult by challenging traditional assumptions of institutional design and policy analysis. Using creative methods that focus on relationships that constrain the choices of executives and managers in a political hierarchy, the author reveals control and coordination as goals that are imperfectly achieved and often conflicting with one another. Despite decades of intense study, serious reform efforts and impressive technological advances, the U.S. government remains a typical bureaucracy that fails to meet citizens' expectations. Clearly, policy analysis is missing something. The problem may rest with "machine" models of government. Rules, especially those governing expenditures, are assumed to be feasible and effective. Analysis of the federal government as a complex system of relationships between semi-autonomous agents helps explain the disconnect between policy and results. The solution is to roll back micro-management of ends and means; policymakers should focus on objectives and facilitate implementation by selectively relaxing constraints that prevent experimentation needed to determine the most effective methods. This book devotes unusual attention to the interaction between executive and legislative branches of government and between political appointees and career civil servants. Most studies of government policy take existing institutional structure for granted. Different conclusions emerge from this analysis by virtue of the systems view that accepts status quo hierarchies but questions the effectiveness of the rules that govern policy implementation. This book will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers focussing on Economic Theory, Public Choice, Institutional Economics and Political Science, as well as to those working in the public sector interested in Public Administration, Public Policy, and Organizational Behavior.

The 38 selections in the volume include complete texts of all of Veblen's major articles and book reviews from 1882 to 1914, plus key chapters from his books The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and The Instinct of Workmanship (1914). These writings present a wide range of Veblen's most significant contributions, especially with respect to the philosophical and psychological foundations of economics, sociology, and other social sciences. A thorougly comprehensive volume, this is the only collection to present Veblen's writings in chronological order, so that their development can be correctly understood. The volume is edited by a leading sociologist and a prominent economist, who provide extensive introductory essays which include item-by-item commentaries that place each selection in its intellectual-historical context and in relation to subsequent developments in economics. It makes for a valuable source of reference both for students and researchers alike.

First published in 1986, this book presents a reissue of the first detailed confrontation between the Austrian school of economics and Austrian philosophy, especially the philosophy of the Brentano school. It contains a study of the roots of Austrian economics in the liberal political theory of the nineteenth-century Hapsburg empire, and a study of the relations between the general theory of value underlying Austrian economics and the new economic approach to human behaviour propounded by Gary Becker and others in Chicago. In addition, it considers the connections between Austrian methodology and contemporary debates in the philosophy of the social sciences.

First published in 1990, this book presents an original and comprehensive overview of Australian economic thought. The authors stress, by way of introduction, the many important innovative contributions Australian economists have made to thought worldwide. As the argument develops, the work of major figures is discussed in detail in addition to the role of different journals and economic societies.

Leading academics discuss the major changes that have taken place in the production and organizational paradigm of Fordism. The book provides a historical overview of the development of post-Fordism and updates the range of concerns that exist within the debate. The authors go on to link these developments to the New Economy debate and outline the new sets of issues emerging within the context of new employment and social relations.

First published in 1914 and reissued with a new introduction in 1992, Work and Wealth is a seminal vision of Hobson's liberal utopian ideals, which desired to demonstrate how economic and social reform could transform existing society into one in which the majority of the population, as opposed to a small elite, could find fulfillment.

Hobson attacked conventional economic wisdom which made a division between the cost of production and the utility derived from consumption. Far from being necesarily arduous, Hobson argued that work had the potential to bring about immense utility and enrichment. The qualitative, humanist work argues in favour of a new form of capitalism to minimise cost and maximise utility.

In the modern world of gigantic datasets, which scientists and practioners of all fields of learning are confronted with, the availability of robust, scalable and easy-to-use methods for pattern recognition and data mining are of paramount importance, so as to be able to cope with the avalanche of data in a meaningful way. This concise and pedagogical research monograph introduces the reader to two specific aspects - clustering techniques and dimensionality reduction - in the context of complex network analysis. The first chapter provides a short introduction into relevant graph theoretical notation; chapter 2 then reviews and compares a number of cluster definitions from different fields of science. In the subsequent chapters, a first-principles approach to graph clustering in complex networks is developed using methods from statistical physics and the reader will learn, that even today, this field significantly contributes to the understanding and resolution of the related statistical inference issues. Finally, an application chapter examines real-world networks from the economic realm to show how the network clustering process can be used to deal with large, sparse datasets where conventional analyses fail.

This book has three purposes. First, to convince professional economists who study the behaviour of the economic system as a whole that they must re-examine some of the assumptions behind the reigning economic theories. Second, to explain to the general public why the currently fashionable economic policies cannot solve the problem of massive long term unemployment. Third, to show that if people's political engagement is revived there is hope for escaping from the economic morass and moral wasteland into which, ever since the 1970s, the fashionable policies have been leading us. To elucidate the theoretical problem the authors pass in review several recent structural developments and consider their effect on the economy. To encourage renewed public political engagement they draw attention to the risks involved in allowing things to drift on in the present direction. The avowed purpose of the book imposes the need to present it in a manner accessible at once to professional macroeconomists and to a wider public ofpeople concerned about today's malaise, politicians, sociologists or philosophers and others. This imposes the need not to encumber readers with the customary glut of academic references in the text, and to refer only to the best known and politically most influential theories and to authors who are also widely known to people who are not professional economists.

The major goal of the book is to create an environment for matching different d- ciplinary approaches to studying economic growth. This goal is implemented on the basis of results of the Symposium "Applications of Dynamic Systems to E- nomic Growth with Environment" which was held at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) on the 7th-8th of November, 2008, within the IIASA Project "Driving Forces of Economic Growth" (ECG). The symposium was organized by coordinators of the ECG project: Jesus Crespo-Cuaresma from IIASA World Population Program, and Tapio Palokangas and Alexander Tarasyev from IIASA Dynamic Systems Program. The book addresses the issues of sustainability of economic growth in a cha- ing environment, global warming and exhausting energy resources, technological change, and also focuses on explanations of signi?cant ?uctuations in countries' growth rates. The chapters focus on the analysis of historical economic growth - periences in relation to environmental policy, technological change, development of transport infrastructure, population issues and environmental mortality. The book is written in a popular-science style, accessible to any intelligent lay reader. The prime audience for the book is economists, mathematicians and en- neersworkingonproblemsofeconomicgrowthandenvironment.Themathematical part of the book is presented in a rigorous manner, and the detailed analysis is - pected to be of interest to specialists in optimal control and applications to economic modeling. The book consists of four interrelated parts.

In June 2010 IE Business School, with King Abdulaziz University, gathered in Madrid some of the world's foremost scholars, academics and practitioners of Islamic Economics and Finance. These highlights of the symposium and original articles specifically address the post-crisis application of this growing and relevant economic philosophy in Europe.

This volume collects research papers addressing topical issues in economics and management with a particular focus on dynamic models which allow to analyze and foster the decision making of firms in dynamic complex environments. The scope of the contributions ranges from daily operational challenges firms face to strategic choices in dynamic industry environments and the analysis of optimal growth paths. The volume also highlights recent methodological developments in the areas of dynamic optimization, dynamic games and meta-heuristics, which help to improve our understanding of (optimal) decision making in a fast evolving economy.

Don Lavoie's published work encompasses a wide range of subjects - socialism, hermeneutics, information technology, and culture. The subjects appear unrelated, but a close examination of his research reveals an underlying unity of thought and an economics at sharp variance with the post World War II mainstream. The contributors to this volume explore the legacy of his scholarship and its implications for economics. Three themes run throughout Don Lavoie's work and are explored in these chapters, the overarching one being the importance of social intelligence to economics. Second, and related to this, was his belief that certain institutions or practices are better at creating social intelligence than others - what might be termed the primacy of liberty or voluntaryism. Thirdly, he asserted that economics is more closely aligned with the humane disciplines than with the physical. As these essays make clear, if the next generation of economists does integrate economics with the humanities, some of the credit must go to Don Lavoie. Students and scholars of economics, methodology, and the humanities more broadly will find this a provocative and enriching collection.

What is the role of economic theory? Is there any common ground among economists of different schools concerning the role or roles to be played by theory? These were the basic questions in my mind when I undertook to edit a book on the subject. I thought it might prove insightful to exam ine the views of distinguished economists of very different persuasions and perspectives on the discipline in general. Accordingly, I invited economists from many of the major schools or groups in contemporary economics to contribute essays. Some were uninterested; some were too busy; but many were more than willing to participate in the exercise. The results make up this book. I knew (or thought I knew) what economists who believe in interven tionist policy were going to say, but I was unsure what other economists would say. I found the diversity in the replies, as well as some unexpected agreement, to be thOUght-provoking. I learned from all the participants. I wish to thank Warren Samuels, who originally invited me to edit a book in his series for Kluwer, and Marc Tool, who gave much needed advice and counsel along the way. They both have my thanks for their assistance to me. I thank my colleague, Michael Baye, for his help."

Thomas Malthus identified a crucial tension at the heart of a market economy: While an accumulation of wealth is necessary to provide the capital investment needed to generate growth, too much accumulation will cause planned saving to exceed profitable investment, which will result in secular stagnation, a condition of low growth and underemployment of resources. Keynes drew inspiration from Malthus in his attempt to comprehend the causes of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Now, Aronoff demonstrates how a related but slightly different aspect of Malthus' thought can illuminate one of the most pressing issues of our times. In A Theory of Accumulation and Secular Stagnation, Aronoff explores Malthus' ideas relating to secular stagnation and uses the insight gained to understand the origins of the subpar growth and tepid employment, periodically punctuated by booms, that has plagued the US economy since the turn of the millennium. He explains how the rise of mercantilism among Asian countries - principally China - and increased income concentration generated an upsurge in excess saving. This accumulation created a chronic deficiency in demand while also depressing interest rates, which generated a search for yield that fuelled periodic booms.

Traditional theories suggest that developing countries lack influence in the trade regime. In A Social Theory of the WTO, Jane Ford uses a social theory or constructivist approach to show that developing countries played a critical role in strengthening multilateralism in the World Trade Organization. By adopting a new role in trade negotiations during the Uruguay Round negotiations, developing countries helped to strengthen trade rules and change the trading culture of limited multilateralism.

When economists claim that rules are coordinating devices, they do not explain how those rules operate in the reality of organizational life. Rules do not indicate behavior, since their most important characteristic is their remoteness from the solution. Thus, rules are merely frameworks for action requiring constant interpretation. This book is grounded in Wittgenstein's understanding of rules as having significance only in the course of their application. It focuses on the disindexation process and on the consequences of a team productivity bonus in an electronic workshop in the Paris Metro.

Astranger in academia cannot but be impressed by the apparent uniformity and precision of the methodology currently applied to the measurement of economic relationships. In scores of journal articles and other studies, a theoretical argument is typically presented to justify the position that a certain variable is related to certain other, possibly causal, variables. Regression or a related method is applied to a set of observations on these variables, and the conclusion often emerges that the causa, l variables are indeed "significant" at a certain "level," thereby lending support to the theoretical argument-an argument presumably formulated independently of the observations. A variable may be declared significant (and few doubt that this does not mean important) at, say, the 0. 05 level, but not the 0. 01. The effects of the variables are calculated to many significant digits, and are often accompanied by intervals and forecasts of not quite obvious meaning but certainly of reassuring "confidence. " The uniformity is also evident in the many mathematically advanced text books of statistics and econometrics, and in their less rigorous introductory versions for students in economics or business. It is reflected in the tools of the profession: computer programs, from the generaiones addressed to the incidental researcher to the dedicated and sophisticated programs used by the experts, display the same terms and implement the same methodology. In short, there appears no visible alternative to the established methodol ogy and no sign of reservat ions concerning its validity."

The five parts of this collection of essays systematically and thoroughly examine the two competing theories of balance of payments and adjustment, namely the Keynesian and the Monetary approaches. Each part deals with specific aspects of the two approaches. Part I surveys the theories behind these two approaches, looking at the presuppositions, main theory, and policy recommendations which they include. Part II examines the empirical literature and describes the numerous models which have been proposed. Part III critiques the two theories on their assumptions, policy advice and empirical modeling. Part IV compares and contrasts the two views, both theoretically and empirically. Empirical studies on different countries are performed to emphasize the differing set of accounts and variables of the two approaches. Part V considers the approaches in a regime of flexible exchange rates. Scholars, students and researchers will find this collection of great help in understanding the two approaches to balance of payments and adjustment.