From the pollution-infested landscape of urban areas to the leached soil of decimated rain forests, the human race has exerted its will on the environment with reckless abandon. In effect, humankind has become a most dangerous type of Earth Cancer. Now this rampant form of cancer is threatening the very existence of life on this planet. Is it our divine right to control all species and habitats? Does our insatiable hunger for expansion and disregard for the environment represent a collective death-wish by our species? If so, how can we change our fate? This extraordinary book confronts these questions by studying the complex relationship between ethics, economics, and ecology. More than a chronicle of environmental devastation, Earth Cancer challenges human beings to examine and redefine their economic, social, and moral values in a way that respects the interdependence of the biosphere. Only when this level of self-understanding is reached can humans realize their full potential as intelligent species and preserve the earth's ecology for future generations. The facts are shocking. Every day on Earth, approximately 75 plant and animal species are driven into biological extinction. Forests are being destroyed and the wealth of our planet's resources are being depleted at an astounding rate. The planet as we know it is facing a barren future unless the human race can halt the spread of a cancer that holds Earth's fate in the balance. To fight back, we must come to terms with several harsh realities: 1. Human beings must realize that our destiny is inextricably linked to the preservation of other species and environmental resources. 2. We must adjust our perspective to view the human race as an equal, interdependent part of the biosphere, not as ruler over it. 3. We must temper our seemingly unquenchable thirst for progress with a more holistic vision for the long-term survival of our species. In short, we must confront the source of this deadly earth cancer—ourselves. Earth Cancer sounds a wake-up call for humanity. Weigel contends that humans have constructed a self-defeating Berlin Wall between themselves and other species. This wall is built from arrogance toward the environment as symbolized by the systematic destruction of habitats and the reckless generation of waste. As our blind pursuit of economic development and expansion continues to prevail over ecological concern, the wall grows larger and the devastation more prolific. Weigel explains that humans face a moral and ethical imperative to stem this tide before it is too late. Because the fate of so many species is dependent upon the decisions we make, the ideal of interdependence with all other members of the biosphere must be embraced. This important book provides new insight about our attitude toward the environment and suggests that a change in our priorities could mean a change in our destiny.

This book uses systemic thinking and applies it to the study of financial crises. It systematically presents how the systemic yoyo model, its thinking logic, and its methodology can be employed as a common playground and intuition to the study of money, international finance, and economic reforms. This book establishes theoretical backings for why some of the most employed interferences of the market and empirical experiences actually work. It has become urgent for economists and policy makers to understand how international speculative capital affects the economic security of various nations. By looking at the issues of monetary movement around the world, this book shows that there are clearly visible patterns behind the flows of capital, and that there are a uniform language and logic of reasoning that can be powerfully employed in the studies of international finance As shown in this book, many of the conclusions drawn on the basis of these visible patterns, language, and logic of thinking can be practically applied to produce tangible economic benefits. Currency Wars: Offense and Defense through Systemic Thinking is divided into six parts. The first part addresses issues related to systemic modeling of economic entities and processes and explains how a few policy changes can adjust the performance of the extremely complex economy. Part II of the book investigates the problem of how instabilities lead to opportunities for currency attacks, the positive and negative effects of foreign capital, and how international capital flows can cause disturbances of various degrees on a nation's economic security. Part III examines how a currency war is initiated, why currency conflicts and wars are inevitable, and a specific way of how currency attacks can take place. In Part IV, the book shows how one nation can potential defend itself by manipulating exchange rate of its currency, how the nation under siege can protect itself against financial attacks by using strategies based on the technique of feedback, and develops a more general approach of self-defense. Part V focuses on issues related to the cleanup of the disastrous aftermath of currency attacks through using policies and reforms. Finally the book concludes in Part VI as it analyzes specific real-life cases and addresses the ultimate problem of whether or not currency wars can be avoided all together.

This book tells the story of one of the most important public figures of the twentieth century. It is the first full biography of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who became, over the course of a remarkable career, the great philosopher of liberty in our time. In this richly detailed portrait, Alan Ebenstein chronicles the life, works, and legacy of a visionary thinker, from Hayek's early years as the scholarly son of a physician in fin-de-siecle Vienna on an increasingly wider world as an economist and political philosopher in Londom, New York, and Chicago. Ebenstein gives a balanced, integrated account of Hayek's extordinary diverse body of work, from his fist encounter with the free market ideas of mentor Ludwig Von Mises to his magisterial writings in later life on the legal, political, ethical, and economic requirements of a free society. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974, Hayek's vision of a renewed classical liberalism-of free markets and free ideas in free societies-has taken hold in much of the world. Alan Ebanstein's clearly written account is an essential starting point for anyone seeking to understand why Hayek's ideas have become the guiding force of our time. His illuminating portrait of Hayek the man brings to new life the spirit of a great scholar and tenacious advocate who has become, in Peter Drucker's words, "our time's preeminent social philosopher."

Challenging the view that managerialism is a form of capitalism and that capitalism has eclipsed socialism, Pena shows that the managerial or new class is an exploiting class. The work of Thorstein Veblen, James Burnham, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Kevin Phillips, he suggests, forms a little-known century-long tradition of reflection on the managerial revolution as well as on the conflux of values and socioeconomic practices that Pena dubs economic barbarism. Building on the work of these thinkers, he argues that industrial barbarism and the managerial revolution led to the decline of U.S. capitalism and its replacement by managerialism, a form of nationalistic socialism in which educated white-collar personnel employed by the state and corporate bureaucracies have become a new exploiting class that receives the bulk of the national wealth. Thus managerialism replaced industrial barbarism with a new form of economic barbarism.

This managerial barbarism has fostered an unequal distribution of wealth that has penalized the middle and lower classes with stagnant or declining incomes, growing job insecurity, unemployment, and underemployment. Unless managerialism can find a way out of persistent poverty and declining living-wage job opportunities, these problems are likely to continue afflicting a sizable portion of the population. If managers put an end to economic barbarism, they have a chance to create a society characterized by generalized prosperity, leisure, and opportunity. It is more likely, however, that economic barbarism will continue to be an integral part of managerialism and, consequently, managerialism will face a sudden social upheaval or a gradual decline.

This is Volume 24 of the monograph series International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics. ISETE publishes proceedings of conferences and symposia, as well as research monographs of the highest quality and importance. All articles published in these volumes are refereed relative to the standards of the best journals, therefore not all papers presented at related symposia are published in these proceedings volumes. The topics chosen for these volumes are those of particular research importance at the time of the selection of the topic.

This book illustrates the potential for computer simulation in the study of modern slavery and worker abuse, and by extension in all social issues. It lays out a philosophy of how agent-based modelling can be used in the social sciences. In addressing modern slavery, Chesney considers precarious work that is vulnerable to abuse, like sweat-shop labour and prostitution, and shows how agent modelling can be used to study, understand and fight abuse in these areas. He explores the philosophy, application and practice of agent modelling through the popular and free software NetLogo. This topical book is grounded in the technology needed to address the messy, chaotic, real world problems that humanity faces-in this case the serious problem of abuse at work-but equally in the social sciences which are needed to avoid the unintended consequences inherent to human responses. It includes a short but extensive NetLogo guide which readers can use to quickly learn this software and go on to develop complex models. This is an important book for students and researchers of computational social science and others interested in agent-based modelling.

Hayek claimed that he always made it his rule 'not to be concerned with current politics, but to try to operate on public opinion.' However, evidence suggests that he was a party political operative with 'free' market scholarship being the vehicle through which he sought - and achieved - party political influence. The 'main purpose' of his Mont Pelerin Society had 'been wholly achieved'. Mises promoted 'Fascists' including Ludendorff and Hitler, and Hayekians promoted the Operation Condor military dictatorships and continue to maintain a 'united front' with 'neo-Nazis.' Hayek, who supported Pinochet's torture-based regime and played a promotional role in 'Dirty War' Argentina, is presented as a saintly figure. These chapters place 'free' market promotion in the context of the post-1965 neo-Fascist 'Strategy of Tension', and examine Hayek's role in the promotion of deflation that facilitated Hitler's rise to power; his proposal to relocate Gibraltarians across the frontier into 'Fascist' Spain; the Austrian revival of the 1970s; the role of (what was presented as) 'neutral academic data' on behalf of the 'International Right' and their efforts to promote Franz Josef Strauss and Ronald Reagan and defend apartheid and the Shah of Iran

Reciprocity is a pervasive type of social interaction in encounters, groups and organizations. Simple giving is one of the major ways of transferring goods. And others regarding social sentiments play crucial roles in the working and in the quality of society. This volume gathers basic works in the sujects's main domains such as, among others, the theory of reciprocity, the public economics of transfers, the economics of the family, charities, gifts of organs, or the motivations for gift giving.

This book transports the reader from the world of mainstream economics, in which the object of observation is The Market (exchange), to a world in which the object of observation is the economic process. Both producer and consumer must, respectively, be legitimate owners of real wealth and monetary wealth.

This book inquires into the Capability Approach, a value theory of freedom, which crystalizes the interests of Marx, Welfare Economics, Social Choice, and Ethics. The capability approach has attracted many people as a promising interdisciplinary approach to human well-being and social worlds, finely overarching ethical and economic concerns. It has well challenged essential characteristics of welfare economics, which focuses on the criterion of efficiency with the concept of utility, by explicitly incorporating normative criteria such as agency, well-being and real freedom into positive analysis. However, it has a bit operational and methodological difficulties such that how to estimate an individual capability set which includes potential multi-dimensional functioning vectors. This book reminds the reader of what traditional economics has left behind, by examining historical backgrounds, scrutinizing philosophical foundations and providing an operational formulation of the capability approach: indispensable for understanding what the capability approach is about and what it can achieve.

As India strives to improve overall social and economic conditions and gender relations through policies such as the abolishment of dowry, increasing the legal age at marriage, and promoting educational opportunities for girls, serious challenges remain, especially in rural areas. "Gender Equality and Inequality in Rural India" focuses on the extent to which economic development has resulted in positive changes in women's empowerment and reproductive health, as well as in sex preference.
Based on a study from a village in Maharashtra where impressive gains in economic development have occurred in recent decades, Carol Vlassoff examines the impact of son preference on fertility and rural women's economic empowerment and other aspects of reproductive behavior. She provides evidence of the added value of their employment beyond the traditional wage labor and domestic spheres, and argues that policies aimed at closing gender gaps in social inequalities must be complemented by policies fostering employment opportunities for women. While many studies have demonstrated the importance of social empowerment for improved reproductive health, this is the first to separate out the differential effects of social and economic factors. This work goes even further than economic arguments by demonstrating, on the basis of a robust statistical analysis, that women's education and their professional labor force participation contribute to better health and wellbeing of rural society, including through reductions in fertility, son preference, and infant and child mortality.

This volume presents selected contributions from the 2018 conference of the International Schumpeter Society (ISS). The selected chapters in this volume reflect the state-of-the-art of Schumpeterian economics dedicated to the three conference topics innovation, catch-up, and sustainability. Innovation is driving catch-up processes and is the condition for a transformation towards higher degrees of sustainability. Therefore, Schumpeterian economics has to play a key role in these most challenging fields of human societies' development in the 21st century. The three topics are well suited to capture the great variety of issues, which have the potential to shape the scientific discussion in economics and related disciplines in the years to come. The presented contributions show the broadness and high standard of Schumpeterian analysis. The ideas of dynamics, heterogeneity, novelty, and innovation as well as transformation are the most attractive fields in economics today and offer the most prolific interdisciplinary connections now and for the years to come when humankind, our global society, has to master the transition towards sustainable economic systems by solving the grand challenges and wicked problems with which we are confronted today. Therefore, the book is a must-read for scholars, researchers, and students, interested in a better understanding of innovation, catch-up, and sustainability, and Schumpeterian economics in general.The chapter "Industrial life cycle: relevance of national markets in the development of new industries for energy technologies - the case of wind energy" is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 License via link.springer.com.

In the years since World War II, the United States and other countries have created a new economic order which has produced one of the broadest and most sustained periods of prosperity in world history. The essence of this new economic order is a system of rules to govern, facilitate, and promote trade in goods and services. The result is applauded by some and condemned by others. This study discusses the roles of money, systems, and growth in the emerging, new economic order. Studying the roles of money, systems, and growth are important for gaining insight into the likely behavior of economies such as China's. A nation as large as China could undermine the ability of other countries to impose politically difficult economic disciplines. There is need for caution. The upheaval in Asia that is affecting the world's largest markets is a case in point. Failure to implement reforms consistent with the rules of the new economic order has pushed such countries as Albania, Romania, and Macedonia close to becoming Europe's hidden Third World. The power of monetary policy and economic growth to either facilitate or hinder a country's readiness to adopt the rules of the new economic order is underscored in this study.

This book presents a collection of papers illustrating the variety of "experimental" methodologies used to study voting. Experimental methods include laboratory experiments in the tradition of political psychology, laboratory experiments with monetary incentives, in the economic tradition, survey experiments (varying survey, question wording, framing or content), as well as various kinds of field experimentation. Topics include the behavior of voters (in particular turnout, vote choice, and strategic voting), the behavior of parties and candidates, and the comparison of electoral rules.

To fully grasp Marx's theory of the labor movement, Lapides supplies a deeper insight into the economic analysis underlying it. This book presents Marx's theory of wages and wage labor, previously scattered throughout his writings, in its entirety for the first time. The author places the theory in its historical context, locating the sources of Marx's wage theory, its intellectual antecedents, and the roots of later controversies, but the primary focus of the work is the actual development of Marx's theory in the words in which he expressed it. In order to reveal the true nature and rich texture of Marx's thought, the author has assembled Marx's own formulations, scattered throughout his numerous works and buried beneath mountains of commentary and criticism. The book provides a faithful record of the complete evolutionary progress of Marx's theory.

This volume grew out of a conference organized by James Alleman and Paul Rappoport, conducted on October 10, 2011 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in honor of the work of Lester D. Taylor, whose pioneering work in demand and market analysis has had profound implications on research across a wide spectrum of industries. In his Prologue, Eli M. Noam notes that demand analysis in the information sector must recognize the "public good" characteristics of media products and networks, while taking into account the effects of interdependent user behavior; the strong cross-elasticities in a market; as well as the phenomenon of supply creating its own demand. The second Prologue, by Timothy Tardiff and Daniel Levy, focuses more specifically on Taylor's body of work, in particular its practical applications and usefulness in analyses of, and practices within, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector (known in Europe and elsewhere as the Telecommunications, Media, and Technology (TMT) sector). The remainder of the book is organized into four parts: Advances in Theory; Empirical Applications; Evidence-Based Policy Applications; and a final Conclusion. The book closes with an Appendix by Sharon Levin and Stanford Levin detailing Taylor's contributions using bibliometrics. Not only featuring chapters from distinguished scholars in economics, applied sciences, and technology, this volume includes two contributions directly from Lester Taylor, providing unique insight into economics from a lifetime in the field. "What a worthy book! Every applied researcher in communications encounters Lester Taylor's work. Many empirical exercises in communications can trace their roots to Taylor's pioneering research and his thoughtful leadership. This book assembles an impressive set of contributors and contributions to honor Taylor. No surprise, the collection extends far and wide into many of the core topics of communications and media markets. The emphasis is where it should be-on important and novel research questions informed by useful data. -Shane Greenstein, Professor of Management and Strategy, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University "For more than 40 years, Lester Taylor has been a leader in the application of consumer modeling, econometric techniques and microeconomic data to understand residential and business user behavior in telecommunications markets. During that time, he inspired a cadre of students and colleagues who applied this potent combination to address critical corporate and regulatory issues arising in the telecommunications sector. This volume collects the recent product of many of these same researchers and several other devotees who go beyond empirical analysis of fixed line service by extending Prof. Taylor's approach to the next wave of services and technologies. These contributions, including two new papers by Prof. Taylor, offer an opportunity for the next generation to learn from his work as it grapples with the pressing issues of consumer demand in the rapidly evolving digital economy." - Glenn Woroch, Adjunct Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

This textbook for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Evolutionary Game Theory covers recent developments in the field, with an emphasis on economic contexts and applications. It begins with the basic ideas as they originated within the field of theoretical biology and then proceeds to the formulation of a theoretical framework that is suitable for the study of social and economic phenomena from an evolutionary perspective. Core topics include the Evolutionary Stable Strategy (EES) and Replicator Dynamics (RD), deterministic dynamic models, and stochastic perturbations. A set of short appendices presents some of the technical material referred to in the main text. Evolutionary theory is widely viewed as one of the most promising appraoches to understanding bounded rationality, learning, and change in complex social environments. New avenues of research are suggested by Vega-Redondo, and plentiful exmples illustrate the theory's potential applications. The recent boom experienced by this dscipline makes the book's systematic presentation of its essential contributions vital reading for newcomer to the field.

This book defines the relationship between the thought of Adam Smith and that of the ancients---Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics. Vivenza offers a complete survey of all Smith's writings with the aim of illustrating how classical arguments shaped opinions and scholarship in the eighteenth century.

Monetary problems are important and widely debated, but the complexity of the international monetary system and the disparate systems that make it up gives rise to many fallacies about the inner workings of these systems. When shared by those who decide economic and monetary policies, these fallacies can have damaging consequences. This book provides a rigorous and approachable analysis of these systems and consequences, providing the keys to untangling and understanding their mechanisms and influence. A clear understanding of the working of monetary systems becomes an indispensable decision-making tool when it comes to pressing questions about reform and issues of global debate such as whether a country should join (or leave) the Eurozone or attempts to cure the so-called 'balance of payments problems'. Starting from basic concepts, Pascal Salin progressively builds upon his analysis of monetary systems in a coherent and easily readable way, drawing on the most reliable theoretical contributions from research and giving examples of lessons that can be drawn from this rigorous examination of topics including devaluations, fixed and flexible exchange rates, monetary integration, monetary crises, monetary policy, and more. His clear, orderly style pares down accumulated details and theories to leave a concise and usable toolkit for analysis and action. This book makes it possible for anyone, starting from scratch, to come to a comprehensive understanding of the working of monetary systems. Students and scholars in economics as well as policy makers and practitioners will find this lucid volume an important resource and reference, as it provides intellectual instruments to evaluate the working of any monetary system.

This cutting edge work offers an alternative perspective on existing paradigms of modernization and development that originated in the West from the vantage point of non-western, late-modernizing societies. It considers how East Asian philosophical ideas enrich the reformulation of the concept of development or societal development, and how influential principles of traditional culture such as yin-yang dialectic interact with modern ideas and technology. It addresses the significance of alternative discourses as culturally independent scholarship, and the problems of pervasive mechanisms of social, political, economic, and cultural dependence in the global academic world.

The book presents the lectures delivered during a short course held at Urbino University in summer 2015 on qualitative theory of dynamical systems, included in the activities of the COST Action IS1104 "The EU in the new economic complex geography: models, tools and policy evaluation". It provides a basic introduction to dynamical systems and optimal control both in continuous and discrete time, as well as some numerical methods and applications in economic modelling. Economic and social systems are intrinsically dynamic, characterized by interdependence, nonlinearity and complexity, and these features can only be approached using a qualitative analysis based on the study of invariant sets (equilibrium points, limit cycles and more complex attractors, together with the boundaries of their basins of attraction), which requires a trade-off between analytical, geometrical and numerical methods. Even though the early steps of the qualitative theory of dynamical systems have been in continuous time models, in economic and social modelling discrete time is often used to describe event-driven (often decision-driven) evolving systems. The book is written for Ph.D. and master's students, post-doctoral fellows, and researchers in economics or sociology, and it only assumes a basic knowledge of calculus. However it also suggests some more advanced topics.

This wide-ranging set of papers deals with crucial questions in economic theory, economic policy and economic history. The papers help explain why economic performance deteriorated dramatically in the West over the past three decades as the ''Golden Age'' of capitalism after World War II was replaced by global neoliberal capitalism. They show that theoretical frameworks rooted in the radical and heterodox traditions can explain this evolution and the current global economic and financial crisis, something mainstream theories cannot do. Topics include but are not limited to: methodology: a critique of ''positivism'' is used to explain why mainstream reliance on fairy-tale assumptions should be replaced by realistic assumption sets as argued by Marx and Keynes Marx, Keynes and Minsky on financial market instability versus mainstream theories of ''efficient'' financial markets how Keynes's assumption that the future is unknowable revolutionized not only macro theory but the micro theory of agent choice as well structural causes of the current global financial crisis how innovative theories of competition, globalization, capital investment and financialization inspired by Marx, Keynes and Schumpeter can be used to explain the crisis tendencies of neoliberal capitalism the influence of class conflict on economic policy, including in the current ''austerity'' regimes. The papers in this book should be of interest to most economists and can be used in both graduate and upper level undergraduate courses. Many of these papers are accessible to anyone who reads the business press.