Introducing an alternative philosophical foundation to the study of economics, this book explains and adopts the perspective of the Italian philosopher Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855), whose interpretation of economic action was fundamentally at odds with the prevailing and all-conquering utilitarianism of modernity. Rosmini, one of the most important Italian and Catholic philosophers of the modern age, eschewed the traditional concepts of subjectivism and individualism at the core of the utilitarian thesis, prefiguring today's critique of 'autistic economics' with his assertion that micro-economic formulae consecrating the 'maximization of utility' derive not from scientific principles or even hypotheses, but from uncritically adopted philosophical ideas. It was an assault on the determinism he perceived as the fatal flaw in accepted economic theory. Rosmini's notion of human and economic action, based on human beings' 'personal' capacities for objective knowledge, truth recognition, moral goodness and happiness, deeply transform the meaning of central economic activities such as labour, wealth creation and consumption, and become crucial factors in any analysis of the operation of the economy. After introducing the fundamentals of Rosmini's thought, the author details the theoretical and institutional features of utilitarian economics, tracing their influence on social norms. He juxtaposes these with Rosmini's alternative philosophy which places the concept of social justice at its heart, and which attempts to establish a framework for relations between the public and private realms. The contemporary case is then made for adopting Rosmini's principles, thus changing an economic paradigm widely held to be unassailable. The fruit of unprecedented and systematic research on Rosmini's economic ideas, this volume offers a detailed conceptual framework to guide alternative approaches to conventional neoclassical economics.

Contains four sets of refereed essays. One group includes papers on Harrod and Robertson; Adam Smith; Keynes; Mendeleev; Veblen; and J. M. Clark. The second group has six papers on the historiography of "institutional economics" during the inter-war period. The third group has two papers on a conference on the status of the status quo. The fourth group has thirteen essays each reviewing one or more recent works.

This work on microeconomics offers interpretations of both its strengths and its weaknesses. It shows how the general equilibrium ideas of Walras and Marshall were gradually transformed after 1930 into formalized accounts of imaginary economies where trading never occurs.

This exposition of the major ideas of Georgescu-Roegen should help readers understand his work - both the revolutionary boldness and originality of many of his ideas and the careful logic with which he developed them. Georgescu-Roegen's work encompassed environmental economics and methodology.

This collection of articles uses economic theory to explain the governance of organizations. It covers the governance of families, oligarchies, democracies, for profit firms and non-profit institutions such as religious organizations. The widespread and novel subject matter within a set of focused economic questions results in fascinating reading allowing the reader to see how similar issues can be answered in areas where the person has little knowledge of the subject. This is an engaging and useful tool for students, researchers and academics wanting to expand their area of expertise into new and exciting realms. Contributors include: D. Acemoglu, R. Gibbons, H. Hansmann, P. Leeson, P. Rubin, B. Weingast

The sequence of antagonistic "'revolutions" and counter-revolutions' between Keynesian and Classical Economics was in the end quite sterile. Fostering a dialogical conception of economics argument, we reconstruct the Pigouvian analytical "node" and the debate unfolding between Keynes and Pigou. The Cambridge "Keynesians" Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn broke that fledging dialogue and ungracefully abandoned a number of Keynes'--and also some of their own--central conceptions. Re-thinking this dialogue leads to new analytical paradigms and perspectives.

This book provides readers with a snapshot of the state-of-the art in fuzzy logic. Throughout the chapters, key theories developed in the last fifty years as well as important applications to practical problems are presented and discussed from different perspectives, as the authors hail from different disciplines and therefore use fuzzy logic for different purposes. The book aims at showing how fuzzy logic has evolved since the first theory formulation by Lotfi A. Zadeh in his seminal paper on Fuzzy Sets in 1965. Fuzzy theories and implementation grew at an impressive speed and achieved significant results, especially on the applicative side. The study of fuzzy logic and its practice spread all over the world, from Europe to Asia, America and Oceania. The editors believe that, thanks to the drive of young researchers, fuzzy logic will be able to face the challenging goals posed by computing with words. New frontiers of knowledge are waiting to be explored. In order to motivate young people to engage in the future development of fuzzy logic, fuzzy methodologies, fuzzy applications, etc., the editors invited a team of internationally respected experts to write the present collection of papers, which shows the present and future potentials of fuzzy logic from different disciplinary perspectives and personal standpoints.

Though the emerging sub-discipline of comparative political economy is now rich in studies of different advanced capitalisms, it still lacks a systematic consideration of the organizing frameworks and methodologies underpinning those studies. This definitive volume outlines the two great debates currently shaping the analysis of advanced capitalism. This book makes the case for a greater awareness of underlying theoretical issues in the design of empirical research, and demonstrates the value of exploring the interconnections between competing intellectual approaches.

The primary goal of the book is to present the ideas and research findings of active researchers from various communities (physicists, economists, mathematicians, financial engineers) working in the field of "Econophysics," who have undertaken the task of modelling and analyzing order-driven markets. Of primary interest in these studies are the mechanisms leading to the statistical regularities ("stylized facts") of price statistics. Results pertaining to other important issues such as market impact, the profitability of trading strategies, or mathematical models for microstructure effects, are also presented. Several leading researchers in these fields report on their recent work and also review the contemporary literature. Some historical perspectives, comments and debates on recent issues in Econophysics research are also included.

Soft computing has provided sophisticated methodologies for the development of intelligent decision support systems. Fast advances in soft computing technologies, such as fuzzy logic and systems, artificial neural networks and evolutionary computation, have made available powerful problem representation and modelling paradigms, and learning and optimisation mechanisms for addressing modern decision making issues. This book provides a comprehensive coverage of up-to-date conceptual frameworks in broadly perceived decision support systems and successful applications. Different from other existing books, this volume predominately focuses on applied decision support with soft computing. Areas covered include planning, management finance and administration in both the private and public sectors.

This book contends that liberalization is troubled in new Europe. It investigates Hungary to depict the disaggregate nature of liberalization due to elitism and the prioritization of economic liberalization. Despite the favorable historical circumstances in Hungary, there was no consensus on the virtues of liberalism after 1989. The proponents of liberalism disengaged the public, lost credibility, and failed to convince the public of the advantages of progressive politics and Europeanization. In reaction, conservative populist politics disparages the achievements of both liberalization and Europeanization. Finally, the global economic crisis demonstrates the demise of economic liberalization and puts political liberalization in peril.

The essays in this book examine the role of education and the university in economic development. It is the contention of the contributors that knowledge--ideas and skilled and educated people--are increasingly important for economic development. How to promote inclusive development--the process of development that includes every citizen in any country--has become a wide-ranging puzzle.

After framing the problems associated with globally integrated learning processes from the perspective of science and technology policies, the essayists look at the role of the university in the knowledge economy drawing examples from the United States, Japan, and Portugal. They then review the role of innovation in the industrial policies of a variety of countries, look at systems of knowledge creation and diffusion, and conclude with commentary on the roles of public planning and policy in the achievement of sustainable development. This wide-ranging examination of knowledge and development issues will be of value to scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with economic growth and development.

This work publishes for the first time Richard T. Ely's study of the history of American economic thought. Ely was both a reformer of economics and a leading economist between the 1880's and 1930's. A founder of the American economic association, he himself wrote on a vast number of topics. This history of American economics tells a story that is both straightforward and his own interpretation.

The cognitive sciences, having emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, are recently experiencing a spectacular renewal which cannot leave unaffected any discipline that deals with human behavior. The primary motivation for our project has been to weigh up the impact that this ongoing revolution of the sciences of the mind is likely to have on social sciences in particular, on economics. The idea was to gather together a diverse group of social scientists to think about the following questions. Have the various new approaches to cognition provoked a crisis in economic science? Should we speak of a scientific revolution in economics occurring under the growing influence of the cognitive paradigm? Above all, can a more precise knowledge of the complex functioning of the human mind and brain advance in any way the understanding of economic decision-making?
This volume brings together economists from various traditions such as Austrian economics, evolutionary economics, institutional economics, law and economics, neuro-economics and bio-economics. More specifically, it contains contributions by William N. Butos and Roger G. Koppl, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Carine Kreck and Elisabeth Kreck, Janet T. Landa, Thomas J. McQuade, Steven G. Medema, Bart Nooteboom, Richard A. Posner, Salvatore Rizzello and Alfons Corts.
*Examines the impact of cognitive science growth on the economics discipline
*Contributors represent a wide variety of economic thought and tradition
*Looks ahead to the future of economics

Providing an up-to-date account of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) with contributions from the world's leading experts, each chapter offers new insights on the topic, building upon MMT's established body of work. This innovative book analyses key economic issues from a wide set of regions including the UK, Europe and the Global South, addressing previous concerns that MMT is too US-focused. Alongside ground-breaking research written by MMT's original developers and leading academics, the book also includes contributions from economic historians and public policy campaigners, highlighting how MMT contributes to challenging neoliberalism and the hegemony of mainstream macroeconomics. Offering an examination of the existing legal, institutional and policy framework which governs the UK Exchequer in particular, it examines how the central claims of MMT map onto the financial activities of the UK government. This will be key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate economics students, as well as more advanced scholars of the discipline, particularly for those looking into theories of finance, money and banking. It will also have a wider appeal across the social sciences, including politics and sociology students.

This book demonstrates the continuing relevance of Marx's critique of the capitalist system, in which value is simply equated with market price. It includes chapters specifically on the environment and financialisation, and presents Marx's qualitative theory of value and the associated concept of fetishism in a clear and comprehensive manner. Section I demonstrates how fetishism developed in Marx's writing from a journalistic metaphor to an analytical device central to his critique. In Section II, commodity fetishism is distinguished from other forms: of money, capital and interest-bearing capital. There follows an analysis of Marx's complex attempt to distinguish his argument from that of Ricardo, and Samuel Bailey. The section ends with a discussion of the ontological status of value: as a social rather than a natural phenomenon. Section III considers the merits of understanding value by analogy with language, and critically assesses the merits of structural Marxism. Section IV challenges Marx's emphasis solely on production, and considers also exchange and consumption as social relations. Section V critically assesses recent Marx-inspired literature relating to the two key crises of our time, finance and the environment, and identifies strong similarities between the key analytical questions that have been debated in each case.

This book treats extensive form game theory in full generality. It provides a framework that does not rely on any finiteness assumptions at all, yet covers the finite case. The presentation starts by identifying the appropriate concept of a game tree. This concept represents a synthesis of earlier approaches, including the graph-theoretical and the decision-theoretical ones. It then provides a general model of sequential, interpersonal decision making, called extensive decision problems. Extensive forms are a special case thereof, which is such that all strategy profiles induce outcomes and do so uniquely. Requiring the existence of immediate predecessors yields discrete extensive forms, which are still general enough to cover almost all applications. The treatment culminates in a characterization of the topologies on the plays of the game tree that admit equilibrium analysis.

Henry George's political economy has been hailed as one of the great contributions of American social criticism. His writings have, however, invited interpretation in contradictory fashion. Commentaries have used him to uphold laissez-faire social Darwinism allowing for the aggrandizement of money. Some on the left have regarded his ideology as calling for a co-operative commonwealth well beyond the intentions of the single-tax mechanism. And there are those who see him as having, in effect, written a new Declaration of Independence as powerful as that of 1776. Bringing to light his previously unavailable British writings would clear up some misunderstandings and also present the man and his ideas in a fresher historical context.

This book comes to terms with Marxism and its relationship to workers' self-management. David L. Prychitko offers a reinterpretation of Marx's vision of socialism by arguing that Marx's understanding of the praxis-nature of humankind led him to a utopian goal of decentralized socialism based on the total abolition of market exchange. The full development of workers' self-management of industry was to be accompanied by comprehensive planning of the socially owned means of production. Prychitko takes modern economists to task for paying too little attention to the implications of Marx's praxis philosophy and to the organizational consequences of abolishing private ownership and the market process. This abolition leads inevitably, he argues, to the development of hierarchical structures of state domination and power. This tension between democratic decentralization--workers' self-management--and central economic planning--which tends to destroy meaningful self-management--can be traced back to Marx himself. The failure of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has not dissuaded those who wish to keep Marx alive from pushing workers' self-management as a feasible enterprise in a free market system. Prychitko's volume does more than simply interpret the meaning of Marxism. It analyzes the tension between centralization and decentralization in contemporary theory and practice. The contemporary theory of self-managed socialism, put to much use in Yugoslavia, is critically assessed by Prychitko. After focusing on a case study of American barrel-making cooperatives that managed to compete well with traditional capitalist firms and survive an extraordinary degree of market competition, Prychitko concludes the book by speculating over the feasibility of worker-managed firms in a truly dynamic, rivalrous market setting. Marxism and Workers' Self-Management will be of great interest to scholars of Marx, political economy, social theory, and labor studies.

This volume of essays contains 16 papers the author has written over the last 40 years on various aspects of the life and work of John Maynard Keynes and Nicholas Kaldor. It covers both theoretical and applied topics and highlight the continued relevance of Keynesian and Kaldorian ideas for understanding the functioning of capitalist economies.

One of the major controversies in macroeconomics over the last 30 years has been that on the effectiveness of stabilization policies. However, this debate, between those who believe that this kind of policies is useless if not harmful and those who argue in favor of it, has been mainly theoretical so far.

The Rational Expectation Hypothesis, Time-Varying Parameters and Adaptive Control wants to represent a step toward the construction of a common ground on which to empirically compare the two "beliefs" and to do this three strands of literature are brought together. The first strand is the research on time-varying parameters (TVP), the second strand is the work on adaptive control and the third one is the literature on linear stationary models with rational expectations (RE).

The material presented in The Rational Expectation Hypothesis, Time-Varying Parameters and Adaptive Control is divided into two parts. Part 1 combines the strand of literature on adaptive control with that on TVP. It generalizes the approach pioneered by Tse and Bar-Shalom (1973) and Kendrick (1981) and one recently used in Amman and Kendrick (2002), where the law of motion of the TVP and the hyperstructural parameters are assumed known, to the case where the hyperstructural parameters are assumed unknown. Part 2 is devoted to the linear single-equation stationary RE model estimated with the error-in-variables (EV) method. It presents a new formulation of this problem based on the use of TVP in an EV model. This new formulation opens the door to a very promising development. All the theory developed in the first part to control a model with TVP can sic et simpliciter be applied to control a model with RE.

Thorstein Veblen has made an immeasurable impact on the development of economics. His legacy has been to challenge orthodox thinking and inspire the institutionalist and evolutionary school of thought. In this book, a distinguished group of contributors analyzes the impact, a century later, of Veblen's 1898 challenge to economics. The authors examine the contribution of Veblen and some of his disciples to heterodox economics. They also reassess other contemporaneous discussions and contributions by other authors - Mitchell, Ayres, Commons, Keynes, Schumpeter, Tinbergen, Frisch - and present an overview of the state of the art in evolutionary economics.

"It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments." - from "The Theory of Money and Credit"
Originally published in 1912, Ludwig von Mises's "The Theory of Money and Credit" remains today one of economic theory's most influential and controversial treatises. Von Mises's examination into monetary theory changed forever the world of economic thought when he successfully integrated "macroeconomics" into "microeconomics" --previously deemed an impossible task --as well as offering explanations into the origin, value and future of money.
One hundred years later, von Mises and the Austrian school of economic theory are still fiercely debated by world economists in their search for the solution to America's current financial crisis. His theorems continue to inspire politicians and market experts who aim to raise up the common man and reduce the financial power of governments. In a preface added in 1952, von Mises urges the people of the world to see economic truth:
"The great inflations of our age are not acts of God. They are man-made or, to say it bluntly, government-made. They are the off-shoots of doctrines that ascribe to governments the magic power of creating wealth out of nothing and of making people happy by raising the 'national income.'"
"The best book on money ever written." --Murray Rothbard, economist and historian
"The greatest economist of the twentieth century." --Sandeep Jaitly, economist

This volume begins with an introduction to Marx's theory of capitalism in his own words, with his examples modernized from use of shillings and pence as subdivisions of the Pound. Well-known 1901 work on the theory of crises in capitalism by Michael Tugan-Baranowsky is translated into English for the first time, with a Preface placing it in context. The political activism and theoretical work of Henryk Grossman through 1926 is summarized in some detail, and a rarely-known brief article of his from
1919 included.

Ambiguity in Marx's definition of accumulation of capital and the
differing directions Lenin and Luxemburg took with it are next analyzed, with a more precise definition offered. Debate, begun in the last volume, over the valuation of means of production and its effect on the possibility of a falling tendency of the profit rate is taken a step forward as contrasting positions are developed.

Finally, credit money as an advanced form of money is analyzed and the post-Keynesian analysis of it, originating from Kaldor, subject to critique. Several theories of inflation theory are reviewed, with focus on the agencies causing inflation. A rediscovery of Marxian inflation theory is proposed.

This book develops a comprehensive systematic economic theory, conceiving how the dynamic of market relations generates an economy dominated by the competitive process of individual profit-seeking enterprises. The author shows how, contrary to classical political economy and contemporary economics, the theory of capital is an a priori normative account properly belonging to ethics. Exposing and overcoming the limits of the economic conceptions of Hegel and Marx, Rethinking Capital determines how the system of capitals shapes economic freedom, jeopardizing the very rights in whose exercise it consists. Winfield thereby provides the understanding required to guide the private and public interventions with which capitalism can be given a human face.