While there are many economists in academia, government, unions, and nonprofit organizations working in the institutionalist tradition, there is currently no book on the market describing this tradition. Editors Champlin and Knoedler have brought together prominent labor economists, highly respected institutional economists, and newer scholars working on issues of such current importance as immigration, wage discrimination, and living wages. Their essays portray the institutionalist tradition in labor as it exists today as well as its historical and theoretical origins. This work is a major contribution to the literature of labor economics, institutionalist economics, and the history of economic thought.

With the restoration of laissez faire as the governing principle of contemporary economic ideology and policy making, Thorstein Veblen's insights are once again timely. This book revisits his legacy, featuring original essays by renowned Veblen scholars. The contributors review and comment upon the subjects that concerned Veblen such as: the legal system, finance and capital, the operation of markets, neoclassical economics, private property, cultural and economic change, the place of science, and higher education. They consider how his evolutionary theory of the economy and society can continue to inform our understanding of our modern world. As an astute and highly capable observer, Veblen shed light on our present system through a re-examination of a similar system. Students and scholars of economics will find this provocative book of great interest. It will also be a refreshing discussion for those frustrated by the gap between the rosy scenarios of conventional economics and the problems of inequality, conspicuous consumption, concentrated economic power and unresponsive government.