Contemporary, strictly interdependent, financial, socio-economic and ecological crises are associated with a pattern of economic activity that subordinates substantial short and long term interests of society to sectional groups and vested interests within the economy. This book reassesses the work of key institutional economists such as Veblen, Commons, Clark and Kapp in the context of the current crisis and the theory of social costs. This book addresses the need for an updated theoretical framework to address those crises, namely social costs as extremely heterogeneous, widespread and cumulatively self-reinforcing adverse effects, induced by the ordinary functioning of business and market institutions in advanced global capitalism and offers evidence-based analyses of essential dimensions of the contemporary financial, socio-economic and ecological crises, and the policies required to deal with them.

The Social Costs approach to the globalised capitalist market economy has gained new relevance in recent years. The present situation is one of widespread and increasing deterioration of the social, cultural, democratic, and environmental frameworks of advanced capitalist market societies. This deterioration is indicated by the threats of unemployment, precarious working conditions and increasing income/status inequality, uneven geographical developments, and the exploitation and undermining of the institutional fabric of the society. It is aggravated by the rapid extension - at local, national, regional and global scales - of ecological disruption. So the global capitalist market economy is characterised by a great deal of instability and so-called true uncertainty, which largely undermine its coordinating and welfare-enhancing capacity. The view suggested by Karl William Kapp's seminal evolutionary open-systems approach is that these processes and problems are the outcome of a widening gap between private individualist economic, and societal values or, to use Karl Polanyi's terms, of the ever increasing disembeddedness of the economy from society and of the subjugation of society to the economy. The key actor in this process is business or, more specifically, it is the increasingly dominant, globalised, deregulated and disembedded hierarchical and power system of business enterprise. Current analyses of the global capitalist market economy are overdue to be undertaken making use of the powerful analytic frame of Karl William Kapp's open systems economics. 'Social Costs and Public Action in Modern Capitalism' examines this approach from a theoretical, conceptual, empirical, policy and case study level.

This book considers Thorstein Veblen's central preoccupation with the dark places of business enterprise, an integral part of the old institutional economics. Combining the contributions made by Karl William Kapp and Philip Mirowski, it proposes the systematization of an adjourned institutional theory of social costs of business enterprise useful for the analysis of contemporary crises. The Dark Places of Business Enterprise explores the research potential of the theory of social costs for the analysis of actual business behavior in the current globalized privatization regime. It begins with a detailed outline of Veblen's critique of business enterprise and market competition before illustrating the methodical enrichment of this approach through Kapp's work. Finally, it concludes by proposing the integration of the Veblenian-Kappian approach with Mirowski's theory of markets and business doubt manufacture. The resulting theory of social costs will shed light on the ubiquitous business control of society under the now dominant computer-based technological infrastructure. This interdisciplinary foundation of the theory of social costs, encompassing knowledge from computer science and engineering to natural sciences, provides the tools required to analyze this great transformation.

This book deals with the current crises from a somewhat different the usual perspectives. It claims that causes and policy implications of these crises cannot be properly assessed by focusing on allocative efficiency or income growth alone; it requires a more general approach, based on social costs. It does not deal with social costs according to the Pigouvian or the Coasian traditions. It draws on the work of Original Institutional Economics (OIE) such as Thorstein Veblen, Karl William Kapp, and Karl Polanyi, on Post-Keynesians such as Hyman Minsky and, in general, on authors who have provided insights beyond the conventional wisdom of economic thought.

The Social Costs approach to the globalised capitalist market economy has gained new relevance in recent years. The present situation is one of widespread and increasing deterioration of the social, cultural, democratic, and environmental frameworks of advanced capitalist market societies. This deterioration is indicated by the threats of unemployment, precarious working conditions and increasing income/status inequality, uneven geographical developments, and the exploitation and undermining of the institutional fabric of the society. It is aggravated by the rapid extension - at local, national, regional and global scales - of ecological disruption. So the global capitalist market economy is characterised by a great deal of instability and so-called true uncertainty, which largely undermine its coordinating and welfare-enhancing capacity. The view suggested by Karl William Kapp's seminal evolutionary open-systems approach is that these processes and problems are the outcome of a widening gap between private individualist economic, and societal values or, to use Karl Polanyi's terms, of the ever increasing disembeddedness of the economy from society and of the subjugation of society to the economy. The key actor in this process is business or, more specifically, it is the increasingly dominant, globalised, deregulated and disembedded hierarchical and power system of business enterprise. Current analyses of the global capitalist market economy are overdue to be undertaken making use of the powerful analytic frame of Karl William Kapp's open systems economics. 'Social Costs and Public Action in Modern Capitalism' examines this approach from a theoretical, conceptual, empirical, policy and case study level.