This book, first published in 1967, explores some of the problems formulating investment criteria for the public sector of a mixed-enterprise, underdeveloped economy. The typical essay on public investment criteria explicitly or implicitly postulates a single goal for economic analysis - maximization of weighted average of national income over time - and relegates all other objectives of public policy to a limbo of "political" and "social" objectives not amenable to systematic, rational treatment. In contrast Professor Marglin assumes a multiplicity of objectives and explores ways and means of expressing contributions to different objectives in common terms. The book also investigates the relationship of specific investment criteria to the objectives of public policy. Benefits and costs are defined separately for each objective, as are so-called "secondary" benefits. This book is suited for students of economics.

This book addresses the role of knowledge in economic development and in resistance to development. It questions the conventional view that development is the application of superior knowledge to the problems of poor countries, and that resistance to development comes out of ignorance and superstition. It argues instead that the basis of resistance is the fear that the material benefits of Western technologies can be enjoyed only at the price of giving up indigenous ways of knowing and valuing the world, an idea fostered as much by present-day elites, who have internalized colonial elites who ruled before them. A prerequisite to decoupling Western technologies from these political entailments is to understand the conflict between different ways of knowing and valuing the world. This book differs from previous critiques of development because it addresses neither the strategy nor the tactics of development, but the very conception itself. Its focus is on knowledge and power in the development process. The book argues that `modern' knowledge wins out in the conflict with `traditional' knowledge not because of its superior cognitive power, but because of its prestige, associated both with the economic and political ascendancy of the West over the past 500 years and with the cultural history of the West itself.

Development failures, environmental degradation, and social fragmentation can no longer be regarded as side-effects or 'externalities'. They are the toxic consequences of pretensions that the modern Western view of knowledge is a universal neutral view, applicable to all people at all times. The very word 'development' and its cognates 'underdevelopment' and 'developing' confidently mark the 'first world' as the future of the 'third'. This book argues that the linear evolutionary paradigm of development that comes out of the modern Western view of knowledge is a contemporary form of colonialism. The authors - covering topics as diverse as the theory of knowledge underlying the work of John Maynard Keynes, what the renowned British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane was looking for when he migrated to India, and the knowledge of Mexican and Indian peasants - propose a pluralistic vision and a decolonization of knowledge: the replacement of one-way transfers of knowledge and technology by dialogue and mutual learning.

This book, first published in 1967, explores some of the problems formulating investment criteria for the public sector of a mixed-enterprise, underdeveloped economy. The typical essay on public investment criteria explicitly or implicitly postulates a single goal for economic analysis - maximization of weighted average of national income over time - and relegates all other objectives of public policy to a limbo of "political" and "social" objectives not amenable to systematic, rational treatment. In contrast Professor Marglin assumes a multiplicity of objectives and explores ways and means of expressing contributions to different objectives in common terms. The book also investigates the relationship of specific investment criteria to the objectives of public policy. Benefits and costs are defined separately for each objective, as are so-called "secondary" benefits. This book is suited for students of economics.

The period after World War Two, with its sustained growth and high employment rate, has been referred to as the "golden age" of capitalism. Blending historical analysis with economic theory, this work presents essays that scrutinize the institutions that fostered this growth and high employment as well as the forces which later undermined the effectiveness of these institutions in the 1960s and 70s. The authors discuss the evolution of the historical background, the macroeconomic structure, the international order, the systems of production, as well as the "rules of coordination." They use this to show that the golden age, like other historical epochs, must be understood as a series of interacting institutions--all operating in different areas, but sometimes interlocking with one another and crucial to an intelligent analysis of a critical period in the American experience. Contributors include A. Glyn, A. Hughes, A. Lipietz, A. Singh, G. Epstein, J. Schor, S. Marglin, A. Bhaduri, S. Bowles, R. Boyer, R. Rowthorn, and M. Aoki.

See "Stephen Marglin on the Future of Capitalism" at FORA.tv.

Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback--say the barn burned down--neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations.

Marglin dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished as people define themselves in terms of how much they can afford to consume. Over the last four centuries, this economic ideology has become the dominant ideology in much of the world. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance in our lives that this ideology has fostered.