Journal of Economic Issues articles from December 1994

Journal of Economic Issues archives from December 1994

Europe 1992: from customs union to economic community.
December 1, 1994... The integration of the European Common Market was expected to significantly deepen in 1992. Thus, the rejection of the Maastricht treaty by Danish voters and the chaos in the currency markets surprised most observers and prompted renewed...

Evolutionary economics and cultural hermeneutics: Veblen, cultural relativism, and blind drift.
December 1, 1994... 1988. -----. More Heat than Light. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Nelson, Richard R., and Sidney G. Winter. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. O'Connor, Martin....

Against decadence: the work of Robert A. Brady (1901-63).
December 1, 1994... In the early years of the twentieth century, Thorstein Veblen described social evolution as a race between the life-giving and the life-destroying, between the cooperative and the predatory elements in human nature and society. He was essentially...

The American Association for Labor Legislation and the institutionalist tradition in national health insurance.
December 1, 1994... The first campaign for compulsory health insurance in the United States was started by the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL), an organization of economists, lawyers, and other reformers who studied labor legislation and agitated...

The logic of contested exchange.
December 1, 1994... A major - if not the major - development within recent work in Marxian economics has been the work of Bowles, Gordon, Weisskopf, and their co-workers and followers on the conflict theory of the firm. The thrust of these works is to revive Marx's...

The biological analogy and the theory of the firm: Marshall and monopolistic competition.
December 1, 1994... Although the application of analogies from biological evolutionary thought to economics is an old pastime, it is well known that economists were among the early sources of inspiration for the emerging theory of natural selection. Charles Darwin...

Rules, contract, and institution in the wage-labor relationship: a return to institutionalism?
December 1, 1994... -----. Legal Foundations of Capitalism. New York: Macmillan, 1924. -----. Institutional Economics. Its Place in Political Economy. Vol. 1. Transaction Publishers, 1990. -----. The Economics of Collective Action. 1950. Reprint. Madison: The...

A critique of the self-interested voter model: the case of a local single issue referendum.
December 1, 1994... In recent years, economists have sought to extend the logic of marginal analysis to topics not traditionally considered within the domain of the discipline. Among the areas to which this analysis has been expanded is political behavior under a...

Kenneth Ewart Boulding, 1910-1993: an appreciation.
December 1, 1994... My purpose is to offer a glimpse of the vast vision and great knowledge of Kenneth Ewart Boulding, whom I consider to be the most creative social scientist of our time. But first a word concerning the man He was born in Liverpool on January...

Kenneth Boulding: A founder of evolutionary economics.
December 1, 1994... Many readers of this journal will still remember Kenneth Boulding's Richard T. Ely lecture in December 1965, when he set out against the conventional wisdom, criticized the ivory tower of orthodox economics, and called for a paradigmatic change...

Kenneth Boulding's grants economics.
December 1, 1994... I will examine the basis of Boulding's claim that neoclassical economics is only a subclass of his more general approach, briefly explain his theory of the grants economy, analyze the application of this theory to the financial system, puzzle...

Boulding's T, Kaleckian power, and Minsky's fragility hypothesis.
December 1, 1994... In his classic A Reconstruction of Economics [1950], Kenneth Boulding goes a long way toward revising the theory of the firm, the concept of consumption, and the macroeconomic theory of distribution. It is a pity that his deepest insights...

On "shirking" and "business sabotage:" a note.
December 1, 1994... In this note, I want to suggest that unlike Thorstein Veblen's treatment of "sabotage," the conventional treatment of workers and firms with regard to "shirking" is asymmetric and biased. In the heterodox view of Veblen, businesses should...

Facing Up: How To Rescue the Economy From Crushing Debt and Restore the American Dream.
December 1, 1994... Peter Peterson is, by his own admission, a "Republican fat cat." He served as Secretary of Commerce and Assistant for International Economic Affairs under President Nixon. He also was the CEO of Bell and Howell and of Lehman Brothers, and he was...

The Theory of Economic Progress.
December 1, 1994... Fifty years ago, at the publication of The Theory of Economic Progress [TEP 1944], the dimensions and character of institutional economics were rather weakly defined and somewhat vague. This was before either the publication of Gamb's Beyond...

Institutional Economics: Theory, Method, Policy.
December 1, 1994... Joseph Schumpeter said that as a young man he aspired to be the world's greatest economist, lover, and horseman. When asked late in life how he had done, he replied that two out of three wasn't bad. The book under review also sets out to...

Pensions and Corporate Restructuring in American Industry: A Crisis of Regulation.
December 1, 1994... The Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) purported to guarantee the security of private pension funds. Although a private employer has no obligation to provide a pension, when a pension is promised, the employer must take...

The Debt Crisis in Africa.
December 1, 1994... This is an interesting book. Professor Nafzinger approaches the economic disaster that Africa represents through the debt crisis - the inability of the African countries to service their external debt. Sub-Saharan Africa, the subject of the book,...

Money and the Economic Process.
December 1, 1994... In Money and the Economic Process, Shelia Dow strings together a collection of previously published articles(1) (1984-1988) in an attempt to prove that a unique methodology is "required to capture the integral role of money in the economic...

The Market Shock: An Agenda for the Economic and Social Reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe.
December 1, 1994... Not all economists consider economics a "science." Gunnar Myrdal, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, certainly did not. He said that he would have rejected his Nobel Prize for this reason, but the call came so early in the morning that he...

Foundations of Post-Keynesian Economic Analysis.
December 1, 1994... Marc Lavoie's major objectives in this book are twofold: to present a synthesis of Post Keynesian economics that reflects the views of a "representative Post Keynesian" and to demonstrate that Post Keynesian economics offers a coherent analysis...

Agriculture and Trade in China and India.
December 1, 1994... This is one of the best books available on the economic reforms now underway in China and India. While the title states that the discussion concentrates on two sectors-agriculture and trade-the book itself places developments in those two sectors...

Nicholas Kaldor and the Real World.
December 1, 1994... Nicholas Kaldor was a major figure in the development of Post Keynesian economics. The unemployment, stagnation, and inequality of the real world stimulated him to tackle the theoretical issues involved and to formulate and aggressively promote...

Technological Change and Women's Work Experience: Alternative Methodological Perspectives.
December 1, 1994... Research concerning the status and well-being of women has become increasingly popular in many disciplines. While feminist scholars within these disciplines have welcomed the opportunity to examine the lives and experiences of women, they have...

A Farm Economist in Washington: 1915-1925.
December 1, 1994... Henry C. Taylor (1873-1969), the "dean of agricultural economics worldwide" in the words of Kenneth H. Parsons, wrote this intriguing book in 1926 after President Calvin Coolidge dismissed him as director of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics,...

Money and Banking: Issues for the Twenty-First Century.
December 1, 1994... Recent reports of record bank profits might lead the casual observer to believe that there are no pressing problems in money and banking. Readers of this work, however, would certainly not be so sanguine. This is a collection of papers presented...

Advertising and a Democratic Press.
December 1, 1994... Economists have had relatively little to say about the role of advertising in the economics of the "fourth estate," its influences in shaping the industrial organization of the "news industry," or its influences on the content of what gets...

Money and Consumer Durable Spending.
December 1, 1994... Wide swings in consumer spending on durable goods is a stylized fact of the modern economy. Such volatility is connected to the fact that spending on long-lived and relatively costly consumer durables, rather than being anchored to the immediate...