Journal of Economic Issues articles from December 1997

Journal of Economic Issues archives from December 1997

The social psychological underpinnings of Commons's institutional economics: the significance of Dewey's 'Human Nature and Conduct.' (economists John R. Commons and John Dewey)
December 1, 1997... If institutional economics is therefore volitional economics, it requires a volitional psychology to accompany it. This is the psychology of transactions, which we may properly name transactional or negotiational psychology. Nearly all of the...

Multipliers and life cycles: a comparison of methods for evaluating tourism and its impacts.
December 1, 1997... The World Travel and Tourism Council [Gatty 1993] projected that in 1994 travel and tourism would generate direct and indirect employment for more than 200 million people - one of every nine workers in the world economy. In the United States, the...

John R. Commons and the special interest issue: not really out of date. (economist)
December 1, 1997... In the sixties and seventies, attacks on "special interest liberalism" and the role of special interests were so strong and well reasoned that they seemed, in the eyes of most observers, to undermine the prescriptions of John R. Commons for a...

Foreign finance and the collapse of the Mexican peso.
December 1, 1997... Mexico's 1982 balance-of-payments crisis followed 12 years of populist macroeconomic policies, characterized by large fiscal deficits, tight restrictions on the prerogatives of foreign capital, and a broad expansion of the state's role in the...

Strategies for maintaining market power in the face of rapidly changing technologies.
December 1, 1997... Innovations in advanced information and communication technologies are calling into question conventional wisdom about markets for the production and consumption of information and communication services. The rapid diffusion of these services has...

Institutionalist and Marxist theories of evolution.
December 1, 1997... What are the forces of change in society? What are the forces of resistance? How are they interrelated? These are central questions that must be answered by any theory of social evolution. Two such theories - Marxism and institutionalism and...

Veblen and technical efficiency. (economist Thorstein Veblen)
December 1, 1997... It is well known that Thorstein Veblen accused the turn-of-the-century captains of industry of sabotage. What is not so well known is that, for Veblen, sabotage was not simply a pejorative term. By sabotage, he meant a "conscientious withdrawal...

Toward a culture-conception of technology.
December 1, 1997... Directing conceptions tend to be taken for granted after they have once come into general currency . . . failure to examine the conceptual structures and frames of reference which are unconsciously implicated in even the seemingly most innocent...

Efficiency and service in the group home industry.
December 1, 1997... Nonprofits and Health Care Most studies have focused on hospitals and have produced conflicting evidence on nonprofit efficiency. We find that the group home industry exhibits no economies of scale, and the level of service and efficiency are...

Can we save Veblen and Ayres from their saviors? (institutional economists Thorstein Veblen and Clarence Ayres)(response to article by Philip A. Klein, Journal of Economic Issues, vol 29, p 1189)
December 1, 1997... Can we save Veblen and Ayres from those currently trying to save them? Philip Klein [1995] argues from a well-established perspective in which social structure is considered to be composed of social institutions. The terms seem almost synonymous....

"Can We Save Veblen and Ayres from Their Saviors? A Response to Professor Klein." (Philip A. Klein)(response to David Hamilton in this issue, p 1051)
December 1, 1997... One presumes from this title that I have so badly misinterpreted Ayres in my recent essay, "Ayres on Institutions" [1995], that he needs to be "saved" from my dreadful misinterpretations. My purpose in writing the essay was to suggest that in one...

A note on the performing arts. (response to article by Arthur C. Brooks, Journal of Economic Issues, vol 31, no 1, p 197)
December 1, 1997... Arthur Brooks, in his article "Toward a Demand-Side Cure for Cost Disease in the Performing Arts" [1977], clamps two demand-side concepts on to the abstract concept "attending a performance" and finds that one fits better than the other. He ends...

A note on the performing arts: counterpoint. (response to Paul Diesing in this issue, p 1059)
December 1, 1997... I am grateful to Paul Diesing for his thoughtful comments on my March 1997 JEI article, "Toward a Demand-Side Cure for Cost Disease in the Performing Arts" [1997, 197-207]. He makes several brief but interesting and provocative points about the...

John Kenneth Galbraith.
December 1, 1997... An informed survey of John Kenneth Galbraith's system of economics is both overdue and welcome. It is especially pleasing to have such a study written by a person who is sympathetic to Galbraith's method and goals - in other words - an...

Inequality: Radical Institutionalist Views on Race, Gender, Class and Nation.
December 1, 1997... "There is no escaping the fact that inequality will be at the top of political and economic agendas in the next century." So says Doug Brown in this volume, and Charles M.A. Clark provides copious statistics to illustrate the ever-increasing...

Intellectual Odyssey: An Economist's Ideological Journey.
December 1, 1997... Neil Chamberlain's career in economics has been extraordinary. He taught at Yale and Columbia, directed a research program on business decision making at the Ford Foundation, wrote 19 scholarly books, edited six others, and published numerous...

The Sources of Economic Growth.
December 1, 1997... To an evolutionary economist, the dust jacket blurb for this fine book offers great promise. "Investments in physical and human capital contribute to growth largely as handmaidens to technological advance. And technological advance must be...

The State of the Nation: Government and the Quest for a Better Society.
December 1, 1997... During Derek Bok's last week as President of Harvard University, representatives of three foundations paid an unexpected visit. They inquired if he would "write about why the government of the United States seemed to be encountering so much...

Legacies of Change: Transformations of Postcommunist European Economies.
December 1, 1997... The three volumes reviewed here provide analyses of institutional transformations in the post-communist societies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. They are drawn from an international collection of scholars representing a range of...

Agricultural Landownership in Transitional Economies.
December 1, 1997... The three volumes reviewed here provide analyses of institutional transformations in the post-communist societies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. They are drawn from an international collection of scholars representing a range of...

Transitions in Land and Housing: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Poland.
December 1, 1997... The three volumes reviewed here provide analyses of institutional transformations in the post-communist societies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. They are drawn from an international collection of scholars representing a range of...

The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America.
December 1, 1997... The message of The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America so clearly runs counter to institutionalist thought that readers may question why it is reviewed here. It is in the spirit of respect for ideas in general that this review is written....

Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System.
December 1, 1997... This is an extraordinarily important book and should be read by everyone with any interest in socialist societies. It is clear and extremely well written. The introductory chapter poses the question as to whether the collapse of the Soviet...

Economics and Reality.
December 1, 1997... Say the word "ontology" to your average economist and the reply might be "gesundheit." Such a disjointed interaction would not be surprising, given that the subject of ontology - simply defined as the study of the nature of being - is not one...

Values, Nature, and Culture in the American Corporation.
December 1, 1997... William Frederick's book reminds institutional economists that while we may have reservations about how it is carried out, it is in business schools, not in departments of economics, that the subject of values and their relationship to...

Contaminated Land.
December 1, 1997... Do institutions matter? Of course. To understand how and why, it is essential to connect historical antecedent with contemporary circumstance and then to systematically explore how those institutions shape both understanding of problems and the...

Design Within Disorder.
December 1, 1997... Roosevelt's New Deal has long been the period of activist government to which Keynesians and institutionalists alike have hearkened, with justifiable pride. Roosevelt promised the voters a New Deal and made good on his promise by using "bold...