Journal of Economic Issues articles from June 2004

Journal of Economic Issues archives from June 2004

The 2004 Veblen-Commons Award recipient: Howard J. Sherman.
June 1, 2004... It is a great privilege for me to be able to introduce this year's recipient of the Veblen-Commons Award: my colleague, comrade, and close friend, Professor Howard Sherman. I first met Howard twenty-two years ago, almost to the day, at one...

Political economy of evolution: remarks upon receiving the Veblen-Commons award.
June 1, 2004... I was always fascinated by social evolution, so I was happy when I read Thorstein Veblen's argument that economics must become an evolutionary science. All institutionalists agree with Veblen's principle that social analysis must begin with...

Thorstein Veblen, Ty Cobb, and the evolution of an institution.(Petco Park)
June 1, 2004... A thorough examination of the by-laws of the Association for Evolutionary Economics revealed no prohibition against having a little fun during a presidential address. So, this is a perfect occasion to say a few words about two of my long-time...

The Clarence Ayres memorial lecture: an institutionalist reconstruction of culture.
June 1, 2004... Institutional economics is an approach that recognizes the importance of culture. This is an exploration of the question of how central culture is for institutionalist theory. The strategy for this exploration is to begin outside of...

Who should control the firm? Insights from new and original institutional economics.
June 1, 2004... Business scandals in the USA, Japan, and Europe have initiated changes in the laws of corporate governance, for instance, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the USA, the renewal in the UK on initiative of Derek Higgs, the Cromme-Code in Germany, the Loi...

Governance and the legitimacy of Corporate Power: a path for convergence of heterodox economics?
June 1, 2004... Corporate power and its accountability and legitimacy is evidently an issue that any economic outlook should take seriously in order to be taken seriously by serious economists. In this necessarily short paper, we seek to set forth some salient...

Old habits die hard: path dependency and behavioral lock-in.(sub-optimal or inefficient technologies can become locked in)
June 1, 2004... An increasing number of scholars have begun to argue that market forces may not automatically select the best technologies or products. During the 1980s and 1990s, Paul David and Brian Arthur published several papers in which they asserted that...

Veblen's theories of "latecomer advantage" and "the machine process": relevancy for flexible production.
June 1, 2004... In particular reference to the rise of Germany (Veblen [1915] 1939) and Japan (Veblen [1915] 1945), Thorstein Veblen expounded the theory of latecomer advantage and emphasized the special leg-ups a latecomer country may enjoy in catching up in...

The appearance of impairment: Veblen and goodwill-financed mergers.(Thorstein Veblen)
June 1, 2004... During a bull stock market, accounting rules favor firms that engage in aggressive mergers. In the 1990s, this process helped reorganize the industries of media, telecommunications, and the Internet. In the aftermath and slow deflation of...

The theory of business enterprise and Veblen's neglected theory of corporation finance.
June 1, 2004... As the twenty-first century began, the neoclassical models of economics and finance appeared to have inadequate explanations for the stagnancy of financial markets. Theorists turned to the historically dependent bubble models to analyze and...

Shifting risk: the divorce of risk from reward in American capitalism.
June 1, 2004... After incurring losses of $1.22 billion in 2001 and $1.27 billion in 2002, the senior executives of Delta Airlines quietly funded a special account to ensure that their own pensions would be completely protected in the event of that airline's...

Cultural contradictions of global capitalism.
June 1, 2004... In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell (1976) found that the decline of the bourgeois value system was brought about largely by the bourgeois economic system itself. In his opinion, the traditional values of American...

The stem cell debate: a Veblenian perspective.(Thorstein Veblen)
June 1, 2004... This paper considers both the developing body of technology that surrounds the use of human stem cells and the cultural reaction to this technology. The purpose of this study is to examine and test Thorstein Veblen's theory of technology...

A utilitarian twist? Performance measurement in the english national health service.
June 1, 2004... The National Health Service (NHS) in England has been subject to ongoing structural change since the early 1990s. (1) Recently this has been accompanied by the increased recourse to performance management and evaluation systems, such as...

Health or wealth security? Public policy priorities in the new millennium.
June 1, 2004... In what would be one of the boldest proposals for reshaping the role of the federal government since the New Deal, President George W. Bush planned to unveil the administration's plan for an "ownership society" in his 2004 State of the Union...

An institutionalist critique of the Bush administration's energy policy.
June 1, 2004... The purpose of this paper is to critique the Bush energy policy from an institutionalist perspective. The first section will sketch current energy usage in the United States; the second section will discuss the central elements of the Bush...

Ceremonialism, intellectual property rights, and innovative activity.(innovation and its impact on social progress)
June 1, 2004... One of the tenets of institutionalism is that innovation is of prime importance in driving social progress (Ayres [1944] 1978). To Clarence Ayres, innovation was the process of creating a "novel combination of existing devices and materials in...

Open source software, the wrongs of copyright, and the rise of technology.(Copyright Law)
June 1, 2004... The popularity of computers, spread of the Internet, and changing attitudes of some technologically minded individuals are together challenging ceremonial business practices. This challenge comes in the form of open source software which,...

The role of the press in a democracy: heterodox economics and the propaganda model.(evaluation of the freedom of press)
June 1, 2004... The central thesis of this paper is that there is need to reinstitute the public purpose requirement for broadcast licensing. On that path, this paper develops an instrumentalist concept of democracy and from there expands to evaluate the...

Network consequences due to oligopolists and oligopsonists in the hog industry, pollution from hog production, and the failure to regulate ecological criteria.
June 1, 2004... Humans have been in a symbiotic relationship with hogs since the time humans became a species. That relationship evolved into a set of transactional (as defined by instrumentalists) processes beginning with the hunter-gatherer tribes. The...

The evolution of environmental legislation: a strategic transaction approach.(Environmental policy)
June 1, 2004... Environmental pollution is often a by-product of agricultural production. This by-product is different from other industrial pollution because (1) the cause and effect relationship between agricultural practice and environmental impact is...

Green revolution myth and agricultural reality?
June 1, 2004... A litany of mythical criticisms of the Green Revolution has so often been repeated and so widely disseminated that the critics' slogans have been accepted by many educated observers as unchallengeable fact. One of the slogans of critics of the...

Conflicting views: neoclassical, porterian, and evolutionary approaches to the analysis of the environmental regulation of industrial activity.(environmental regulation)
June 1, 2004... The current European Union approach to environmental regulation aims to ensure that firms achieve continuous improvement in environmental performance and explicitly encourages firms to integrate environmental concerns into production...

Literacy and women's empowerment in Indonesia: implications for policy.
June 1, 2004... One of the most important topics in development economics is education. Education, at a minimum having the capability to read and write, not only gives people skills that help them make a living but also opens opportunities for them to think...

Pinochet meets Polanyi? The curious case of the Chilean embrace of "free" market economics.(Karl Polanyi)
June 1, 2004... A sweeping experiment with University of Chicago-style "free" market economics began in Chile in 1973 with General Pinochet's coup d etat (Pinera 1992). Presently, it is commonly held that the restructured--Chicagoized--Chilean economy is a...

Myrdal's backwash and spread effects in classical economics: implications for multilateral trade negotiations.(Gunnar Myrdal)
June 1, 2004... Within the economics profession it is well understood that what informs the "trade" part of multilateral trade negotiations (MTNs) is deeply, though by no means solely, rooted in the orthodox version of classical trade theory. What has largely...

J. M. Clark and the economics of responsibility.(John Maurice Clark)
June 1, 2004... In his 1930 essay, "The Socializing of Theoretical Economics," John Maurice Clark criticized orthodox economics, or, as he termed it, "Euclidean economics" (Clark 1921, 132 ff.). He believed that the treatment of business under orthodox...

The influence of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of Business Enterprise on the economic theories of Edward Chamberlin.
June 1, 2004... Edward Chamberlin's Theory of Monopolistic Competition is one of the twin pillars (along with Joan Robinson's contribution) of what is today called "Industrial Organization." In addition to its impact on microeconomics, macroeconomics has over...

The human mind, institutions, and economic behavior.
June 1, 2004... In this paper I explore the implications for institutional analysis of recent research on the role of the brain and the mind in human behavior in both neuroscience and neo-psychoanalytic theory. In particular, I cover findings of neuroscientist...

Principles of macroeconomics: toward a multiparadigmatic approach.
June 1, 2004... A two-fold, yet parallel, response to the decline in economics majors has emerged between variants of the profession: neoclassical economics (NCE) and original institutional economics (OIE) (Becker 1997; Siegfreid 1999; Knoedler and Underwood...

In memory.(Paul Sweezy)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
June 1, 2004... Paul Sweezy 1910-2004 Paul Sweezy, recipient of AFEE's 1999 Veblen-Commons award and a prominent American Marxist economist, died February 28, 2004, in Larchmont, New York. Sweezy taught economics at Harvard from 1934 to 1942. He...