Journal of Economic Issues articles from June 2005

Journal of Economic Issues archives from June 2005

The 2005 Veblen-Commons Award recipient: William M. Dugger.
June 1, 2005... It is hard to imagine institutional economics since 1974 without the contributions of William Dugger. Fortunately, we do not have to imagine such a circumstance. In addition to his twelve books and edited volumes, he has published in every...

Dugger's theorem: the free market is impossible: remarks upon receiving the Veblen-Commons Award.
June 1, 2005... In Memory of Allan G. Gruchy New disputes are always arising in a market. If resolved, they result in new rules. If unresolved, they can accumulate until the market breaks down. I will address seven of the issues around which rules and...

Accidental Veblenian, intentional institutionalist, and inevitable feminist.(Column)
June 1, 2005... I had hoped to begin this address with some humor. Recent events have made it hard to think of anything amusing that wouldn't be either cynical or insensitive. So as I sat preparing this introduction I gave some thought to both the grim...

The Clarence Ayres memorial lecture: the paradoxes of happiness in an old institutionalist perspective.
June 1, 2005... In recent years, happiness research has become a strongly recognized new field of economic discourse. This contribution tries to delineate the insights and limitations of this research from a critical institutionalist vantage point. In a couple...

Market and society: how do they relate, and how do they contribute to welfare?
June 1, 2005... The relationship between market and society is a hotly debated issue in the social sciences. At the level of theory, this discourse dates back to considerations of social order in which Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and David Hume were among the...

Combining equity and the precautionary principle: examples drawn from hog production in Poland.
June 1, 2005... Equity criteria are one set of efficiency criteria crucial for evaluating and judging production institutions and processes. Efficiency means the ability to produce a desired effect. Before efficiency can be determined, criteria must be...

How efficiency/equity tradeoffs resolve through horizon effects.
June 1, 2005... The so-called efficiency/equity tradeoff emerges from the notion that competition is efficient and that the financial incentives spurring output do not consist with equity in the outcomes so achieved. Distributional equity is seen to conflict...

Utility maximization, morality, and religion.
June 1, 2005... One of the most important foundation stones for neoclassical economics is utility maximization theory. This theory assumes that all choices are made to maximize the chooser's utility, happiness, or pleasure. The theory can be expanded by...

Economic security and the myth of the efficiency/equity tradeoff.
June 1, 2005... I think the one special thing about a Harvard education is that it allows you options. --Ted Donato Confronted with an uncertain future driven by heightened global competition, rapid technological change, and volatile energy prices, a...

Should Australian aborigines succumb to capitalism?
June 1, 2005... For more than 50,000 years Aborigines (1) successfully inhabited the rugged land of Australia without much change and with little contact from the outside. In a mere fraction of that time, little more than 200 years, foreign invaders/settlers...

The impact of welfare reform on labor markets in impoverished rural areas.
June 1, 2005... Labor markets became important to a discussion of welfare policy after the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (PRWORA) changed the focus of federal welfare law to integration of welfare participants into the workforce....

Agency of development and agents of change: localization, resistance, and empowerment.
June 1, 2005... The counterforce of development through localization is indispensable for rural poverty alleviation and development in India to be a sustaining and sustainable process. Rural poverty in India derives from a complex set of forces that often...

Mexico's changing distribution of income?
June 1, 2005... The Mexican economy experienced three major economic events during the last decade. First, the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) starting on January 1, 1994, was a major milestone in the opening of the Mexican...

The impact of supply chain management on labor standards: the transition to incessant work.
June 1, 2005... Logistics-comprising transportation, distribution channels, and warehousing-connects manufacturing and retailing. It, along with the retail sector, has replaced manufacturing as the core of modern industry. What used to be the minor area of...

The social cost of labor.
June 1, 2005... Social Costs and the Economics of Cost Shifting For a profit-maximizing firm pursuing a reduction in its costs, it is equally "efficient" to (1) develop a process that will economize on the quality or quantity of inputs necessary to produce...

Living large: evolving consumer credit institutions and privately induced transfer payments.
June 1, 2005... Between 1980 and 2003, real per capita personal income in the United States grew by 59 percent. Meanwhile, real outstanding consumer debt per adult over age fifteen (revolving debt, 2003 dollars) grew from $712 in 1980 to $3,261 in 2003, an...

Whither, or wither, the good society?
June 1, 2005... Human liberation requires an affluent, egalitarian, and democratic society in which man is free from domination by nature's caprice and, in all spheres of life, free from domination of other men. --William M. Dugger The recent election...

Cognition and valuation: some similarities and contrasts between institutional economics and the economics of conventions.
June 1, 2005... This paper explores some interconnections between the "original," or "old," institutional economics (OIE hereafter) and the French economics of conventions (EC hereafter), with the aim of promoting a mutually beneficial cooperation between...

Rereading Becker: contextualizing the development of discrimination theory.(Gary Becker)
June 1, 2005... Gary Becker's "tastes and preferences" approach to labor market discrimination, articulated in The Economics of Discrimination ([1957] 1971), has been the dominant theory of discrimination within mainstream economics. Neoclassical economists...

A contemporary view of Joseph A. Schumpeter's theory of the entrepreneur.
June 1, 2005... In the late 1700s as the modern world started developing, a major transition took place in human activity. The workplace began to change from one of nature to one of artificial environments. Seasons were replaced with work shifts; the sun was...

Stability in a superpower-dominated global economic system.
June 1, 2005... The real world is awash with "soft" variables. At the personal level, we often refer to such amorphous concepts as self-esteem, fatigue, anger, and love. At the organizational level, companies value their intangible resources, such as brand...

Processes of gradual institutional drift.
June 1, 2005... Just as there are different kinds of institutions, there are different kinds of institutional change. Institutions may be habits, norms, customs, rules, or laws; change may take the form of evolutionary change or revolutionary change. The...

Deweyan inquiry and economic practice.(John Dewey)
June 1, 2005... Insights from John Dewey's analysis of inquiry provide constructive guidance to inquiry in political economy. However, these insights have been lost or neglected as generations of institutional economists pass down second-hand, sloganized...

The Veblenian critique and critical realism: a comparison of critical theories of mainstream economics.
June 1, 2005... The Veblenian critique of mainstream economics has something important in common with the critical realist critique. It is essentially an ontological critique. By this I mean that it inquires into the mainstream tradition's preconceptions about...

Selected theories of the business cycle in terms of "econsochology".
June 1, 2005... The business cycle has been studied, rejected, restudied, and reaccepted during various periods of the past century, especially after the writings of Lord John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). The...

The natural rate of interest is zero.
June 1, 2005... This paper argues that the natural, nominal, risk free rate of interest is zero under relevant contemporary institutional arrangements. However, as Spencer Pack reminded us, "[n]atural and nature are complex words, fraught with ambiguity and...

Paying interest on reserve balances: it's more significant than you think.
June 1, 2005... It has long been recognized that uncompensated reserve balances act like a tax on banks and that banks as a result expend scarce resources to avoid holding them. The Fed itself has historically supported legislation to enable it to pay interest...