Journal of Economic Issues articles from June 2008

Journal of Economic Issues archives from June 2008

The 2008 Veblen-Commons Award recipient: Rick Tilman.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... It is entirely appropriate for RICK TILMAN to receive AFEE's Veblen-Commons Award on the 150th anniversary of Veblen's birth. Rick is one of our generation's most important scholars on the work of Thorstein Veblen. He has gone beyond...

Institutional economics as social criticism and political philosophy: remarks upon receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award.(Column)
June 1, 2008... Preliminary Remarks I would like to thank the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) for the 2008 Veblen-Commons Award which you have just given me. I would also like to thank Dale Bush, Glen Atkinson, Bill Dugger and the Award...

Purpose and measurement of national income and product.
June 1, 2008... A careful examination of the construction of national income and product accounts provides remarkable insight into professional and popular thought about the operation of economic processes and activities. According to Simon Kuznets, the father...

Deducing principles of economics from ontological constraints on information.
June 1, 2008... "For the tool-combination principle is indeed a law of progress." Clarence E. Ayres (1944, 119) The Problem: Are there Universal Principles of Knowledge Evolution? In the first half of the 20th century, institutional economists had...

Elites and structural inertia in Latin America: an introductory note on the political economy of development.
June 1, 2008... In the post-reform era, Latin America has reinforced its pattern of specialization in natural resources and standardized commodities and its growth rate has diverged from that of one of the most dynamic economies in recent years. Additionally,...

Continuity and continuousness: the chain of ideas linking Peirce's synechism to Veblen's cumulative causation.
June 1, 2008... This paper traces and also emphasizes strong connections between ideas regarding continuity and continuousness introduced into American philosophical thinking by Charles Sanders Peirce. Some decades after attending a seminar held by Peirce,...

Circular Cumulative Causation (CCC) a la Myrdal and Kapp--Political Institutionalism for minimizing social costs.
June 1, 2008... This paper reconstructs the CCC's original meaning, and methodology from the writings of Myrdal and Kapp to explore the unique characteristics of this key concept of institutional economics. Moreover, the paper demonstrates the CCC's...

Nicholas Kaldor and cumulative causation: public policy implications.
June 1, 2008... Kaldor and his Theory of Cumulative Causation Kaldor was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1908. In 1925, he went to the Humboldt University of Berlin to study political economy because of a fascination with the hyperinflation plaguing Germany...

Principle of circular and cumulative causation: fusing Myrdalian and Kaldorian growth and development dynamics.
June 1, 2008... Circular and cumulative causation (CCC) has been a critical principle of political economy for over a hundred years. While the roots of the concept go back further (see Humphrey 1990; O'Hara 2000), Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) utilized the...

Circular and cumulative causation and the social fabric matrix.
June 1, 2008... Scientists from many different fields of study independently derived common principles about systems that are usually referred to as general systems analysis (GSA), which can be applied for analysis with the social fabric matrix (SFM) (see...

How Veblen generalized Darwinism.
June 1, 2008... Thorstein Veblen repeatedly proclaimed the need for a "post-Darwinian" economics. (1) However, the Darwinian aspect of Veblenian thinking was largely neglected, both by later commentators and by the tradition of American institutionalism that...

Eat grubs and live: the habit-instinct problem in Institutional Evolutionary Economics.
June 1, 2008... There is significant debate among Institutional Evolutionary Economists as to whether, or how concepts that are used to explain the genetic evolution of species can be used to explain the evolution of humanly devised social institutions (Cordes...

Darwinian foundations for evolutionary economics.
June 1, 2008... The Revival of Veblen's Promise Thorstein Veblen's (1898) Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science has been described as a manifesto for evolutionary economics that holds a promise that is yet to be fulfilled (Rutherford 1998). In this...

Globalization and the nation-state: dead or alive.
June 1, 2008... There is a good deal of discussion in the globalization literature related to the question: "Is the Nation-State Finished?" (Holton 1998, 80-107; Ohmai 1995). Even as early as 1969 Charles Kindleberger stated that "[t]he nation state is just...

"Did Yunus deserve the Nobel Peace Prize: microfinance or macrofarce?".(Muhammad Yunus)
June 1, 2008... In October 2006, Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist trained at Vanderbilt, won the Nobel Peace Prize, which was shared with the Grameen Bank, the microcredit facility he conceived and founded in 1976. Grameen's chief aims are to alleviate...

Institutional and ecological economics: the role of technology and institutions in economic development.
June 1, 2008... In this paper, we discuss parallel and competing ideas in ecological and institutional economics about economic growth and development by focusing on the roles that technology and institutions play in each of their approaches. Both are critical...

Unemployment insurance reform: elements of a social provisioning approach.
June 1, 2008... Unemployment Insurance (UI) is one of the largest and most important social protection programs in the United States) Established as part of the New Deal with the primary purpose of partially replacing the earnings of workers who had become...

John R. Commons' contributions to Health Care Reform in the 21st Century.
June 1, 2008... Health care in the United States continues to be in crisis. Reform programs ranging from market-driven solutions to universal coverage have been proposed. Almost 100 years ago, John R. Commons and his colleagues in the American Association for...

A critical assessment of electricity and natural gas deregulation.
June 1, 2008... Electric and natural gas utilities are an integral part of a nation's infrastructure. When performing properly they constitute a platform that provides a necessary service for all sectors of society, thereby assuring conditions for economic...

Economic regulation--the lights are still on: a view from the inside.
June 1, 2008... In 2006, state utility regulators gathered, as they had regularly since 1995, at a Commissioners' Summit to discuss strategic issues. Several important issues were high-lighted. However, for the first time, defining the public interest was...

Institutional challenges in the development of the world's first worker-owned free trade zone.
June 1, 2008... The world's first worker-owned free trade zone, run by a small cooperative in Nicaragua created by a group of poor women, reveals a grass roots effort to appropriate advantages for themselves from within a neoliberal export-production strategy,...

The role of risk as an FDI barrier to entry during transition: the case of Bulgaria.(foreign direct investment)(Survey)
June 1, 2008... Survey studies present a valuable opportunity to contribute to economic research and are consistent with the methodology of institutional economics; particularly, surveys assist in understanding economic behavior that is often buried in a...

Arguing for policy space to promote development: Prebisch, Myrdal, and Singer.
June 1, 2008... The underdeveloped countries' demand for policy space--autonomy to shape market forces--to promote development has a longer history than what might at first appear in the current globalization debate that witnesses their protest against its...

"Silent trade" and the supposed continuum between OIE and NIE.(Original Institutional Economics)(New Institutional Economics)
June 1, 2008... The Carthaginians say also this that there is a place in Libya, and People living in it, beyond the Pillars of Heracles. When they, the Carthaginians, come there and disembark their cargo, they range it along the seashore and go back again to...

Logics of justification and logics of action.
June 1, 2008... There has been a growing debate among social scientists, including some economists, about different institutional logics, logics of action, identities, and the like (Dequech 2007). From the perspective of institutionalists, this should be seen...

Confronting Foster's wildest claim: "only the instrumental theory of value can be applied!".
June 1, 2008... Many of John Fagg Foster's students and colleagues considered him to have been a world-class teacher and scholar. Those who didn't know him can scarcely judge how accurate such praise of his teaching was. But the current availability of some of...

Veblenian concept of habit and its relevance to the analysis of captured transition.
June 1, 2008... The experiences of transforming East European countries, including the former Soviet Union, reveal divergent paths in transition from plan to market. In current economic literature successful transition toward well-functioning market economies...

Organizational learning: a process between equilibrium and evolution.(Brief article)
June 1, 2008... Ulrich Witt (2005) recently emphasized that economic theories still have difficulties in understanding "why" and "how" organizations change. On the one hand Neoclassical approaches and New Institutional Economics based on the equilibrium...

Galbraith's heterodox teacher: Leo Rogin's historical approach to the meaning and validity of economic theory.
June 1, 2008... A Leading Heterodox Economist of the 1930s and 1940s The great American heterodox economist John Kenneth Galbraith studied with orthodox neoclassical Marshallians and with agricultural specialists, but he also had an outstanding heterodox...

Formal institutions in historical perspective.
June 1, 2008... Formal institutions play a prominent, indeed a predominant role in human societies. Such was not always the case. Modern humans (Homo sapiens) are thought to have evolved from precursor variants of the Homo species about 100,000 years ago...

Veblen on interpreting Veblen.(Thorstein Veblen)
June 1, 2008... Different interpretations of Thorstein Veblen's work are often at odds with one another, giving rise to controversy. At times such controversy can become quite intense. When these disputes escalate, we often find ourselves wishing we could say...