Journal of Economic Issues articles from March 1994

Journal of Economic Issues archives from March 1994

Governance, economic restructuring, and international competitiveness.
March 1, 1994... The (de-)regulation debate of the 1980s only marginally touched upon two central theoretical, as well as practical, aspects of the problem: the functions and the institutions of regulation. As a rule, economists consider that there is a function...

Economic institutions and the satisfaction of human needs.
March 1, 1994... societal preconditions are compatible, or whether there are conflicts between any of them. 4. See Hodgson |1988~ and Etzioni |1988~. The labels are confusing here. "The new institutionalism" usually refers to modifications of neoclassical...

Karl Popper's theory of science and econometrics: the rise and decline of social engineering.
March 1, 1994... University Press, 1970. -----. Conjectures and Refutations. 4th ed. 1963. Reprint. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972a. -----. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 6th ed. 1959. Reprint. London: Hutchinson, 1972b. -----. "Autobiography...

Comparison of Marxism and institutionalism.
March 1, 1994... It is our view that Marxism and institutionalism have much in common--and that it is useful in the United States to stress the common ground among all critical economists. We also recognize that there are different viewpoints within each of these...

ERISA: law, interests, and consequences. (Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974)
March 1, 1994... The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) preempted state law on employee benefits, required that federal courts adjudicate disputes about employee benefit claims, established fiduciary standards, and required that corporate...

Cumulative tax rates on the working poor: evidence of a continuing poverty wall.
March 1, 1994... The persistence of poverty in the United States remains an analytical and political issue |Sawhill 1988~. "Welfare" programs' contribution to this persistence likewise has been the subject of heated political exchanges and less impassioned but no...

Gardiner Means on administered prices and administrative inflation.
March 1, 1994... While he never rowed in the mainstream, Gardiner C. Means (1896-1988) was an original and independent-minded researcher and writer who had considerable influence on economic thought and public opinion. Although he was often characterized as an...

Imbalance in part-time employment.
March 1, 1994... Many labor economists view changes in the proportion of the labor force working part-time as evidence of a fundamental restructuring of the employer-employee relationship. The current literature on contingent(1) workers argues that part-time...

A reassessment of institutionalist-mainstream relations.
March 1, 1994... Relations between institutionalists and main stream economists can scarcely be said to be improving and arguably have worsened in the past dozen years. Main stream economics has seen the emergence of "new classical economics" (to monetarism have...

The myth of two Coases: what Coase is really saying. (Ronald Coase)(response to E. Ray Canterbery and A. Marvasti, Journal of Economic Issues, p. 1179, December 1992)
March 1, 1994... "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean--either more nor less." --Humpty-Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. In the December 1992 issue of this journal, E. Ray Canterbery and A. Marvasti take issue with...

Two Coases or two theorems? (response to article by Steven Medema in this issue, p. 208)
March 1, 1994... Professor Steven Medema |1993~ has written a thoughtful, readable commentary on our recent article |1992~. He suggests that our critique of the Coase Theorem "is largely on the mark"; only pathological modesty could provoke our disagreement....

America's Agenda: Rebuilding Economic Strength.
March 1, 1994... This was the second report of the Commission on Competitiveness appointed in 1987 by Governor Mario Cuomo of new York (America's Agenda: Rebuilding Economic Strength. By the Cuomo Commission on Competitiveness, Lewis B. Kaden, chairman, Lee...

Coming To Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World.
March 1, 1994... In democratic societies, public opinion obviously matters. It governs what are deemed to be important problems and opportunities and what, if anything, is to be done to address them. Although institutional economics accepts and emphasizes the...

The Rich Good Neighbor: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil.
March 1, 1994... Less than at any time in the last 50 years are international relations in the Western Hemisphere being shaped by an overriding focus in U.S. foreign policy. Starting in the late 1930s, a chief aim of the State Department was to monitor and, in...

A Framework for Cognitive Economics.
March 1, 1994... Cognitive or behavioral economics has been something of a growth industry in recent years as witnessed by the works of Peter Earl, Robert Frank, Geoffrey Hodgson, and Richard Thaler. Roger McCain begins his contribution to this literature with a...

The End of Equality.
March 1, 1994... In The End of Equality, Mickey Kaus presents his interpretation of the Democratic party's liberal ideology and then proceeds to "rip it down." His purpose is to replace the Democrats' "money liberalism" with a new version called "civic...

Gunnar Myrdal and His Works.
March 1, 1994... The editors of this book claim that it is actually two books: one concerning Gunnar Myrdal as a contributor to social democracy, the other focusing on his theoretical contributions. Its stated purpose is to analyze Myrdal as an individual,...

Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics.
March 1, 1994... In 1973, Herman Daly published a collection of essays under the title Toward a Steady-State Economy. With minor revisions and a new postscript, the collection was republished in 1980 as Economics, Ecology, Ethics. That title is now the subtitle...

Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos.
March 1, 1994... Ecology, economics, and physics deal with systems. As a result, everything is connected to everything else, or as Garrett Hardin puts it, "we can never do merely one thing." The leitmotif of Living within Limits is the examination of the increase...

Adam Smith Goes to Moscow: A Dialogue on Radical Reform.
March 1, 1994... It does not matter how profound you are if no one reads your work. Not that it really matters. Many--perhaps most--orthodox economists are satisfied to talk to each other while ignoring policymakers and the public. Unfortunately, this has not...

New Horizons In Economic Thought: Appraisals of Leading Economists.
March 1, 1994... Warren Samuels has brought together essays on 13 contemporary economists whose work centers on serious deficiencies in mainstream economic thought. Some, like William Baumol and Douglass North, are close to the mainstream, while others, such as...

Rethinking the Future: The Correspondence Between Geoffrey Vickers and Adolph Lowe.
March 1, 1994... This is a belated review of a book that readers of the JEI should know about. Jeanne Vickers, the daughter-in-law of Sir Geoffrey Vickers, has collected, edited, and published the letters written to and from Sir Geoffrey Vickers and Adolph Lowe...

The Corporation As Anomaly.
March 1, 1994... As Professor Schrader makes clear, economics does not have a genuine theory of the firm. What we call the theory of the firm merely applies the neoclassical research program to business decisions. If we know the marginal cost and marginal benefit...

The New Geography of Consumer Spending: A Political Economy Approach.
March 1, 1994... In capitalist societies, "consumption" has a double meaning: to business, it means the "purchase behavior" that brings in sales revenue; to individual "consumers," it means procuring and using the necessities of life. The two halves of this...

Economics As A Science of Human Behavior: Towards A New Social Science Paradigm.
March 1, 1994... This volume arises from Bruno Frey's dissatisfaction with the excessive formalism dominating economics today. He reminds us that there exits "another type of economics . . . which is surprisingly little known". However, his "new" paradigm is an...

Economics - Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns?
March 1, 1994... Economic methodology had been to a large extent the province of institutionalists and other heterodox groups. Growth of output in the field of the methodology of economics has occurred over the last 15 years in the wake of the failure of...

The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy.
March 1, 1994... I disagree with, or have serious reservations about, a number of aspects of this very interesting and useful book--and I hope it finds a wide audience. The disagreements begin with the first sentence in the preface: "The most important conclusion...

The Motivation to Work.
March 1, 1994... Transaction Publishers has seen fit to reissue Herzberg, Mausner, and Synderman's The Motivation To Work, which was originally published in 1959. This 1992 edition contains a new introduction by Herzberg, self-congratulatory in tone, where he...

Technology and the Wealth of Nations.
March 1, 1994... Over the last decade, the relationships between technology, the trade environment, and national competitiveness have been the subject of considerable political and policy debate. These two volumes would seem to offer the analyses needed to...