Journal of Economic Issues articles from September 1995

Journal of Economic Issues archives from September 1995

The criticism of modern civilization. (speech by Wesley C. Mitchell before the Kosmos Klub in 1909)(Transcript)
September 1, 1995... Introduction The paper presented below is an address given by Wesley Mitchell to the Kosmos Club of the University of California (with which he was closely involved) in the fall of 1909. It is one of two Wesley Mitchell papers discovered in...

Post-Lange market socialism: an evaluation of profit-oriented proposals.
September 1, 1995... A possible milestone may have been achieved in 1992 when the American Economic Association published John Roemer and Pranab Bardhan's article "Market Socialism: A Case for Rejuvenation' in the summer issue of its Journal of Economic Perspectives....

Uncertainty, competition, and speculative finance in the eighties.
September 1, 1995... The dynamics of the financial system that lead to institutional change result from profit-seeking activities... In this process innovation occurs... transform(ing) the financial and economic system... into one that (is) vulnerable to crises....

Sir Robert Giffen and the great potato famine: a discussion of the role of a legend in neoclassical economics.
September 1, 1995... It is widely believed that British economist Sir Robert Giffen observed Irish peasants consuming increasing quantities of potatoes as potato prices rose during the mid-nineteenth century famine. The conventional explanation for this purported...

Naturalism in economics.
September 1, 1995... Social sciences face a dilemma in comparing themselves with the natural sciences. Are they the same kind of undertaking as the natural sciences, or are they different? Should they imitate the natural sciences, or should they develop their own...

Marx, Dewey, and the instrumentalist approach to political economy. (Karl Marx; John Dewey)
September 1, 1995... It is generally accepted by contemporary institutionalist writers that the two seminal thinkers of their tradition are Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey. In naming as their intellectual forerunners an economist and a philosopher, institutionalists...

Toward a "general theory" of market exchange.
September 1, 1995... Within neoclassicism, the theory of perfect competition describes the ideal operation of the market system. This paper will question the adequacy of this idealized conception of the theory of exchange by challenging the generality of the...

Understanding job quality in an era of structural change: what can economics learn from industrial relations?
September 1, 1995... Several decades of economic restructuring have produced fundamental changes in the way work is organized in the United States and other industrialized countries. Dramatic changes have occurred in almost every facet of the work experience...

Comparison of the corporate decision networks of Nebraska and the United States.
September 1, 1995... Institutional economists have long been concerned with identifying patterns, linkages, and interconnections that constitute a system [Ramstad 1986; Hayden 19821. Relationships among corporations have been of particular interest. The thesis of...

Interpersonal effects on consumer demand in economic theory and marketing thought, 1890-1950.
September 1, 1995... In the late nineteenth century, theoretical explanations of consumer demand were derived from the neoclassical microeconomic analysis developed by Alfred Marshall in his Principles of Economics [1890]. Neoclassical theory, however, was of limited...

Gradualism in China's economic reform and the role for a strong central state.
September 1, 1995... The fortunes of states pursuing a program of economic reform have been varied. While the economies of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe have shrunk in size, the growth of the Chinese economy, apart from a minor biccup in 1989-90,...

The NAIRU delusion. (non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment)
September 1, 1995... The hypothesis that there is a natural rate of unemployment (or a nonaccelerating-inflation rate of unemployment) is probably accepted in one form or another by the great majority of professional economists in the United States today and by the...

A restoration of significance. (Thorstein Veblein's farmstead)
September 1, 1995... Historical significance is a highly elusive concept, especially in the United States where teaching history is a neglected art and historians are considered vaguely subversive. Because of this, the act of preserving an old building for historical...

Reflections on the intellectual context and significance of Thorstein Veblein.
September 1, 1995... In September 1954, I arrived at the University of Wisconsin to commence graduate studies in economics. I had taken a course on institutional economics at the University of Miami and went to Wisconsin because of its John R. Commons...

A comment on high social expenditures in Hungary.
September 1, 1995... Experts [World Bank 1992] are of the opinion that too much money is spent on social expenditures (social incomes(1) plus financially supported consumption and housing) in Hungary and in other Middle and Eastern European countries compared to...

Crisis and Change: The Maturing of Hong Kong's Financial Markets.
September 1, 1995... An extended review of Robert Fell, Crisis and Change: The Maturing of Hong Kong's Financial Markets. Hong Kong: Longman Group (Far East), 1992. Pp. xiv, 262. The title of this book might seem to indicate a prosaic guide to one of the emerging...

Evolutionary and Neo-Schumpeterian Approaches to Economics.
September 1, 1995... Edited by Lars Magnusson. Boston, Mass.: Kluwer, 1993. Pp. 326. The number of books being published each year with words such as "evolutionary" and "Schumpeterian" in their title seems to be increasing at an exponential rate. On the whole, this...

Institutions in Economics.
September 1, 1995... By Malcolm Rutherford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xi, 225. $49.95. Malcolm Rutherford has written a book that sHould be required reading for institutionalists--both old (OIE) and new (Nie)--and for all other economists as...

Post Keynesian Macroeconomic Theory: A Foundation for Successful Economic Policies for the Twenty-First Century.
September 1, 1995... By Paul Davidson. Aldershot, England, and Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Elgar, 1994. Pp. 309. $74.95 (cloth). Paul Davidson, editor and co-founder of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, has long been a leader in challenging the classical...

Economic Thought and Discourse in the Twentieth Century.
September 1, 1995... By Warren J. Samuels, Jeff Biddle, and Thomas W. Patchak Schuster. Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar, 1993. Pp. ix, 288. This volume contains four long essays by members of the Department of Economics at Michigan State University. Two--"John R....

Forecasting Financial and Economic Cycles.
September 1, 1995... By Michael P. Niemira and Philip A Klein. New York: John Wiley and Sons. 1994. Pp. xi, 526, index. $55.00 (cloth). This is a comprehensive study of measurement and forecasting of business cycles by means of the indicator approach of the...

Beyond Dissent: Essays in Institutional Economics.
September 1, 1995... By Philip A Klein. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Pp. 31 1. This is a collection of 18 papers published between 1973 and 1990-16 in the JEI--with a foreword by Marc Tool. The essays are grouped into five parts: institutionalism--a basic...

The Economic Status of Women Under Capitalism.
September 1, 1995... Edited by Janice Peterson and Doug Brown. Hants, England: Edward Elgar, 1994. Pp. vii, 187. $59.95 (cloth). At the turn of the century, Thorstein Veblen used an institutional approach to study "the economic status of women under capitalism."...

The Pathology of the U.S. Economy: The Costs of a Low Wage System.
September 1, 1995... By Michael Perelman. New York: St Martin's Press, 1993. Pp. xiii, 252. $45.00. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Americans look back on a century of economic progress that stalled in its closing decades. The business sector finds it...

Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies.
September 1, 1995... By Donald A Schon and Martin Rein. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Pp. 247. This is a flawed but very important book. Its basic subject is evident only in its subtitle, yet its true topic and significance are effectively obscured by its title....

The Greening of Agricultural Policy in Industrial Societies: Swedish Reforms in Comparative Perspective.
September 1, 1995... By David Vail, Knut Per Haslund, and Lars Drake. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii, 300. $45.00. There have always been three major areas of problems in agriculture: efficiency, equity, and environmental quality. In the...

Imperfect Alternatives: Choosing Institutions in Law, Economics, and Public Policy.
September 1, 1995... By Neil K Komesar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Pp. xi, 287. $34.95 (cloth). The title reveals the question addressed: How to choose between the imperfect alternatives of market, legislature, and courts in resolving human...

The Art of Monetary Policy.
September 1, 1995... Edited by David C. Colander and Dewey Daane. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Pp. 224. $50.00 (cloth), $21.95 (paper). An alumnus of Middlebury College established a chair at the college in honor of Alan Holmes, the Federal Reserve official of...

Projecting Capitalism: A History of the Internationalization of the Construction Industry.
September 1, 1995... By Marc Linder. Westport, Conn., and London: Contributions in Economics and Economic History 158, Greenwood Press, 1994. Pp. xv, 270. The spread of machine technology from England to northern Europe and then to the rest of the world is perhaps...

Non-Natural Social Science: Reflecting on the Enterprise of More Heat than Light.
September 1, 1995... Edited by Neil de Mamhi. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Pp. iv, 372. Index. $35.00 (cloth). This collection of 16 essays, the 1993 annual supplement to History of Political Economy, originated in a conference held at Duke...