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The Human Capital Labor Economist

Jacob Mincer

in Jacob Mincer: A Founding Father of Modern Labor Economics

This final chapter sums up the analysis of Jacob Mincer's prolific and interesting career. It also highlights the hallmarks of Mincer's approach to economic analysis. It points out his major ... More

This final chapter sums up the analysis of Jacob Mincer's prolific and interesting career. It also highlights the hallmarks of Mincer's approach to economic analysis. It points out his major contributions to economic analysis and suggests the topics and features by which his work will continue to influence future generations of (labor) economists.Less

Islam, Economics and Finance

Ibrahim Warde

in Islamic Finance in the Global Economy

Any successful belief system, whether religious or secular, has contradictory characteristics: it is flexible enough to adapt to several geographical settings and to survive the test of time, but it ... More

Any successful belief system, whether religious or secular, has contradictory characteristics: it is flexible enough to adapt to several geographical settings and to survive the test of time, but it must also be able to maintain its specificity, or it would disappear or become fused with the competing belief system. It is idealistic or sometimes utopian, yet it is capable of adjusting to human imperfection and making the kind of compromises that are endemic to political and economic life. Bearing this in mind, a better understanding of how a system rooted in the Middle Ages could have survived and thrived in the global economy can be derived. Following a broad overview of the parallel evolution of religion and history, this chapter explores and examines the ways in which Islam and Islamic economics and finance have adapted to and thrived against the changing circumstances and the advent of globalisation. It also explains how Islam came to accommodate itself within modern economics and finance given the characteristics of Islamic finance, which is tightly bounded to religion and the Shariah principles.Less

The Discourse on Economics

Cedric J. Robinson

H. L. T. Quan and Avery F. Gordon (eds)

in An Anthropology of Marxism

Based on the previous chapter’s demonstration of the links between Marxism and German bourgeois thought, Robinson argues in this chapter that Marxism represents neither the interests of the oppressed ... More

Based on the previous chapter’s demonstration of the links between Marxism and German bourgeois thought, Robinson argues in this chapter that Marxism represents neither the interests of the oppressed nor a radical break with contemporary philosophy. Chapter 4 provides an alternative history of oppositional discourse on poverty in European history that Robinson uses to emancipate socialism from the rigid ideological regime of bourgeois intellectuals imposed by Marxism. Robinson demonstrates the importance of Aristotle and Athenian philosophy for the empirical, conceptual, and moral precepts of modern economics. Robinson then traces the persistence of socialist impulses in Europe’s Middle Ages, particularly in the work of Marsilius and the Jesuits and its eventual transformation into the secular socialist utopianism of eighteenth century bourgeois Europeans. In both cases, he shows how radical gender relations are effaced by modern economics and by Marxism. Robinson thus shows how Marx and Engel’s scientific historical economics privileged a select group of bourgeois ideologists, insisting upon individualism and historical materialism and ignoring alternative oppositional discourses built in previous rebellions against oppression, inequality, racism, gender discrimination, and poverty.Less

Economics, Ecology, and the Value of Nature

Matt Price

in The Moral Authority of Nature

This chapter explores a specifically twentieth- (and now twenty-first) century conundrum: how to assess the value of nature and natural goods, and to weigh that value against other goods in a moral ... More

This chapter explores a specifically twentieth- (and now twenty-first) century conundrum: how to assess the value of nature and natural goods, and to weigh that value against other goods in a moral calculus. The contemporary obsession with nature's value reopens a question that John Locke thought he had solved in the seventeenth century. Indeed, modern economics begins with his all-but-categorical denial of the value of nature's works. The labor theory of value required it: Locke needed to show that human activity was the true source of all value, thereby grounding his theory of property, his liberal version of the social contract, and his arguments on political authority. If the lands untouched by human toil, and their value, had to be sacrificed on the altar of property, that was hardly controversial in an era when “wilderness” was a term of abuse. But ever since the hedonic theory of utilitarianism captured political economy from the dismal scientists, economists have rejected toil in favor of pleasure, and spaces once called wastelands are now more often named wetlands.Less

Paul A. Samuelson

Roger W. Spencer and David A. Macpherson

in Lives of the Laureates: Twenty-three Nobel Economists

This chapter describes the life of Paul A. Samuelson, who received the Nobel Prize in 1970. It examines the years of his development as an economist. He was born in 1915, and studied economics at the ... More

This chapter describes the life of Paul A. Samuelson, who received the Nobel Prize in 1970. It examines the years of his development as an economist. He was born in 1915, and studied economics at the University of Chicago, Midway, in the 1930s, and received his Ph.D from Harvard in 1941. While still an undergraduate student, he discerned that mathematics was to revolutionize modern economics. He was then professor of economics at MIT until 2009. His Foundations of Economic Analysis contributed to his being awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize. His success it seems was due to his tremendous energy in writing articles about economics and economic relationships. He also wrote many technical articles. Among his key publications are Foundations of Economic Analysis and Linear Programming and Economic Analysis.Less

Moving Coin

George Oppitz-Trotman

in Stages of Loss: The English Comedians and their Reception

Early modern itinerant theatre was associated with prodigality, debt, and economic malaise. Witnesses to the success of the English Comedians comment routinely on the heaps of coins they took with ... More

Early modern itinerant theatre was associated with prodigality, debt, and economic malaise. Witnesses to the success of the English Comedians comment routinely on the heaps of coins they took with them out of the city. Permanent or semi-permanent theatre-houses arose in Germany not merely in appreciation of the English Comedians, but as a means of regulating and acquiring the money spent by citizenry on their entertainments. Focusing in particular on the English clown’s involvement in discourses of prodigality, and his representation in popular art as a dissolute figure conniving in national depredations, this chapter also shows how the finances of the English Comedians depended on early money markets, emerging financial instruments, patronage, and credit. It offers an original account of the economics involved in long-distance theatre, comparing the foreign troupes to joint-stock companies and exploring what their theatre was actually worth to them in the long run.Less

Open Approaches to Promoting Innovation and Economic Growth

Adrian Kuenzler

in Restoring Consumer Sovereignty: How Markets Manipulate Us and What the Law Can Do About It

This chapter contrasts the accepted account with more progressive notions of what constitutes progress. It shows that scholars of information production, software development, and the networking ... More

This chapter contrasts the accepted account with more progressive notions of what constitutes progress. It shows that scholars of information production, software development, and the networking industries have long recognized that the fundamental economic characteristics of the social organization of production can be framed not only based on an argument around scarcity—as the present market regulatory account does—but alternatively also on a story about abundance. This reading involves the promotion of new innovation through commons-based systems of economic production that underlie new models of technological and cultural innovation, as well as the teachings and lessons from open source, intellectual property law’s negative space and the literature on spillover effects and modern infrastructure economics. The chapter shows how market access thinking can be applied not only to traditional infrastructure resources such as waterways, highways, or bridges but also to everyday consumer goods and services.Less

1 Classical Theories

Herbert Hovenkamp

in The Making of Competition Policy: Legal and Economic Sources

This chapter focuses on the classical economic theories that influenced modern economics in Western Europe and the United States. It considers two movements: the “classical political economy” ... More

This chapter focuses on the classical economic theories that influenced modern economics in Western Europe and the United States. It considers two movements: the “classical political economy” associated with Adam Smith, whose work The Wealth of Nations is considered to be the origin of free market ideology, and neoclassical economics or “political economy”, with emphasis on thinking mainly about policy. It looks into the development of classical political economy in England by analyzing Smith's theories together with his followers, and describes how this affected economic policy in the United States. It considers the differences in labor practices between England and America and how this became the basis for the development of neoclassicism in the U.S., with one of its highest points being the passing of the Sherman Act.Less