Download or read book Moral Markets written by Paul J. Zak and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-16 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics), and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy.
Download or read book What Money Can t Buy written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?In his New York Times bestseller Justice, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that we, in our market-driven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don't honor and that money can't buy?
Download or read book Defending the Free Market written by Robert Sirico and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years ago, the economic system of the Soviet empire—socialism—seemed definitively discredited. Today, the most popular figures in the Democratic Party embrace it, while the shapers of public opinion treat capitalism as morally indefensible. Is there a moral case for capitalism? Consumerism is an appalling spectacle. Free markets may be efficient, but are they fair? Aren’t there some things that we can’t afford to leave to the vicissitudes of the market? Robert Sirico, a onetime leftist, shows how a free economy—including private property, legally enforceable contracts, and prices and interest rates freely agreed to by the parties to a transaction—is the best way to meet society’s material needs. In fact, the free market has lifted millions out of dire poverty—far more people than state welfare or private charity has ever rescued from want. But efficiency isn’t its only virtue. Economic freedom is indispensable for the other freedoms we prize. And it’s not true that it makes things more important than people—just the reverse. Only if we have economic rights can we protect ourselves from government encroachment into the most private areas of our lives—including our consciences. Defending the Free Market is a powerful vindication of capitalism and a timely warning for a generation flirting with disaster.
Download or read book Virtue and Economy written by Andrius Bielskis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in Aristotelianism and in virtue ethics has been growing for half a century but as yet the strengths of the study of Aristotelian ethics in politics have not been matched in economics. This ground-breaking text fills that gap. Challenging the premises of neoclassical economic theory, the contributors take issue with neoclassicism’s foundational separation of values from facts, with its treatment of preferences as given, and with its consequent refusal to reason about final ends. The contrary presupposition of this collection is that ethical reasoning about human ends is essential for any sustainable economy, and that reasoning about economic goods should therefore be informed by reasoning about what is humanly and commonly good. Contributions critically engage with aspects of corporate capitalism, managerial power and neoliberal economic policy, and reflect on the recent financial crisis from the point of view of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Containing a new chapter by Alasdair MacIntyre, and deploying his arguments and conceptual scheme throughout, the book critically analyses the theoretical presuppositions and institutional reality of modern capitalism.
Download or read book The Moral Economy written by Samuel Bowles and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-28 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends.
Download or read book Morals and Markets written by Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life insurance—the promise of an insurer to pay a sum upon a person's death in exchange for a regular premium—is a bizarre enterprise. How can we monetize human life? Should we? What statistics do we use, what assumptions do we make, and what behavioral factors do we consider? First published in 1979, Morals and Markets Is a pathbreaking study exploring the development of life insurance in the United States. Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer combines economic history and a sociological perspective to advance a novel interpretation of the life insurance industry. The book pioneered a cultural approach to the analysis of morally controversial markets. Zelizer begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of the life insurance industry, a contentious chapter in the history of American business. Life insurance was stigmatized at first, denounced in newspapers and condemned by religious leaders as an immoral and sacrilegious gamble on human life. Over time, the business became a widely praised arrangement to secure a family's future. How did life insurance overcome cultural barriers? As Zelizer shows, the evolution of the industry in the United States matched evolving attitudes toward death, money, family relations, property, and personal legacy.
Download or read book Beyond Market and Government written by Yining Li and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how moral factors exert influence on economy from an economic and philosophical point of view. The book takes an in-depth look at topics such as efficiency and coordination, fairness and identification, law and self-discipline and the third distribution, which have long been the focus of public attention. As expounded in this book, in places where regulation by market or government does work, there are still some gaps that the two modes of regulation cannot reach owing to the limitations of their influence. Each does compensate for the other’s limitations, but only up to a point. The gap can only be filled by custom and morality. In this sense, regulation by custom and morality can be viewed as a regulatory mode beyond market and government. In a market economy, market regulation of resource allocation as a basic mode can be called “primary regulation” and government regulation, as a high-level mode, “secondary regulation.” Regulation that relies on the force of custom and morality, a regulation beyond market and government, can be called “the third regulation.” A variety of causes can give rise to market failure or government paralysis, rendering regulation by market or government ineffective or extremely limited. But even in such circumstances, custom and morality still exist and continue working as normal. What affects resource allocation, socio-economic operations and living standards is not just the power of market or government, but that of custom and morality. This book is one of the three published writings that best reflect Professor Li Yining’s academic standpoint. Although written in economic language, the book also incorporates sociology, history and philosophy and will help the reader make better judgment calls in the face of changing market conditions and economic policies.
Download or read book Morality of Markets written by Parth J. Shah and published by Academic Foundation. This book was released on 2004 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Book Addresses Critical Issues Ranging From The Underlying Ethics Of Voluntary Exchange, Morality In The Commerce And The Corporation, The Immorality Of State Intervention, And The Role Of Markets In The Teachings Of Major World Religions. Contributions By Distinguished Economists, Ethicists, And Theologians Explore The Moral And Ethical Foundations Of The Free Market.
Download or read book Markets Morals and Religion written by Jonathan B. Imber and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The examination of the relationship of economic activity to other important aspects of human life and social behavior has inspired some of the most interesting and provocative social-scientific research in the past one hundred years. This book of original essays by leading thinkers across many disciplines offers new insights into enduring questions about how modern and modernizing market economies are both shaped by and shapers of morality, values, and religion. Part 1, "Markets and Morals," offers eight contributors who provide analyses of the various ways in which the market operates in relation to morality. An empirical presentation of moral values and market attitudes is given. Other essays take aim at how markets serve and disserve moral interests: Economic growth has moral consequences; the manipulation of markets exposes a moral underside; the nature of market failure has implications for understanding moral vulnerability; preference change has moral implications. In other chapters, a broad consideration of the positive moral effects of market economies is offered along with historical essays on the role that intellectuals have played in debates about the positive and negative effects of commercial life and on the ways in which the American idea of the pursuit of happiness reveals much about the morality of economic life. In Part 2, "Markets and Religion," nine contributors address both the historical and contemporary emergence of religious factors in the growth and transformation of global capitalism. Major religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are examined for their contributions to answering questions about the nature and function of economic life in light of religious ideas and ideals. Several essays present original approaches to the importance of religious values to modern forms of consumption and to the political economy of reconciliation and forgiveness in nations coming to terms with past conflict. Finally, the influence of non-Western ideas, in particular Chinese religions and Buddhism on economic thought and practice, is assessed as part of the globalizing impact of religion on economic life generally.
Download or read book Integrative Economic Ethics written by Peter Ulrich and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-09 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrative Economic Ethics is a highly original work that progresses through a series of rational and philosophical arguments to address foundational issues concerning the relationship between ethics and the market economy. Rather than accepting market competition as a driver of ethical behaviour, the author shows that modern economies need to develop ethical principles that guide market competition, thus moving business ethics into the realms of political theory and civic rationality. This book was in its fourth edition in the original German in 2008, this English translation of Peter Ulrich's development of a fresh integrative approach to economic ethics will be of interest to all scholars and advanced students of business ethics, economics, and social and political philosophy.
Download or read book Markets Morals and Policy Making written by Enrico Colombatto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-29 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Free-market economics has attempted to combine efficiency and freedom by emphasizing the need for neutral rules and meta-rules. These efforts have only been partly successful, for they have failed to address the deeper, normative arguments justifying – and limiting – coercion. This failure has thus left most advocates of free-market vulnerable to formulae which either emphasize expediency or which rely upon optimal social engineering to foster different notions of the common will and of the common good. This book offers the reader a new perspective on free-market economics, one in which the defense of markets is no longer based upon the utilitarian claim that free markets are more efficient; rather, the defense of markets rests upon the moral argument that top-down coercive policy-making is necessarily in tension with the rights-based notion of justice typical of the Western tradition. In arguing for a consistent moral basis for the free-market view, we depart from both the Austrian and neoclassical traditions by acknowledging that rationality is not a satisfactory starting point. This rejection of rationality as the complete motivator for human economic behaviour throws constitutional economics and the law-and-economics tradition into new relief, revealing these approaches as governed by considerations derived by various notions of social efficiency, rather than by principles consistent with individual freedom, including freedom to choose. This book shows that the solution is in fact a better understanding of the lessons taught by the Scottish Enlightenment: the role of the political context is to ensure that the individual can pursue his own ends, free from coercion. This also implies individual responsibility, respect for somebody else’s preferences and for his entrepreneurial instincts. Social virtue is not absent from this understanding of politics, but rather than being defined through the priorities of policy-makers, it emerges as the outcome of interaction among self-determining individuals. The strongest and most consistent case for free-market economics, therefore, rests on moral philosophy, not on some version of static-efficiency theorizing. This book should be of interest to students and researchers focussing on economic theory, political economics and the philosophy of economic thought, but is also written in a non-technical style making it accessible to an audience of non-economists.
Download or read book The Social Market Economy written by Peter Koslowski and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The social market economy forms a fundamental theory of the market economy and an integrated economic and ethical theory of the economic order in which the political and societal conditions for the working of the market are included in the theory of the market economy. The social market economy is presented as a universal theory of the decisions to be made about the economic order in all cultures and is analysed in its basic theoretical foundations and in its application to the transition process from the planned to the market economy, particulary in the privatisation of socialised property in Russia and former East Germany. Leading German and Russian experts in the field as well as four classical texts present a systematic analysis of the social market economy from the point of view of economics, law, and ethics.
Download or read book The Economics of Ethics and the Ethics of Economics written by Geoffrey Brennan and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economics and ethics are succumbing to the pull of disciplinary specialisation at their own peril. This volume represents a necessary and most welcome reminder of some ways in which the two are intertwined. How do economic preferences relate to ethical values? What are the motivational underpinnings on which we should base a theory of choice? What explains compliance with rules, and with tax legislation in particular? Any economist or political philosopher interested in these questions must read this book. Peter Dietsch, Université de Montréal, Canada Do market prices reflect values? What is the relation between social norms and economic incentives? Do economic agents respond to ethical arguments? By probing the boundaries between positive and normative theorizing and by bridging ethics, economics, and political science, this book is able to address a fascinating set of questions. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in normative issues in public policy to academics and practitioners alike. Fabienne Peter, University of Warwick, UK This book makes a rational and eloquent case for the closer integration of ethics and economics. It expands upon themes concerned with esteem, self-esteem, emotional bonding between agents, expressive concerns, and moral requirements. Economists have long assumed that value and price are synonymous and interchangeable. The authors show how disregarding this false assumption and adopting an interdisciplinary approach could improve the economics profession by distinguishing economic values from ethical values. Replete with discussions that will challenge conventional economics, this book offers a corrective argument against the rigid separation of agents motivation and the purely normative aspects of economic analysis. The various contributions explore the different dimensions at the frontier between the rational and the moral in political economy, ethics and philosophy. Containing a variety of cross-border analyses, this innovative book will be a must-read for economists, political scientists and philosophers. It will also be an invaluable resource for students in the fields of economics and philosophy.
Download or read book The Moral Power of Money written by Ariel Wilkis and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-19 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary social interactions, The Moral Power of Money investigates the forces of power and morality at play, particularly among the poor. Drawing on fieldwork in a slum of Buenos Aires, Ariel Wilkis argues that money is a critical symbol used to negotiate not only material possessions, but also the political, economic, class, gender, and generational bonds between people. Through vivid accounts of the stark realities of life in Villa Olimpia, Wilkis highlights the interplay of money, morality, and power. Drawing out the theoretical implications of these stories, he proposes a new concept of moral capital based on different kinds, or "pieces," of money. Each chapter covers a different "piece"—money earned from the informal and illegal economies, money lent through family and market relations, money donated with conditional cash transfers, political money that binds politicians and their supporters, sacrificed money offered to the church, and safeguarded money used to support people facing hardships. This book builds an original theory of the moral sociology of money, providing the tools for understanding the role money plays in social life today.
Download or read book Is the Market Moral written by Rebecca M. Blank and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003-12-31 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the great tradition of moral argument about the nature of the economic market, Rebecca Blank and William McGurn join to debate the fundamental questions—equality and efficiency, productivity and social justice, individual achievement and personal rights in the workplace, and the costs and benefits of corporate and entrepreneurial capitalism. Their arguments are grounded in both economic sophistication and religious commitment. Rebecca Blank is an economist by training and describes herself as "culturally Protestant in the habits of mind and heart." She has also chaired the committee that wrote the statement on Christian faith and economic life adopted by the United Church of Christ. Addressing market failure, for her, requires that sometimes "freedom to choose" give way to other human values. William McGurn, a journalist and a Roman Catholic, uses his expertise in economics to reflect on the teachings of the church concerning the morality of the market. For McGurn, humans reach their fullest potential when they are free from the constraints of others. He writes that "our quarrel is not so much with Adam Smith or Milton Friedman but with the Providence that so clearly designed man to be his most prosperous at his most free." This book grapples with the new imperatives of a global economy while working in the classic tradition of political economy which always treated seriously the questions of morality, justice, productivity, and freedom.
Download or read book Ethics Efficiency and the Market written by Allen E. Buchanan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1985 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This clear and incisive book provides the ideal critical synthesis of the best thinking on one of the most important moral, social, and political issues of our time: the role of the market as a basic institution of social organization. It articulates the two main types of arguments for and against the market--efficiency arguments and ethical arguments--and examines their conceptual, empirical, and moral presuppositions, as well as their implications for capitalist, socialist, and market-socialist economic arragements. Among the many striking features of the argument is Buchanan's contention that the allegedly purely technical notions of efficiency current in the social science literature rest on unexamined ethical assumptions and that the ethical arguments offered by philosophers and political theorists depend upon unexamined assumptions about efficiency. Buchanan also contends that the problem of relativism for judgments comparing social systems is no less serious for efficiency claims than for ethical claims. This short, accessible book will raise the quality of the debate in both philosophy and the social sciences. It is an ideal introduction to its subject for students in political and social theory, economics, comparative politics, and philosophy.
Download or read book The Morals of the Market written by Jessica Whyte and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fatal embrace of human rights and neoliberalism Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to “civilisation”. Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects.
