Download or read book The Curious Culture of Economic Theory written by Ran Spiegler and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One economist's reflections on the professional culture of economic theory"--

Download or read book The Curious Culture of Economic Theory written by Ran Spiegler and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essay collection that insightfully explores the professional culture of contemporary economic theory, highlighting key features of successful economic theory from the last quarter century. When is a theoretical result taken seriously enough for economic application? How do theorists actively try to influence this judgment? What determines whether a new theoretical subfield adopts a “pure” or an “applied” style? How do theorists respond to economists’ penchant for “rational” explanations of human behavior? These are just some of the questions regarding the professional culture of contemporary economic theory that Ran Spiegler attempts to answer in this incisive essay collection, The Curious Culture of Economic Theory. In exploring these questions, Spiegler addresses the norms that economic theorists apply as they produce, evaluate, and disseminate research. Introducing a new genre—a kind of cultural criticism of economic theory—the essays in this unique collection highlight elements of style and rhetoric that characterize classic pieces of economic theory from the last quarter century. For each piece, Spiegler offers a precise yet accessible exposition of modern classics of economic theory while placing them in the broader context of the field’s professional culture. Affectionate in its criticism and anthropological in its approach, The Curious Culture of Economic Theory is as valuable a complement to standard textbooks in graduate-level economic theory, game theory, and behavioral economics as it is to the libraries of practicing economic theorists, academic economists, historians of economic thought, and philosophers of economics.

Download or read book Economics Culture and Social Theory written by William A. Jackson and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: . . . the book is excellent in setting out and explaining a fundamental critique of economics one moreover that has been missed by most other current critics of the field. Making this case is an achievement. Hopefully, it will have a greater impact than its author probably expects. Journal of Cultural Economics Economics evolved by perfecting the taking of culture out of its reductionist and virtual world. But culture has recently been reintroduced, both as a sphere of application for an otherwise unchanging methodology and as a weak form of acknowledging that the economic alone is inadequate as the basis even for explaining the economy. This volume is an essential critical starting point for understanding the changing relationship between economics and culture and in offering a more satisfactory and stable union between the two. Ben Fine, University of London, UK Economics, Culture and Social Theory examines how culture has been neglected in economic theorising and considers how economics could benefit by incorporating ideas from social and cultural theory. Orthodox economics has prompted a long line of cultural criticism that goes back to the origins of economic theory and extends to recent debates surrounding postmodernism. William A. Jackson discusses the cultural critique of economics, identifies the main arguments, and assesses their implications. Among the topics covered are relativism and realism, idealism and materialism, agency and structure, hermeneutics, semiotics, and cultural evolution. Drawing from varied literatures, notably social and cultural theory, the book stresses the importance of culture for economic behaviour and looks at the prospects for a renewed and culturally informed economics. The book will be invaluable to heterodox economists and to anyone interested in the links between culture and the economy. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, arguing against the isolation of economics, and will therefore hold wide appeal for social scientists working in related fields, as well as for economists specialising in cultural economics and economic methodology.

Download or read book Cultural Economics and Theory written by David Hamilton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-10-16 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Hamilton is a leader in the American institutionalist school of heterodox economics that emerged after WWII. This volume includes 25 articles written by Hamilton over a period of nearly half a century. In these articles he examines the philosophical foundations and practical problems of economics. The result of this is a unique institutionalist view of how economies evolve and how economics itself has evolved with them. Hamilton applies insight gained from his study of culture to send the message that human actions situated in culture determine our economic situation. David Hamilton has advanced heterodox economics by replacing intellectual concepts from orthodox economics that hinder us with concepts that help us. In particular, Hamilton has helped replace equilibrium with evolution, make-believe with reality, ideological distortion of government with practical use of government, the economy as a product of natural law with the economy as a product of human law and, last, he has helped us replace the entrepreneur as a hero with the entrepreneur as a real person. These articles provide an alternative to the self-adjusting market. They provide an explanation of how the interaction of cultural patterns and technology determine the evolutionary path of the economic development of a nation. This is not a simple materialist depiction of economic history as some Marxists have advocated, instead Hamilton treats technology and culture as endogenous forces, embedded and inseparable from each other and therefore, economic development. This volume will be of most interest and value to professional economists and graduate students who are looking for an in-depth explanation of the origins and significance of institutional economics.

Download or read book How Economics Became a Mathematical Science written by E. Roy Weintraub and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In How Economics Became a Mathematical Science E. Roy Weintraub traces the history of economics through the prism of the history of mathematics in the twentieth century. As mathematics has evolved, so has the image of mathematics, explains Weintraub, such as ideas about the standards for accepting proof, the meaning of rigor, and the nature of the mathematical enterprise itself. He also shows how economics itself has been shaped by economists’ changing images of mathematics. Whereas others have viewed economics as autonomous, Weintraub presents a different picture, one in which changes in mathematics—both within the body of knowledge that constitutes mathematics and in how it is thought of as a discipline and as a type of knowledge—have been intertwined with the evolution of economic thought. Weintraub begins his account with Cambridge University, the intellectual birthplace of modern economics, and examines specifically Alfred Marshall and the Mathematical Tripos examinations—tests in mathematics that were required of all who wished to study economics at Cambridge. He proceeds to interrogate the idea of a rigorous mathematical economics through the connections between particular mathematical economists and mathematicians in each of the decades of the first half of the twentieth century, and thus describes how the mathematical issues of formalism and axiomatization have shaped economics. Finally, How Economics Became a Mathematical Science reconstructs the career of the economist Sidney Weintraub, whose relationship to mathematics is viewed through his relationships with his mathematician brother, Hal, and his mathematician-economist son, the book’s author.

Download or read book Culture and Economic Action written by Laura E. Grube and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2015-06-29 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume, a collection of both theoretical essays and empirical studies, presents an Austrian economics perspective on the role of culture in economic action. The authors illustrate that culture cannot be separated from economic action, but t

Download or read book The Theory of Learning in Games written by Drew Fudenberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explains that equilibrium is the long-run outcome of a process in which non-fully rational players search for optimality over time. The models they e×plore provide a foundation for equilibrium theory and suggest ways for economists to evaluate and modify traditional equilibrium concepts.

Download or read book The Illusion of Free Markets written by Bernard E. Harcourt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.

Download or read book A New Economic Theory of Public Support for the Arts written by Arnaldo Barone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should the arts receive public support? Can the arts survive in a modern capitalist society? Can economics shed light on the nature of public support, and whether there is a rationale for public intervention? This book undertakes to examine these questions as it explores the ways government and public resources are used to support the arts. This book applies a Veblenian approach to understanding economic development to investigate public support for the arts in an effort to determine whether this approach can elucidate economic rationales for public support. Divided into three parts, the first provides basic information on public support for the arts by surveying support in the United States and Australia. Part two includes a neoclassical overview of the topic while part three presents Veblen’s ideas on economic development. This book will be of interests to researchers concerned with cultural and institutional economics, as well as political economy.

Download or read book Economic Lives written by Viviana A. Zelizer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-24 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the human side of economic life Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. No one has played a greater role in this development than Viviana Zelizer, one of the world's leading sociologists. Economic Lives synthesizes and extends her most important work to date, demonstrating the full breadth and range of her field-defining contributions in a single volume for the first time. Economic Lives shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. Economic Lives ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity—as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises. Providing an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field, Economic Lives promises to be widely read and discussed.

Download or read book Economics written by Melvin W. Reder and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-01-15 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1930s economists have increasingly emphasized the scientific, quantitative side of their field, which has directed research to topics that can be elaborated through mathematical models. Economist Melvin Reder argues that this ongoing historical shift has been the result of pressure from two directions: from society's demand that expert advice be based on "scientific findings," and from economists themselves, who have wanted to view their own profession as a science. Economics: The Culture of a Controversial Science describes the profession of economics as it has developed in response to these challenges.

Download or read book Integral Economics written by Ronnie Lessem and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why on earth is economics perceived to come in only one or at best two different a-cultural if not a-moral guises? There are real, and many, alternatives to the economic mainstream. The trouble is, of course, that they are hidden from us. In Integral Economics Ronnie Lessem and Alexander Schieffer pave the way for a sustainable approach to economics, building on the richness of diverse economic approaches from all over the globe. By introducing the most evolved economic perspectives and bringing them into creative dialogue they argue that neither individual enterprises nor wider society will be transformed for the better without a new economic perspective. Here, they introduce a comprehensive framework based on the same 'Four Worlds' model that is applied to enterprise and research in their earlier works. Given the richness of even mainstream economic theory reviewed in this book, let alone the variety of alternative approaches introduced, it is frustrating that policymakers and business practitioners are impoverished by a lack of apparent economic choice - between a seemingly failing capitalism and an already failed communism. The 'villains of the piece' in relation to this lack of choice are not so much the financial community and governments, though they do have much to answer, but the schools of economics and the business schools, that have created the very social ethos, the philosophical principles, and the mathematical models, that influence events. Integral Economics is partly addressed to academics and students in those very schools, who have either realized the error of their ways, or, less dramatically, are curious to explore whether our businesses and communities could be run in a different way. It will be welcomed by informed senior practitioners, eager to understand the current rethink of economic theory and practice and to discover how to position themselves, their organizations, and their society within a new framework.

Download or read book Culture and Prosperity written by John Kay and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2004-05-25 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain's leading economic columnist explores the nature of market economies, what makes them dynamic--and what limits their power.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of the History of Global Economic Thought written by Vincent Barnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-27 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of the History of Global Economic Thought offers the first comprehensive overview of the long-run history of economic thought from a truly international perspective. Although globalization has facilitated the spread of ideas between nations, the history of economics has tended to be studied either thematically (by topic), in terms of different currents of thought, or individually (by economist). Work has been published in the past on the economic thought traditions of specific countries, but this pioneering volume is unique in offering a wide-ranging comparative account of the development of economic ideas and philosophies on the international stage. The volume brings together leading experts on the development of economic ideas from across the world in order to offer a truly international comparison of the economics within nation-states. Each author presents a long-term perspective on economics in their region, allowing global patterns in the progress of economic ideas over time to be identified. The specially commissioned chapters cover the vast sweep of the history of economics across five world regions, including Europe (England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy Greece, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, Russia and the Ukraine), the Americas (the USA, Canada, Mexico and Central America, Spanish-Speaking South America, Brazil and the Caribbean), the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, Arab-Islamic Economics, Persia/Iran, North Africa), Africa (West Africa, Southern Africa, Mozambique and Angola), and the Asia-Pacific Region (Australia and New Zealand, China, Southeast Asia, the Asian Tigers, India.) This rigorous, ambitious and highly scholarly volume will be of key interest to students, academics, policy professionals and to interested general readers across the globe.

Download or read book Individuality and Entanglement written by Herbert Gintis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly transdisciplinary account of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and behavior In this book, acclaimed economist Herbert Gintis ranges widely across many fields—including economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, moral philosophy, and biology—to provide a rigorous transdisciplinary explanation of some fundamental characteristics of human societies and social behavior. Because such behavior can be understood only through transdisciplinary research, Gintis argues, Individuality and Entanglement advances the effort to unify the behavioral sciences by developing a shared analytical framework—one that bridges research on gene-culture coevolution, the rational-actor model, game theory, and complexity theory. At the same time, the book persuasively demonstrates the rich possibilities of such transdisciplinary work. Everything distinctive about human social life, Gintis argues, flows from the fact that we construct and then play social games. Indeed, society itself is a game with rules, and politics is the arena in which we affirm and change these rules. Individuality is central to our species because the rules do not change through inexorable macrosocial forces. Rather, individuals band together to change the rules. Our minds are also socially entangled, producing behavior that is socially rational, although it violates the standard rules of individually rational choice. Finally, a moral sense is essential for playing games with socially constructed rules. People generally play by the rules, are ashamed when they break the rules, and are offended when others break the rules, even in societies that lack laws, government, and jails. Throughout the book, Gintis shows that it is only by bringing together the behavioral sciences that such basic aspects of human behavior can be understood.

Download or read book Understanding the Culture of Markets written by Virgil Henry Storr and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Black American Cinema offers a fresh collection of essays on African American film, media, and visual culture in the era of global multiculturalism. Integrating theory, history, and criticism, the contributing authors deftly connect interdisciplinary perspectives from American studies, cinema studies, cultural studies, political science, media studies, and Queer theory. This multidisciplinary methodology expands the discursive and interpretive registers of film analysis. From Paul Robeson's and Sidney Poitier's star vehicles to Lee Daniels's directorial forays, these essays address the career legacies of film stars, examine various iterations of Blaxploitation and animation, question the comedic politics of "fat suit" films, and celebrate the innovation of avant-garde and experimental cinema.

Download or read book What Money Wants written by Noam Yuran and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One thing all mainstream economists agree upon is that money has nothing whatsoever to do with desire. This strange blindness of the profession to what is otherwise considered to be a basic feature of economic life serves as the starting point for this provocative new theory of money. Through the works of Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and Max Weber, What Money Wants argues that money is first and foremost an object of desire. In contrast to the common notion that money is but an ordinary object that people believe to be money, this book explores the theoretical consequences of the possibility that an ordinary object fulfills money's function insofar as it is desired as money. Rather than conceiving of the desire for money as pathological, Noam Yuran shows how it permeates economic reality, from finance to its spectacular double in our consumer economy of addictive shopping. Rich in colorful and accessible examples, from the work of Charles Dickens to Reality TV and commercials, this book convinces us that we must return to Marx and Veblen if we are to understand how brand names, broadcast television, and celebrity culture work. Analyzing both classical and contemporary economic theory, it reveals the philosophical dimensions of the controversy between orthodox and heterodox economics.