This book contains the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years. Nelson and Winter focus their critique on the basic question of how firms and industries change overtime. They marshal significant objections to the fundamental neoclassical assumptions of profit maximization and market equilibrium, which they find ineffective in the analysis of technological innovation and the dynamics of competition among firms. To replace these assumptions, they borrow from biology the concept of natural selection to construct a precise and detailed evolutionary theory of business behavior. They grant that films are motivated by profit and engage in search for ways of improving profits, but they do not consider them to be profit maximizing. Likewise, they emphasize the tendency for the more profitable firms to drive the less profitable ones out of business, but they do not focus their analysis on hypothetical states of industry equilibrium. The results of their new paradigm and analytical framework are impressive. Not only have they been able to develop more coherent and powerful models of competitive firm dynamics under conditions of growth and technological change, but their approach is compatible with findings in psychology and other social sciences. Finally, their work has important implications for welfare economics and for government policy toward industry.

Most of the essays in this book were first collected together in October 1931, immediately after Britain had left the gold standard. They reflected Keynes's attempts over the previous dozen years to influence public opinion and policy over the Treaty of Versailles, over which he had resigned from the Treasury in June 1919, reparations and inter-allied war debts, stabilisation policy, the gold standard and the shape of liberal politics in Britain. In 1972 the essays were reprinted but with the full texts of the pamphlets he had included -- Can Lloyd George Do it?, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, A Short View of Russia, and The End of Laissez Faire. At that time, the full texts of his of his two post-1931 pamphlets -- The Means to Prosperity and How to Pay for the War -- were added. As a result the book contains examples of Keynes's finest writing on economic policy and politics.

Governments and institutions, perhaps even more than markets, determine who gets what in our society. They make the crucial choices about who pays the taxes, who gets into college, who gets medical care, who gets drafted, where the hazardous waste dump is sited, and how much we pay for public services. Debate about these issues inevitably centers on the question of whether the solution is "fair." In this book, H. Peyton Young offers a systematic explanation of what we mean by fairness in distributing public resources and burdens, and applies the theory to actual cases.

Janos Kornai, a distinguished Hungarian economist, began his adult life as an ardent believer in socialism and then became a critic of the communist political and economic system. He lost family members in the Holocaust, contributed to the ideological preparation for the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and became an influential theorist of the post-Soviet economic transition. He has been a journalist, a researcher prohibited from teaching in his home country, and a tenured professor at Harvard. By Force of Thought traces Kornai's lifelong intellectual journey and offers a subjective complement to his academic research.Disenchanted with communism, Kornai published Overcentralization (1956), the first book written by someone living behind the Iron Curtain to be openly critical of Soviet-style economics. Although it was attacked in Hungary, it was hailed by Western economists. The Kornai-Liptak theory on two-level planning captured the attention of mathematical economists. Kornai went on to publish the controversial Anti-Equilibrium (1971), a critique of the general equilibrium theory underpinning mainstream economic analyses of markets, Economics of Shortage (1980), The Road to a Free Economy (1990), and the summary of his lifetime research, The Socialist System (1992). An intellectual emissary between East and West, Kornai commuted between Harvard and Budapest for many years.Kornai's memoir describes his research--including his present-day evaluation of his past work--as well as the social and political environments in which he did his work. The difficulties faced by a critic of central planning in a communist country are made especially vivid by material from newly opened secret police files and informers' reports on his activities. By Force of Thought will be an essential resource for students of economic thought, socialist systems, and postsocialist transition, and for readers interested in Eastern European intellectual life before, during, and after communism.

Disagreements about the morality of markets, and about self-interested behavior within markets, run deep. They arise from perspectives within economics and political philosophy that appear to have nothing in common. In this book, Daniel Finn provides a framework for understanding these conflicting points of view. Recounting the arguments for and against markets and self-interest, he argues that every economy must address four fundamental problems: allocation, distribution, scale, and the quality of relations. In addition, every perspective on the morality of markets addresses explicitly or implicitly the economic, political, and cultural contexts of markets, or what Finn terms 'the moral ecology of markets'. His book enables a dialogue among the various participants in the debate over justice in markets. In this process, Finn engages with major figures in political philosophy, including John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Michael Walzer, as well as in economics, notably Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and James Buchannan.

This book brings together key players in the current debate on positive and normative science and philosophy and value judgements in economics. Both editors have engaged in these debates throughout their careers from its early foundations; Putnam as a doctorial student of Hans Reichenbach at UCLA and Walsh a junior member of Lord Robbins's department at the London School of Economics, both in the early 1950s. This book collects recent contributions from Martha Nussbaum and Harvey Gram, as well as a new chapter from the editors.

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By the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, an essential and paradigm-altering framework for understanding economic development--for both rich and poor--in the twenty-first century.
Freedom, Sen argues, is both the end and most efficient means of sustaining economic life and the key to securing the general welfare of the world's entire population. Releasing the idea of individual freedom from association with any particular historical, intellectual, political, or religious tradition, Sen clearly demonstrates its current applicability and possibilities. In the new global economy, where, despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers--perhaps even the majority of people--he concludes, it is still possible to practically and optimistically restain a sense of social accountability. Development as Freedom is essential reading.

When the term 'rational' is used in formal economic theory, a strict definition is implicit. This strict definition cannot accommodate the complexities of our everyday ideas of what is rational. The concept of rationality that is embedded in our language is not a morally neutral one. It has always been believed possible to argue rationally about the worthiness of goals, the legitimacy of claim to rights, the existence of obligations or duties. Outside the discussions of the social sciences, argument concerning the rationality of a choice or action is never a purely technical, value-free discourse. This book is devoted to an examination of the limitations of the various formulations and interpretations of the concept of rationality which has been developed by economic theorists. It presents a series of challenges to the formal (axiomatic) concept of rationality. This conecept has spread from economics and decision theory through the social sciences and policy studies. It forms the implicit foundation for the pronouncement of policy-makers, whose recommendations can seriously affect the society and environment in which we live. The book begins with the claim of neoclassical economics that a rational agent maximizes utility. Next it considers the later, more austere construction of rationality where a rational agent was simply one whose choices or actions were consistent. The discussion then turns to who, dissatisfied with this bare notion of consistency, claimed that a rational agent was one whose choices or actions were directed towards maximization of the agent's self-interested aims - a view they attributed (misleadingly?) to Adam Smith. Once the character of the individual agent has been established, neoclassical theory has always regarded the analysis of allocation among these agents as its supreme task. This is the subject of chapters 6 and 7. Vivian Walsh examines the philosophical implications of the replacement of the ordinary concept of rationality by the formal concepts constructed to fit the requirements of general equilibrium theory, decision theory, and game theory. He argues that the current intellectual climate, which has moved away from formalism, necessitates the reexamination of the concepts of rationality which scholars and policy-makers, many of whom were not economists, were ready to adopt directly or indirectly from economic theory in the recent past. The final two chapters are intended to contrast sharply with the rest of the book. They offer a readable and minimally technical account of the much smaller role played by the concept of rational choice in the work of a present-day school which derives from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical economists.

This book brings together and develops some of the most important economic, social, and ethical ideas Sen has explored over the last two decades. It examines the claims of equality in social arrangements, stressing that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than either their resources or their welfare. Sen also looks at some types of inequality that have been less systematically studied than those of class or wealth.

本书乃作者二十多年学术研究的结晶。十八篇论文分为两大部分：一为“宋代财政诸问题研究”；二为“宋代史籍、类书等考论”。第一部分主要围绕宋代的“内库”、“计钱的省陌制”、“舒州酒务公文”以及“宋代经济生活中的市侩”等问题详加析论，颇多新见。第二部分则对宋史研究中常用的一些史籍、类书作了考论，或质疑，或辑补，用力甚勤。本书对读者了解、研究宋代历史，尤其是宋代经济史颇有益助。