In: Alcohol and alcoholism: the international journal of the Medical Council on Alcoholism (MCA) and the journal of the European Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism (ESBRA), Volume 45, Issue 2, p. 173-179
"This book examines how the Cambridge School economists, such as J.M. Keynes, constructed revolutionary theories and advocated drastic policies based on their ideals for social organizations and their personal characteristics. Although vast numbers of studies on Marshall, Keynes and Marshallians have been published, there have been very few studies on the 'Keynesian Revolution' or Keynes's relevance to the modern world from archival and intellectual viewpoints which focus on Keynes as a member of the Cambridge School. This book approaches Keynes from three directions: person, time and perspective. The book provides a better understanding of how Keynes struggled with problems of his time and it also offers valuable lessons on how to survive fluctuating global capitalism today. It focuses on eight key economists as a group in 'a public sphere' rather than as a school (a unified theoretical denominator), and clarifies their visions and the widespread beliefs at the time by investigating their common motivations, lifestyles, values and habits"--
Society drifts apart in many dimensions. Economists focus on income of the poor and rich and the distribution of income but a broader spectrum of dimensions is required to draw the picture of multiple facets of individual life. In our study of multidimensional polarization we extend the income dimension by time, a pre-requisite and fundamental resource of any individual activity. In particular, we consider genuine personal time as a pronounced source of social participation in the sense of social inclusion/exclusion and Amartya Sen's capability approach. With an interdependence approach to multidimensional polarization we allow compensation between time and income, parameters of a CES-type subjective well-being function, where a possible substitution is evaluated empirically by the German population instead of arbitrarily chosen. Beyond subjective well-being indices we propose and apply a new intensity/gap measure to multidimensional polarization, the mean minimum polarization gap 2DGAP. This polarization intensity measure provides transparency with regard to each single attribute, which is important for targeted policies, while at the same time their interdependent relations is respected. The empirical investigation of interdependent multidimensional polarization incidence and intensity uses the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and detailed time use diary data from the three German Time Use Surveys (GTUS) 1991/92, 2001/02 and the actual 2012/13. We focus on the working individuals where the working poor requires increasing interest in the economic and social political discussion. The microeconometric two-stage selectivity corrected estimation of interdependent multidimensional risk (incidence) and intensity quantifies socio-economic factors behind. Four striking results appear: First, genuine personal leisure time additional to income is a significant subjective well-being and polarization dimension. Second, its interdependence, its compensation/substitution, evaluated by the German Society, is of economic and statistical significance. Remarkably, besides compensation regimes, there are interdependent multidimensional polarization regimes where even higher income cannot compensate time deficits. Third, interdependent multidimensional polarization incidence (headcount ratio) decreased over those 20 years in Germany, however and in particular, as shown by the new minimum 2DGAP approach, interdependent multidimensional polarization intensity increased over those 20 years in Germany. Fourth, there are different multidimensional polarization results and developments for the poverty and affluence poles and regimes, for fulltime selfemployed, employees and subsequently for further socio-economic groups. And, polarization also appears with respect to social participation.
This article examines certain issues in postwar economic theory and compares them with related issues in the nascent fields of cybernetics, industrial dynamics, and operations research. Because all these fields had close connections to MIT, the comparison provides an opportunity to assess to what degree a peculiar MIT "style" of economics, developed particularly by Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, could be attributed to the MIT context, and to what degree this style developed in dialogue with a larger conversation taking place in and around the American economic profession as a whole. It is concluded that there were significant affinities in theoretical interest running between MIT economics and other fields at MIT, which revolved around the emergence of macro-scale phenomena out of the dynamic interplay of local decision-making processes. However, the methodology through which Samuelson and Solow, in particular, addressed these issues was peculiar to economic discourse.
Abstract Consumer behavior and sociological research have recognized early on the negative externalities of exposure to conspicuous consumption: anxiety, debt and wasteful consumption. This article contributes to political economy by incorporating the costs of exposure to wealth-signaling consumption into the materialist self-interest model of social policy preferences. The argument is that exposure to conspicuous consumption reduces support for social spending and increases demand for lower income taxes. Tax cuts impact purchasing power directly, allowing individuals to keep up with consumption standards and to avoid looking poor by comparison. Two USA-based analyses using fine-grained data on consumption and individual attitudes at the zip code and county level support the argument. Importantly, less-affluent citizens are more likely to prioritize cuts to social spending over tax increases, at higher levels of conspicuous consumption. Additional analyses rule out alternative explanations like upward mobility prospects, local wealth effects and partisan context.
What is Economics? -- Explaining the Behaviour of Individuals: Theory of Consumer Choice -- Demand and Supply: the Price Mechanism in a Market Economy -- Markets and Competition -- Production Economics: Theory of the Firm -- Factors of Production and their Rewards: Theory of Distribution -- Market Failure: Some Problems of Using the Market to Allocate Resources -- Macroeconomics: the Workings of the Whole Economy -- International Trade -- Government Policy for Agriculture and Rural Areas.
Introduction -- Thinking Like an Economist, Especially in a Less Developed Country -- The Ethical Basis of Economic Theory and Practice -- Institutions, Morality Norms and Development -- Amartya Sen's Ideas in the Context of Socio-Economic Progress of Bangladesh -- Is there an Economics of Social Business?
This paper puts the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 into its historical and economic context. It points out that the developments which led to the demise of communism were not restricted to the Soviet Bloc but part of a longer-term crisis of the global economy. Using Kondtratieff's theory of Long Waves in capitalist developments, this paper shows how the end of the long post-war boom in around 1974 represented the top of the Kondtratieff wave and that the primary recession of 1979-82 and the deflationary policies carried out in order to restore capitalist profitability at that point also laid the ground for the undermining of the Soviet Bloc economies. 1989 is therefore seen as the consequence of the shift to global financialisation of the economy which necessitated a competitive catch-up policy in the form of Perestroika, the corollary of which was a readiness on the part of the Soviet Union to let Eastern Europe go its own way. The period since 1989 in Germany is presented as one in which the major party of the Centre-Left, the SPD, was forced to tack to the neo-liberal wind but which left the space for the PDS/Linke to profile itself as a left alternative. The current crisis, which the author contends will issue into a long Kondtratieff depression lasting until around 2020, means that social and economic priorities will shift away from the market and back towards the re-establishment of the primacy of politics over the market. This will put Die Linke in a strong position to represent the disadvantaged and force the SPD back towards a more leftist position. The end result, the author contends, will be a realignment of the Left into a solid block on the basis of the changed demography of a reunited Germany and a global economic crisis.