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Mainstream economics assumes economic agents act and make decisions to maximize their utility. This model of economic behavior, based on rational choice theory, has come under increasing attack in economics because it does not accurately reflect the way people behave and reason. The shift towards a more realistic account of economic agents has been mostly associated with the rise of behavioral economics, which views individuals through the lens of bounded rationality. Identity, Capabilities, and Changing Economics goes further and uses identity analysis to build on this critique of the utility conception of individuals, arguing it should be replaced by a conception of economic agents in an uncertain world as socially embedded and identified with their capabilities. Written by one of the world's leading philosophers of economics, the book develops a new approach to economics' theory of the individual, explaining individuals as adaptive and reflexive rather than utility maximizing.

The concept of the individual and his/her motivations is a bedrock of philosophy. All strands of thought at heart come down to a particular theory of the individual. Economics, though, is guilty of taking this hugely important concept without questioning how we theorise it. This superb book remedies this oversight.The new approach put forward by Davis is to pay more attention to what moral philosophy may offer us in the study of personal identity, self consciousness and will. This crosses the traditional boundaries of economics and will shed new light on the distinction between positive an

"This book examines the different conceptions of the individual that have emerged in recent new approaches in economics, including behavioral economics, experimental economics, social preferences approaches, game theory, neuroeconomics, evolutionary and complexity economics, and the capability approach. These conceptions are classified according to whether they seek to revise the traditional atomist individual conception, put new emphasis on interaction and relations between individuals, account for individuals as evolving and self-organizing, and explain individuals in terms of capabilities. The method of analysis uses two identity criteria for distinguishing and re-identifying individuals to determine whether these different individual conceptions successfully identify individuals. Successful individual conceptions account for sub-personal and supra-personal bounds on single individual explanations. The former concerns the fragmentation of individuals into multiple selves; the latter concerns the dissolution of individuals into the social. The book develops an understanding of bounded individuality, seen as central to the defense of human rights"--

This volume expands on the standard economic framework of 'global economy' by looking at the way in which economic life is framed by society and social relationships and investigates how social values influence and help determine economic values.

Interest in John Maynard Keynes's economic, political and philosophical thinking has undergone a tremendous revival in the last decade. The essays and comments collected in this volume were written on a set of themes representative of the current state of interpretation of Keynes's thinking. Some of the topics investigated have received much attention in the past, and some are of more recent interest. In the former category are topics on standard issues in the interpretation of Keynes's economics: the transition in Keynes's thinking from the The Treatise on Money to The General Theory, the nature of the argument in The General Theory, and Keynes's economic policy views. The latter category introduces themes of a wider nature, and includes two papers on Keynes's vision and one on Keynes's philosophical thinking. The strategy adopted in the selection of topics was to review the debates over Keynes's economics from fresh perspectives, and then go on to supply discussions of broader issues concerning the nature of Keynes as a thinker. This collection as a whole adds to our general understanding of Keynes's work, and contributes to the current revival of interest in Keynes

The task given to me for this issue was to discuss the history, challenges, and accomplishments of the History of Economics Society (HES) as I see them from my vantage point as a past president. I frame my remarks in terms of changes I believe have occurred in how our field has been pursued in the society since I became involved.

ABSTRACT This paper characterizes a pandemic as a kind of contagion, and describes a contagion as a two-level, two-direction, reflexive feedback loop system. In such a system, expert opinions for managing a pandemic can act as self-fulfilling prophecies due to how they influence collective belief formation. However, when multiple experts produce multiple expert opinions that act as self-fulfilling prophecies, this can fragment a society's response to a pandemic, worsening rather than ameliorating it. This paper models this possible outcome by distinguishing two competing expert opinions, appealing respectively to people in club good and common pool types of employment/health insurance situations, and argues that to combat fragmentation of opinion about how to address a pandemic, public health policy needs to attend to the nature of public reasoning. It argues this entails asking how just and legitimate deliberative institutions can function in an 'inclusive and noncoercive' way that allows society to reconcile competing visions regarding how to combat system-wide crises such as pandemics.