Fred Hirsch's Social Limits Growth is one of the sleeper hits of economics. Its brilliant and acute insights, informed by Hirsch’s experience as a journalist at The Economist before turning to academia, have become ever more relevant as liberal capitalism confronts challenges from austerity to the global race for scarce resources.Hirsch makes the case for what he calls "positional goods", which derive their value from being scarce in ways that can’t be relieved by...

Continuing his groundbreaking analysis of economic structures, Douglass North develops an analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies, both at a given time and over time. Institutions exist, he argues, due to the uncertainties involved in human interaction; they are the constraints devised to structure that interaction. Yet, institutions vary widely in their consequences for economic performance; some econo...

When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of "one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century" (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. In her long-awaited Responsibility for Ju...

What's wrong with markets in everything? Markets today are widely recognized as the most efficient way in general to organize production and distribution in a complex economy. And with the collapse of communism and rise of globalization, it's no surprise that markets and the political theories supporting them have seen a considerable resurgence. For many, markets are an all-purpose remedy for the deadening effects of bureaucracy and state control. But what about those markets we might labe...

Karl Marx's Capital is one of the most important texts written in the modern era. Since 1867, when the first of its three volumes was published, it has had a profound effect on politics and economics in theory and practice throughout the world. But Marx wrote in the context of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, and his assumptions and analysis need to be updated in order to address to the technological, economic, and industrial change that has followed Capita...

In political theory, the traditional model of state power was that elected officials make policy decisions which are then faithfully executed by a lower cadre of public servants. The complexity of the modern state, however, leaves this model outdated. The vast number of economic and social problems it confronts is such that a great deal of rule-making power is now delegated to a class of civil servants. Yet many political philosophers have not taken this model up, and the field has ignored...

The effects of economic decision making are far-reaching. Economics is more than just business—the course of government, society, and more has been determined, to a large degree, by economic players. This comprehensive volume takes a three-pronged approach to introduce readers to the essentials of economics: after providing an overview of basic economic concepts, it chronicles the development of economics as a discipline and then launches into an examination of the various economic systems...

An influential sociologist revives materialist explanations of class, while accommodating the best of rival cultural theory.Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, analysis of class and other basic structures of capitalism was sidelined by theorists who argued that social and economic life is reducible to culture—that our choices reflect interpretations of the world around us rather than the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Today, capitalism is back...

This book shows through argument and numerous policy-related examples how understanding moral philosophy can improve economic analysis, how moral philosophy can benefit from economists' analytical tools, and how economic analysis and moral philosophy together can inform public policy. Part I explores the idea of rationality and its connections to ethics, arguing that when they defend their formal model of rationality, most economists implicitly espouse contestable moral principles. Part II...

Originally published in 1975, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff is a very personal work from one of the most important macroeconomists of the last hundred years. And this new edition includes ""Further Thoughts on Equality and Efficiency,"" a paper published by the author two years later.In classrooms Arthur M. Okun may be best remembered for Okun's Law, but his lasting legacy is the respect and admiration he earned from economists, practitioners, and policymakers. ...

Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Michael Albert would disagree.Realizing Hope offers a speculative vision of a future beyond capitalism - an alternative to the exploitation of human labour, the unchecked destruction of the earth, and the oppression of all for the benefit of the few. Participatory economics - parecon for short - is Albert's concrete proposal for a classless economy, developed from anarchist pr...

The legitimate and illegitimate use of incentives in society todayIncentives can be found everywhere—in schools, businesses, factories, and government—influencing people's choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, man...