“The question I want to pursue, of course, is which economic theories are we talking about? All possible? Those formulated in heterodox approaches? Economists who have contributed to, or who have been informed by, the project of critical realism in economics have, in their more substantive contributions, generated economic theories that posit a variety of novel entities which in large part at least are unobservable. These include particular social relations (gender, race, employer/ employee, student/ teacher, money), other structures of power, social processes, social positions, social rules, evolving totalities, specific institutions, etc.…. This research, like that of others on industrial districts, regions, collective learning and so on, is constantly positing new categories, relations, processes and totalities, etc., many (albeit not all) of which are (or possess essential aspects that are) inevitably unobservable. Indeed, human society itself can only be known, and not seen, to exist.” [Tony Lawson. Reorienting Economics. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Pages 68.]

“… I do not think that the failure of mainstream economics is a consequence of an unfathomable, overly complex and dynamic social reality, nor even of the infeasibility of meaningful experimental control. Rather, the continuing failure of the discipline must be put down to the often quite irrelevant, typically formalistic, methods and techniques which economists naively and unthinkingly wield in a forlorn hope of thereby gaining illumination of a social world that they do not ‘fit.’” [Tony Lawson, “Economic Science Without Experimentation.” Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson, and Alan Norrie, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 1998. Pages 144-185.]

“The greater equality of wealth under a democratic socialism would be a much firmer basis for political democracy. When we the people control the corporations, then the corporations cannot control us. Only then will our formal rules about equality in voting and freedom of speech have a far greater democratic content. Of course, democratic socialism means an on-going struggle for the fullest democratic participation in government and democratic collective control of the economy; it does not simply mean government ownership, where the government is run by a self-selected elite as in the Soviet Union.” [Howard Sherman, “In Defense of Radical Political Economy.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 10, number 3, September 1976. Pages 697-699.]

“Perhaps the utility-max postulate could be replaced by a different axiom—one asserting that the ultimate factors controlling economic activity are the shifting power relationships within the social system. Radicals emphasize the difference between neo-classical economics which deals in market relationships (i.e., those determined by utility maximization) and Marxian economics which emphasizes power. Perhaps today’s radical political economy can bring the economics profession to a paradigm shift whereby ‘power conflicts’ come to be considered the basic force which governs the play of economic variables.” [Stephen T. Worland, “Radical Political Economy as a ‘Scientific Revolution.’” Southern Economic Journal. Volume 39, number 2, October 1972. Pages 274-284.]

“Radical political economy is articulated as a school of economic thought in the late 1960’s and 1970’s in the United States and Western Europe. The term ‘radical’ is interpreted as a theoretical and practical rejection of capitalism, while ‘political economy’ refers to return to tradition of classics and [Karl] Marx. This economic doctrine is focused on Marxist-based analysis and critique of contemporary capitalism, while the influence of other doctrines, such as Keynesianism, neo-Ricardian economics and institutional economics, is noticeable. Radical political economy encompasses a wide range of ideological orientations: anarchism, reformism, environmental, feminist, ethnic, social democratic and communist movements. As the common denominators of supporters of radical political economy, regardless of their ideological orientation, may be indicated.” [Zoran Stefanović and Branislav Mitrović, “The Contribution of Radical Political Economy to Understanding the Great Recession.” Facta Universitatis. Volume 8, number 4, 2011. Pages 345-356.]

“It would appear on the surface … that feminists view the state as a beneficent entity whose effect has been, for the most part, to try to alleviate gender inequity wrought by the market and society. This superficial perspective on feminism and the state can arouse suspicion among radical political economists who, in contrast, have often emphasized a critical perspective on the role of the state in capitalist economies. In fact, feminist empirical studies of the state have emphasized an ambivalent role. First, the macroeconomic development literature has presented sophisticated analyses of the impact of state policy on women’s lives and women’s agency in shaping the direction of policy initiatives.… Second, labor market policies, especially in advanced industrialized countries, has been an important topic.… Finally, feminists have extensively examined the gendered construction of social welfare policies in advanced industrialized and developing countries.” [Ellen Mutari, “Radical Political Economy and the State: Lessons from Gender Theory.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 35, number 3, summer 2003. Pages 296-303.]

“There have been numerous ‘offshoot’ Neo-Marxist schools which have taken on many of the themes and conclusions of the Marxian school, although they should not be considered rigorous applications of classical Marxian theory. We note only the related ‘Dependency School’ of development associated with Raul Prébisch and Andre Gunder Frank, the ‘World Systems’ school associated with Immanuel Wallerstein and the work on radical political economy of David M. Gordon, Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and others. A separate (and unrelated) school is the ‘Analytical Marxian’ school, normally associated with the work of John E. Roemer and John Elster, which attempts to reduce some of the Marxian propositions to conventional, methodological individualism (i.e. with utility-maximizing rational agents, etc.).” [The New School. The Neo-Marxian Schools (“Radical Political Economy”). Retrieved on May 1st, 2009. The original link is now dead.]

“The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) is an interdisciplinary association devoted to the study, development and application of radical political economic analysis to social problems.

“Founded in 1968, URPE presents a continuing critique of the capitalist system and all forms of exploitation and oppression while helping to construct a progressive social policy and create socialist alternatives.”

[Union for Radical Political Economics. Undated membership form. Retrieved on September 28th, 2015.]

“The new reading of Capital in the US finds there a new concept of class different from the concepts of class that prevailed before [Karl] Marx, as well as during his lifetime and that have persisted as if they were Marx’s ever since …. Stated briefly, the prevailing concepts have defined class as a noun; classes are specific groups of people. Most often, such classes refer to groupings according to the property they do or do not own: rich versus poor, owners of means of production versus those without such means, the propertied versus the propertyless. From social critics in ancient Greece and Rome through traditional Marxists writing today, class is defined as a matter of the social distribution of property.” [Richard D. Wolff, “The new reading of Karl Marx’s Capital in the United States.” History of Economics Review. Volume 45, 2007. Pages 26-40.]

“This essay aims to assess the role of imperialism in the economic structure of modern, advanced capitalist nations, particularly the United States. For much of the discussion, my vantage point will be that of the largest oligopolistic corporations which most economists view as comprising the typical locus of decision making—at least on the production side of such economies. Given the shares of total employment, assets, sales, and investible funds usually accounted for by, say, the 500 largest of such corporations, an assessment of the significance of imperialism for them may serve as a first approximation to its significance for the economy as a whole.” [Richard D. Wolff, “Modern Imperialism: The View from the Metropolis.” The American Economic Review. Volume 60, number 2, May 1970. Pages 225-230.]

“One major recent focus has been on [Karl] Marx’s stress in Capital on the production and distribution of surplus located in productive enterprises. This micro-level focus suggests that the alternative to capitalism – where one group of people produces a surplus while a different group appropriates and distributes it – would be enterprises in which the producers of the surplus are also collectively its appropriators and distributors.” [Richard D. Wolff, “Alternatives to Capitalism.” Critical Sociology. Volume 39, number 4, July 2013. Pages 487-490.]

“First, Marxian theory does not see that economy as a unified entity. Instead it sees divisions: prosperity for some is recession for others, government policies hut some and help others, inflations bring pain to some, profits to others. Secondly, it focuses attention on a particular division in society because neoclassical theory simply refuses to see or analyze it and because that refusal blinds neoclassical theory to important aspects of U.S. economic and social problems.” [Richard D. Wolff, “Economic problems and Marxian analysis.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 30, issue 2, June 1988. Pages 38-42.]

“As [Karl] Marx taught, capitalism is cyclical: highly unstable as an economic system. Typically,its prosperous times collapse into recessions and depressions, while depressions eventually give way to economic upswings. The post-World War II boom came to an end in the serious economic downturn of the mid-1970s. The initial hegemony of the U.S. gave way to the rise of Japanese and European capitalisms that became temporarily more profitable than their U.S. counterparts. By the 1970s, a crisis of capitalist enterprise faced the U.S.” [Richard D. Wolff, “The U.S. Economic Crisis: A Marxian Analysis.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. Number 97, June 2001. Pages 82-98.]

“For liberals, freedom refers to an absence of constraints on individuals’ behavior, but according to [Karl] Marx and radical economists, freedom is a freedom to, not a freedom from. Thus Marx was critical of the liberal negative concept of freedom, because for him the distinctive character of humanity lies in the ability to plan conscious activity directed towards satisfying basic human needs. Consequently, the extent to which a society is free is directly reflected to the extent to which a society controls its economy and directs itself in serving the needs of people. Consequently, the obligation of government institutions and related policies is to ensure that basic economic rights and welfare be given highest priority.” [Edward J. Martin and Matthew S. Pimentel, “Viewing the Great Recession through Radical Economics: Social Class, Inequality, and the Social Safety Net.” Global Virtue Ethics Review. Volume 7, number 1, 2014. Pages 70-94.]

“In general, radical economists tend to underestimate the resource scarcity problem. Some radicals even echo the neoclassical dogma of technological utopianism. Furthermore, this optimistic view has been reinforced by an emphasis on the importance of the social relations of production to the exclusion of the resource base of economic systems.…

“There is a widespread view in the radical literature that more or less unlimited abundance will be possible under socialism.”

[John M. Gowdy, “Radical Economics and Resource Scarcity.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 39, number 2, October 1981 Pages 165-180.]

“‘Radical economics’ has two basic meanings. One employs the basic sense of ‘radical,’ whatever goes to the roots of the matter. The other common meaning of radical has to do with whatever diverges from the orthodoxy of the time. This issue examines radical economics in both senses.…

“… The philosophical bases of the economic theories in circulation are often more than two centuries old. But some important ideas from the past have been forgotten, the distinction between wealth and riches is one. Social change also plays a part in the problems. Community friendly capitalism, ridiculed and attacked by some economists, has faded. At a deeper level the tendency for the rich to get much richer while the poorest people in the world are only slightly better off has produced more instability and uncertainty, which economists have not successfully addressed.”

[Leslie Armour, “Introduction: Radical economics and our current predicament.” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 37, number 1, 2010. Pages 168-178.]

“Once the heterodox community emerges, its history becomes one of growth, change, and evolution within the context of a hostile environment. Of particular interest are the histories of subgroups and the forces that affect their growth and divergence or convergence within the community. Consequently, the history of heterodox economics is not just the history of heterodox economic theory; nor is it only the history of networks and institutions. Rather, since networks and institutions affect the development of theory, and since theory has an impact on the type of networks and institutions that emerge, the history of heterodox economics draws on both networks and theories and is thus an emergent synthesis of both.…

“In spite of the McCarthyite repression of the postwar years, scholarly discourse on Marxian and radical economics continued.…

“By the mid-1960s, the young radical economists found that the existing outlets and activities did not provide the specialist forums at which they could discuss topics of particular interest to them or provide the academic base that would support their academic careers.”

[Frederic S. Lee, “History and Identity: The Case of Radical Economics and Radical Economists, 1945-70.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 36, number 2, Spring 2004. Pages 177-195.]

“Radicals are dedicated to constructing alternative theories which will help us create and maintain a decent society — which is the proper goal for theory. Other criteria than efficiency must be added to theory with which to judge a society — individual development, responsiveness of social institutions — democracy, equity, community. Clearly some preference structures are preferable to others — in that people with those preference structures would be happier than with alternative preferences. What kinds of institutions would create those preference structures? What kinds of institutions would allow people to be happy? No one has definitive answers to these questions. What is known is that capitalism is not such a system and to develop a preference structure that places a premium on interpersonal relations, aesthetics, spirituality and sensuality within a capitalist society is a revolutionary act. Radical political economists are involved in that process.” [James H. Weaver, “Toward a Radical Political Economics.” The American Economist. Volume 14, number 1, spring 1970. Pages 57-61.]

“While the development of radical economics as a distinct approach was related to the radicalization process which occurred on the campuses in the mid- and late 1960s, it is also part of a more extensive intellectual tradition which can be traced to the contributions of Karl Marx. The immediate intellectual progenitors of the current crop of radical political economists are a handful of older Marxists. Among the Americans there are Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff; the main influences from abroad are Maurice Dobb, Joan Robinson, and Ernest Mandel. In addition, Herbert Marcuse (philosopher), William Appleman Williams (historian), and C. Wright Mills (sociologist), all rooted in the Marxian tradition, have had an important influence on many young radical economists. Thus, the current character of radical political economy has been shaped by young and old scholars from a variety of disciplines writing from within and without the orthodox Marxian framework.” [Raymond S. Franklin and William K. Tabb, “The Challenge of Radical Political Economics.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 8, number 1, March 1974. Pages 127-150.]

“This paper is clearly not the place fully to develop or defend the scope and method of radical political economics, which is the central function of the Union for Radical Political Economics. But it is clear that the subject matter is vital to an understanding of the economic system and can be integrated with more orthodox material in an introductory course which will be attractive to students and analytically sound. In addition to subject matter, the quality of teaching is important. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that radical political economists and good teachers have a useful role in departments of economics.” [Michael Zweig, “Teaching Radical Political Economics in the Introductory Course.” The American Economic Review. Volume 62, number 1/2, March 1972. Pages 434-438.]

“This article discusses the predecessors of contemporary radical economics, the social origins of radical economics, the radical critique of neoclassical economics, the general radical paradigm, and some specific applications of radical economics.…

“Although some American radicals are influenced by Thorstein Veblen by various other U.S. dissident economists, most are heavily indebted Karl Marx for their inspiration, the questions they ask, and the method use. Very few accept all of [Karl] Marx’s analyses or conclusions. Radical economists stress the need for everyone to think independently, so they will not blindly follow Marx or anyone else.…

“… Marx … recognized that there is no social science separate from ethical values; every significant statement in the social sciences is a combination of fact and value. Marxist social science should reflect the ethical values of oppressed and exploited groups.”

[Howard J. Sherman, “Contemporary Radical Economics.” The Journal of Economic Education. Volume 15, number 4, autumn 1984. Pages 265-274.]

“Economic radicalism is the product of forces external to the discipline as well as internal First, the external forces. Our hypothetical radical economist was a student activist in college and was raised in a home characterized by a high level of political interest. This background led him/her to develop a left of center political perspective as an important part of the primary belief system. Experience as a student activist reinforces these beliefs and contributes to an adult radical perspective. A low level of religiosity and a modest income are associated with economic radicalism, a prediction consistent with traditional Western political alignments and philosophies. Concerning the effect of factors internal to the discipline, the student activism experience leads the activist to seek postgraduate education in economics. While in graduate school the individual finds role models who reinforce a radical perspective. Professional socialization and radicalism will be com patible with a conventional life style.” [Carol Copp, “Scholarly Belief and Attitude Formation: The Case of the Radical Economics Paradigm.” Sociological Focus. Volume 25, number 2, May 1992. Pages 121-138.]

“The proposition examined in this paper is that the public/private divide, a frequent issue in advanced capitalist countries, can be understood by applying [Karl] Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. That is, according to commodity fetishism, the social character of production is invisible to individual producers and consumers. By extension, the value resulting from that social cooperation and division of labor is also attributed to private firms and their products, legitimating their claim to the surplus. Along with authorizing claims regarding income distribution, the notion that commodities and money have intrinsic value leads to distorted economic policies and ineffective social control of capitalist production.” [Ann E. Davis, “The New ‘Voodoo Economics’: Fetishism and the Public/Private Divide.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 45, number 1, 2002. Pages 42-58.]

“The purpose of this article or note is threefold: (1) to point out several inconsistences in Mr. [James H.] Weaver’s article; (2) to raise some questions for Mr. Weaver and his fellow ‘radical political economists’ (even if they are not sure what they are) (x) and; (3) to suggest that orthodox economics can be employed to deal with some of the problems which trouble the ‘radical political economists.’ In connection with this last point it should suffice to say at this time that the LM-IS model will be the application of orthodoxy.” [Peter B. Webb, “Toward a Radical Political Economics.” The American Economist. Volume 15, number 1, spring 1971. Pages 108-111.]

“What of the merits of a radical political economics? As a system to provide for the needs of mankind?very little. True, many of their observations have numerous grains of truth. We, as did Keynes, do not contend that capitalism is perfect, but we do assert that it produces the wherewithal to sustain the popu lace. Where wrinkles exist, they must be ironed out. But this does not mean we should discard the baby with the water. It means that the basic principles of self-interest, competition, and private property must be maintained, but tempered whenever inequities result.” [B. Haroian and P. Grimaldi, “Toward a Radical Political Economics.” The American Economist. Volume 14, number 2, fall 1970. Pages 90-92.]

“When close to 2 billion people lived in societies calling themselves socialist and there were large ‘socialist’ movements in many capitalist economies as well, it was not overly difficult for radical economists to criticize most income from private ownership of productive property as unjust, precisely because it was unearned. Besides, few radical economists owned much productive property themselves, and those few who inherited unseemly amounts usually donated a great deal of it to worthy causes. But it has never been easy for radical economists to criticize income people receive simply because they have more human capital than others, allowing them to produce more valuable goods and services than others can produce, even when they engage in no greater sacrifice than others do. This has always proved a heavy burden for radical economists to carry up the steps to their bully pulpits.” [Robin Hahnel, “Economic Justice.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 37, number 2, spring 2005. Pages 131-154.]

“Capitalists and their allies were impressively disciplined in their long war of position from the 1940s through the 1960s. The long war over ideology is perhaps the most important one for left scholars to wage. New alliances within academia have become possible as reform politics has reached its limits in many cases. For instance, we have been able to successfully reach out to labor relations scholars who for many years were uninterested in radical or Marxian ideas.” [Richard McIntyre and Michael Hillard, “Capitalist Class Agency and the New Deal Order: Against the Notion of a Limited Capital-Labor Accord.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 45, number 2, 2012. Pages 129-148.]

“This present participle of commoning means that the practice is best conceived of as a verb rather than a noun; something that is actively done. As such, commons should not be seen as essential, nor all-or-nothing (either everyone has equal access or it is not a common) but, more sophisticatedly, the commons can be understood as an ongoing concern, constantly negotiated and transformed through lived experience. It is given meaning by the participation of people. To these ends, it seems appropriate here to consider a little articulated element of the commons that appears increasingly relevant in contemporary society: the common resource of mobility.” [Daniel Newman, “The Car and the Commons.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 48, number 1, 2016. Pages 53-65.]

“Without wishing to exhaust the subject, this article will try to reveal the contradiction between economics and democracy in two stages. The first stage concerns the deconstruction of the naturalization process economics has undergone. In this process putative economic laws have been made equivalent to natural laws and economic decisions transformed into plain technical issues supposedly free from democratic debate. The second stage concerns the description of the ways in which the market has managed to legitimize its hegemony in society and the reasons why this contributes to the erosion of democracy. Within this hegemony five aspects will be dealt with: the imposition of a market jurisdiction, the deregulation of the economy, the process of political and economic unaccountability, the de-politicization of choice, and the conflict between the territorialization of democracy and the de-territorialization of the market.” [Manuel Couret Branco, “Economics Against Democracy.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 44, number 1, 2012. Pages 23-39.]

“As a radical, could I have done more in extending my activities beyond academia? The answer is, and always is, yes. But my own personal disposition, and comparative advantage to coin a phrase, to undertake intellectual work has no doubt prejudiced me towards the view that such effort does not necessarily bear fruit. It has often been suggested, for example, that I address a larger audience through popular texts. I deeply applaud the intention behind such suggestions but have difficulty in envisioning what a text would be like that would be fit for purpose. So my response is to ask to be given examples in economics, or otherwise, to be emulated.” [Ben Fine, “Being Radical or Radical Being?” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 44, number 1, 2012. Pages 100-106.]

“There are those who view the history of thought as being only on the intellectual level, in which one idea in economics leads to another. Most radicals would agree that radical economists may also be shaped by their experiences in progressive movements, as illustrated in earlier sections of this article. It is, however, an important hypothesis of the article that many radicals are also shaped by some defining life experience. Karl Marx was shaped not only by the prior movements and revolution of 1848, but also by his personal experience of growing up in an affluent family and then being subjected to grinding poverty in London. I grew up in an affluent family whose ideas were shaped by the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.” [Howard J. Sherman, “The Making of a Radical Economist.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 38, number 4, fall 2006. Pages 519-538.]

“Where support represents a major emphasis of software developers, piracy would be irrelevant. The vendor would serve as a vehicle for the transfer of information about the program.” [Michael Perelman, “High Technology, Intellectual Property, and Public Goods: The Rationality of Socialism.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 20, numbers 2 and 3, 1988. Pages 277-282.]

“Most radicals will probably not agree, but I’ve never seen much benefit in attacking capitalism by showing people that capitalism was not in their economic self-interest. I know the official wisdom of many radicals holds that appealing to anything but one’s self-interest is utopian, but if we are ever going to have kind, loving, selfless people, we’ve got to stop pampering and rewarding their base motives. It is not that self-interest is not important; it is just that appealing to this motive without developing alternatives is counter-productive in the long run.” [Will Cummings, “Teaching Critical Social Consciousness.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 6, number 4, January 1975. Pages 48-54.]

“This paper describes a simple, in-class game which illustrates certain principles of income distribution. The class members earn or produce income in direct proportion to the sum of their scores on a quiz. They then decide by majority vote how the total class income is to be distributed among members of the class. They use the income to purchase letter grades. The following section describes the rules of the game in detail. The second section contains several variations of the game which seem to be particularly effective. The third section describes some of the concepts the game illustrates and contains a brief discussion of distribution, efficiency, and incentive. In the fourth section I discuss the actual playing of the game. The last section contains some general comments on games and simulations. Sources of other games are included in the annotated bibliography.” [Gelvin L. Stevenson, “A Simple Income Distribution Game.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 3, number 3, August 1971. Pages 107-119.]

“Building on [Karl] Marx’s discussion about forms of subsumption of labor under capital, the paper makes the conceptual argument that to the extent that Marx’s four conditions for formal subsumption exist, capitalist social relations exist, even if productivity-increasing technological change is absent; whether property-owners formally subsuming labor will also resort to technological change crucially depends on the balance of power between them and labor. The paper has also critiqued in tandem the view of many radicals who, subscribing to a restrictive view of capitalism, doubt that agriculture in India (and by implication, agriculture in many other similar ex-colonial Third World social formations) is capitalist enough.” [Raju J. Das, “Reconceptualizing Capitalism: Forms of Subsumption of Labor, Class Struggle, and Uneven Development.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 44, number 2, June 2012. Pages 178-200.]

“The article analyzes why many transitional economies have succeeded by pursuing policies that differed significantly from the radical economic liberalization that was credited for economic success in the countries of Central Europe, while many countries with liberal policies have not succeeded. It emphasizes that the art of the policymaker is to create markets without causing government failure, as happened in many countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.…

“Uneven income distribution, as is well known, has a negative impact on economic growth both because it makes the investment climate worse and because it leads to the formation of pressure groups that resist structural reforms and macrostabilization. In addition, social inequality fuels macroeconomic populism—the redistribution of income from competitive sectors to noncompetitive ones, from successful businesses to losing ones, and from the rich to the poor.”

[V. Popov, “A Confluence of Circumstances or a Historical Pattern?” Problems of Economic Transition. Volume 52, number 8, December 2009. Pages 45-58. Or: V. Popov, “A Confluence of Circumstances or a Historical Pattern?” Russian Social Science Review. Volume 51, number 2, March–April 2010. Pages 58-71.]

“Radical economists disagree about the potential progressive or destructive impacts of protectionism on the world capitalist economy. On the one hand, there are many who suggest that the emergence of trade conflict will eventually propel the major advanced capitalist states into a trade war. The result win then be the erosion of all global capitalist cooperation and the re-emergence of a dangerous climate of stagnation, national chauvinism and imperial conflict. If this represents a correct understanding of contemporary trade conflicts, then it is clearly not in the Left’s interest to support protectionist politics.

“On the other hand, a growing number of theorists interpret certain forms of protection as the beginnings of a progressive movement for capital controls.”

[John Willoughby, “Economic Nationalism, The Left and the World Economy.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 16, number 4, 1984. Pages 1-13.]

“Richard Wolff connected [Stephen A.] Resnick with an important institution of radical thought within the United States: the Monthly Review School of American Marxism. Resnick and Wolff’s respective partners also came to be acquainted with each other through the early experiences of the women’s liberation movement in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1968, Resnick, [Stephen] Hymer, and Wolff took part with others in the development of the Union for Radical Political Economics as an alternative to what they considered to be apologetic positions that the American Economic Association represented in the face of the evident instability, poverty, oppression, and exploitation that were inherent in the way the capitalist system worked.” [Rajesh Bhattacharya and Ian J. Seda-Irizarry, “Re-centering Class in Critical Theory: A Tribute to Stephen A. Resnick (1938-2013).” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 47, number 4, 2015. Pages 669-678.]

“… it [universal basic income] is more moral because it eliminates paternalism and other forms of social control caused by the welfare state and because it lays on thorough checking before granting assistance or other social benefits. Secondly, it is more moral because it is universal in the sense that no criterion of discrimination operates in providing the income. Therefore, unlike the forms of support focused exclusively on the poor, the universal basic income does not generate the shame accompanying like a shadow the privilege of being granted a benefice.…

“… If we compare today’s fears and reluctance to proposals on universal basic income with those from the dawn of capitalism we see how much they are similar, although, in the meantime two hundred years of technological progress had passed. The only plausible explanation for today’s reluctance, which could also emphasize the coexistence of old and new fears, is demagogy – a demagogy that uses the contradictions present at the time in the cultural system called ‘common sense’ to legitimize a greater degree of social control.”

[Lucian T. Butaru, “Beyond or Besides Neoliberalism?: The Political Economy of Universal Basic Income.” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai. Volume 60, number 1, March 2015. Pages 9-21.]

“Postmodern Marxist, SCOT [social construction of technology], and feminist approaches to consumer theory serve to foreground social, cultural, and political practices in which both production and consumption activities are interwoven in complex and contradictory ways. The market—no longer an empty space within which suppliers and consumers interact with one another—comes to be seen as a place in which individuals, occupying multiple subject positions as consumers, retail workers, producers, supervisors, interact in such a way that identities (individual, group, and class) are reproduced or transformed. A signal feature of radical political economy is the belief that economic actions are embedded in relations of power and conflict, domination and resistance. I argue that this is no less true in sites of consumption and in the spaces that disrupt the clear distinction between production and consumption.” [Bruce Pietrykowski, “Exploring New Directions for Research in the Radical Political Economy of Consumption.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 39, number 2, spring 2007. Pages 257-283.]

“In applying a critical approach, this analysis focuses on the politics of the economic projects within the liberal peace framework, drawing examples from south-east Europe. First, it deals with the orthodox rationale of the political economy of peacebuilding. Next, the article notes the virtual death of the Washington Consensus and identifies a millennial revisionist agenda that emerged internationally during the course of 2004–05. This interrogation, then, allows reflection about the objectification of war-torn societies as well as reflection on the essentialist rationale of the political economy of peacebuilding and its dysfunctional and normative/ethical contradictions. The article contends that, although the depiction of an aggressive, undifferentiated liberal peacebuilding has been refined, the millennial revisionist project ultimately fails to address these contradictions. An inclusive/emancipatory participation of local actors and structural diversity in political economies indicates alternative options to the revisionist ideology that is embedded in a liberal structuring of global political economy.” [Michael Pugh, “The Political Economy of Peacebuilding: A Critical Theory Perspective.” International Journal of Peace Studies. Volume 10, number 2, autumn/winter 2005. Pages 23-42.]

“We agree in a rather prosaically empirical sense that earlier existing social structures do have less power in monitoring increasingly autonomous agency than in the past. But we do not argue that this entails some sort of end to the value of structural explanation tout court. We propose to the contrary that there is indeed a structural basis for today’s reflexive individuals. And that this is not social structures, but increasingly the pervasion of information and communication structures. We propose that there is tendentially the beginnings of the unfolding of a process in which social structures, national in scope, are being displaced by such global information and communication (I & C) structures. These information and communication structures are the very networked flows, are the very economies of signs and space which are the subject of this book. Thus structured flows and accumulations of information are the basis of cognitive reflexivity. Thus structured flows and accumulations of images, of expressive symbols are the condition of burgeoning aesthetic reflexivity. Thus the conditions of both cognitive and aesthetic reflexivity are economies of signs in space.” [Scott Lash and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2002. Pages 6-7.]

“The spirit of capitalism regulates the political economy of unhappiness, aiming to ensure that individuals find partial fulfilment in work and consumption. If they found no fulfilment, there would be a risk that they might opt out; yet if they found too much fulfilment, this could signify a satisfaction of desire that is anathema to an economic system that depends on desire remaining inexhaustible. Real happiness, [Theodor] Adorno reminds us, would mean no longer seeking ever more and ever newer sources of satisfaction. Real progress would mean abandoning the obsession with technical and economic progress. Far safer, therefore, for the capitalist to promise substantive eudaimonia, but to deliver only a taste of it, or substitute it for a more instant hedonic experience that leaves the individual still wanting more. During periods of stability, capitalism successfully regulates this distribution of happiness and unhappiness. That unhappiness is now appearing as a costly and threatening negative externality to be tackled by the state suggests that this equilibrium is breaking down.” [William Davies, “The Political Economy of Unhappiness.” New Left Review. Series II, number 71, September–October 2011. Pages 65-80.]

“… as Japanese economic influence spreads, naturally the patterns of the Japanese domestic political economy are reproduced through a widening regional and global sphere of influence. Throughout the 1980s the level of capital flowing out of Japan into tourism and real-estate development around the region grew steadily, stimulated by the accumulation of trade surplus, the inflation of domestic land and stock assets, and the availability of cheap credit (commonly around 4 per cent) against the collateral of land.… In aggregate terms, too, Japan seems likely to become ‘number one’ in the near future.” [Gavan McCormack, “The Price of Affluence: The Political Economy of Japanese Leisure.” New Left Review. Series I, number 188, July–August 1991. Pages 121-136.]

“In this section, I outline a Keynesian–Marxian theory of the firm’s investment decision. The Keynesian aspects of the model include true/Keynesian uncertainty and the possibility of financially fragile outcomes in such an environment, the illiquid nature of capital, endogenous expectations and preferences, and the potential for misaligned interests between firm management and shareholder/owners and creditors. The Marxian attributes include the Marxian competitive environment, as distinct from the neoclassical concept of competition, including critical regime shifts in the form of competition, transitions between different modes of accumulation, the imperative to accumulate capital through the progressive maximization of surplus value/profits and endogenous expectations and preferences.” [Jonathan P. Goldstein, “A Keynes–Marx theory of investment.” Heterodox Macroeconomics: Keynes, Marx and globalization. Jonathan P. Goldstein and Michael G. Hillard, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Pages 112-126.]

“We begin by locating the global household as a cognate of two recognizable and relatively respectable theoretical objects—the household and the transnational family. We then attempt to build its credentials as a macroeconomic category by estimating its (considerable) size and representing its consequential role in international finance and production. In the latter part of the article, we explore some potential effects of activating the global household as a political economic concept, looking particularly at three areas of inquiry and activism: globalization, development, and economic transformation. Specifically, we argue that a prioritizing focus on the global household strengthens the vision of globalization from below; alters the participants, practices, and potentials of economic development; and reconfigures the imaginary of economic transformation. We conclude with an invitation to explore the unknown territory of the future armed with new concepts and a refusal to accept standard notions of economic power and global unfolding. Our hope is to contribute to the emergence of a feminist, postcapitalist international political economy that could inform a globally transformative economic politics.” [Maliha Safri and Julie Graham, “The Global Household: Toward a Feminist Postcapitalist International Political Economy.” Signs. Volume 36, number 1, autumn 2010. Pages 99-125.]

“Since the 1980s, liberal economists have labelled non-liberal economists as ‘dinosaurs.’ Especially with the global financial crisis that started in 2008, liberal economists themselves are now described as ‘zombies.’ According to this description, under the influence of neoliberal dogma, economics is intellectually dead. This does not however mean that it is perishing. On the contrary, the zombies roam the streets and infect healthy economists and other social scientists ….

“… ‘perfect competition’ and ‘monopoly’ in zombie economics is a mutually exclusive dichotomy. Since competition is reduced to the price competition of identical firms, competition negates monopoly and monopoly negates competition. The political economists such as [Karl] Marx, however, consider competition and monopoly as a dialectical process where they enforce and complement each other. In this view, competition goes beyond the price competition between identical firms but is considered as a struggle between firms to survive and capture larger markets, particularly via productivity increases.…

“One of the most significant peculiarities of the globalization process has been the widening gap between the rich and the poor …. Zombie economics normalizes and justifies this inequality by arguing that factors of production get income according to their contribution to the output.”

[Turan Subaşat, “Zombie Economics.” Izmir Review of Social Sciences. Volume 2, number 2, January 2015. Pages 41-55.]

“This article reviews the experience of gender mainstreaming within the European Employment Strategy (EES) …. This experience merits evaluation not only for what it has and has not done to foster equal opportunities within Europe, but also for the implicit lessons it provides in applying feminist economics in practice.… It has to be said at the outset that one of the lessons we have to learn is that policy-makers, and indeed economists, do not yet have the tools or the understanding for a full implementation of a feminist economics approach and, even more importantly, may well lack the political will to move far along that path. Nevertheless, the experience provides insight into both the current obstacles to the application of a feminist economics approach and into what progress can nevertheless be made along that road.” [Jill Rubery, “Reflections on Gender Mainstreaming: An Example of Feminist Economics in Action?” Feminist Economics. Volume 11, number 3, November 2005. Pages 1-26.]

“During its fifteen years of publication Feminist Economics has worked to broaden participation in economic debates to include scholars with different life experiences and training and from different parts of the world. In pursuing this aim, Feminist Economics has welcomed contributions not just from economists but also from activists, policy makers, and scholars from many other fields of inquiry. Equally important, the journal has sought to include contributions from scholars who hail from all regions of the world and to require the papers it publishes to speak to a global audience. These efforts reflect our commitment to inclusivity and our belief that broader representation of scholars will lead to a more rigorous and useful economics, better serving the interests of all people.” [Diana Strassmann, “Editorial: Toward a More Inclusive Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics. Volume 16, number 1, January 2010. Pages 1-2.]

“Over the past half-century, feminist economists have transformed our understanding of how the world economy functions. They have critiqued the gender-blindness of traditional economic models and challenged analytic descriptions of development and globalization that ignore much of women’s economic activity. Feminist economists have developed analytical frameworks for examining gender relations that permeate political, social, and economic institutions including markets, governments, households, and firms. They have produced new methodologies that incorporate women’s experiences in economic models, statistics, and the evaluation of economic phenomena. Their research has pushed the boundaries of knowledge by challenging conventional paradigms and concepts, ideas and categories that were engrained and therefore rarely scrutinized.” [Maria Sagrario Floro and John Willoughby, “Feminist Economics and the Analysis of the Global Economy: The Challenge That Awaits Us.” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs. Volume 40, number 2, summer 2016. Pages 15-27.]

“Early feminist economists criticized Marxist analyses of labour by arguing that they universalized the male worker in industrialized economies as representative of all workers; thereby foreclosing a more complex, gendered analysis – one that is grounded in the lived realities of women and men, and of uneven power relations within the labour market, the household and the economy. Feminist analysis moved beyond situating the economic man as the norm in definitions of economics to considerations of humans in relation to the world ….

“They built on the Marxist category of class to bring in sex and gender relations in order to better understand women’s and men’s positions, roles and responsibilities in the labour market and society as a whole. In particular, feminists argue that power in economic relations is erased by standard theories and models that de-emphasize difference as constraints or differences in natural endowments, while erasing variables such as distinct capabilities and access to resources between and among women and men. This focus also enables analyses of those commodities and processes that are necessary for capital accumulation, including the reproduction of the labour force.”

[Radhika Balakrishnan and Savitri Bisnath, “Feminist economics.” The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho, editors. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2012. Pages 125-130.]

“[Phillip Anthony] O’Hara has fashioned a new synthesis of institutionalism and Marxism, which may be called Marxist Institutionalism. What is Marxist Institutionalism? It is an integration or synthesis of [Karl] Marx and [Thorstein] Veblen, though different people may emphasize more of one than the other.…

“The Marxist-Institutionalist theory of the [business] cycle argues the following propositions, compatible with either Marx or Vehlen. First, the business cycle appears only in the capitalist business economy because it has institutions of market exchange, money and credit, and production for private profit. Within those institutions, the internal dynamics of capitalism have thus far turned every expansion into a slowdown, recession, or deep depression, depending on many variables. The institution of the labor market is such that wages always lag behind profits in every expansion, causing an eventual limitation on consumer demand. The institution of the commodity market is such that the prices of raw materials rise faster than other prices in almost every expansion. The institutions of finance capital are such that interest rates rise in every expansion. All of these reasons—and others—cause an eventual leveling off and decline of profit. Given the institutions of capitalism, a decline in profit inevitably leads to a decline in investment.”

[Howard J. Sherman, “Marxist Institutionalism.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 60, number 4, December 2002. Pages 603-608.]

“Howard Sherman’s … [article] is mostly positive since we share the vision of a unified political economy, drawing on some of the heterodox approaches. We both draw inspiration from [Karl] Marx, [Thorstein] Vehlen and [John Maynard] Keynes; contemporary neo-Marxian, neo-institutionalist, feminist, post Keynesian and social political economy; but more than anything we want to comprehend the dynamic motion of capitalism, as well as draw up a framework for democratic socialism. We both take a historical-relational view of capitalism; applying a dialectical method to institutional transformation; and especially trying to comprehend the cyclical or wave motion of capitalism. In this we share a holist method with other political economists, and are close intellectually to Bill Dugger, Ron Stanfield, the late David Gordon, Sam Bowles, Michal Aglietta, Rick Wolff and Steven Resnick.” [Phillip Anthony O’Hara, “The Role of Institutions and the Current Crises of Capitalism: A Reply to Howard Sherman and John Henry.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 60, number 4, December 2002. Pages 609-618.]

“The capital-labor accord of the 1950s and 1960s was based on the purging of militant unionists from positions of authority and on the institutionalization of numerous agreements in which union members allowed control of production to be left in the hands of management in return for distributive benefits, better work conditions, and more job security. A more docile work force and a relatively high rate of technological change enabled productivity gains to be distributed between capital and labor.” [Phillip Anthony O’Hara, “An Institutionalist Review of Long Wave Theories: Schumpeterian Innovation, Modes of Regulation, and Social Structures of Accumulation.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 28, number 2, June 1994. Pages 489-500.]

“The cultural contradictions of global capitalism … must be holistically engrained in the system. They are complex, following the general lines of cultural evolution of the times, forever changing yet always emanating from the complex interactions that are the hallmark of global capitalism. They must be able to penetrate the dominant institutions, interact with other aspects of culture, and manifest to varying degrees through historical time. It is in this vein that we investigate the contemporary cultural contradictions of global capitalism.” [Phillip Anthony O’Hara, “Cultural Contradictions of Global Capitalism.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 38, number 2, June 2004. Pages 413-420.]

“It is our view that Marxism and institutionalism have much in common—and that it is useful in the United States to stress the common ground among all critical economists. We also recognize that there are different viewpoints within each of these paradigms. There are liberal and radical institutionalists, but there are also official and independent, critical Marxists. By official Marxism, we mean that version of Marx that was held by the Soviet Union and all of the Communist parties during the Stalin era (1928-1953). We recognize that liberal institutionalists and official Marxists have little or nothing in common, but we believe that modern, radical institutionalists and modern, critical (nonofficial) Marxists have much in common. It should be stressed that the dichotomy mentioned within each school is a drastic over- simplification. In reality, there is a wide spectrum of views within each school. We use a dichotomy only to highlight certain differences within each school.” [William M. Dugger and Howard J. Sherman, “Comparison of Marxism and Institutionalism.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 28, number 1, March 1994. Pages 101-127.]

“For students working in the heterodox tradition of political economy, where the respective works of Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen form part of the canon, numerous ostensible parallels between the works of these authors present themselves. Despite this common intuitive supposition, even a cursory glance at the existing literature reveals little consensus. Far from an on-going discussion, much of the literature more closely resembles the intermittent trading of shots between firmly entrenched camps. It would therefore be folly to think we could resolve this century-long deliberation in the context of the present paper; we hope merely to add a new dimension to the debate. Here, we maintain that the striking similarities that emerge in the analysis and conclusions of both thinkers follow from a commonality in method. While we do not argue that methodologies of Marx and Veblen are, by any means, identical, or attempt to deny distinctions between the two, we insist, in line with the radical institutionalist literature, that the rift between them has been greatly overstated. Specifically, we argue that a parallel can be drawn between Marx and Veblen in terms of their chosen starting points; a parallel only reinforced by their shared perception of the nature of economic life.” [Kirsten Ford and William McColloch, “Thorstein Veblen: A Marxist Starting Point.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 46, number 3, September 2012. Pages 765-777.]

“[Thorstein] Veblen’s radical economic analysis deepens our understanding of capitalism in a way which the analysis of [Karl] Marx does not. This is because Veblen’s theory provides complementary sources to Marx’s analysis of capitalism; among the most important are the following. Veblen analyzes in detail microeconomic phenomena such as monopoly, monopsony [a single buyer], reserve capacity, and markup pricing that Marx does not analyze in his theory of competition among capitals (firms) because Marx is interested in the whole economic system, the macroeconomy. In this respect, Veblen’s economic theory does lead to the analysis of industrial duality under capitalism.” [Adil H. Mouhammed, “Veblen’s Economic Theory: A Radical Analysis.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 32, number 2, 2000. Pages 197-221.]

“[Thorstein] Veblen believes that the system of private property, i.e. capitalism, must be abolished and replaced by a revolution in order to establish a new system based on the instinct of workmanship, although some of Veblen’s scholars think that Veblen really does not put much store on being constructively persuasive. Veblen emphasizes this conclusion because he does not believe in policy economics, nor is he interested in saving capitalism from breakdown because of the economic problems it creates.” [Adil H. Mouhammed, “Veblen and Keynes: On the Economic Theory of the Capitalist Economy.” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE)/Zeitschrift für diegesamte Staatswissenschaft. Volume 155, number 4, December 1999. Pages 594-609.]

“… [Thorstein] Veblen believes that the private property must be abolished in order to establish a system based upon the instinct of workmanship, the instinct of cooperation. Veblen emphasizes this conclusion because he does not believe in policy, nor is he a policy economist. Veblen points out, ‘Science creates nothing but theories. It knows nothing of policy or utility, of better or worse’ …. In other words, for Veblen, capitalism must be replaced.” [Adil H. Mouhammed, “Veblen and Keynes.” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. Volume 13, number 2, December 1999. Pages 169-186.]

“… [Thorstein] Veblen’s political economy is a structure of power relations. The most useful economic indicators are found to be determined by such relations. For Veblen, power is actually reflecting social relationships between vested interests and common man. Very specifically, the vested interests, as represented by large corporations and businesses, seek domination and control over other social groups for the essential reason of obtaining sufficient profits.” [Adii Mouhammed, “Thorstein Vehlen: Political Economy and Power.” International Social Science Review. Volume 66, number 4 autumn 1991. Pages 147-157.]

“What one student called [Thorstein] Veblen’s ‘admiration for Marx’ reflects the solidarity of two thinkers working upon a common project and toward a common goal. On the other hand, within economics, Phillip O’Hara, Howard J. Sherman, William M. Dugger, Adil Mouhammed, and a number of other radicals, forge a Marxist institutionalism based upon a dialogue between Veblenian and Marxian strands of radical analysis …. Thus, for Bill Dugger, the ‘real Thorstein Veblen was not a humorist. He was a radical and a Marxist. Like any good Marxist he did not follow his intellectual mentor slavishly, but … critically’ …. But even among heterodox economists (already a minority within the profession), institutionalists are a militant minority within a minority. And radical institutionalists represent a minority within that minority ….

“In the early 20ᵗʰ century, however, Veblen’s influence across the social sciences was considerable. The approach to sociology, anthropology, and economics that he inspired came to be called institutionalism. Institutionalists took from Veblen his emphasis upon the economy as a social institution and much of his terminology; but only a handful of early followers incorporated his radical, anti-capitalist framework into a radical institutionalism. As Dugger puts it, ‘the red threads woven throughout Veblen’s thought’ embarrassed ‘institutionalists’ …. His work was normalized, de-fanged. When not entirely forgotten, his texts were re-interpreted, often read as parody without politics.”

[Graham Cassano, “Choosing our Ancestors: Thorstein Veblen, Radical Institutionalism and Sociology.” Critical Sociology. Volume 35, number 3, May 2009. Pages 367-377.]

“While [Thorstein] Veblen’s view that nationalism subverts class struggle has parallels elsewhere in Marxian discourse, his articulation of the mechanism through which this nationalist consensus establishes itself represents a fundamental theoretical innovation. A community ruptured by class division, and economic inequality, survives precisely because the common people accept an immaterial wage in return for symbolic allegiance to their exploiters. The conditions of economic exploitation are secured by this status wage in symbolic prestige.” [Graham Cassano, “Symbolic Exploitation and the Social Dialectic of Desire.” Critical Sociology. Volume 35, number 3, 2009. Pages 379-393.]

“Much is often made of the dialectics of [Karl] Marx versus the opaque cause and effect of [Thorstein] Veblen, but I think the principal difference between Marx and Veblen is that Marx constructed a labor theory of value to explain how capitalists grew rich through exploiting the workers while Veblen constructed a theory of business enterprise to show how business people grew rich at the expense of the underlying population. Their theories do not contradict each other but focus on different aspects of the same problem. Marx emphasized the exploitation of the working class through the capitalist class’s control of the production process; while Veblen emphasized the exploitation of the underlying population through the control of the market system by big business and big government. There is a difference, but no contradiction between the two. In fact, when combined, Marx and Veblen yield a more complete explanation of how the minority grow rich at the expense of the majority and how they get away with it even under modern conditions of science and enlightenment.” [William M. Dugger, “Veblen the Red.” MRzine. Online magazine. August 12th, 2007. Retrieved on August 1st, 2016.]

“[Phillip Anthony] O’Hara systemizes the work of many authors who have pioneered an analysis of capital that is much broader than the narrow concept held by traditional economists. Ecological capital, social capital, and human capital are far more important than private business capital, which is perhaps as little as 20 percent of the total capital stock. The relationship between the forms of capital need much more study. For example, ecological capital is under attack from the expansion of private business capital, yet control of government policies, dominated by business capital interests, suggests that the dominance of business capital will continue. O’Hara summarizes the limited knowledge available without taking the argument much further.” [David R. Fusfeld, “Marx, Veblen, and Contemporary Institutional Political Economy: Principles and Unstable Dynamics of Capitalism.” Review article. Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 35, number 4, December 2001. Pages 1033-1035.]

“When speaking of institutionalism in this paper, we refer to a critical institutionalism with mainly Marxist roots that encompasses different interpretations such as radical institutionalism … and institutional political economy …. Although the aim of this paper is not to differentiate between the two critical institutionalisms, it should be noted that many of their differences stem from the fact that while radical institutionalism has clear Marxist and Veblenian roots, institutional political economy does not link its theoretical developments to the field of development economics.” [Fernando García-Quero and Jorge Ollero-Perán, “Is Neoclassical Economics Scientific Knowledge Detached from Ethics? A Kantian Answer, an Institutionalist Alternative.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 47, number 1, 2015. Pages 56-69.]

“Interest in developing institutional explanations of political and economic behavior has blossomed among social scientists since the early 1980s. Three intellectual perspectives are now prevalent: rational choice theory, historical institutionalism and a new school of organizational analysis. This paper summarizes, compares and contrasts these views and suggests ways in which cross-fertilization may be achieved. Particular attention is paid to how the insights of organizational analysis and historical institutionalism can be blended to provide fruitful avenues of research and theorizing, especially with regard to the production, adoption, and mobilization of ideas by decision makers.” [John L. Campbell, “Recent Trends in Institutional Political Economy.” The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. Volume 17, number 7/8, 1997. Pages 15-56.]

“The neo-institutionalist movement has taken much from both [John Maynard] Keynes and [Karl] Marx, but its proponents do not believe that this borrowing has eliminated the identity or significance of their movement as an interdisciplinary social science that presents a formidable challenge to both orthodox micro and macro economics. The neo-institutionalists do not regard neo-Marxism or neo-Keynesianism as satisfactory substitutes for their cultural version of economics. Consequently they reverse the proposals of both the neo-Marxians and the neo-Keynesians, to eliminate or absorb the neoinstitutionalist movement. It is the neo-institutionalists who take what is worthwhile from both neo-Marxian and neo-Keynesian economics with the aim of creating a satisfactory challenge to orthodox economics.” [Allan G. Gruchy, “Neo Institutionalism, Neo-Marxism, and Neo-Keynesianism: An Evaluation.” Journal of Economic Issue. Volume XVIII, number 2, June 1984. Pages 547-556.]

“In order to understand the present and outline the possibilities for the future, we must look beyond the narrow formalisms and equilibrium-oriented theorising of mainstream economics. Our search must involve economic heretics as diverse as Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek, all of whom have made major and enduring contributions to our understanding of the structure and dynamics of real economies. Marx enhanced our understanding of socio-economic systems, Veblen addressed economic evolution and institutional change, Keynes diagnosed the pathologies of money and employment, Schumpeter broke the bonds of equilibrium in mainstream theory and highlighted innovation and entrepreneurship, and Hayek analysed the nature and role of knowledge in market economies. Yet the works of such authors do not receive the prominence they deserve. The direct and detailed study of their writings is widely neglected even in the most prestigious university departments of economics. This book attempts to show the value of their ideas for both the dissection of the present and the prognostication of the future.” [Geoffrey M. Hodgson. Economics and Utopia: Why the learning economy is not the end of history. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2001. Page xvii.]

“It would be … fruitful to cast socialist political economy … [as]: a general analysis of capitalist relations of production and their inbuilt exploitation, a particular analysis of the concrete politico-economic situation, and an analysis of the structures and institutions of the state. Such a comprehensive analysis would provide a far more worthy theoretical foundation than that species of revolutionary opinion which draws its strength from the secret conviction that nothing can be changed.” [Geoff Hodgson, “On the Political Economy of the Socialist Transformation.” New Left Review. Series I, number 133, May–June 1982. Pages 52-66.]

“I must emphasise that this [article] is not an attempt to undermine the genuine achievements of the NIE [new institutional economics], or a move to promote the original institutionalism as an alternative. Instead, one of the most important arguments raised below is that the identities and boundaries of both the NIE and the original institutionalism are now unclear; there is a sizeable overlap between them.Hence this comment is not divisive: it is an appeal for mutual understanding of both traditions, recognising the merits of each, so that these may be jointly deployed in future enquiry.” [Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “On fuzzy frontiers and fragmented foundations: some reflections on the original and new institutional economics.” Journal of Institutional Economics. Volume 10, number 4, December 2014. Pages 591-611.]

“Any attempt to define institutionalism in terms of policy outputs would run into severe difficulties. Consider some possible policies. Can institutionalism be defined, in part, in terms of a critique of market solutions to economic problems?

“Many institutionalists have criticized pro-market policies and have proposed various forms of economic intervention and planning. However, so too have neo-classical economists. (Neoclassical economics is defined as the type of economics invoking the standard textbook principles of rationality, maximization and equilibrium.) The problem of using a disposition towards planning and against markets to define institutionalism would be that many neoclassical economists would then be institutionalists.”

[Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “What Is the Essence of Institutional Economics?” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 34, number 2, June 2000. Pages 317-329.]

“[Geoffrey M.] Hodgson’s interest in Darwinism has two distinct points of origin. First, on an abstract level, his disappointment of the early 1980s with Marxism’s ‘teleological’ and ‘determinist’ tendencies led him to search for a new philosophical standpoint. [Thorstein] Veblen’s concept of history as a continuous process with no legitimate-predetermined end appeared to him as the best alternative for replacing Marxism. Second, on a more concrete level, the triumph of … [an] evolutionary alternative to neoclassical economics … led Hodgson to seriously consider biology for the theorization of a new paradigm in economics.” [George Liagouras, “From Heterodox Political Economy to Generalized Darwinism: Geoffrey Hodgson’s Tensions in Retrospect.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 48, number 3, 2016. Pages 467-484.]

“… little detailed reference has been made by leading exponents of the ‘new’ institutional economics to this predecessor. Two factors may help to explain this oversight. The first is that the history of economic thought is currently a much neglected subdiscipline, and there is now widespread unfamiliarity with the ‘old’ American institutionalism, despite its favored geographic location and accessible language. The second reason is that since its decline in America after 1930 the ‘old’ institutionalism has been repeatedly written off, and is dismissed for failing to provide a systematic and viable approach to economic theory. It is also widely—and wrongly—believed that institutionalism was essentially anti-theoretical and descriptive.” [Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “The Approach of Institutional Economics.” Journal of Economic Literature. Volume 36, number 1, March 1998. Pages 166-192.]

“There is no question of the legality of absentee ownership, nor of its moral right. It is a settled institution of civilised life, embedded in law and morals, and its roots run through the foundations of European civilisation. Legality and morality are a matter of statute, precedent, and usage; and absentee ownership is quite securely grounded in the Common Law and deeply ingrained in the moral sense of civilised men. In the American commonwealth such ownership is also covered by the constitutional provision which declares that men must not be deprived of their property except by due process of law. And the legal precedents, interpretations and refinements which have been set up and worked out by jurists under this constitutional provision have in the main been concerned with fortifying and extending the security and implied rights of absentee ownership in one bearing and another; with the result that these rights are, legally and morally, more secure and more extensive today than ever before. Indirectly too, the provision for ‘due process of law’ has greatly reinforced the dominant position of absentee ownership as against any claims of another kind or against claimants of any other class. Litigation as conducted according to the rules and precedents which govern the ‘due process’ has in recent times become too costly to be carried to a conclusion by any litigant who is not an absentee owner of large means. This will hold true in America perhaps in a more conclusive fashion than in any other civilised nation. In effect, due process of law as it concerns property has become an appliance for the regulation of relations between absentee owners.” [Thorstein Veblen. Absentee Ownership—Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 2004. Pages 11-12.]

“Any knowledge that runs in such out-worn terms turns out to be futile, misleading, meaningless; and the habit of imputing qualities and behavior of this kind to everyday facts will then fall into disuse, progressively as experience continues to bring home the futility of all that kind of imputation. And presently the habit of perceiving that class of qualities and behavior in the known facts is therefore gradually lost. So also, in due time the observances and the precautions and provisions embodied in law and custom for the preservation or the control of these lost imponderables will also fall into disuse and disappear out of the scheme of institutions, by way of becoming dead letter or by abrogation. Particularly will such a loss of belief and insight, and the consequent loss of those imponderables whose ground has thereby gone out from under them, take effect with the passing of generations.” [Thorstein Veblen. The Vested Interests and the Common Man. New York: B. Huebsch, Inc. 1919. Page 8.]

“… [Certain] ancient norms differ from the modern norms given by the machine in that they rest on conventional, ultimately sentimental grounds; they are of a putative nature. Such are, e.g., the principles of (primitive) blood relationship, clan solidarity, paternal descent, Levitical cleanness, divine guidance, allegiance, nationality. In their time and under the circumstances which favored their growth these were, all and several, powerful factors in controlling human conduct and shaping the course of events. In their time each of these institutional norms served as a definitive ground of authentication for such facts as fell under its particular scope, and the scope of each was very wide in the day of its best vigor. As time has brought change of circumstances, the facts of life have gradually escaped from the constraint of these ancient principles; so that the dominion which they now hold over the life of civilized men is relatively slight and shifty.” [Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of Business Enterprise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1932. Page 68.]

“… heterodox institutionalism advanced by the old institutional economics recognizes that various social institutions ‘impose different constraints on what constitutes acceptable [economic] behavior’ …. According to such institutionalism, economic phenomena like markets, including the labor market …, represent social institutions …. By contrast, orthodox institutionalism found in the new institutional economics tends to neglect such institutional properties of and influence on economic phenomena, and to treat social institutions as aggregate effects of rational individual actions, particularly optimizing behavior. By over-stressing the efficiency solution to the problem of institutional origin and evolution, such institutionalism seems to conflates this issue with that of how social institutions affect the operation of market economies ….” [Milan Zafirovski, “Orthodoxy and heterodoxy in analyzing institutions: Original and new institutional economics reexamined.” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 30, number 7/8, 2003. Pages 798-826.]

“… there are groups – some of them apparently not the result of retrogression – which show the traits of primitive savagery with some fidelity. Their culture differs from that of the barbarian communities in the absence of a leisure class and the absence, in great measure, of the animus or spiritual attitude on which the institution of a leisure class rests. These communities of primitive savages in which there is no hierarchy of economic classes make up but a small and inconspicuous fraction of the human race. As good an 1nstance of this phase of culture as1 may be had is afforded by the tribes of the Andamans, or by the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills. The scheme of life of these groups at the time of their earliest contact with Europeans seems to have been nearly typical, so far as regards the absence of a leisure class.” [Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1912. Page 6.]

“The habits of thought induced by workday life impose themselves as ruling principles that govern the quest of knowledge ; it will therefore be the habits of thought enforced by the current technological scheme that will have most (or most immediately) to say in the current systematization of facts. The working logic of the current state of the industrial arts will necessarily insinuate itself as the logical scheme which must, of course, effectually govern the interpretation and generalizations of fact in all their commonplace relations. But the current state of the industrial arts is not all that conditions workmanship. Under any given institutional situation, — and the modern scheme of use and wont, law and order, is no exception, — workmanship is held to a more or less exacting conformity to several tests and standards that are not intrinsic to the state of the industrial arts, even if they are not alien to it; such as the requirements imposed by the current system of ownership and pecuniary values. These pecuniary conditions that impose themselves on the processes of industry and on the conduct of life, together with the pecuniary accountancy that goes with them — the price system — have much to say in the guidance and limitations of workmanship. And when and in so far as the habituation so enforced in the traffic of workday life goes into effect as a scheme of logic governing the quest of knowledge, such principles as have by habit found acceptance as being conventionally salutary and conclusive in the pecuniary conduct of affairs will necessarily leave their mark on the ideals, aims, methods and standards of science and scholarship. More particularly, those principles and standards of organization, control and achievement, that have been accepted as an habitual matter of course in the conduct of business will, by force of habit, in good part reassert themselves as indispensable and conclusive in the conduct of the affairs of learning. While it remains true that the bias of workmanship continues to guide the quest of knowledge, under the conditions imposed by modern institutions it will not be the naive conceptions of primitive workmanship that will shape the framework of the modern system of learning; but rather the preconceptions of that disciplined workmanship that has been instructed in the logic of the modern technology and sophisticated with much experience in a civilization in whose scheme of life pecuniary canons are definitive.” [Thorstein Veblen. The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. New York: B. W. Huebsch. 1918. Pages 6-7.]

“The pastoral-nomadic institutions … appear to have best made their way in those regions of Europe where this brachycephalic brunet stock has been present in some force if not as a dominant racial factor. The evidence is perhaps not conclusive, but there is at least a strong line of suggestion afforded by the distribution of the patriarchal type of institutions within Europe, including the tribal and gentile organisation. There is a rough concomitance between the distribution of these cultural elements presumably derived from an Aryan source on the one hand, and the distribution past or present of the brachycephalic brunet type on the other hand. The regions where this line of institutions are known to have prevailed in early times are, in the main, regions in which the Alpine racial type, is also known to have been present in force, as, e.g., in the classic Greek and Roman republics.” [Thorstein Veblen, “The Blond Race and the Aryan Culture.” The University of Missouri Bulletin. Volume 2, number 3, December 1913. Pages 39-57.]

“The behavior of small groups interested in collective goods can sometimes be quite complex …. There are certain institutional arrangements and behavioral assumptions that will not always lead to the suboptimality and disproportionality that the preceding paragraphs have described. Any adequate analysis of the tendency toward suboptimal provision of collective goods, and toward disproportionate sharing of the burdens of providing them, would be too long to fit comfortably into this study, which is concerned mainly with large groups, and brings in small groups mainly for purposes of comparison and contrast. The problem of small groups seeking collective goods is of some importance, both theoretically and practically, and has not been adequately treated in the literature.” [Mancur Olson. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1971. Pages 29-30.]

“… what would the Marxist tradition have to cede in order to incorporate ideas from the radical institutionalist tradition? With these questions in mind, the intention of this paper is to provide a critical evaluation of [Thorstein] Veblen’s political economy, particularly looking at the internal limitations that prevent the extension of his theories into a systematic analysis of capitalism analogous to [Karl] Marx’s critique of capitalism. The central argument made here is that Marxist supporters of Veblen are right in suggesting that he puts forward many ideas that are, at face value, parallel to Marx’s ideas; however, there is an underlying tension between the core elements in Veblen’s and Marx’s theories, which makes it unclear whether Veblen’s concepts can ‘update’ Marx. This tension, I argue, can be traced back to a fundamental difference between Veblen and Marx: their methods.” [Devin Penner, “The Limits of Radical Institutionalism: A Marxian Critique of Thorstein Veblen’s Political Economy.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 43, number 2, June 2011. Pages 154-161.]

“The present paper presents a possible extension of standards for patent eligibility based upon theories developed by economist Thorstein Veblen, who elaborated a dichotomy between economically productive and unproductive activity, extended from classical economics. This follows from Veblen’s observations that patents represent ways of segregating the gains and transmission of technology, even though ‘in the case of [such] intangible assets there is no presumption that the objects of wealth involved have any serviceability at large, since they serve no materially productive work, but only a differential advantage to the owner in the distribution of the industrial product.’ While Veblen did not offer a precise test for determining patent subject matter eligibility, or even approach that question directly, he did provide a broad conceptual framework that can help illuminate a path toward a suitable patent eligibility standard, and, perhaps most importantly, can help evaluate various tests proffered to assess patent eligibility.” [Austen Zuege, “A New Theory for Patent Subject Matter Eligibility: A Veblenian Perspective.” Cybaris. Volume 1, issue 2, article 1, 2014. Pages 211-352.]

“Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857-1929) is the father of institutional economics and a critical influence in the formation and development of AFEE [the Association for Evolutionary Economics]. He established an indigenous branch of radical economics in the United States—institutionalism—and many argue he adapted certain Marxian themes to U.S. conditions …. He recognized the importance of contradictory processes, collective wealth, and interdisciplinary methods in a manner similar in many ways to the method of Karl Marx …. A major theme of Veblen which has Marxian overtones is that capitalism operates in a contradictory environment where business is in conflict with industry, while the concerns of the common people are in contradistinction to those of the leisure and business classes. He developed an evolutionary and materialistic understanding and critique of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while developing certain socialistic policies and perspectives for improving human welfare ….” [Phillip Anthony O’Hara and Howard Jay Sherman, “Veblen and Sweezy on Monopoly Capital, Crises, Conflict, and the State.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 38, number 4, December 2004. Pages 969-987.]

“Since its early development, institutions have been part and parcel of evolutionary economics. Veblen, one of its founding fathers, emphasised the importance of habits, conventions and norms in economics …. He laid the foundations of what is now called ‘old’ institutionalism, and which has affinities with evolutionary economics as this has developed since the 1980s.” [Ron Boschma and Ron Martin, “The aims and scope of evolutionary economic geography.” The Handbook of Evolutionary Economic Geography. Ron Boschma and Ron Martin, editors. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2010. Page 3-39.]

“… [One] view of change is that of the radical institutionalist. Even basic institutions have changed in the past, so evolution includes both incremental change and drastic institutional change. Furthermore, the key dichotomy is between business and industry or, more broadly, between institutions and technology. The institutions include the vested interests of the elite, which engender resistance to anything that threatens their wealth and power. Thus the Great Depression resulted from business institutions sabotaging the economic system and causing industrial contraction. The Civil War resulted when the institutions of slavery were holding back industrial progress. Finally, the vested interests clash with those who want change, as in the Civil War.” [Howard J. Sherman, “Evolutionary Economics from a Radical Perspective.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 37, number 1, March 2003. Pages 75-83.]

“… ‘evolutionary economics’ means much more than an acceptance of human evolution. It means an emphasis on change, and on technology as one of the main drivers of economic development. In addition, when Veblen proposed that economics should be an evolutionary science, he specifically mentioned the role of Darwinism.

“For [Thorstein] Veblen …, Darwinism involved the rejection of teleological reasoning in favor of a detailed analysis of cause and effect. Accordingly, Veblen followed pragmatist philosophers such as William James and John Dewey in rejecting explanations of human conduct based on reason and deliberation alone. These too had to be explained, and this was partly through the psychological concept of habit.”

[Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “Toward an Evolutionary and Moral Science: Remarks upon Receipt of the Veblen-Commons Award.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume XLVI, number 2, June 2012. Pages 265-275.]

“By taking a fully procedural and systemic view, involving the multiple feedbacks between individuals, institutions and rules, a more rigorous evolutionary approach may eventually offer a viable alternative to models incorporating global rationality with given individuals. At the very minimum we should recognize that a more acceptable notion of rationality and human action involves tiered and selective processes of cognition, in which both habit and social conditioning are preponderant.” [Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “Calculation, Habits and Action.” The Economics of Rationality. Bill Gerrard, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Pages 26-36.]

“The term ‘evolutionary economics’ is currently applied to a confusingly wide variety of approaches within the subject. At least six main uses of the phrase can be identified:

[Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “The Challenge of Evolutionary Economics.” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE) / Zeitschrift für diegesamte Staatswissenschaft. Volume 152, number 4, December 1996. Pages 697-706.]

“In biology and elsewhere, the word ‘evolution’ is used in a confusing variety of ways, and the term ‘evolutionary economics’ replicates this confusion ….” [Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “The Evolution of Evolutionary Economics.” Scottish Journal of Political Economy. Volume 42, number 4, November 1995. Pages 469-488.]

“… evolutionary economists and evolutionary game theorists inhabit different academic spheres, with little conversation between them.…

“This state of affairs does not encourage fruitful research collaboration between these two research communities. This article explores the possibility that these barriers may be overcome and greater conversation may emerge between evolutionary game theorists and evolutionary economists.”

[Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Kainan Huang, “Evolutionary game theory and evolutionary economics: are they different species?” Journal of Evolutionary Economics. Volume 22, number 2, April 2012. Pages 345-366.]

“This book is … interested in a … radical strand of economics; radical because it approaches the economy from a completely different starting point. It focuses on evolutionary economics (which draws on the work of Joseph Schumpeter) and complexity science (which has its roots in the natural sciences). It touches also on closely related fields, including behavioural science and the study of networks. While each of these schools has its differences and nuances, they share many similarities; so, when referring to them we use ‘heterodox economics’ and ‘new economic thinking’ as catch-all terms.

“What each of these schools has in common is a shared critique of the core tenets of neoclassical economic theory, in particular the notion of static equilibrium. This suggests that markets are generally stable and that, while external shocks to the system can occur, the inherent tendency is for markets to move back into equilibrium. This happens because economic actors are rational and self-interested and possess all the information necessary to make optimal decisions in the marketplace. Following the laws of supply and demand, market transactions are processed at which point the market is said to ‘clear.’ According to the models used by neoclassical economists, such clearing takes place instantaneously, leaving no time for market lag. Although they incorporate discount rates and scenarios to account for uncertainties, their models are essentially rigid and linear and are based on the notion that economic transactions are a zero sum game.”

[David Nash, “Introduction.” Complex New World: Translating new economic thinking into public policy. Tony Dolphin and David Nash, editors. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. August, 2012. Pages 7-17.]

“Central to many Marxist and institutionalist perspectives of the economy is (1) the need for a collectivist ethos in which people recognize and reinforce the societal nature of production, distribution, and exchange, and the social generation of wealth; (2) where democracy goes far beyond (but includes) the ballot box to the active involvement of people in decision-making structures, backed up with the ability to make informed judgments; and (3) where education is treated as a social good, and knowledge is distributed freely throughout the population to reduce concentrations of socioeconomic power.” [Phillip Anthony O’Hara, “The Association for Evolutionary Economics and the Union for Radical Political Economics: General Issues of Continuity and Integration.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 29, number 1, March 1995. Pages 137-159.]

“… three strands of heterodox economics are discussed in some detail: complexity, evolutionary and behavioural economics.….

“Complexity economics considers the economy to be a ‘complex adaptive system’ in which constant interaction plays a significant role. A complex adaptive system allows for a wide set of interactions between individuals and recognises that an economic actor’s preferences are diverse ….

“Like complex systems theory, evolutionary economics emphasises the crucial role of history in shaping the future. Past interactions and decisions have major impacts on the economy – a characteristic known as path dependence – and any initial small changes in an economy can produce drastic downstream effects, partially driven by networks and cross-cutting hierarchical organisation. Economic outcomes are determined not only by current conditions but also by previous decisions and initial conditions ….

“If adaptation and innovation are central to the evolutionary economics critique of neoclassical economics, then the psychology of human beings is central to that of the behavioural economists. In short, behavioural science is a combination of psychology and economics that has led to a debunking of the traditional economic assumption of rational, self-interested individuals. This approach explores the limits to human rationality in decision-making. It argues that human agents do not possess the flawless ability to maximise utility or profits by weighing all available alternatives presented to them and that there are flaws and imperfections associated with decision-making ….”

[Amna Silim, “What is New Economic Thinking?” Complex New World: Translating new economic thinking into public policy. Tony Dolphin and David Nash, editors. London: Institute for Public Policy Research. August, 2012. Pages 18-27.]

“The early development of evolutionary game theory in economics was motivated primarily by theoretical concerns: the justification of traditional game-theoretic solution concepts, and the development of methods for equilibrium selection in games with multiple stable equilibria. More recently, evolutionary game theory has been applied to concrete economic environments, in some instances as a means of contending with equilibrium selection problems, and in others to obtain an explicitly dynamic model of the phenomena of interest. Of course, these applications are most successful when the behavioral assumptions that underlie the evolutionary approach are appropriate, and when the time horizon needed for the results to become relevant corresponds to the one germane to the application at hand.” [William H. Sandholm, “Evolutionary Game Theory.” November 12th, 2007. Privately published. Pages 1-65. Retrieved on September 1th, 2016.]

“Quite a few biological games turned out to have the same structure as games that had been studied by economists, usually under another name: the biologists’’Hawk-Dove’ game, for example, has the same structure as the economists’’Chicken’-game. Evolutionary game theory has found a large number of applications in economic interactions ….” [Karl Sigmund, “Introduction to Evolutionary Game Theory.” Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics. Volume 69, 2011. Pages 1-25.]

“… the theory of an institution or a phase of life may be stated in conventionalized terms of the apparatus whereby life is carried on, the apparatus being invested with a tendency to an equilibrium at the normal, and the theory being a formulation of the conditions under which this putative equilibrium supervenes. In this way we have come into the usufruct of a cost-of-production theory of value which is pungently reminiscent of the time when Nature abhorred a vacuum. The ways and means and the mechanical structure of industry are formulated in a conventionalized nomenclature, and the observed motions of this mechanical apparatus are then reduced to a normalized scheme of relations.…

“It may or may not be a teleological process in the sense that it tends or should tend to any end that is conceived to be worthy or adequate by the inquirer or by the consensus of inquirers. Whether it is or is not is a question with which the present inquiry is not concerned; and it is also a question of which an evolutionary economics need take no account. The question of a tendency in events can evidently not come up except on the ground of some preconception or prepossession on the part of the person looking for the tendency. In order to search for a tendency, we must be possessed of some notion of a definitive end to be sought, or some notion as to what is the legitimate trend of events. The notion of a legitimate trend in a course of events is an extra-evolutionary preconception, and lies outside the scope of an inquiry into the causal sequence in any process. The evolutionary point of view, therefore, leaves no place for a formulation of natural laws in terms of definitive normality, whether in economics or in any other branch of inquiry.”

[Thorstein Veblen, “Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science?” The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Volume 12, number 4, July 1898. Pages 373-397.]

“The axioms of evolutionary realism are, by construction, empirical generalizations that serve as analytical ‘meta-truths.’ From the evolutionary perspective, all existences are bimodal-associative-processes; no existence is not composed in all three ontological dimensions.…

“Axiom 1: All existences are matter-energy actualizations of ideas (bimodality).

“Axiom 2: All existences associate.

“Axiom 3: All existences are processes.”

[Kurt Dopfer and Jason Potts, “Evolutionary realism: a new ontology for economics.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 11, number 2, June 2004. Pages 195-212.]

“… there are some important fundamental differences in approach in which … our ontology of ‘evolutionary realism’ differs substantially from the transcendental ‘critical’ realist ontology (e.g. [Tony] Lawson …) that gathers under the ‘Cambridge school’ of social ontology …. We all want more ontology in economic analysis; but we differ as to what that ontology should be and what function it serves in relation to (evolutionary) economic theory and analysis.” [Kurt Dopfer and Jason Potts, “Why evolutionary realism underpins evolutionary economic analysis and theory: A reply to Runde’s critique.” Journal of Institutional Economics. Volume 6, number 3, 2010. Pages 401-413.]

“The purpose of evolutionary economic policy … is to facilitate the flow of ‘generic profit’ to the originators of generic ideas and the ongoing flow of ‘generic rent’ to the adopters and retainers of these generic rules. Generic policy is therefore focused only about the creation of opportunity space (zeroth-order policy) and the creation of the capabilities to explore that space (second-order policy) and not at all about the operational space of first-order generic rules.” [Jason Potts, “Exchange and evolution.” The Review of Austrian Economics. Volume 20, 2007. Pages 123-135.]

“Building on the ontology of evolutionary realism recently …, we develop an analytical framework for evolutionary economics with a micro–meso–macro architecture.…

“… Adoption of a more explicit micro–meso–macro framework enables us to conceive more clearly how complex systems theory and self-organization theory fit together with population-based thinking to provide evolutionary economists with an analytical apparatus that can embrace the emergence of generic novelty in structured open systems.”

[Kurt Dopfer, John Foster, and Jason Potts, “Micro–meso–macro.” Journal of Evolutionary Economics. Volume 14, 2004. Pages 263-279.]

“… the widespread belief in ‘hard’ environmental constraints may be obscuring the important role of entrepreneurship in co-evolutionary interactions between the economy and the environment. If this is the case, it may have distorted the analytic focus of ecological economics in a way that has limited the range of policy options explored for achieving sustainable economic development.” [Jason Potts, John Foster, and Anna Straton, “An entrepreneurial model of economic and environmental co-evolution.” Ecological Economics. Volume 70, 2010. Pages 375-383.]

“The conventional view of innovation also regards the production of technology as something that happens mainly within the isolated firm. A more realistic view embraces the concept of innovation as a social process involving many participants. The production of new technology often depends on the flow of technological information between firms. This is especially so in rapidly changing, highly innovative industries. It is a process whereby bits of information are gathered from a variety of sources, mostly outside the individual firm, to be assembled in new pattern within the firm or a group of firms.” [Jason Potts and Tom Mandeville, “Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Innovation and Growth in the Service Economy.” Prometheus. Volume 25, number 2, June 2007. Pages 147-159.]

“[Kurt] Dopfer and [Jason] Potts … commence their overview by arguing that there is a need for ‘empirical generalization’ of evolutionary realist methodology with the aim of refining analytical research. The authors set out three ‘ontological axioms,’ suggesting that these axioms will help to illuminate the ontological commitments of Evolutionary Economics. In turn, the latter is viewed as a ‘nascent analytical framework’ approaching the economy as an open system. This ‘theoretical hybrid’ supposedly weaves together ‘evolutionary theory, complex systems theory, self-organization, and agent-based computational theory,’ while merging the methodologies of ‘Austrian, Behavioural, Institutional, Post-Keynesian and Schumpeterian economics.’” [James Juniper, “A Critique of Dopfer and Potts’s Evolutionary Realism.” Australasian Journal of Regional Studies. Volume 15, number 1, 2009. Pages 27-43.]

“Long before the emergence of the modern brand economy, Thorstein Veblen elaborated an economic theory centered on symbolic entities. Based on his thought, this article pursues a view of the brand which escapes both sociological and economic approaches to the phenomenon. Views of the brand as a meaningful object and of the trademark as a signal of product quality omit the simple possibility that the brand, to some extent, is a symbol turned into a commodity. The article develops this possibility using Veblen’s economic theory of display, which can be read as revolving around the notion of a ‘costly symbol.’ Things which necessitate waste, and thus materially attest to wealth, enter Veblen’s economy of display insofar as they become valued for their own sake. His theory thus foretells the basic transformation that characterizes the emergence of modern brand economy, where symbols which ostensibly qualified commodities became by themselves economic objects.…

“This essay argues that Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class is crucial for the understanding of brands. Although written long before the emergence of the modern brand economy, Veblen’s book is concerned with the central themes in the study of brands. Most importantly, his book addresses symbols – symbolic practices and things whose function is to display differential social distinctions. To construct an economic theory of symbols, Veblen explores economic life as intertwined with social relations: how economic entities articulate social identities and social relations. Such themes are now central to the study of brands and consumer culture.”

[Noam Yuran, “Meaningful Objects or Costly Symbols? A Veblenian Approach to Brands.” Theory, Culture & Society. Volume 33, number 6, November 2016. Pages 25-49.]

“Sadly, economics today is a relatively monolithic discipline. It is typically defined in terms of one set of assumptions and approaches, rather than in terms of an object of analysis – the economy, which could in principle be analysed from different perspectives. Taking inspiration from some alternative traditions in economics, this essay questions the adequacy of orthodox analyses of health care systems and points to a different approach.

“Health care provision and expenditure are attracting increasing attention from economists, but alternative approaches within economics have received relatively little consideration.… It is argued here that the peculiar features of the health sector and the special requirements of health policy limit the viability of a neoclassical approach even more severely than in other typical areas of its application.”

[Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “Towards an alternative economics of health care.” Health Economics, Policy and Law. Volume 4, issue 1, January 2009. Pages 99-114.]

“The development of capitalism since the nineteenth century has involved (as [Karl] Marx long ago predicted it would) the continuing transformation of the labouring population in every area of the world into wage-earning employees of capitalist firms. Although the ups and downs of the business cycle brought sometimes improvement, sometimes worsening of their working and living conditions, capitalism, given its foundation on the extraction of profit from the productive activities of workers, continually reproduces a basic conflict of interest between the working and employing classes, a conflict more recently accompanied by ecological and military threats to the continued welfare and even the existence of the human race as a whole. But the social movements and organizations that once competed or cooperated to shape that conflict into a struggle to abolish capitalism and create a new form of society in which productive labour would be free from exploitation are largely gone.” [Paul Mattick, Jr. Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. 2011. Page 95.]

“Paul Mattick’s brief account in Business as Usual is short on detail, but its tight focus on the basic economics of the crisis make it a good introduction for the non-expert looking for a more integrated story. Once again the writing is excellent, and although there are no tables or charts there is plenty of well-chosen information, wide-ranging as regards time and place, and both events and ideas are clearly summarised. His first chapter gives a summary account of the crisis and the mainstream analysis of it, starting from the impact that falling house prices had on the mortgage finance sector from 2006, and the way decades of financial liberalisation and internationalisation had created an ideal mechanism for spreading that impact into global credit markets. While acknowledging the strength of Keynesian critiques of neoclassical economics, he challenges the failure of such critics to account for the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, and their continued faith in the possibility of building a ‘good’ capitalism free from financial instability and speculation. He then extends his critique to those who emphasise the structure of finance as a cause, given the speed with which the crisis revealed the weakness of both private businesses and the public sector in the US, propped up for years by the recycling of East Asian and Middle Eastern export earnings.” [Hugo Radice, “Explaining the Crisis.” Capital & Class. Volume 36, number 2, September 2012. Pages 339-367.]

“In the preface [to Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism], [Paul] Mattick argues that the Marxist approach best illuminates and explains the longterm likelihood for crises plaguing the capitalist system. The first chapter, ‘What Happened?’ chronicles the series of events leading up to the ‘Great Recession.’ In addition, Mattick issues an injunction against the mainstream approach in economics, primarily because of its lack of historicity and explanatory power. Mattick relies upon the history of economic thought to explore ‘Ups and Downs,’ his second chapter that deals with business cycles. Here, Mattick argues that we must consider firms’ profitability and not national income, as the chief determinate of investment driving economic growth. In ‘Money, Profit, and Cycles,’ Mattick explores the definition and socio-historical peculiarities associated with money. In addition, he considers the social-systemic character of profit as a category. Mattick likewise emphasizes the importance of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: what he relies upon to highlight the dialectical nature of the cycle of prosperity and depression.” [Andres Guzman, “Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism.” Review article. Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 46, number 3, September 2012. Pages 819-821.]

“Alternative economies represent an essential part of ‘cultures of resistance’ … to the increasing commodification of social life and the monolithic nature of global capitalism.… Yet, various alternative spheres of economic activity exist where exchange is not necessarily monetized and/or underpinned by motivations for profit.

“Alternative economies constitute responses to the precarious conditions in everyday lives of individuals, and their lack of access to and scarcity of resources and competences …. Alternative economic models rest on shared commitments to minimize economic domination and exploitation and thereby alleviate the subordinated position of local subjects …. Specifically, alternative economies have (re-) emerged in local communities where various groups and movement actors work towards localized development and are driven by their hope to improve human conditions.”

[Mario Campana, Andreas Chatzidakis, and Mikko Laamanen, “Special Issue on Alternative Economies: Journal of Macromarketing, 2017.” Journal of Macromarketing. Volume 34, number 3, 2014. Pages 408-409.]

“My philosophical intuitions are uncompromisingly realist, but I have pursued a middle of the road line of accommodating, in my conception of scientific realism, a number of apparently antirealist ideas (such as those related to social constructivism, relativism, error, and deliberate falsehood in scientific theories). I have also sought to distinguish between numerous different kinds of realism so as to help clarify the issues in the ongoing debates. The project is one of local scientific realism that proceeds in a bottom-up manner and is sensitive to the peculiarities of particular scientific disciplines.” [Uskali Mäki, “Uskali Mäki: Research interests and publications.” Personal website. Undated. Retrieved on September 4th, 2016.]

“I must confess I was influenced by Roy Bhaskar’s first two books …. I even used some of their vocabulary when I started teaching undergraduate courses in the philosophy of the social sciences in the last years of the 1970s. But as I tried to apply Bhaskar’s ideas in my emerging realist philosophy of economics, within a few years I abandoned them as too simplistic for the purpose (as you know, some years later Bhaskar’s ideas were discovered by Tony Lawson and used in arguments that I think distort facts about economics).

“This early disappointment with Bhaskar helped me realize there was nothing available in the philosophical literature that would be directly applicable to such a complex and peculiar subject as economics ….

“… The arguments for local scientific realism provide an instructive case against the popular practice of borrowing ideas from general philosophical literature and applying them directly to economics or any other specific discipline.…

“… we are likely to have a number of local scientific realisms tailored for specific disciplines and fields, and perhaps theories ….”

[Uskali Mäki, “Realism from the ‘lands of Kaleva’: an interview with Uskali Mäki.” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. Volume 1, issue 1, autumn 2008. Pages 124-146.]

“The issue of resemblance is the hottest methodological issue in and about theoretical economics. Models and their assumptions are being criticised for being unrealistic and defended as sufficiently realistic or inconsequentially unrealistic.” [Uskali Mäki, “Models are experiments, experiments are models.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 12, number 2, June 2005. Pages 303-315.]

“Ontological unification is a factual discovery concerning the actual degree of unity in the world, and an ontologically unifying theory represents this unity in a truthful fashion.” [Uskali Mäki, “Economics Imperialism: Concept and Constraints.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 39, number 3, September 2009. Pages 351-380.]

“… the purpose of the article has been to use a reconstruction of one school of economic thought as an example to give a rough idea of how economics based on realism and explanatory ambitions would look, as opposed to economics based on instrumentalism and predictive aims. Secondly, I outlined a version of scientific realism which, for instance, allows essences and mental objects the ‘right’ to existence among scientific objects. Thirdly, I demonstrated how this version can be used to illuminate and reconstruct the Austrian way of explaining economic phenomena and institutions. For this purpose I introduced the notions of reductive redescription, identification and ontological unification. I also pointed out how the emerging conception of explanation can be made consistent with a sceptical attitude towards predictive capabilities in economics, and also how inferential and pragmatic concerns might be incorporated into the conception. Fourthly, I showed the way in which common sense plays a crucial role in Austrian realism.” [Uskali Mäki, “Scientific realism and Austrian explanation.” Review of Political Economy. Volume 2, number 3, November 1990. Pages 310-44.]

“The notion of ontological unification has one advantage over the notion of derivational unification. The advantage is this: the power of a theory to unify may be thought to have limits that are based on the degree of ontic unity of its domain. In this picture, factual inquiry into this domain and its boundaries adopts a special role. As the conclusion of such factual inquiry, we may draw such boundaries variously. Naturally, scientists are inclined to generalize on past discoveries and take those generalizations as guidelines for future inquiries.” [Uskali Mäki, “Explanatory Unification: Double and Doubtful.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences Volume 31, number 4, December 2001. Pages 488-506.]

“The degree of flexibility or revisability … varies from field to field or discipline to discipline and their stage of development. Casual observation suggests that there is more flexibility in young and interdisciplinary (open) fields and less flexibility in old and monodisciplinary (closed) fields. Compared to economics, neuroscience is young, interdisciplinary, and flexible in its conventions.” [Uskali Mäki, “When economics meets neuroscience: hype and hope.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 17, number 2, June 2010. Pages 107-117.]

“Among the conclusions are the following three. First, while causal relevance is important for understanding explanatory relevance, it is not sufficient. Considerations of pragmatic relevance have to be added to get a more complete account. Second, there are other accounts of causal relevance besides the particular small grain one: those formulated in terms of property–property relations. Without modification, the particular grain view may not be able to account for actual social explanations by social scientists. Third, the ontological and pragmatic constraints that have emerged in the foregoing discussion appear to be such that, at most, supplementary versions of economics imperialism have a chance of meeting them, in the spirit of explanatory ecumenism.” [Uskali Mäki, “Symposium on Explanations and Social Ontology 2: Explanatory Ecumenism and Economics Imperialism.” Economics and Philosophy. Volume 18, number 2, October 2002. Pages 235-257.]

“Considering the location of the present paper in current philosophy, I take it to address issues that have suffered from a relative neglect. First, the growing body of literature on scientific models and representations has given relatively little systematic attention to issues and concepts of truth. Second, the debates around scientific realism have made strong claims about truth in science, but the specific units of science that might or might not bear those truths have been left obscure. Third, the recent literature on theories of truth has paid relatively little critical and systematic attention to the issues of truth bearers. What follows can be read as an attempt to start putting these issues on the agenda in connection to one another.” [Uskali Mäki, “Models and the locus of their truth.” Synthese. Volume 180, number 1, May 2011. Pages 47-63.]

“What we seem to need now is a positive analysis, in the context of economics, of two things: 1) scientific realism as the major alternative to instrumentalism in the sciences and in philosophy; and 2) notions of explanation that satisfy the canons of realism. By performing these two inter-related tasks, we may acquire a non-instrumentalist and realist understanding of economics (what it is or is not, and/or what it could or should be). Understandably, only initial steps in this direction will be taken in this paper.” [Uskali Mäki, “Scientific realism and Austrian explanation.” Review of Political Economy. Volume 2, number 3, November 1990. Pages 310-344.]

“One can use a special social science such as economics as one such test case. How does scientific realism fit with economics? At this point it is important to see that we can approach examining the relationship between economics and realism from two points of view. One may adopt a top down approach: Fix a version of scientific realism as the right one; check whether economics fits; if it does, say ‘hooray!’; if it fails to fit, blame economics and insist on its revision so as to improve the fit. One may also adopt a bottom-up approach: Identify a set of generic key features of economics as a science; check this set against a large variety of realist ideas; depending on the outcome, make such realist ideas subject to rejection, adjustment, or replacement by new realist ideas, so as to improve the fit.” [Uskali Mäki, “Aspects of Realism about Economics.” Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science. Volume 13, number 2, May 1998. Pages 301-319.]

“The exposition is in three moves. I begin with discussing versions of what I call the apparent challenge of (misunderstood) scientific realism to economics.… I then discuss the challenge of economics to scientific realism, neglected by the apparent challenge. My revisionist argument will point out some of the consequences of making scientific realism sensitive to disciplinary peculiarities. Finally, on the basis of such a revised economics-sensitive notion of scientific realism, I will be prepared to outline some real challenges of (properly understood) scientific realism to economics.” [Uskali Mäki, “Scientific realism as a challenge to economics (and vice versa).” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 19, number 1, March 2011. Pages 1-12.]

“Scientific realism has mostly been conceived as a global doctrine about science. Under the pressures of anti-realist arguments, there have recently been attempts to turn scientific realism into a more selective account sensitive to the nature and performance of particular theories or disciplines. This has resulted in a shrinking scope for realism: those parts of science that do not fit with some canons of realism are being excluded and given over to anti-realist interpretations …. In contrast, this essay sets out to contribute to the anti-global movement in order to give scientific realism a chance more broadly: it is thereby also a contribution to a sort of re-globalization, It outlines a strategy that seeks to re-globalize scientific realism by going local in a more penetrating manner than has been done by selective realists.” [Uskali Mäki, “Reglobalizing Realism by Going Local, or (How) Should Our Formulations of Scientific Realism be Informed about the Sciences?” Erkenntnis. Volume 16, number 2, September 2005. Pages 231-251.]

“To get rid of an unrealistic methodology that is out of touch with real scientific practice, we need to look at what really happens in economics. And we need to expand our conceptual toolbox needed for understanding the complexities of actual scientific inquiry. I will offer a very brief and selective outline, bringing in just two themes: scientific modelling, and the institutions of inquiry.” [Uskali Mäki, “Mark Blaug’s unrealistic crusade for realistic economics.” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. Volume 6, issue 3, winter 2013. Pages 87-103.]

“… the aim of this paper is to compare and contrast the positions of two of the main exponents of realism in economics, Uskali Mäki and Tony Lawson. Although they share some basic notions of realism, their approach and contributions to the realist project in economics differ fundamentally. Indeed they may be regarded as advancing two different if overlapping projects. The aim here is not a comprehensive critical evaluation as such, but primarily to clarify their interpretation and use of realist philosophy in economics. Although there are some explicit and implied criticisms in the text, close attention is paid to the work of the authors themselves rather than to what various critics have had to say about it. Needless to say, given the extensive publications by the two authors in this area, this review is necessarily selective in describing the main ideas and arguments in each case and the basic differences between them.” [Duncan Hodge, “Economics, realism and reality: a comparison of Mäki and Lawson.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 32, number 2, March 2008. Pages 163-202.]

“Uskali Mäki has been the most consistent defender of philosophical realism among those contributing to the literature on economic methodology during the last twenty or so years. There are others who have written extensively about realism, such as Tony Lawson …, but, unlike Mäki, Lawson, and others have tended to focus on just one particular version of realism in Lawson’s case critical realism – rather that examining the broader set of questions associated with a realist account of economic science.” [D. Wade Hands, “Realism, commonsensibles, and economics: The case of contemporary revealed preference theory.” Economics for Real: Uskali Mäki and the Place of Truth in Economics. Aki Lehtinen, Jaakko Kuorikoski and Petri Ylikoski, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2012. Pages 156-178.]

“Uskali Mäki has been one of the major thinkers in economic methodology during the last decades and devoting a book to his philosophy of economics is a natural and appropriate step. Let me already at this stage admit that I am not really neutral about Mäki’s work. On several occasions I have myself applied it to contemporary issues in economics. From my own experience I know that Mäki’s ideas about realism, realisticness, isolation, commonsensibles, ontology, and so forth, have the potential to be successfully communicated to practicing economists, other social scientists and even politicians. This kind of potential is noteworthy and not common in economic methodology.” [Fredrik Hansen, “Economics for Real: Uskali Mäki and the Place of Truth in Economics.” Review article. Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. Volume 5, issue 2, autumn 2012. Pages 113-117.]

“… we … issue practical precepts for ethical consumption:

“Precept 1: Inform yourself first about those commodities the consumption of which, ceteris paribus, has the highest probability of giving rise to a moral wrong.…

“Precept 2: Reduce your ignorance about those commodities the consumption of which, ceteris paribus, risks engendering or sustaining the most severe moral consequences.…

“Precept 3: Obtain information first about those commodities about which, ceteris paribus, reliable information is relatively easily gathered.…

“Precept 4: Gather information about commodities you might consider purchasing up to the point at which the cost of further information gathering involves a moral sacrifice that outweighs the moral harm avoided by collecting more information.”

[Mark Peacock, “Market Processes and the Ethics of Consumption.” SAGE Open. Volume 2, number 2, April–June 2015. Creative Commons. Pages 1-12.]

“The most important aspect of necessity that we must now recognize, is the necessity of abandoning the commons in breeding. No technical solution can rescue us from the misery of overpopulation. Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run, and an increase in anxiety in the short.

“The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. ‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity’—and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.”

[Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science. Volume 162, number 3859, December 1968. Pages 1243-1248.]

“Garrett Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was one of the most frequently cited articles of the twentieth century. Hardin argued that a valuable resource must be owned. If it was left unowned, it would be consumed and not replenished. There appeared to be two kinds of owners: (1) private individuals or corporations, and (2) governments. A heated debate followed about the relative advantages and dangers of each, but the consensus held that one or the other type of owner ought to own everything that mattered. If you favored the government, you leaned toward the socialist side of the political spectrum; if you preferred private ownership, you were more of a libertarian. There was not much of a third way in the theoretical literature, although there were important, overlooked alternatives in practice.” [Peter Levine, “Seeing Like a Citizen: The Contributions of Elinor Ostrom to ‘Civic Studies’” The Good Society. Volume 20, number 1, 2011. Pages 3-14.]

“Supposedly, the tragedy of the commons is that when things are shared, selfish people destroy them or take them for themselves. That certainly describes the behavior of colonizers and corporations! The question for everyone else is not how to do away with commons, but how to defend them. Privatization does not protect against the tragedy of losing the things we share—it imposes it. The solution is not more individualization, but better collectivity.” [CrimethInc. Frequently Asked Questions about Anarchism. Berkeley, California: The Anarchist Library imprint of Open Guild Organization. 2017. Page 7.]

“Suppose the case of two persons agreeing to labour jointly, and that the result of their labour is to be common property. Then, were either of them, at any time, to increase his exertions beyond their previous amount, only half of the resulting bene- fit would fall to his share; were he to relax them, he would bear only half the loss. If, therefore, we may estimate the motives for exertion by the magnitude of the personal consequences expected by each individual, these motives would in this case have only half the force, which they would have, were each labouring separately for his own individual benefit. Similarly, in the case of three partners, they would have only one third of the force—in the case of four, only one fourth—and in a multitude, no force whatever. For beyond a certain point of minuteness, the interest would be so small as to elude perception, and would obtain no hold whatever on the human mind.” [William Foster Lloyd, “W. F. Lloyd on the Checks to Population.” Population and Development Review. Volume 6, number 3, September 1980. Pages 473-496.]

“Empty Moscow storefronts are a stark example of anticommons property, a type of property regime that may result when initial endowments are created as disaggregated rights rather than as coherent bundles of rights in scarce resoures. More generally, one can understand anticommons property as the mirror image of commons property. In a commons, by definition, multiple owners are each endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, and no one has the right to exclude another. When too many owners have such privileges of use, the resource is prone to overuse—a tragedy of the commons. Canonical examples include depleted fisheries, overgrazed fields, and polluted air.

“In an anticommons, by my definition, multiple owners are each endowed with the right to exclude others from a scarce resource, and no one has an effective privilege of use. When there are too many owners holding rights of exclusion, the resource is prone to underuse—a tragedy of the anticommons. Legal and economic scholars have mostly overlooked this tragedy, but it can appear whenever governments create new property rights. This Article proposes empty Moscow storefronts as a canonical example of the tragedy of underuse.”

[Michael A. Heller, “The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets.” Harvard Law Review. Volume 111, number 3, January 1998. Pages 621-688.]

“… [There is] a principle I call the tragedy of the anticommons. What’s that? Start with something familiar: a commons. When too many people share a single resource, we tend to overuse it— we overfish the oceans and pollute the air. This wasteful overuse is a tragedy of the commons. How do we solve such a tragedy? Often, by creating private property. Private owners tend to avoid overuse because they benefit directly from conserving the resources they control.

“Now imagine twenty or two hundred owners. If any one blocks the others, the resource is wasted. That’s gridlock writ large—a hidden tragedy of the anticommons. I say ‘hidden’ because underuse is often hard to spot. For example, who can tell when dozens of patent owners are blocking a promising line of drug research? Innovators don’t advertise the projects they abandon. Lifesaving cures may be lost, invisibly, in a tragedy of the anticommons.”

[Michael Heller. The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives. New York: Basic Books imprint of the Perseus Books Group. 2010. Pages 1-2.]

“… when innovation is sequential and complementary, standard conclusions about patents and imitation may get turned on their heads. Imitation becomes a spur to innovation, whereas strong patents become an impediment.…

“… we introduce a static (nonsequential) model that, we claim, underlies the traditional justification for patents. We emphasize the point that, besides helping an inventor to cover his costs, an important role of patents is to encourage innovative activity on the part of others who would otherwise be inclined merely to imitate.…

“… we assume as in the static model that, in a setting without patents, firms can costlessly imitate each sequential innovation and that firms incurring the investment cost have an equal probability of developing the next innovation (so that the current invention’s discoverer has no real advantage). However, we suppose that, absent licenses, a patent on an invention is sufficiently broad to block the next innovation in the sequence.”

[James Bessen and Eric Maskin, “Sequential innovation, patents, and imitation.” RAND Journal of Economics. Volume 40, number 4, winter 2009. Pages 611-635.]

“I will construct a simple model based on [James] Bessen and [Eric] Maskin’s … sequential model, as a metaphor for how the comedy of the knowledge commons, the ideal solution to the tragedy of the anticommons in knowledge works. The comedy seems romantic in a society today where even an unrecognizable one-and-a-half-second sound clip is copyright-protected …, but it can be realistic.…

“The anticommons in knowledge is distinct from the anticommons in physical objects. The former is always tragic, while the latter is not necessarily so. For society at large, the tragedy of the former will be much more tragic than the tragedy of the latter.

“The neoliberal argument that single ownership is the socially optimal solution to the tragedy of the knowledge anticommons is misleading. Actually, intellectual property per se is the very source of the tragedy of the knowledge anticommons, and the tragedy is unavoidable so long as the intellectual property regime exists. The only epistemically and socially beneficial solution to the tragedy of the knowledge anticommons is to create, expand, and protect the knowledge commons. The comedy of the knowledge commons comes from the positive meta-externalities of performance of the knowledge commons. Some heterodox formal models can be constructed as metaphors for how the comedy works.”

[Yi Zhou, “The Tragedy of the Anticommons in Knowledge.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 48, number 1, March 2016. Pages 158-175.]

“How might the topic of interpersonal comparisons of utility be brought within the domain of positive economic science as part of a testable and disconfirmable empirical theory? This essay sketches how we could develop such a testable theory of interpersonal comparisons if we already possessed other theories. We do not currently possess these other theories but we do have their beginnings and it is reasonable to think they will be developed adequately in the future. This essay, then, describes the only last part of this route to interpersonal utility theory, the part that builds upon these other theories yet to be developed. To show how it is possible for there to be an empirical theory of interpersonal comparisons leaves the non-trivial task of actually carrying through this project but, believing in the division of intellectual labor, I am content to leave that to economists.” [Robert Nozick, “Interpersonal Utility Theory.” Social Choice and Welfare. Volume 2, number 3, 1985. Pages 161-179.]

“The real debate over the organization of financial systems in capitalist economies is not about methods and modes of regulation. It is a debate between systemic options, at two levels.

“… The supply of credit from the financial system to the mass of consumers through the usual mechanisms of credit card, car debt and other loans and mortgages was, however, supplemented by the distinctive mechanism of asset-price bubbles, which generated so-called wealth effects among a relatively broad layer.”

[Peter Gowan, “Crisis in the Heartland: Consequences of the New Wall Street System.” New Left Review. Series II, number 55, January–February 2009. Pages 5-29.]

“The Economy for the Common Good (ECG) is a comprehensive and coherent economic model and is being practiced in hundreds of businesses, universities, municipalities, and local chapters across Europe and South America. It represents an alternative to both capitalism and communism. It emerges out of a holistic worldview and is based on “sovereign democracy,” a stronger democracy than exists today.” [Christian Felber and Gus Hagelberg. The Economy for Common Good: A Workable, Transformative Ethics-Based Alternative. Washington, D.C.: The Next System Project. 2017. Page 1.]

“In the Economy for the Common Good, competition would not be eliminated. Negative behavior resulting from some types of competition, however, would reflect poorly in a company’s Common Good Balance Sheet. Aggressive behavior against competitors, such as hostile takeovers, price dumping, advertising via mass media, or enclosure of intellectual property, would reflect negatively on their ethical scorecard and harm their chances of succeeding in the market. The more cooperative their conduct was, and the more helpful they were with customers and competitors—for example, being transparent and sharing know-how, resources, and means of production—the better their common good score would be. The current win-lose paradigm would be replaced by a win-win paradigm. If enterprises were rewarded for cooperation, destructive competition would turn into peaceful coexistence at the very least. In some cases, proactive cooperation among businesses would result.…

“The starting point here is an historical dualism of two extremes. Socialist economic theories, on the one hand, place a very high value on public property. Capitalism, on the other hand, argues that private property is the most important form of property. The Economy for the Common Good envisions all types of property, putting none above the other, but placing limits and conditions on all of them. We argue, for instance, that it is good for a society when the government provides a broad range of basic infrastructure, ranging from water, energy, and transportation to health services, and education. If these services are free, at least for low-income individuals, they are an effective measure against poverty and exclusion. They strengthen social cohesion and the democratic community. On the other hand, there is no clear argument as to why government-run organizations would have to produce furniture, clothes, or food. Private companies can do this just as well, if not better, but under three conditions: the size of companies is regulated, common good balance sheets are compulsory, and inheritance is limited.”

[Christian Felber and Gus Hagelberg. The Economy for Common Good: A Workable, Transformative Ethics-Based Alternative. Washington, D.C.: The Next System Project. 2017. Pages 11-12.]

“… the US constitution features in its preamble the words ‘promote the general welfare.’ The constitutions of democratic states are pervaded by a wide consensus as to what the goal of economic activity is: the advancement of the common good. In any case no constitution that I have read states that the goal of economic activity is to achieve monetary gain.… In the Western world there has been consensus for over two thousand years concerning the goal of economic activity. As you can see, the Economy for the Common Good is not suggesting anything new; it merely proposes that the constitutional goal of the economy should be implemented in the existing economic order as well.…

“To do this our current market economy would have to be put on a new course: directing our path away from pursuit of profit and competition, and instead striving towards pursuit of the common good and cooperation. The framework of legal incentives would have to abandon ‘maximization of self-interest’ and embrace ‘the common good’ as its guiding light instead, with the goal of all enterprise being to make the largest possible contribution to the common good. This is nothing new. The goals of individual economic protagonists would merely be harmonized with constitutional goals. This would be the first step towards an ethical reorientation of free markets.”

[Christian Felber. Change Everything: Creating an Economy for the Common Good. Susan Nurmi, translator. London: Zed Books. 2015. Pages 16-17.]

“This paper shows how [Karl] Marx extended his value theory beyond a mechanistic summing up of labor values to include the effect of scarcity, financial shocks, and technical change. This theory had a subjective and an objective dimension. I demonstrate how [Karl] Marx’s crises theory takes account of scarcity and financial shocks and that this theory is superior to the algebraic falling profit rate theory usually attributed to Marx. I explain why Marx used the category of constant capital as an obscure indicator of scarcity because of the political influence of the Malthusians.…

“Marx recognized the importance of this phenomenological analysis of constant capital.”

[Michael Perelman, “The Phenomenology of Constant Capital and Fictitious Capital.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 22, numbers 2–3, June 1990. Pages 66-91.]

“The corpus of Marxist theoretical work has concentrated primarily on the side of production and not human reproduction. It can be argued that as a consequence there is a huge analytical blind spot in understanding the woman question. Just as the modes of production are constituted by distinct relations and forces of production, so too, the modes of human reproduction are constituted by relations and forces of reproduction. The forces of human reproduction signify the degree of control mm/woman exert over nature vis-à-vis birth and mortality, giving rise to the demographic configuration of the modes. The exercise of control over birth and mortality is influenced by the level of accumulated knowledge in the fields of disease control, environmental control and birth control.” [Deborah Fahy Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela, “Outside the Domestic Labor Debate: Towards a Theory of Modes of Human Reproduction.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 16, number 2/3, 1984. Pages 137-166.]

“The rate of unemployment does fall toward the peak of the business cycle and this does have some influence on wage rates. Wage costs are the largest single element of costs, so this may be a significant cause of higher costs. Likewise, in the depression unemployment rises, helping to cause a fall in wage rates, so this element of costs does decline.…

“… Since capitalism faces both cost and demand problems, there is no easy out. Periodic contractions are caused endogenously so long as the system persists. Of course, government taxes, spending, and monetary policy may affect and modify the business cycle of capitalism. But only a revolution can end it.”

[Howard Sherman, “A Marxist Theory of the Business Cycle.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 12, number 1, April 1979. Pages 1-23.]

“… I will begin by presenting a schematicized version of the theory of alienation which can (loosely) be attributed to [Karl] Marx ….

“… instead of dissolving into individual market behavior, worker preferences to reduce or eliminate collective alienation, when acted upon, can only dissolve ‘upward’ into choice over whole economic systems. This is not to suggest, of course, that partial reforms which extend worker control over products can never occur within capitalism, They do occur, although with great difficulty, since they are usually regarded as fundamental systemic challenges. Paradoxically, they will be least resisted when they are least democratically constituted — that is, when the preferences of only some of the work force are substituted for the entire group — since partial coalitions cannot supply alternative social relations of production on their own. (The firm can then bargain over particular outcomes without calling into question the more general right to determine the content and disposition of production.)”

[Peter Dorman, “Alienation and Preference Theory.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 21, number 3, September 1989. Pages 1-6.]

“Complexity economics calls into question the entire premise of equilibrium (a balanced state), which is the centrepiece of conventional economics; instead, it assumes emergence, tension and chaos are key characteristics of economic systems and processes …. Complexity economics assumes that economic patterns are always emerging, are seldom in a steady state and are ever-changing, exhibiting perpetually novel behaviour – multiple equilibria ….

“Consumer educators now have the opportunity to gain deep insights from recent efforts to reconceptualize economics so that it moves away from the basic neoclassical principles of individualism, reductionism, rationality (reason), homogeneity, linearity, equilibrium (balance), maximization of utility and optimization (Arnsperger, 2010). Complexity economics introduces a new set of assumptions that can underpin consumer education initiatives: complexity, change and evolution, adaptation, self-organization, emergence, non-equilibrium, chaos and tensions, patterns and networks, and holistic, synergistic interconnections and relations between individual and aggregate agents ….”

[Sue L. T. McGregor, “Complexity economics, wicked problems and consumer education.” International Journal of Consumer Studies. Volume 36, issue 1, January 2012. Pages 61-69.]

“Rational expectations economics asks what forecasts (or expectations) are consistent with (are on average validated by) the outcomes these forecasts and expectations together create. Conventional economics thus studies consistent patterns: patterns in behavioral equilibrium that would induce no further reaction. Economists at the Santa Fe Institute, Stanford, MIT, Chicago, and other institutions are now broadening this equilibrium approach by turning to the question of how actions, strategies, or expectations might react in general to (might endogenously change with) the aggregate patterns these create …. The result—complexity economics—is not an adjunct to standard economic theory but theory at a more general, out-of-equilibrium level.” [W. Brian Arthur, “Complexity and the Economy.” Science. Volume 284, number 5411, April 1999. Pages 107-109.]

“… what is political ecology? For us it is simply a new approach rooted in political economy and cultural studies and critically branching out to understand relationships between society and the natural world. Political ecology is a relatively new area of critical exploration, and at present it raises more questions than it answers. But these are timely, and in some cases unique questions. Attempts to come to grips with the environmental crisis have opened up previously unseen landscapes, and the theorizing has begun. Our conference attempted to expand the boundaries of theoretical frameworks and research paradigms in political ecology.” [Roger Keil, David V. J. Bell, Peter Penz, and Leesa Fawcett, “Editors’ Introduction: Perspectives on global political ecology.” Political Ecology: Global and local. Roger Keil, David V. J. Bell, Peter Penz, and Leesa Fawcett, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 1-16.]

“In this article I shall suggest that there are good reasons for seeing the project of political ecology as being premised on a materialist conception of history much as [Karl] Marx sought to develop. However, I shall also argue, there are respects in which Marx’s radicalisation of classical political economy does not go far enough. In particular, both classical political economy and its Marxian critique effectively consider the human metabolism with nature almost exclusively in the dimension of human intention – labour – while all but disregarding unintentional effects, and the input of nature itself.” [Tim Hayward, “The Meaning of Political Ecology.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 66, spring 1994. Pages 11-20.]

“Critical economics recognizes that the favor its mainstream brethren enjoys with Western governments and corporations arises as much from its willingness to promote the interests of the powerful as from its explanatory power; indeed, the causation runs both ways, and critical economics is both humbled by, and fascinated with untangling, this interplay between politics and economics.” [Isaac Knowles, “Critical Economics.” Philosonomics: My Economics Research and Critique, and other Mental Meanderings. Blog. April 10th, 2007. Retrieved on September 19th, 2015.]

“[Antonio] Gramsci uses the term ‘critical economics’ to characterise Marx’s critique of political economy, in opposition to what he describes as ‘pure’ economics, under which term he includes also ‘orthodox’ or ‘liberal’ economics. Occasionally, he speaks of Marx as the ‘founder of critical economics.’” [Michael R. Krätke, “Antonio Gramsci’s Contribution to a Critical Economics.” Historical Materialism. Volume 19, number 3, 2011. Pages 63-105.]

“Where in particular does the emphasis lie in scientific research in classical economy and where, as against that, does it lie in critical economy? Why is this the case, i.e. with a view to reaching what practical goals or resolving what given theoretical and practical problems? For critical economy, it would seem sufficient to define the concept of ‘socially necessary labour’ in order to arrive at the concept of value, since one must take as one’s starting point the labour of all working people to arrive at definitions both of their role in economic production and of the abstract, scientific concept of value and surplus value, as well as one of the role of all capitalists considered as an ensemble For classical economy, on the other hand, the important thing is not the abstract, scientific concept of value (which it attempts to reach by other means, but only for the formal reasons of having a logically and verbally consistent system. arriving there – or thinking it has arrived there – using marginal utility by way of psychological research), but the more concrete and more immediate concept of the profit of the individual or the firm. What is therefore of importance is a study of the dynamic of ‘socially necessary labour,’ a dynamic that assumes various theoretical formulations – the theory of comparative costs. of static and dynamic economic equilibrium.” [Antonio Gramsci. Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. 1995. Pages 168-169.]

“The evolving view from the New Left was that socialism meant more than simply material well-being; it also meant social equality and an improved quality of life. This intellectual ferment produced a growing disenchantment with the traditional presentation of Marxian economic theory as well as with the arguments that Keynesian techniques could produce a more humane capitalism; but at the same time it produced a renewed interest in Marxism and more particularly in socialist economics.” [Frederic S. Lee, “Conference of Socialist Economists and the emergence of heterodox economics in post-war Britain.” Capital & Class. Volume 25, number 3, autumn 2001. Pages 15-39.]

“At the beginning of the’[19]90s we proposed to a group of the revolutionary left in Europe the idea of undertaking a common research project on the situation of the working class.… Some comrades from other countries, however, thought that, in view of the world-historical change, it was more urgent to examine our theoretical concepts. At that time we ourselves still approached the collapse of really existing socialism very optimistically.…

“Prevous revolutionary concepts and certainties were thoroughly shaken. Struggles in the factories had now only a defensive character. even stooping to begging for jobs. The left was concentrating on racism, fascism and nationalism, without either wanting to or being able to connect these with the class character of capitalism and the question of its revolutionary overcoming. That is why more and more influence in political lscussion was gained by those theories which had already in the 1980s, departed from the radical critique of class society ….”

[Wildcat and John Holloway, “Wildcat (Germany) reads John Holloway – A Debate on Marxism and the Politics of Dignity.” Common Sense: Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists. Number 24, 1999. Pages 58-75.]

“Prior to the systematic study of centrally planned economies, most blueprints of the socialist economy emphasized three theoretical features …. First, central planning achieves balance between inputs and outputs by coordinating decisions at levels of economic activity that are consistent with state preferences, including full employment. Second, though planning proceeds chiefly on the basis of physical magnitudes, money cannot be dispensed with altogether. Planning therefore ensures balancing of nominal and real flows, with monetary instruments serving essentially to facilitate plan implementation at stable prices. Finally, prices are flexible to clear markets, although such adaptability may be guided administratively on an intermittent basis.” [Jozef M. van Brabant, “Socialist Economics: The Disequilibrium School and the Shortage Economy.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives. Volume 4, number 2, spring 1990. Pages 157-175.]

“The present position in the study of the theory of socialist economy is a little peculiar. In recent years a certain central principle for the economic running of a socialist economy has gradually come to be recognised as fundamental by nearly all economists who have written on the subject. But the conclusions that inevitably follow from the acceptance of this principle have not yet been successful in displacing those that continue to be held because they follow from obsolete principles that have now been rejected. Such a state of affairs is by no means as uncommon as might be supposed, and can be recognised by the use of a distinctive phrase which seems to have the effect of allaying the feeling of intellectual discomfort that the inconsistency arouses in thinking people. The comforting phrase is ‘theory must be distinguished from practice.’ By ‘theory’ is meant the new principle. By ‘practice’ is meant the theoretical conclusions that follow from the old principles. By ‘distinguishing between them’ is meant refraining from thinking about both of them at the same time. In this way the friction and the discomforts of the inconsistency are reduced to a minimum.” [A. P. Lerner, “Theory and Practice in Socialist Economics.” The Review of Economic Studies. Volume 6, number 1, October 1938. Pages 71-75.]

“What the political economy of socialism has to say about the political economy of capitalism

“This question is yet another way of looking at the legacy of the political economy socialism. The transition process might be an occasion to reconsider the established Western economic science. This has not been the case until now. When the packages of ‘stabilisation-cum-liberalisation’ did not bring the expected immediately or showed some drawbacks, these packages were never questioned themselves; the ‘Washington consensus’ had to remain valid. At most, it was admitted that to introduce some policy measures in the specific environment of the in transition could lead to some adverse results, but the validity of the underlying economic philosophy as such was never questioned-or if you did that, immediately rejected in the disgraceful category of ‘die-hard communists.’

“Time has come to question the assumptions of this ‘mainstream’ current. done in the debates about non-neoclassical economics (evolutionary, institutional, regulationist economics). With very few exceptions, those who belong schools are not interested in the works of the economists of the former socialist system.”

[Marie Lavigne, “The Political Economy of Socialism: What Is Left?” Europe-Asia Studies. Volume 49, number 3, May 1997. Pages 479-486.]

“The virtues of the market and the deficiencies of central planning have become common sense for many socialist economists, both in the capitalist countries and in those of ‘actually existing socialism.’ Some spirited defences have recently been made of non-market forms of economic co-ordination, … but in my view these do not provide fully satisfactory responses to the advocates of market socialism.” [Diane Elson, “Market Socialism or Socialization of the Market?” New Left Review. Series I, number 172, November–December 1988. Pages 3-44.]

“Several … things are required if we are interested in a serious evaluation of market socialism. First, lest the analysis be excessively nebulous, it should focus on a specific form of market socialism rather than on the concept as a whole. There have been several institutional proposals for market socialist economies, and clearly there might be major differences in the performance of various institutional forms. Second, the analysis should compare market socialism not with a hypothetical ideal economy but to the existing real-world capitalist economy. Specifically, it is not necessarily a sound argument against market socialism that it would be inefficient according to theoretical criteria—unless it could also be established that the real-world capitalist economy is indeed efficient (or at least less inefficient) according to these same criteria.” [James A. Yunker, “A Comprehensive Incentives Analysis of the Potential Performance of Market Socialism.” Review of Political Economy. Volume 19, number 1, January 2007. Pages 81-113.]

“Market socialists represent the economists who have taken the Austrian arguments against central planning most seriously. Unlike Austrian economists, market socialists continue to argue for sometimes radical interventions to correct perceived inequities in a pure laissez-faire economy. Some of these proposals are still subject to Austrian criticism, but others may actually correct the market in ways that clear-headed Austrian analysis can support. The distinction between willingness to pay and ability to pay has been ignored by many Austrian economists. When taken into account, and joined with other insights that Austrian economists and market socialist economists agree on, this insight points toward potential policy solutions that the two schools might accept.” [Guinevere Nell, “Bridging Austrian and Market Socialist Economics.” Challenge. Volume 54, number 4, July/August 2011. Pages 50–64.]

“Prior to the systematic study of centrally planned economies, most blueprints of the socialist economy emphasized three theoretical features …. First, central planning achieves balance between inputs and outputs by coordinating decisions at levels of economic activity that are consistent with state preferences, including full employment. Second, though planning proceeds chiefly on the basis of physical magnitudes, money cannot be dispensed with altogether. Planning therefore ensures balancing of nominal and real flows, with monetary instruments serving essentially to facilitate plan implementation at stable prices. Finally, prices are flexible to clear markets, although such adaptability may be guided administratively on an intermittent basis.” [Jozef M. van Brabant, “Socialist Economics: The Disequilibrium School and the Shortage Economy.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives. Volume 4, number 2, spring 1990. Pages 157-175.]

“Only a socialist economy can distribute incomes so as to attain the maximum social welfare. In any system with private ownership of the means of production, the distribution of incomes is determined by the distribution of ownership of the ultimate productive resources. This distribution is an historical datum which originates independently of the requirements of the maximisation of social welfare. For instance, the distribution of landed property is different in countries where the big landed estates of the feudal epoch have been broken up by bourgeois and peasant revolutions than where they have been left intact. Under capitalism the distribution of the ownership of the ultimate productive resources is a very unequal one, a large part of the population owning only their labour power.” [Oskar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part Two.” The Review of Economic Studies. Volume 4, number 2, February 1937. Pages 123-142.]

“In the socialist system as described [here] we have a genuine market (in the institutional sense of the word) for consumers’ goods and for the services of labour. But there is no market for capital goods and productive resources outside of labour. The prices of capital goods and productive resources outside of labour are thus prices in the generalised sense, i.e. mere indices of alternatives available, fixed for accounting purposes.… It seems … convenient to regard the income of consumers as being composed of two parts: one part being the receipts for the labour services performed and the other part being a social dividend constituting the individual’s share in the income derived from the capital and the natural resources owned by society.” [Oskar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part One.” The Review of Economic Studies. Volume 4, number 1, October 1936. Pages 53-71.]

“… [Karl] Marx was able to make … [a] great discovery — the founding of Marxist political economy — not only because of his efforts in the study of economics, but also because he carried out a complete revolution in terms of philosophical methodology. It was precisely the ‘definite’ or ‘certain’ historical philosophical context that allowed him to fundamentally surpass classical economics. Classical economics is natural, empirical social materialism, but only Marx’s historical materialism truly lays a scientific path; this allowed him to experience a profound shift in all the realms of his thought. At the same time, only in Marx’s great political economic revolution was his historical materialism first truly able to become a real science. This was a two-sided process of construction. More importantly, in Marx’s process of facing the economic development of social history, he was able to combine the critical reason of philosophy with fact-based research of real economics; this formed his most unique scientific, critical, historical phenomenology.” [Zhang Yibing. Back to Marx: Changes of Philosophical Discourse in the Context of Economics. Oliver Corff, editor. Thomas Mitchell, translator. Göttingen, Germany: Göttingen University. 2014. Creative Commons. Page 389.]

“There is no generally agreed definition, or even understanding, of financialization. This article critically reviews some of the relevant literature in light of the current crisis. It subsequently puts forth a theoretical analysis of financialization that is situated within classical Marxist political economy. Financialization is posited as a systemic transformation of mature capitalist economies that comprises three fundamental elements: first, large non-financial corporations have reduced their reliance on bank loans and have acquired financial capacities; second, banks have expanded their mediating activities in financial markets as well as lending to households; third, households have become increasingly involved in the realm of finance both as debtors and as asset holders.” [Costas Lapavitsas, “Theorizing financialization.” Work, employment and society. Volume 25, number 4, December 2011. Pages 611-626.]

“Productive labour is labour that creates value and surplus value; unproductive labour does not. The definition is simple, but deceptively so, for whether to make the distinction, and if so how, are among the most controversial issues in Marxist economics. Partly this is because, as with so much else, [Karl] Marx both built on and transformed the categories of productive and unproductive labour that he had inherited from his predecessors (primarily Adam Smith). Partly it is because Marx never developed a systematic treatment in his own work, so that the category has to be recovered and interpreted from widely scattered sources among writings put together for publication after his death by [Friedrich] Engels … and [Karl] Kautsky …. And partly it is because capitalist economies have changed since Marx’s day, so that what is unproductive has a historical specificity that writings in the late nineteenth century could not anticipate.” [Simon Mohun, “Productive and unproductive labour.” The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho, editors. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2012. Pages 277-282.]

“Marxist political economy experiences a rhythm and evolution in terms of both its prominence and (perceptions of) its substantive content. There can be no doubt, for example, that the global crisis that broke from the end of 2007 has raised the profile and the perceived relevance of Marxism, but this is necessarily different from the Marxisms that were prominent before 1917, in the interwar period, after 1956 or post- 1968. Influential social theories are moulded by, just as they mould, their own social and historical context. But, in contrast with mainstream approaches, Marxism offers a theoretical and conceptual apparatus that can be used to review its own evolution and historical experiences, and that can support the emergence of new generations of progressive movements and thought.” [Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho, “Introduction.” The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics. Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad Filho, editors. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2012. Pages 1-4.]

“Marxist economics is a difficult subject for many people, including myself. It is not something simple one can merely pick up from a book and become an expert in right away. It takes time, practice, research, and hard work, to learn our economic craft. This is not Austrian economics, which requires merely reading Econ 101 and blaming the state for all problems that arise. We seek to investigate the causes of the contradictions of capitalism.” [Jason Unruhe. Marxist Economics Made Simple. Niagra Falls, Ontario: MRN Publishing. 2016. Page 2.]

“[Karl] Marx’s critique of capitalism doesn’t alter the way in which good are mechanically produced, only the way in which they are distributed and social relations that arise from them. Investigated is also the political environment and the mechanics of it that result from the capitalist mode of production. As well as analyzing the source of wealth.” [Jason Unruhe. Marxist Economics Made Simple. Niagra Falls, Ontario: MRN Publishing. 2016. Page 8.]

“Queer economics and bank lending practice …

“A queer reading is needed rather than a gendered one because hero narratives of straight masculinity also highlight the homo-social heterosexuality of acceptable risk. Metaphors and the norms associated with them have the power to displace ‘others.’ Thus (heterosexual) women and minority groups may be associated with each other, and relegated on the assumption that they are not tough, strong, or visionary enough and are therefore (somewhat ironically) too high risk. Obviously in a battle between the sexes over space and access to public life, the ‘pioneer’ whose narrative was produced long after the historical events, helped to (re)produce femininity as dependent and tied to the domestic sphere, she keeping home as he blazes a new trail, she demanding intimacy and monogamy as he strives for independence and self-sufficiency. This narrative may help to explain why family is only clearly figured as a burden or a risk for women and not for men seeking loans.”

[Felicity Grace, “Risky Business: Heterosexual Credit and Lending Practice.” Sexualities. Volume 2, number 4, November 1999. Pages 322-449.]

“Queer studies, with its poststructuralist underpinnings, has, for all its enabling energies, not been particularly hospitable toward materialist analyses. But the time may now be right for a reincorporation of capitalism into our historical work. Queer theory is facing up to the fact that material constraints stemming from oppressed race, gender, and class positions mean that for many working-class people and people of color, queer notions such as ‘fluidity’ have as much to do with transnational flows of labor and capital as they do with the free play of genders and sexualities. Work in the burgeoning field of queer economics, which unravels the often messy entanglements of queer life with capitalist markets, bodes well too. It may also prove profitable to revisit a prequeer and pre-post-Marxist moment in lesbian/gay history’s development as a field.” [Steven Maynard, “‘Without Working?’: Capitalism, Urban Culture, and Gay History.” Journal of Urban History. Volume 3, number 3, March 2004. Pages 378-398.]

“The contention of this paper is that ecological economics requires solid foundations in the philosophy of science to clarify how natural and social sciences can cooperate and the extent to which they can combine in a way which meaningfully advances knowledge. Ecological economics must clarify its position on such issues as the use of mathematical formalism, the role of empiricism and the meaning of pluralism. A distinct and radical synthesis is called for in order to establish new foundations. This can be seen as relating to various calls for developing a preanalytic vision ….” [Clive L. Spash, “New foundations for ecological economics.” Ecological Economics. Volume 77, May 2012. Pages 36-47.]

“Following the Second World War, resource and then environmental economics also became established areas of study. However, the ability of these sub-disciplines to explore environmental critiques was restricted because they remained within the neo-classical framework and therefore tended to defend that paradigm. The emphasis on a mono-disciplinary approach also discouraged pluralism. Ecological economics has therefore become the latest attempt to take seriously the concern that aspects of the world such as the diversity of life in the wild, ecosystems structure and functioning, and the resources humans build into their cultures are all something more than a useful component of a welfare generating economic system.” [Clive L. Spash, “The Development of Environmental Thinking in Economics.” Enviromental Values. Volume 8, number 4, November 1999. Pages 413-435.]

“A perhaps inevitable struggle has then been on-going between this Social Ecological Economics approach and those engaged in legitimizing economics as an objective technical means for engineering society, where the environment is something external to the economy.

“This paper explores that struggle and some of the resulting confusion it has created for understanding the meaning and content of Ecological Economics. The central contention of the current paper is that the institutionalized power of mainstream theory has played an important role in delimiting the field of environmental research.

“Understanding the discourse surrounding the work that has been appearing as Ecological Economics involves more than merely focussing on the academic technical debates. This requires historical analysis, exploration of conflicts and probing of the ideological and methodological differences.”

[Clive L. Spash, “Social Ecological Economics: Understanding the Past to See the Future.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Volume 70, number 2, April 2011). Pages 340-374.]

“The policy dilemma is this: given the fact that a significant part of our well-being is derived from money flows from the market economy—an economy isolated from direct influences of the natural world—how do we create policies to preserve the life support systems of the planet? Ecological economics is still struggling with this question, and there are no satisfactory answers yet. But of all the conventional and heterodox schools of economic thought, ecological economics is the only one poised to address the problems of human survival in the coming centuries. It is the school of thought that explicitly recognises the interconnections and interdependence of the economic, biophysical and social worlds. We offer no grand theory, but rather a flexible approach recognising the uniqueness of specific cultures and ecosystems.” [John Gowdy and Jon D. Erickson, “The approach of ecological economics.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 29, number 2, 2005. Pages 207-222.]

“One of the major challenges of ecological economics has been how to understand and examine the design of environmental policies and governance institutions. Institutional economics in all its guises has been an influential source of ideas for ecological economics. Ecological economics has turned to institutional economics for sophisticated models and understanding of human behaviour …. Institutional economics has also been a source of alternative views regarding policy analysis and the normative basis of policy prescriptions …. While the influence of institutional economics has been profound, we believe that a comprehensive review of the conceptual foundations of institutional economics can provide new insights and important new directions for ecological economics.” [Jouni Paavola and W. Neil Adger, “Institutional ecological economics.” Ecological Economics. Volume 53, issue 3, May 2005. Pages 353-368.]

“… a coevolutionary research agenda has not taken off within ecological economics (EE). The epistemological and methodological challenges of coevolutionary research are formidable …. This special section presents a diverse collection of contributions that aim to reinvigorate the coevolutionary analysis of ecological–economic change. This opening article positions these contributions within the growing literature of (co)evolutionary approaches in environmental studies and economics …. Our ambition is to map a tentative coevolutionary research agenda for EE.” [Giorgos Kallis and Richard B. Norgaard, “Coevolutionary ecological economics.” Ecological Economics. Volume 69, issue 4, February 2010. Pages 690-699.]

“… [The] varied intellectual and social roots of ecological economics put ecological economists in a unique position, which holds the potential for the sorts of creative insight that can only come about from opposites held in tension. Yet good outcomes will not necessarily follow: Working from this liminal space also has its hazards. The purpose of this essay is to suggest how insights from feminist economics might help ecological economists put this unique position to its best use.” [Julie A. Nelson, “Between a rock and a soft place: Ecological and feminist economics in policy debates.” Ecological Economics. Volume 69, issue 1, November 2009. Pages 1-8.]

“Ecological Economics can be defined as economics for sustainable development or more simply ‘sustainability economics.’ This may include neoclassical environmental economics but is broader in scope and has partly emerged as a criticism of neoclassical economics …. Some argue that neoclassical economics, while being useful for some purposes, is not very helpful in tackling present social and environmental challenges, and is part of a mental map that has brought us to the present precarious situation.” [Peter Söderbaum, “Towards Sustainability Economics: Principles and Values.” Journal of Bioeconomics. Volume 9, number 3, 2007. Pages 205-225.]

“… ecological economics … attracted a combination of older academics disenchanted with the failure of environmental economics, younger socio-economists seeking new ideas and more radical social scientists. In general, this group appears to have been looking for interdisciplinary interactions with open-minded natural scientists and others. This socially oriented ecological economics grouping wanted new theory within economics, not just some political realisation that the environment was as important as other economic topic areas. The point was that understanding economic systems requires understanding the natural environment within which it is embedded, and that this fundamentally changes the way in which economics should be conducted both in theory and practice. This group formed a practical desire for policy to change the institutional arrangements whereby daily life is conducted; the aim being to address power relationships and social inequity because they are integrally related to environmental degradation. The group might be thought of as a revolutionary and radical branch ….” [Clive L. Spash and Anthony Ryan, “Economic schools of thought on the environment: investigating unity and division.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 36, number 5, 2012. Pages 1091-1121.]

“Many academic economists produce and utilize representations of the economy other than the supply-and-demand conception of markets. They are often referred to as heterodox economists, or sometimes political economists, and work within theoretical traditions other than the neoclassical-Keynesian one. A short list of these would include Marxian, classical, post Keynesian, radical, institutionalist, feminist, Austrian, and postcolonial approaches. If I had the space, I would give a detailed example from each. However, for the purposes of this discussion, let me invoke but one example, from the Marxian tradition. Certainly, one can find references in [Karl] Marx’s texts, including Capital, to many of the terms that are used in the neoclassical and Keynesian stories. Markets, prices, supply, demand, even equilibrium all play a role in the Marxian representation of the economy. But the basic story is quite different. For Marx, the commodities that are bought and sold on markets have exchange-values that can be understood in terms of two key elements: (a) the characteristics that economic agents have that make them capable of exchanging commodities and (b) the amount of society’s labor that is embodied in the commodities during the course of production and for which the commodities exchange. The first entails Marx’s discussion of ‘commodity fetishism,’ his theory of how economic agents come to be constituted socially and historically such that commodity exchange can take place. The second leads to his theory of surplus labor and, in a capitalist economy, the theory of surplus-value, that is, the idea that part of a capitalist commodity‘s value is the extra value created in and through the exploitation of the direct producers.” [David F. Ruccio, “Introduction: What are economic representations and what’s at stake?” Economic Representations: Academic and everyday. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. Pages 1-31.]

“The simple truth is that we must look beyond law itself. If we do no more than weigh the latest judgment of the courts in terms of how consistently it matches earlier precedent, then we may develop a highly consistent common law (no bad thing), but one which is inward looking and treats law as an entirely autonomous entity existing in some juridical vacuum. The advantage of both environmental economics and environmental ethics is not that either of them should tell us what the law is, but that both of them offer a paradigm from which the workings of legal rules can be viewed. It is the capacity of these disciplines to ask some fundamental questions about the entire enterprise of environmental regulation that makes the exploration of them so valuable.” [Julian Boswall and Robert Lee, “Economics, Ethics and the Environment.” Economics, Ethics and the Environment: Papers from the UKELA Cardiff Conference, June 2001. Julian Boswall and Robert Lee, editors. London and New York: Cavendish Publishing Limited imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Pages 1-8.]

“The problem of who decides when the market mechanism has failed is very much a political issue. For in many cases of ‘failure’ of the market mechanism, with serious ecological effects, there exists a flourishing market which would have to be stopped by regulation before the ‘rational’ decision-making processes could begin.” [David Evans, “Ecology and Economics.” Australian Left Review. Volume 1, issue 36, July 1972. Pages 30-32.]

“Ecological economics is moving towards the construction of a more general theoretical framework, part of which is a new ecological macroeconomics …. Within it, an ecological monetary economics has started to emerge. The monetary analysis of some ecological economists (but not all) appears to bemostly articulated around the following core: a stationary economy (and a fortiori a degrowth economy) is incompatible with a system in which money is created as interest-bearing debt ….” [Louison Cahen-Fourot and Marc Lavoie, “Ecological monetary economics: A post-Keynesian critique.” Ecological Economics. Volume 126, June 2016. Pages 163-168.]

“Decommodification is any historical, social, political, economic or cultural process ‘that reduces the scope and influence of the market in everyday life’ …. Decommodified research would seek to produce knowledge that supports ‘efforts to undermine the grip of market hegemony by increasing the transparency of the market and revealing its true social costs and consequences’ …. When conducting decommodified research it is important to acknowledge that the market economy has the potential to function as an effective tool for ‘organising productive activity’ …. The main problem identified here is when the market economy becomes a ‘market society,’ where almost everything is up for sale and where ‘market values seep into social relations and govern every domain’ …. To provide an illustration of what decommodified research would look like, we briefly consider three studies taken from the non‐experimental social psychology literature that present an analysis of self-identity outlining some of the costs and consequences of market values upon it.” [Matthew McDonald, Brendan Gough, Stephen Wearing, and Adrian Deville, “Social Psychology, Consumer Culture and Neoliberal Political Economy.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Early–view edition. February, 2017. Pages 1-17.]

“This paper explains the connection between ideas developed in my recent books and papers and those of economists who self-identify as Post Keynesians. My own work is both neoclassical and ‘old Keynesian.’ Much of my published work assumes that people have rational expectations and that ‘animal spirits’ should be modeled as a new fundamental. I adopt a general equilibrium framework to model the macroeconomy. But although I write from a neo-classical tradition the themes I explore in my published writing have much in common with heterodox economics. This paper explains the common elements between these seemingly disparate traditions. I make the case for unity between Post-Keynesian and General Equilibrium Theory under the banner of Post-Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Theory.…

“… beliefs … [are] an independent driver of business cycles. According to Keynes, animal spirits, aka beliefs, is an independent driving variable that shifts the aggregate demand curve up and down. As the curve shifts, so its intersection with aggregate supply also shifts. This intersection represents an equilibrium, or rest point, of the macroeconomy. An important research question for macroeconomics is: what are the determinants of the aggregate demand curve and why does it shift around in sometimes unpredictable ways over time? In my view, Keynes’ theory of the consumption function is inadequate to answer this question. We should instead explicitly model the connections between consumption and wealth.”

[Roger E. A. Farmer, “Post Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Theory.” Presented at the 20th annual conference of the FMM Research Network on Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies, Towards Pluralism in Macroeconomics. October 20th–22nd, 2016. Pages 1-16. Retrieved on February 7th, 2017.]

“Total factor productivity (TFP) is a central concept in the mainstream analysis of economic growth. Using aggregate production functions, economists estimate the shares of economic growth explained by increases in capital, labor, and (in some applications) natural resource inputs. The residual of unexplained growth is then ascribed to ‘disembodied’ technological advance or TFP. This article develops a radical ecological-economic critique of TFP analysis. The critique uses Marxist theory to synthesize relevant nonmainstream perspectives ….

“This article develops an ecological critique of a central concept in the mainstream analysis of economic growth: total factor productivity (TFP). The main theoretical basis of TFP is the aggregate production function, which expresses, in mathematical form, the relationship between the quantity of output that can be produced by an economy and different amounts of factor inputs employed in production. TFP growth is defined as the amount of output growth that cannot be explained by growth of the individual factor inputs in the aggregate production function.”

[Paul Burkett, “Total Factor Productivity: An Ecological-Economic Critique.” Organization & Environment. Volume 19, number 2, June 2006. Pages 171-190.]

“The bitcoin blockchain

“Put most simply, a blockchain is a shared ledger. This concise definition captures the essence of the concept while allowing for the ample flexibility with which it is used. In even the loosest of applications of the concept, a blockchain is, first, a write-only ledger: a list of recorded entries that can only be added to, not erased or changed. Second, a blockchain is shared: it is maintained and accessed by a number of parties without one central host. Each “block” is a set of records in the ledger. All parties can add blocks and can see when blocks are added, so the blockchain is a ‘chain’ of ‘blocks.’

“The concept of a blockchain was, of course, developed not as a generic, multipurpose ledger but for the purpose of assigning and transferring ownership of a new form of digital money, bitcoin.…

“Ledgers are a common feature of most payment systems. In a highly simplified version of traditional payment systems, a centralized institution, like a bank, keeps account of who paid what to whom, crediting and debiting accounts accordingly. In contrast, with bitcoin, there is no bank keeping track of credits and debits. Instead, all node computers maintain the ledger of ownership of each bitcoin. To make a transaction, the owner broadcasts the transfer of a coin to all nodes. That transaction is collected into a ‘block,’ which is ‘chained’ to all previously generated blocks to form the ledger hosted by all nodes. New bitcoins are generated for nodes as a reward for verifying blocks and adding them to the chain. The system protects against duplication or counterfeiting coins by verifying all blocks and ensuring that all nodes are in agreement. Each bitcoin is, in turn, really just an entry in the ledger. One trades in the rights to claim this bitcoin.

“The bitcoin blockchain can be understood in terms of its social architecture as well as its technical features. The bitcoin blockchain is produced via a set of overlapping, sometimes inconsistent, ideological systems.”

[Lana Swartz, “Blockchain Dreams: Imagining Techno-Economic Alternatives After Bitcoin,” in Manuel Castells, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Sviatlana Hlebik, Giorgos Kallis, Sarah Pink, Kirsten Seale, Lisa J. Servon, Lana Swartz, and Angelos Varvarousis. Another Economy is Possible: Culture and Economy in a Time of Crisis. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2017. Wiley ebooks edition.]

“I call the next system economy a ‘living’ economy, because its underlying design principles come from our understanding of healthy living systems.…

“Just as a living economy requires a living Earth story and a living Earth economics, so too it requires a living Earth jurisprudence that puts the rights of life ahead of the rights of money. Only by saving nature can we save ourselves.…

“Call it deep or living democracy, it has five essential elements: Equality + Voice + Ownership + Local + Community. When ownership is small and local, and owners are community members, the powers of ownership naturally align with community interests, including the community’s interest in a healthy environment, shared prosperity, and transparent, inclusive decision-making processes—the core goals of a living economy.…

“Cooperatives may generate a profit, but if they are true to the principles of cooperative enterprise, their primary purpose is to serve their members. They may indeed organize as living communities, in which service to members takes priority over profit. Such enterprises are essential to democracy and living economies.…

“Authentic market economics—in contrast to contemporary market ideology—identifies a number of conditions essential for optimal market function. These conditions include: (1) buyers and sellers must have full information; (2) there are no trade secrets; (3) the full cost of producing and using the good or service must be included in the buyer’s price; and (4) no buyer or seller can be big enough to influence the market price. In other words, there must be no monopoly power. Local markets, that approximate these market conditions, are a central feature of living economies, as are any markets that approximate these stipulated conditions.”

[David Korten. The New Economy: A Living Earth System Model. Washington, D.C.: The Next System Project. 2016. Pages 2-36.]

“The Living Economy narrative frames the culture and institutions of a new economy that works in co-productive partnership with nature to maintain the conditions essential to all life. It supports and enhances Earth’s living systems. It provides livelihood opportunities for all people. It is radically democratic. And it advances Living Earth’s evolutionary journey.

“The Living Economy narrative is integral to the fast-growing New Economy movement. Business people speak of the responsibility of business to serve the common good. Investors speak of a living return that combines a modest financial return with the benefits of living in a healthy community with a healthy ecosystem. The homilies on economic justice of Pope Francis reach a vast audience with foundational moral truths. Multiracial leadership groups like Movement Generation are advancing a generative Earth frame among grassroots groups. Recent findings in science affirm that our health depends on our connection to nature and a caring community in which wealth is equitably distributed. We are learning that committing acts of kindness brings joy.”

[David Korten. Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. Oakland, California: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2015. Page 136.]

“A close look at the development of feminist ecological economics reveals similarities between its premises and challenges and those of feminist economics.…

“By linking … two concerns – theoretical and practical gender and ecological perspectives – a feminist ecological economics provides theoretical justification and impetus for those concerned with economic sustainability or the economic contribution of women to revisit their research priorities.”

[Ellie Perkins and Edith Kuiper, “Introduction: Exploring Feminist Ecological Economics.” Feminist Economics. Volume 11, number 3, November 2005. Pages 107-109.]

“Currently the feminist environmental discussion is in deadlock. It is politically weak and wears itself out in an antagonism similar to the one described above: either distributive justice or environmental protection and resource preservation. But these alleged contradictions must be conceptualized in their mutual dependency and combined with a feminist-emancipatory perspective. I believe one reason for the current weakness of feminist environmental movements is that the mediation between a deconstructivist understanding of gender and a materialist understanding of nature is as yet theoretically and practically difficult to grasp. A feminist conception of environmental policies faces the challenge of conceiving the relationship between humans and nature as a material relationship without perpetuating the discourse of women’s more intimate connection with nature.” [Christine Bauhardt, “Rethinking gender and nature from a material(ist) perspective: Feminist economics, queer ecologies and resource politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies. Volume 20, number 4, 2013. Pages 361-365.]

“Green economics is the economics of the real world—the world of work, human needs, how they mesh together most harmoniously. It is primarily about ‘use value,’ not ‘exchange value’ or money. It is about quality, not quantity, for the sake of it. It is about regeneration—of individuals, ecosystems—not about accumulation, of either money or material.…

“… Ecological development requires an unleashing of human development and an extension of democracy. Social and ecological transformation go hand in hand.”

[Brian Milani, “What Is Green Economics?” Race, Poverty & the Environment. Volume 13, number 1, summer 2006. Pages 42-44.]

“So what is Green Economics? One definition of Green Economics is the economic analysis and evaluation of alternatives (technologies, projects, systems, etc.) that reduce carbon emissions (green house gases) that contribute to global warming. This definition includes the study and evaluation of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar/sun, wave, water, and others, as well as the economics of energy conservation efforts such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).” [Donald N. Merino, “Some Observations on Green Economics.” Engineering Management Journal. Volume 22, number 3, September 2010. Page 1.]

“… models for measuring sustainability must more explicitly address the fundamental importance of environmental issues at all levels of society, including individual companies …. This is further supported by the green economics paradigm, which recognizes that the economy operates within social relationships that are embedded in nature …. Societies cannot continue indefinitely with a deteriorating environment and natural resources. Signs of a deteriorating environment abound, with global warming, ozone layer depletion and ocean pollution among the prominent examples.” [Payman Ahi and Cory Searcy, “A stochastic approach for sustainability analysis under the green economics paradigm.” Environmental Research and Risk Assessment. Volume 28, number 7, October 2014. Pages 1743-1753.]

“As described in the green economics paradigm …, the economy operates within social relationships, which are embedded within nature. Moreover, according to the concept of strong sustainability …, human activity is enclosed within the confines of the limits of the environmental carrying capacity. Therefore, focusing on the sustainability objectives, economic growth as well as quality of life improvements are constrained by the boundary of ecological limits …. [T]he economy is a part of society, which is nestled inside of the environment. In this view, both economy and society are dependent on the environment and thus are constrained by the environmental limits.” [Payman Ahi. Sustainability Analysis and Assessment in the Supply Chain. Ph.D. dissertation. Ryerson University. Toronto, Ontario. 2014. Page 108.]

“Intended to be a paradigm-shifting reallocation of capital, the green economy concept seeks to dispel the preconceived notion that environmental sustainability must come at the expense of economic productivity and progress, and vice versa. Under this framework, a zero-emission and socially inclusive economic model would also give ample value to natural resources.” [Anjali Appadurai, “The Brown Baggage of Green Economics.” Alternatives Journal. Volume 38, number 4, July/August 2012. Page 6.]

“Much has been written about whether endowments help or hurt congregations [in Unitarian Universalism]. Such questions are asking, in effect, are their intrinsic factors in endowments that help or hurt a congregation? From a postmodern perspective, such questions are asking whether and how endowments include irreducible economic factors? There are strong opinions on either side of the question: Some say endowments hurt congregations, and others say they help. This diversity of opinion was found in the literature and was expressed by the responders in this study. Some say that the endowment hurts like an addiction if it is used for operating budgets …. Some observers say that whether it helps or hurts depends upon the quality of congregational leadership.” [Paul G. Hull. The sacred money of church endowments for church growth and revitalization from a postmodern economic perspective. Doctor of Ministry dissertation. Lancaster Theological Seminary. Lancaster, Pennsylvania. February, 2007. Page 229.]

“The important point is that a postmodern approach to EAL [economic analysis of law] would open the inquiry to all possible instrumental ends sought-including distributional ends. It would keep the dialogue open and avoid dogmatism. Many economists today argue that interpersonal utility comparisons are not appropriate. Contending that value is wholly subjective, they would deny the assertion that a pauper would value his last dollar more than the billionaire. Others of a libertarian ilk might argue that any scheme to redistribute wealth violates one’s natural rights to private property. But a pragmatic approach to ends does not require unanimity of opinion, only consensus among people with common sense and good faith. In this light, one might suspect that many policy makers would find the arguments favoring redistribution of wealth palatable.” [Daniel T. Ostas, “Postmodern economic analysis of law: Extending the pragmatic visions of Richard A. Posner.” American Business Law Journal. Volume 36, number 1, fall 1998. Pages 193-238.]

“Our society and its economy and culture have perpetuated a massive transfer of capital—by which I mean human effort, human hope and energy, as much as the abstract economic ability to buy and sell. That transfer has been not merely from the underclasses through the professionalized middle class, squeezed as it has been, bringing enormous lines of credit to an ever shrinking portion of the Fortune 500. The transfer of capital has been not simply from the ravaged inner city to the 1.5 percent who control approximately 50 percent of the gross national product. The transfer of human hope and effort into increasingly complex patterns of ownership and control has been, throughout the years since the last devastation of our city landscapes, a transfer of our national heritage, from distress to something that resembles despair.” [Jim Merod, “The Wisdom of Our Violent Knowledge: Postmodern Economics and Academic Cyberspace.” boundary 2. Volume 21, number 3, autumn 1994. Pages 231-246.]

“Heterodox scholars are now starting to explore how postcolonial theory may inform Keynesian, institutionalist, feminist and Marxian economic traditions … and, while much has been made of the mutual antipathy between postcolonial approaches and economic theory, these chapters illustrate some of the empirical, theoretical and political work underway by scholars – in a variety of contexts – looking for productive possibilities at the intersections of the postcolonial and the economic.

“The book has its origin in an Economic and Social Research Council ([the British] ESRC)–funded seminar series on Postcolonial Economies, which ran from January 2006 to October 2007. The seminar series stimulated interdisciplinary debate and knowledge sharing around postcolonial critiques of ‘the economic’ by facilitating discussion of the genealogies and geographies of economic knowledges in academic and policy debates, of how, and on what terms, postcolonial approaches and economic theory might enrich each other, and of what postcolonial economic understandings might look like in terms of policy and pedagogy. The book is designed to make two main contributions. First, the volume brings together, for the first time, dispersed social science researchers who are building cross-disciplinary dialogue about postcolonialism and its treatment of ‘the economic’ as a means to explore the uneven material and social realities of capitalism. Second, the chapters that follow seek to critique and enrich contemporary efforts to re-think economy, which tend to be rooted, empirically and theoretically, in Western-centred conceptions of what constitutes ‘diverse’ or ‘alternative’ economic practices ….” [Jane Pollard, Cheryl McEwan, and Alex Hughes, “Introduction: Postcolonial Economies.” Postcolonial Economies. Jane Pollard, Cheryl McEwan, and Alex Hughes, editors. London and New York: Zed Books. 2011. Pages 1-20.]

“References to and adaptations of different aspects of postcolonial critique have appeared in the work of feminist, institutionalist, post-development, postmodernist, post Keynesian and Marxian economists. This is not to say that most heterodox economists are familiar with postcolonial theory. However, key contributions such as [Edward W.] Said’s on the European construction of Othering and [Satya P.] Mohanty’s analysis of ‘third world’ feminism are widely enough seen in the literature that my present discussion does not exhaust all texts containing references to them. Needless to say, various strands of heterodoxy are not mutually exclusive; postcolonial work in Economics draws on more than one heterodox tradition.” [Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin, “Postcolonial theory and economics: orthodox and heterodox.” Postcolonial Economies. Jane Pollard, Cheryl McEwan, and Alex Hughes, editors. London and New York: Zed Books. 2011. Pages 37-62.]

“Meritocracy, therefore, must be placed between the one extreme of aristocracy, where opportunities and outcomes are structured only by descent, and the other extreme of egalitarianism, where opportunities and outcomes are entirely equally distributed among the members of a society. Obviously, modern societies have abandoned aristocratic structures and float somewhere between meritocracy and egalitarianism. Despite varying considerably in degree through redistributive welfare arrangements and institutions directly impinging on market outcomes, in every highly developed country some measure of egalitarian redistribution of opportunities and outcomes is employed.” [Arne Heise, “The Political Economy of Meritocracy: A Post-Kaleckian, Post-Olsonian Approach to Unemployment and Income Inequality in Modern Varieties of Capitalism.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 40, number 1, winter 2008. Pages 67-88.]

“The goal of the present discussion is to contribute towards a ‘dynamic’ approach to the identification and use of the economic ― and, given the multidisciplinary character of materialistic political economy ― social, political and anthropological variables that are needed to represent and change reality. It shall be argued that in ‘capitalism as we know it’ such variables are understood in theory, and used in practice, as metaphysical concepts deriving from the dominant culture and as simulacra of the material items themselves. If [David] Hume’s scepticism is correct, it shall be shown that what was just said implies that the participants to, and students of, the economy do not know, nor indeed can they know, whether they are ever able to directly grasp the actual material: the concrete. This paradox is the central concern of the present paper, for its methodological consequences on political economy.…

“… Materialistic political economy, rather than a positive or normative discipline, becomes a dynamic tool to continuously understand in novel fashion and, as a consequence, continuously challenge social and economic reality.…

“The conclusions emphasize the cultural fetters capitalism poses upon all intellectual endeavours of understanding. Only a dynamic political economy can be a revolutionary tool that frees us from such capitalist fetters, compelling us to be creative.”

[Andrea Micocci, “Unusual Humean issues in materialistic political economy.” The Journal of Philosophical Economics. Volume VII, issue 2, spring 2014. Creative Commons. Pages 2-26.]

“My main concern … [has been] to overcome what I see as the typical problem of economic theories: they mix up capitalism in theory and ‘capitalism as we know it’ in practice. This is the result of the logical flaws of economic theory and of capitalism in general, which constitute the general subject of my book. By political economy I therefore mean the materialistic study of the economic activities of the capitalist era. It comprises what we term economics, political economy in the Marxist sense, political science, sociology, psychology and history. As I explain in the book, it is a Classical approach only in the sense that is inspired by Adam Smith and Karl Marx (with his ‘critique of political economy’). But this is only the beginning of a theoretical reasoning that leads to a proposed ‘historical’ political economy, which differs from everything hitherto devised even in the role it can play in practice.” [Andrea Micocci, “A historical political economy of capitalism—an interview with Andrea Micocci.” Stuart Birks, interviewer. World Economics Association Newsletter. Volume 6, issue 4, August 2016. Pages 2-3.]

“In capitalism as we know it, in other words, no revolution is possible. Only subversions that reshuffle the known items of reality into a new configuration within the general framework are allowed. This way the intrinsic violence and prevarication of the capitalist mode of production … is also preserved, in practical as well as in academic politics. If all ideas have the same power vis-à-vis each other, then only material force (academic, political or military might, for three typical instances) can solve the contradictions by pushing them in one direction. Peaceful radical changes are ruled out and replaced by slow, boring and violent conformity. That this is only a temporary arrangement goes without saying.” [Andrea Micocci, “Alternative Economic Strategies and the Practice of Economics.” Presented at Political Economy, Activism and Alternative Economic Strategies: Fourth Annual Conference in Political Economy. International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy. The Hague, the Netherlands. June 9th–11th, 2013. Pages 1-9. Retrieved on November 20th, 2016.]

“Capitalism as we know it … is not based on economic categories but on (flawed) intellectual, cultural and institutional logic that makes it possible for value to be understood, used and institutionalized. Because this possibly Marxian argument is alternative to what most Marxists say, I call it •materialistic.’

“… a hybrid may be born whereby, suppliers, communities and individuals form cooperative networks. What happens to the ‘top’ in such cases? Does it change, albeit grudgingly, so as to eventually allow the system to shift further towards our second more utopic scenario? In the absence of this eventuality, we believe that whether we are fully within a first scenario or in some hybrid version of it, social and environmental damage is continually generated during its life-cycle. Fragmentation may occur at vastly different points in time when comparing these two situations. Yet fragmentation in our opinion is sure to happen. But when it occurs, will it simply be an anti-climax to the irreversible social and ecological damage already imposed on our planet? Hopefully, complexified knowledge achieved across veritable cooperation will not only save us in a physical sense but bring us closer towards the threshold of psychological and spiritual wisdom.” [W. David Holford, Omar Aktouf, and Mehran Ebrahimi, “Balanced wealth creation across cooperative economics.” Futures. Volume 40, number 5, June 2008. Pages 424-437.]

“Our exploration into the potential of cooperative entrepreneurship is not an aberration. Throughout the U.S. and the world, thousands of cooperative firms produce goods and services for the market and provide social conditions and work opportunities capable of responding to human needs and developing human potential. As with traditional business formations, these cooperative structures range in sizes similar to sole proprietorships and partnerships, to that of medium and large corporations. In the U.S. more than 100 million people are members of 47,000 producer-owned, consumer-owned, and worker-owned cooperatives spanning almost every sector of the economy, in both rural and urban areas. In 1995, continuing an upward trend, the revenues of the top 100 cooperatives in the U.S. increased to $110.4 billion. Every industry group registered increased revenues, with Agriculture, Finance, and Supermarkets accounting for the majority of the gains. Internationally the largest six cooperatives have larger total co mbined revenues than Citicorp, Merrill Lynch, Apple Computer, Texas Instruments, ITT and Bell Atlantic combined.” [Curtis Haynes, Jr., and Jessica Gordon Nembhard, “Cooperative economics—A community revitalization strategy.” The Review of Black Political Economy. Volume 27, number 1, summer 1999. Pages 47-71.]

“The viability of workers’ cooperatives in a capitalist economy has long been a point of debate and analysis since the nineteenth century, as can be seen in the early writings of Karl Marx …. The literature on this issue has traditionally been dominated by the ‘degeneration thesis,’ which asserts that cooperatives are unavoidably destined to suffer either business failure or a gradual degeneration from democratic forms to capitalist forms of organization …. Current literature contends that workers’ cooperatives are more efficient … and resilient … than conventional businesses, although the prevalence of capital-owned firms in the actual market economies is undeniable.” [Anjel Errasti, Ignacio Bretos, and Aitziber Nunez, “The Viability of Cooperatives: The Fall of the Mondragon Cooperative Fagor.” Review of Radical Political Economics. OnlineFirst edition. February, 2017. Pages 1-17.]

“Many theorists on the left would object to the idea that any kind of production embedded in today’s world dominant capitalist chains of production could be non-capitalist. As global production networks become more complex, each product and item we interact with in our daily lives bear the fingerprints of thousands, if not millions, of people …. Therefore, so the argument might go, it is useless to attempt any ostensibly non-capitalist activity. But while an awareness of the complexity of global production networks is important for understanding global capitalism, it does not follow that any organization that interacts with capitalist organizations is itself necessarily capitalist.” [Sofa Gradin, “Radical Routes and Alternative Avenues: How Cooperatives Can Be Non-capitalist.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 47, number 2, 2015. Pages 141-158.]

“Consider now the case of a worker-controlled firm (co-op).…

“In market socialism, the market situation facing the co-op resembles that facing the competitive capitalist firm.…

“In some co-ops, however, collective spirit may be weak, so that individualistic if not cynical behavior dominates. This outcome is especially likely if the coop is imposed upon the members by outside forces. Nonetheless, we can hypothesize that the level of conflict in a worker-controlled co-op is qualitatively lower than that in a capitalist firm.”

[Michael Reich and James Devine, “The Microeconomics of Conflict and Hierarchy in Capitalist Production.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 12, number 4, winter 1981. Pages 27-45.]

“Although it is important here to critique the nationalization process for its failings in delivering more socialistic forms of economic organization, we should recognize the genuine radicalism and sense of injustice that inspired both politicians and theoreticians of the time. Nevertheless, the key criticism that applies relates to the failure to inject anything approaching a more democratic form of organization into the nationalized industries, stopping short even of the concept of elected worker directors that subsequently developed in the then West Germany and the Nordic countries.…

“Denmark has been the pioneer in this regard, having increased the share of renewable energy in its electricity generation from virtually nothing in 1980 to 15 percent by 2007. This has created a wind turbine industry employing over 20,000 people with 50 percent of the world market. A less well-known aspect of the Danish success story is the role of cooperatives and local ownership; 85 percent of turbine ownership is held by individuals or cooperatives.”

[Andrew Cumbers and Robert McMaster, “Revisiting Public Ownership: Knowledge, Democracy and Participation in Economic Decision Making.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 44, number 3, 2012. Pages 358-373.]

“… the effects of extreme cooperation can be studied from the living subject, so to speak; and the observed facts provide the soundest data available for a discussion of what the ‘real movements’ of society ‘are going to be like,’ should the basic relationships to private property undergo any modifications.” [Heinrich Infeld, “Social Control in a Cooperative Society.” Sociometry. Volume 5, number 3, August 1942. Pages 258-271.]

“Is it further possible to agree with the thesis that the ‘diffusion of socialist principles of management in the West is far from limited to the cooperative production sector’ in the sense that ‘traditionally capitalist enterprises, i.e., the joint-stock firms themselves, in which the controlling package of stocks belongs to private persons, are not purely capitalist firms inasmuch as they increasingly incorporate various forms of worker participation in management, in profit sharing, and in stock ownership’?” [Aleksei Melent′ev, “On Versions of ‘Cooperative Socialism’ and Other Matters (A Subjective Reaction to the Article by V. Popov).” Problems of Economic Transition. Volume 36, number 9, January 1994. Pages 79-94.]

“The thrust of this commentary is to demonstrate that an appropriate understanding of the underpinnings of the ‘original’ CDC [Community Development Corporation] and its progeny sheds important insights concerning the subject matter of this conference. This is accomplished by first describing the community based organization which generated the CDC model. The linkage between this specific initiative and historical cooperative efforts by blacks to build an economic base embodying quasi solidaristic principles is then examined. The examination includes consideration of the similarities and differences between this historical movement and the Mondragon Movement in northern Spain. The potential of the CDC is then reconsidered from the vantage point of an expanded evaluative framework that takes into account contemporary economic development efforts by blacks. The overall exercise is designed to illustrate how social economists can refine notions of solidarity and social justice through detailed scrutiny of the black experience.” [James B. Stewart, “Building a Cooperative Economy: Lessons from the Black Experience.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 42, number 3, December 1984. Pages 360-368.]

“The cooperative movement needs to move forward on two feet. One foot consists of alternative economic institutions – worker and consumer co-ops, community development financial institutions and barter networks. The movement needs to forge linkages between these organizations to form second order co-ops and federations. The other foot consists of a broad scale coalition of anti-corporate people’s political organizations. Such a political thrust is needed to challenge the entrenched power of the transnational corporations and open them up to democratic control by their employees, as well as to modify the legal and tax framework to make it more friendly to cooperatives. This might be done by taking over one of the existing political parties, but it is much more likely that we will need to develop a new movement outside the existing major party framework, building a progressive third party or coalition. The seeds of such a political development are now beginning to sprout – as in the Green Party, the Alliance, the New Party and the Labor Party. To become more effective, these groups will need to work together. The opposition to corporate capitalist dominance cannot afford the internecine squabbles that split the socialist and other left movements over most of their history.” [Frank Lindenfeld, “The Cooperative Commonwealth: An Alternative to Corporate Capitalism and State Socialism.” Humanity & Society. Volume 27, number 4, November 2003. Pages 578-592.]

“There is good evidence to suggest that providing consumers and workers with a voice inside organisations produces better, more intelligent and responsive forms of business. Consumer and credit co-operatives reduce poverty and make a positive contribution in skill development, education and gender equality. Higher levels of worker engagement and more effective decision-making are achieved through worker membership because the distinctively democratic structures fostered by co-operatives enable individual participation to result in real influence within the enterprise through democratically legitimised authority. The co-operative tradition of democratic participation in the workplace enables individuals to develop the skills and confidence for participation in their communities and societies. Co-operatives are sites for learning how to participate in democratic decision-making, and, as such, they generate a public good which exceeds their economic imperative. Thus, democratic participation in co-operatives supports both better business decisions and stronger communities.” [Cliff Mills and Will Davies. The Blueprint for a Co-operative Decade. Brussels, Belgium: International Co-operative Alliance. 2017. Page 8.]

“During a short time about thirty different political parties and interest groups came into being in Estonia. Their vision about the further development of the country and also about co-operation was different. Several parties considered co-operation to be an economic regulation characteristic of the totalitarian regime, which does not accord with a market economic society. The different opinions of the political parties hindered the passing of the necessary bills and because of that the development of co-operation. Increased private interest was the dominating factor.” [Jaan Leetsar and Ille Kerner, “Role of Co-operatives in a Renewing Society.” International Co-operative Review. Volume 90, number 1, 1997. Pages 61-65.]

“… during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many within the co-operative movement had global aspirations and placed few limits on the possibilities of co-operative action; some even dreamed of creating what became known as the Co-operative Commonwealth. In the UK and increasingly in other countries as well, advocates of consumer co-operation believed they could reform much of the economy through intelligent consumption; the British had their great advocates, notably Beatrice Webb, and their great success story in the remarkable accomplishments of the consumer movement that fed a quarter of the nation and pioneered in many institutional innovations: it was one of the most remarkable economic and social accomplishments of the industrializing world in the later nineteenth century, though not many realized how much had been done.” [Ian MacPherson, “The Co-Operative Movement and the Social Economy Traditions: Reflections on the Mingling of Broad Visions.” Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics. Volume 79, number 3/4, 2008. Pages 625-642.]

“This article aims to critically review and examine that academic work in order to better understand and advance further research on the role of cooperatives in the current globalized economy. To guide this research we analyze how historical claims about the viability of cooperatives work in the current globalized scenario; that is, we discuss the key advantages and disadvantages of the cooperative form under current globalization. We also study the role of cooperatives, based on said advantages and disadvantages, to promote local development facing the current challenges of neoliberal globalization. This issue is addressed from a wide-ranging approach structured in three large dimensions: the potentialities of cooperatives to counteract the negative effects that globalization poses for the economic, socio-labor and democratic stability of local communities. A discussion of the challenges and opportunities that international expansion poses for cooperatives completes the analytical review.” [Ignacio Bretos and Carmen Marcuello, “Revisiting Globalization Challenges and Opportunities in the Development of Cooperatives.” Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics. Volume 88, number 1, 2017. Pages 47-73.]

“… the core values of the Gospel are common to all the Christian denominations and they are taught to all the members. The distribution of wealth is one of the main points of the social doctrines based on the Gospel. In particular, charity and solidarity have characterized the Christian communities since the origins. One could therefore expect that Christians are more cooperative, more charitable and more prone to share their wealth than the non-religious (considering an area where Christian religions are predominant). However, the Christian paradigm of charity is not limited to almsgiving, which is a major, but not the only, aspect of charity …. In particular, two other elements are crucial beyond almsgiving: redistribution of wealth and reciprocity; these aim at pursuing an unconditional commitment of the rich to the needs of the others …. In this sense the Christian doctrine teaches the believers to share their wealth with the poor and to reciprocate positive actions (such as donations).” [Matteo Migheli, “The Gospel and Economic Behaviour: Experimental Evidence from a Trust Game.” Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics. Volume 88, number 1, 2017. Pages 33-45.]

“In co-op [coöperative] development, as in many social enterprise projects, there is often a critically important partnership between the co-op or social enterprise and its incubator, developer, or sponsor organization (usually a nonprofit). In some cases, three entities are involved, with a local nonprofit acting as the incubator or local host and contracting with another entity that specializes in co-op development. Especially when three partners are involved, and even with two, unsound partnership choices and poorly defined organizational roles can be significant barriers in worker co-op development.” [Hilary Abell. Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Scale. Takoma Park, Maryland: The Democracy Collaborative. 2014. Page 23.]

“A cooperative is a group of individuals acting together and pooling their resources for mutual benefit. By forming a cooperative, members and patrons are able to obtain services which they could not receive economically as individuals.

“Ownership and control of a cooperative are vested in the member. In a cooperative organized with capital stock, membership is evidenced by ownership of one or more shares of voting (or ‘common’) stock. Some State laws limit the amount of common stock held by individuals to a percentage of the total amount issued.”

[Raymond Williams and Richard Douglas. Financing New Cooperatives. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture. April, 1979. Page 1.]

“Consistent with the argument, the Connecticut Federation for Economic Democracy and the workers used existing government and church institutions to advance their movement to establish International Poultry as a worker cooperative. While they did not appear to completely co-opt any of these institutions, the argument may still hold some explanatory power. As recognized by the argument, government support was important. They relied on loans from the Community Services Administration and the US Small Business Administration.

“While information is lacking about the internal structure of the Connecticut Federation for Economic Democracy and the state and church institutions, a group loyal enough to spend hours renovating the building existed. The workers and the Federation appear to have had external links to other groups, given that the Industrial Cooperative Association helped secure the funds and interested individuals contributed funding. These links, however, do not seem to have led to opposition to the movement.”

[Ariana R. Levinson, “Founding Worker Cooperatives: Social Movement Theory and the Law.” Nevada Law Journal. Volume 14, spring 2014. Pages 322-363.]

“… in order that the land cultivators and generally the small to medium size producers be convinced about the advantages of the big cooperative enterprise, the latter would have to develop a comparatively higher labour productivity which is a necessary precondition for an increase in revenue and for the improvement of the working conditions of the people. Anyway, it is impossible to achieve higher productivity in the absence of right subjective and objective conditions. The process of getting the right conditions is a result of a long evolutionary process and not determined by arbitrary deeds and forced actions. The people may help in speeding-up this process but they cannot ignore the laws of economic and social evolution, especially as no guidance can be sought from earlier generations or from the experience of other countries.” [Tassos Fakiolas, “Transformation of private to collective ownership. Marxist theory and practice.” Σπουδαί / Spoudai: Journal of Economics and Business. Volume 36, numbers 1–4, 1986. Pages 1-4.]

“To set up a business and expect it to profitable is inscribed within the logic of competition. This applies whether you set up your business by yourself or if you do so with four friends, that is, whether you do so independently or you create a cooperative. If a business is not competitive, it dies. The fraud that they tried to get us to believe in the era of capitalist reconstruction after the Second World War—in the fifties in Europe and in Spain during the democratic transition—was the announcement that, overnight, we would be able to cease to be workers in order to become entrepreneurs solely because we would have freed ourselves of the exploitation of an employer, without taking into account the fact that we would also be subject to the exploitation of the market, to competition. Capitalism—due to the fierce workers struggles of the sixties and seventies—provided an opportunity to some workers to try to escape from their class, provided that they prove that they can offer profits to the enterprise and competitiveness on the market on the basis of exploiting themselves, third persons or consumers. Over the course of this development, many were those who believed this lie that was supported by a handful of examples that helped to nourish this fiction. It is in fact true, however, that most of those who set up their own businesses have done so in exchange not just for selling their physical labor power but also their mental health as well as that of their comrades at work and their friends and families.” [Editor. Self-management of Misery or the Miseries of Self-management. Kurrajong, New South Wales, Australia: Subversion Press. 2012. No pagination.]

“A widespread discussion of [relevant] questions … is a crucial first step in developing proposals for economic and political restructuring which characterize good society analysis. This is the raison d’être for the Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society. PEGS [Political Economy of the Good Society] seeks to play a crucial role as a new forum and network through which thinkers in and out of the academy can discuss broad visions of a new political economy and the institutional arrangements which will give it concrete form.

“PEGS is multi-disciplinary in character. The organization draws not only on those who identify them selves as political scientists, economists, planners, and philosophers, but also on good society thinkers with a wide variety of normative commitments. This group includes libertarians, democrats, socialists, ecologiste, and those without any obvious political labels.”

[Stephen L. Elkin, “Toward a Political Economy of the Good Society.” The Newsletter of PEGS. Volume 1, number 1, August 1991. Pages 1-4.]

“My investigation of the characteristics of social production companies and their links with agrarian cooperatives shows that the flow of rents through the Venezuelan state sustains a limited and dependent form of capital accumulation. Specifically, this refers to the way in which mechanisms of government support such as cheap credit, free land titles, market protection, an expanded public-sector workforce, and subsidized capital inputs have stimulated short term rent circulation over production in the social economy. These forms of rent circulation are realized through enduring structural contradictions of Venezuelan rentier capitalism―the overvaluation of the national currency, which cheapens imports but inhibits exports, and the concomitant expansion of the internal market through the circulation of rents. Therefore, the main argument is that the current form of the social production companies model is a reaction to rather than a way to overcome the contradictions of rentier capitalism.” [Thomas Francis Purcell, “The Political Economy of Social Production Companies in Venezuela.” Latin American Perspectives. Volume 40, number 3, May 2013. Pages 146-168.]

“Traditional comparative economics has evolved into a new field. This field shares with its predecessor the notion that by comparing alternative economic systems, we can understand better what makes each of them work. But it sees the key comparisons as being those of alternative capitalist models that prevail in different countries. Each capitalist economy has many public and private institutions. These institutions function to choose political leaders, to secure property rights, to redistribute wealth, to resolve disputes, to govern firms, to allocate credit, and so on. Political economy over the last two centuries, as well as recent empirical research, demonstrate that these institutions differ tremendously and systematically among countries, with significant consequences for economic performance. The analysis of these differences is the subject of the new comparative economics.…

“… Understanding the diverse consequence of transplantation [of institutions of social control of business] is a crucial challenge for the new comparative economics.…

“At least since the 18ᵗʰ century, economists have recognized that good institutions – those that secure property rights – are conducive to good economic performance. The appreciation of the benefits of good institutions has grown recently, in light of both the challenges of transition and development and the significant growth of empirical knowledge. But now economics can move further, and recognize that different institutions are appropriate in different circumstances. This, we believe, is the goal of the new comparative economics.

“… this perspective [the new comparative economics] sheds light on a range of historical experiences, including colonial transplantation, the rise of the regulatory state, and the transition from socialism.”

[Simeon Djankov, Edward Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer, “The New Comparative Economics.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3054. May, 2003. Pages 1-27.]

“The radical analysis, on the other hand, shows much fewer benefits received on the bottom end of the income distribution and significant benefits received in the highest income bracket. When net fiscal incidence is examined, the orthodox results show that under both assumptions about the incidence of taxes, the budgets of Michigan governments are equalizing influences on the distribution of income. On the contrary, the radical analysis shows that only under the most charitable incidence assumptions can the public sector be considered to even marginally equalize the income distribution. Under more realistic (less progressive in the case of taxes, less regressive in the case of spending) assumptions, the radical analysis finds that the State may act to reinforce and exacerbate the income inequality resulting from market forces.” [Donald M. Peppard, Jr., “Toward a Radical Theory of Fiscal Incidence.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 8, number 4, December 1976. Pages 1-16.]

“With the women’s movement pushing for increased social services to improve women’s economic status, on one side, and the antimilitarist movement calling for a major shift in our priorities from war to peace, on the other side, we are witnessing the beginning of a major social struggle over the purposes of the state and its revenues. This paper grows out of the spirit and potential of this struggle and a concern to connect it to a long-term vision of democratic socialism. To help achieve this purpose we offer a critical appraisal of the feminization of poverty analytical framework, which has been crucial in creating public awareness about the need to fight state program cutbacks and to expand child care and job training programs. In place of a strict feminization of poverty analysis, we offer a structural analysis of women’s dual role which aims to underscore the theoretical implications of women’s vulnerability to poverty for socialist-feminist analysis and strategy. While we applaud N.0.W. [National Organization for Women] and other women’s organizations such as the California Women’s Economic Agenda Project for their efforts to mobilize women around the feminization of poverty issues, we are concerned about their short-term strategic orientation, which has led to alignments with right-wingers on such issues as child support reform. For this reason, we also suggest a standard of long-term progressive criteria according to which policy can be shaped and evaluated. Finally, in order to illustrate the value of our approach, we present an analysis of two specific issues: the six-hour day and child support.” [Wendy Sarvasy and Judith Van Allen, “Fighting the Feminization of Poverty: Socialist-Feminist Analysis and Strategy.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 16, number 4, 1984. Pages 89-110.]

“It is widely recognized that any ‘information’ extracted from the poor wretches held there [the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center] could have no bearing on tracking or arresting Al Qaeda [Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, القَاعِدَة, ʾal-Qāʿidaẗ, ‘the base’] operatives. Could it be that Guantánamo, in its mutation from military base to televised torture camp, designates a new point on the world’s symbolic-economy map; that the practices here reveal the first stages of an emerging security industry, one based on quite different principles to those of existing systems; on producing a new sort of security ‘intelligence’ for a globalized media age?

“Perceived in this light, Guantánamo manifests a distinctive form of labour control. Whereas slavery forced labour out of humans that were defined as chattel, and the wage system turned a worker’s labour power into a commodity to be traded in the marketplace, by extension, the security industry extracts the raw material of intelligence out of humans who are less than chattel; who have no status, except that of the infinitely detained. In terms of a cost/benefit analysis, one can hardly imagine a more profitable mode of production. Outside of investments in infrastructure (the chainlink fence, shackles, concrete floor), and minimal outlays for service and maintenance (hoods and jumpsuits, interrogators, Muslim diets), intelligence is basically free for the taking. Once procured, it feeds the exponential growth of the American appetite for security, and that of an industry to supply it.”

[Susan Willis, “Guantánamo’s Symbolic Economy.” New Left Review. Series II, number 39, May–June 2006. Pages 123-131.]

“Subjectivity is a philosophical method which is largely unconscious of itself. It involves an experience of reality without reference to the analytically objective aspects of that reality, without recourse to formally rational process. I will argue that in modern capitalist society, subjectivity, or style-interpretation of experience, constitutes the primary mode by which people are trained to process the world. This is not to say that experience has no subjective aspect, though.…

“It is capitalism itself which makes subjectivity one-sided. By submerging ever more of our social relations into commodity relations, capitalist society produces our need to flee from the prevalence of those relations (subjectivity).…

“Subjectivism is an attitude ignorant of its opposing aspect, materialism. It has been argued here that the dichotomy between subjective and material is itself a function of capitalism.…

“… Subjectivism sustains class rule by making bourgeois ideology appear explicative. Materialism undermines class society by exposing bourgeois ideology for the sham it is.”

[Daniel Luria, “Subjectivity and Dialectical Materialism.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 6, number 3, October 1974. Pages 61-68.]

“This article discusses the political economy of Wikipedia. We argue that Wikipedia’s mode of production, which is used in other cooperative information productions, such as free software, bears strong resemblance with what [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels described as communism. At the same time, Wikipedia, as a semiautonomous system, is influenced by society at large and by the effects of inequality and exploitation of the capitalist system. First, we give an overview of the relationship of concepts of communication, communism, and the commons. Then, we analyze Wikipedia’s mode of production in three parts: we present the subjective dimension of the mode of production (cooperative labor), the objective dimension of the mode of production (common ownership of the means of production), and the subject–object dimension of the mode of production (the effects and products of the mode of production). Finally, we reflect on the relationship between info-communism and capitalism.” [Sylvain Firer-Blaess and Christian Fuchs, “Wikipedia: An Info-Communist Manifesto.” Television & New Media. Volume 15, number 2, September 2012. Pages 87-103.]

“The New Right has found such a restatement and a new spokesman with impeccable credentials. He is Mr. Assar Lindbeck, a young but influential Swedish economist, a member of the Nobel Prize Committee for Economics, an adviser to Swedish banks, disciple of P.A. Samuelson, and formerly a close associate of the leftist Prime Minister of Sweden, Olaf Palme. Itt must be said at once that Lindbeck is not one of the troglodytes of laissez-faire, and that he does not maintain that all planning for social purpose is necessarily irrational, It remains true, however, that his approach is saturated with the presumption of the superiority of the market system, of commodity production over all other institutional arrangements for an economy; that he elevates optimality in resource allocation and ’economic efficiency’ (as traditionally defined in the orthodox textbooks) to the status of a golden yardstick; and that this prism condemns both socialist economies and New Left economists to the original sin of irrationality.” [Bruce McFarlane, “The Political Economy of the New Right.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 4, number 2, June 1972. Pages 85-99.]

“… virtuous organizational policies and procedures, individual and communal per fection require support from a virtuous political economy. Two characteristics of a virtuous political economy emanate from the writings of [Neale Donald] Walsch and [Reverend Sun Myung] Moon – Democratic Social Capitalism (a free-market based economy with upper and lower income limits) and the principle of visibility.…

“Moon and Walsch’s preference for democracy over other forms of political systems is self evident given the theological assumptions devel oped earlier in this article. Equal political rights and duties naturally flow from the evolution of True Love. All human beings contain a divine seed that reflects the dual characteristics of True Love. Freedom of expression and creativity helps to define the uniqueness of each person, and the freedom to follow one’s conscience is essential for individual and communal growth toward embodying True Love. Thus, all adults deserve equal respect, dignity, and autonomy from governing bodies.”

[Denis Collins, “Virtuous Individuals, Organizations and Political Economy: A New Age Theological Alternative to Capitalism.” Journal of Business Ethics. Volume 26, number 4, August 2000. Pages 319-340.]

“Let them stop [working beyond their income limit]. Mandatory work above the income limit, with contributions to the world charitable trust, would not be required. The money saved from the elimination of mass production of weapons of war would be sufficient to supply everyone’s basic need. The 10 percent tithe of all that is earned worldwide on top of those savings would elevate all of society, not just the chosen few, to a new level of dignity and abundance. And the contribution of earnings above the agreedupon limit would produce such widespread opportunity and satisfaction for everyone that jealousy and social angers would virtually disintegrate.

“So some would stop working—especially those who saw their life activity as real work. Yet those who saw their activity as absolute joy would never stop.”

[Neale Donald Wasch. The Complete Conversations with God: an uncommon dialogue. A joint publication of Charlottesville, Virginia: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons imprint of the Penguin Group. 2005. Ebook edition.]

“As offspring of the same parents, all of us have the same feelings of joy, anger, sorrow and pleasure. Yet we cannot share our deepest feelings with one another because we speak different languages. Is not this one of humanity’s greatest misfortunes? If we are to realize the ideal world of one global family which can honor Christ at the Second Advent as our True Parent, surely our languages must be unified. As expressed in the account of the building of the Tower of Babel, chaos was brought to our languages when we exalted the will of Satan. The principle of restoration through indemnity requires that we participate in the construction of God’s tower and the glorification of God’s Will as the way to unify all languages.

“Based upon which language will all languages be unified? The answer to this question is obvious. Children should learn the language of their parents. If Christ does indeed return to the land of Korea, then he will certainly use the Korean language, which will then become the mother tongue for all humanity. Eventually, all people should speak the True Parents’ language as their mother tongue. All of humanity will become one people and use one language, thus establishing one global nation under God.”

[Reverend Sun Myung Moon and Hyo Won Eu. Exposition of the Divine Principle. New York: The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. 1996. Page 324.]

“In spending over two years researching and writing this book, my views on the economics of crime have often been challenged and refined. Before I began the project, I certainly accepted the main premise of rational crime analysis that criminals respond to changes in the costs and benefits of committing crimes. As an economist, it would be difficult for me not to accept this premise, at least in theory. And with my reading of the empirical literature on whether there is a deterrent effect of punishment, be it through changes in the certainty or in the severity of punishment, I continue to accept that the authorities can fight crime by devoting resources toward enhanced punishment. This statement, however, needs to be qualified.

“I do not know what percentage of criminals fit the rational crime model, and make no claim about the prevalence of such behavior. I do believe that manipulating the expected punishment can reduce crime, but I cannot confidently say by how much. I tend to believe that criminals are more responsive to changes in the certainty of punishment (especially through the probability of apprehension) than to changes in the severity of punishment, but it is with the severity of punishment I feel that I have gained the most new insights.…

“Where my preconceived ideas were most affected concerned the deterrent effect of the death penalty. Prior to this book, my belief was that economic empirical research had made great strides toward confirming the deterrent effect. While I recognize that there is a body of literature that finds that a deterrent effect of capital punishment exists, I no longer believe that the available evidence has convincingly confirmed or refuted the deterrent effect. I consider this to be one of the most openended questions in the current economics of crime literature (along with the role of gun control laws and their effect on the crime rate, a debate which closely parallels the death penalty debate). Fundamentally, the available data on capital punishment appear to be too thin to yield robust empirical results one way or the other. Unless there is a substantial increase in the rates of death penalty sentencing and execution, there may never be enough data to confidently address this issue.”

[Harold Winter. The Economics of Crime: An introduction to rational crime analysis. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2008. Page 114.]

“The founder of socio-economics is a sociologist, Amitai Etzioni …, and many of the products of socio-economics aire either produced by sociologists or are sociological in nature ….” [Richard Swedberg, “New Economic Sociology: What Has Been Accomplished, What Is Ahead?” Acta Sociologica. Volume 40, number 2, 1997. Pages 161-182.]

“This is a time of change. Criticisms of neoclassical economics and other social sciences that draw on the same ethical (utilitarian) assumptions are giving way to a constructive effort to encompass the neoclassical paradigm in a broader framework. A new paradigm of socioeconomics is emerging from the old model’s assumptions about the goals people pursue, the ways they pursue them, and whether the decisionmaker is a solitary individual or part of a community.” [Amitai Etzioni, “A New Kind of Socioeconomics.” Challenge. Volume 33, number 1, January/February 1990. Pages 31-32.]

“A core assumption of socioeconomics is that all economies are nestled within a society which contains specific ethical and political institutions. Their specific attributes determine both whether the market forces are accorded sufficient range for the economy to be able to flourish (for instance, via legitimation of commerce and of entrepreneurship) and whether anti-market forces are contained. These forces not only emanate from the societal-political realm but are also generated by powerful economic actors using both intraeconomic means (e.g., predatory pricing to block the entry of new competitors) and political (e.g., lobbying for tariffs, quotas, tax exemptions) and unethical means, violating the trust which lies at the root of all transactions.” [Amitai Etzioni, “Founding a New Socioeconomics.” Challenge. Volume 29, number 5, November/December 1986. Pages 13-17.]

“In response to the argument for working to modify values and preferences, neoclassicists raise another objection, an ethical one. They state that individuals, and not the government, ought to determine their own conduct, and that those who object to consumer sovereignty and seek to influence individual tastes are elitist snobs who wish to impose their values on others. Socioeconomics takes a different normative stance, arguing that some tastes clearly ought to be modified, for instance, those that cause harm to others (e.g., smoking and reckless driving) and those that demonstrate open disregard for community needs (e.g., dumping toxic wastes into lakes).” [Amitai Etzioni, “Policy Implications of Socioeconomics.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. Volume 66, number 1, January–February 1990. Pages 5-17.]

“Although the United States and Western Europe do have fairly expansive welfare-state programs in place, it is not clear that such programs represent a recognition of socioeconomic rights. For example, the move from ‘welfare’ to ‘workfare’ across the Western world renders many economic benefits conditional; even a basic standard of living is not guaranteed by virtue of inherent rights, but, rather, is conceded only insofar as individuals fulfill some obligation of labor—an arrangement that is much closer to a private contract than a state-sponsored entitlement ….” [Amitai Etzioni, “Socioeconomic Rights: A Dialogue With Islam.” Digest of Middle East Studies. Volume 22, number 2, fall 2013. Pages 348-360.]

“The Association for Social Economics was founded in 1941 seeking to promote high quality research in the broadly defined area of social economics. Social economics is the study of the ethical and social causes and consequences of economic behavior, institutions, organizations, theory, and policy. The fields of research promoted by ASE [Association for Social Economics] include the mutual relationships among ethics, social values, concepts of social justice, and the social dimensions of economic life. Social Economics investigates the relationships between the economy and society. Social economists address such questions as: what economic conditions are requisite for a good society and how can they be achieved; how do social and moral values influence economic behavior; how does social interaction affect economic outcomes; what are the ethical implications of economic theory and policy; and how do different social institutions contribute to a sustainable, just, and efficient economy. The ASE welcomes academics and practitioners who regard human behavior to be the result of complex social interactions with ethical consequences.” [Editor, “Welcome to the Association for Social Economics.” The Association for Social Economics. Website. Undated. Retrieved on September 11th, 2016.]

“The globalization of the economy has been a prominent topic of public debate at least since the 1999 Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization filled the streets with protest demonstrations by environmental, labor, consumer, religious, and other civil society groups.…

“How are we to understand the current state of this debate? In the social economics tradition, we look first at the moral values that are at stake. These values are important not just for normative insight into economic policies, but also for the light they shed on the behavior of different parties in the economy, and the arguments of different advocates in the debate.”

[John P. Tiemstra, “The Social Economics of Globalization.” Forum for Social Economics. Volume 36, issue 2, October 2007. Pages 143-159.]

“The exercise of socially structured agency is no denial of individual freedom, merely recognition that the individual emerges from and at all times acts within a social setting. As [Thorstein] Veblen put it, the realistic economic agent has both antecedence and consequence: the individual has a history and makes history …. Social relationships are meaningful categories of social economic life. Dignity and the quality of relationships matter ….” [James Ronald Stanfield, “Some Social Economics Concepts for Future Research.” Forum for Social Economics. Volume 30, issue 1, April 2011. Pages 7-17.]

“The recent period of intensive and extensive development of global economic integration, or globalization, has reached a crossroads. The regime of the neoliberal Great Capitalist Restoration is not sustainable and fundamental governance changes must be made. This paper adds perspective to the choices that must be made at this critical juncture of the global social economy ….

“The place of economy in society is then the manner by which a society solves its substantive economic problem of integrating its division of labor. Some normalized and reasonably repetitive patterns of behavior must be established. Individuals must be enabled and motivated to perform productive tasks using tools and materials that must be somehow assigned to these tasks. The real income thus generated must be meted out in some fashion that is perceived as more or less legitimate and ultimately sanctioned by force. Governance structures are systems of communication and sanction ….”

[James Ronald Stanfield and Michael C. Carroll, “The Social Economics of Neoliberal Globalization.” Forum for Social Economics. Volume 38, issue 1, April 2009. Pages 1-18.]

“The Catholic Economic Association [CEA] was re-named the Association for Social Economics in 1970 in order to attract new members who supported CEA aims and objectives but were not Catholics. Among those who joined ASE were Bill Dugger, John Elliott, Wally Peterson, George Rohrlich, Warren Samuels, and Ron Stanfield, all of whom eventually were awarded the Thomas Divine Award for contributions to social economics and the social economy.” [Edward J. O’Boyle, “Origins of the Association for Social Economics.” Forum for Social Economics. Volume 43, issue 2, June 2014. Pages 104-106.]

“In order to analyze the case of the mother abandoning her infant, we must hark back to the issue of property (for in the libertarian view babies are but a form of property), how it gets to be owned in the first place, how it can be transferred, and how it can be abandoned. That is, since libertarianism defends ‘justly acquired property,’ not any old property rights, if we are to be thorough we must first delve into the theory of how man attains property in the first place We will trace down the implications of property theory for children’s rights in general, and then apply these to the question of abandoning children without notification.” [Walter Block, “Libertarianism, positive obligations and property abandonment: children’s rights.” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 31, issue 4, 2004. Pages 275-286.]

“The arguments that openness to trade contributes to economic growth and that this can, in turn, be beneficial for poverty reduction and food security, are well grounded in conventional economic theory and have been supported by a number of empirical studies. However, some commentators caution that in studying the correlation between more trade and higher economic growth, researchers need to be careful about implying causality.

“Trade policy reform involves a combination of: domestic support measures; export subsidies and tariffs. In each case, there are complications that must be taken into account.”

[Krishna Chikhuri, “Impact of alternative agricultural trade liberalization strategies on food security in the Sub-Saharan Africa region.” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 40, issue 3, 2013. Pages 188-206.]

“This article reviews the main contributions of models of cultural transmission, from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It presents their implications regarding the long-run population dynamics of cultural traits, and discusses the links between the economic and other approaches to cultural evolution in the social sciences as well as in evolutionary biology. Furthermore, it discusses how to extend the economic theory of cultural transmission to the analysis of several important aspects of the dynamics and propagation of beliefs and values.” [Alberto Bisin and Thierry Verdier, “The Economics of Cultural Transmission and Socialization.” Handbook of Social Economics. Volume 1A. Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Matt Jackson, editors. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Elsevier Science imprint of Elsevier. 2011. Pages 339-416.]

“Defining the social economy broadly as the complex intersection of markets, governments, and communities, my goal in this paper is to explore the place of learning in the interactions between and evolution of these three social domains. Learning is seen here not only as a link between these domains, but also as a process through which individual thought and action is affected by and in turn affects the evolution of these social domains and the relationships between them. More specifically, this paper focuses on communication and conversation as key generative and adaptive mechanisms through which individual and social learning occurs.” [Zohreh Emami, “Presidential Address: Social Economics and Evolutionary Learning.” Review of Social Economy. Volume LXX, number 3, December 2012. Pages 401-420.]

“Our findings suggest that no assumption or investigation tool used alone seems to be sufficient to fully explain the respondents elicited preferences. Hence, no simple pattern of relationships should be expected between theory and true data.” [Daniel Franco and Luca Luiselli, “A procedure to analyse the strategic outliers and the multiple motivations in a contingent valuation: A case study for a concrete policy purpose.” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 40, issue 3, 2013. Pages 246-266.]

“Despite their significant erosion, many of these values remain set in certain aspects of legal principle and method. Human rights law is quite naturally a central source of such values, and within this body of law the theory and practice of socio-economic rights arguably offers the most penetrating challenge to neo-classical and neo-liberal economics, best encapsulating a neglected social ethic. The specific debate between human rights and economics is therefore of particular interest. It has evolved mostly in the context of development economics. To date, it has ranged from an initial acceptance by key economists that some human rights beyond property rights (but initially restricted to negative rights to particular freedoms) are instructive and beneficial additions to economic theory, to a deeper understanding of the importance and relevance of socio-economic rights and positive requirements on states to intervene in markets. It has also evolved from the initial confusion of a narrow strand of mainstream economic theory with the whole discipline of economics per se, to a more nuanced appreciation and understanding of a variety of heterodox approaches to economics and their significant overlaps with the social values inherent in human rights. The debate has moved beyond a ‘non-conversation’ towards a deeper conception of the precise ways in which human rights can inform economic policy processes and supplement the inescapable value judgements that are necessary, though often unacknowledged, in any economic calculation.” [Joshua Curtis, “Merging Socio-Economic Rights and Heterodox Economics: Emancipatory and Transformative Potentials.” Economics and Law in Conversation Series, 2015–2016. Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy. Centre for the Study of Human Rights. The London School of Economics and Political Science. London. Pages 1-10.]

“Amitai Etzioni, the founder of socioeconomics, offered the vision of the moral dimension as a component of the self. Metaeconomics operationalizes this vision by making explicit the Strict Father moral dimension in the invisible hand and recognizing interdependence of self when Nurturant Parent morality is operant.…

“In socioeconomics, the Nurturing Parent morality system is perhaps already duly visible. Seemingly analysts who favor socioeconomics could use metaeconomics (once it is fully elaborated: Much work remains) to enhance precision in the analysis, to frame questions to test empirically. Perhaps we could shift more attention to developing a specific theoretical model that socioeconomists will eventually find to be the standard model from which each starts, much like microeconomics is now the standard model in most economic analysis, especially of the neoclassical variety.”

[Gary D. Lynne, “Divided self models of the socioeconomic person: the metaeconomics approach.” Journal of Socio-Economics. Volume 28, issue 3, May 1999. Pages 267-288.]

“Metaeconomics acknowledges that microeconomics takes the analyst a considerable way toward understanding economic behavior. Self-interest is one of the main tendencies in human nature, and more times than not dominates the other tendency represented in the other-interest. As a result, metaeconomics is designed to show microeconomics as the default case that still explains a substantive part of behavior at least for the segment of the population oriented mainly to the self-interest. Metaeconomics goes beyond it by recognizing there are other segments of the population who are mainly oriented to their internalized other-interest. Most importantly, metaeconomics posits that a majority of individuals struggle with the integration of these two interests, perhaps even switching back and forth (a kind of preference reversal), with the ultimate economic goal of finding the peace of mind that comes from finding a particular orientation in these internalized interests that suits the individual.” [Gary D. Lynne, “Toward a dual motive metaeconomic theory.” Journal of Socio-Economics. Volume 35, issue 4, August 2006. Pages 634-651.]

“The way [Karl] Marx puts it—‘even if we consider [David] Ricardo’s theory’— shows that in his mind there was, so far as unequal exchange was concerned, something more than can be got from Ricardo’s theory. What, in fact, that something more was, he did not have the time to tell us; and so, rather than venture outside Ricardo’s comparative costs, which would involve grave intellectual risks, Marxists confined themselves to reformulating under the cover of Marx’s authority what he had observed already regarding unequal exchange in Ricardo’s theory, which is only a minor aspect of the question, showing itself even in Ricardo’s theory.

“Over and above this Ricardian inequality and the differentiation in organic composition …, the Marxists in general do not accept any other structural nonequivalence in world prices; this is remarkable enough when one thinks of all those people who take nonequivalent exchange for a Marxist invention.

“It is natural, though, that a supporter of the subjective theories of value should feel completely at ease in the presence of the terms of trade. The phenomenon I call unequal exchange ought not to embarrass someone who has never required that exchange be equal to anything at all. If equivalence is an ex post phenomenon of the market, there is no such thing as equivalence or nonequivalence in themselves.

“It is not the same for a Marxist, who believes in the existence of an abstract equilibrium price and for whom the formation of value is a process of production and not a market process. If he acknowledges the existence of a century-long movement of prices that transcends the economic cycles, he ought to find a law for it and then reconcile this law with the labor theory of value, something that is no easy task. If, however, he thrusts unequal exchange away into the outer darkness of those ‘fluctuations’ for which theory does not have to account, he may devote himself without danger to all the statistical and empirical analyses anyone could wish of the pernicious effect that the anarchy of capitalist world trade may have on the economic development of the backward countries.”

[Arghiri Emmanuel. Unequal Exchange: A Study in the Imperialism of Trade. Brian Pearce, translator. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. 1972. Page 93.]

“Roughly sketched, the theorem of Unequal Exchange regarding the international division of labor runs as follows:

“If specialization occurs according to the principle of comparative costs, albeit not in terms of physical costs or social costs (whatever this may mean), but in terms of monetary costs or individual-producer costs; and

“if the prices of certain factors are fixed in an extra-economic way, so that these factors are not necessarily cheaper where they are more abundant (or more expensive where they are scarcer); and

“if the proportion of the quantities of factors entering the production is not the same in all branches; and

“if at least one of the factors is immobile internationally,

“an autonomous variation in one country of the price of one or several immobile factors may, under free-trade conditions, lead to a reversal of the trade pattern without any change in the objective conditions of production and con- sumption with, as a consequence, an overall reduction of real income in the whole system.”

[Arghiri Emmanuel, “Gains and Losses from the International Division of Labor.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center). Volume 1, number 2, fall 1977. Pages 87-108.]

“The thesis of Unequal Exchange of Arghiri Emmanuel, can be summarised in this way: the normal price of a good in international markets is that which allows all factors participating in its production, in every part of the world, to be compensated at the same level. This would take place if there were world markets for every factor in which supply and demand would be contrasted for each factor. Nonetheless, wages as well as income or indirect taxes, constitute the remuneration of the factors that are established in an independent or institutional manner; to be sure in a way exogenous or outside of the economic realm. If more than one may contest the inexistence of a labour market at the national level, in the way Emmanuel proposes it, this appears to be far less arguable at the international level. At the national level simply because, for Emmanuel, wages are more a reflection of the state of the trade unions’ leveraging power vis-à-vis the employers’ leveraging power, to which State regulations on this area are added – minimum wage, length of the working day, social security contributions– than to the contrasting of the supply and demand for labour. At the international level because it is not possible to pretend that emigration here or there, given its size, is determinant as to having a decisive weight on labour supply. Relative to the factors generating rent, such as soil or subsoil, the preclusion of an international market is readily admissible given the impossibility of their physical movement. Instead, capital, in contrast to the preceding factors, can move internationally, and, thus, its remuneration, the rate of return, tends to equalise itself amongst the different nations. Under these conditions, the unequal exchange comes from the differences between the remunerations of the factors, whose price is determined institutionally, outside the market, in the different countries of the world. In the terms of trade among the countries that undervalue the latter factors and those that endowed them at their fair price, there is a transfer of value in detriment of the former and in favour of the latter countries. Generally, it is proposed that the countries of the industrialised world exploit Third World countries through trade, for the wage gap between the two zones is greatly superior to the foreseeable differences in productivity.” [Claudio Jedlicki, “Unequal Exchange.” Sustainable Human Development. September, 2007. Pages 1-7.]

“Although his [Arghiri Emmanuel’s] presentation [in his, Unequal Exchange: A Study in the Imperialism of Trade] was in Marxist categories, his interest in addressing a more broad and versatile audience was explicit from the start.…

“When the framework [unequal exchange] is extended to take into account several factors, the equivalence between labor theory of value and the cost of production theory ceases to be so straightforward. Emmanuel particularly considers the case for two factors, capital and labor. While labor can be reduced to a homogenous unit as in his simple commodity economy, capital according to Emmanuel is always homogenous by its nature. Its mobility, on the other hand makes sure that equilibrium rate of profit must be the same in all branches of the economy, just like the equilibrium wage rate. Deviations from the equilibrium bring about movements to restore it, thanks to the factors being internally competitive, i.e. mobile.”

[Ayşe Özden Birkan, “A Brief Overview of the Theory of Unequal Exchange and its Critiques.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. Volume 5, number 4, April 2015. Pages 155-163.]

“… [Arghiri] Emmanuel … remains a central character in any history of theories of unequal exchange and the central character in my own. Since his intellectual contributions have never been afforded full appreciation or study in the often heated reaction to and rejection of his work – and certainly have met with little or no understanding among ecological economists – I have taken this job upon me. My treatment of the debates themselves has unfortunately suffered from this choice, but future studies will hopefully find it easier to treat it dispassionately if the different theoretical (and ideological) stances have first been clearly spelt out. I do include many of the other central and not very central participants in this the central and thickest part of this work. I would argue that lack of recognition of Emmanuel’s theoretical originality has made previous estimations biased against him, including those by my illustrious predecessors in the ‘Earlier studies’ section, and it may be that I have therefore adopted a certain counter-bias which will eventually have to be adjusted. As it stands, reading the debate from a more Emmanuelian perspective perhaps has the merit of illustrating that theoretical novelty tends to be accepted, or at all seen, only as long as it corresponds with the pre-established scheme of whatever school the interpreter happens to adhere. In any case, an interpretation of Emmanuel would still have to place his ideas on unequal exchange in the general perspective of his thought as a whole. To the best of my knowledge, this has never been attempted until now. One of the central novelties of Emmanuel’s perspective has direct bearing on the interpretation of mercantilism, and I will also point out where he formulated unequal exchange in ecological terms.” [John Brolin. The Bias of the World: A History of Theories of Unequal Exchange from Mercantilism to Ecology. Ph.D. dissertation. Lund University. Lund, Sweden. 2006. Page 7.]

“The differentiation between Left and Right neoliberalism doesn’t really undermine the way it which it is deeply unified in its commitment to competitive markets and to the state’s role in maintaining competitive markets. For me the distinction is that ‘left neoliberals’ are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things.” [Walter Benn Michaels, “Let Them Eat Diversity.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 1, winter 2011. Pages 17-22.]

“We are now in a prolonged period of global transition in which social forms zigzag between advances and retreats. As Rosa Luxemburg warned, we are trying to construct the new with the materials of the old, including ourselves. Even the builders of socialism are products of capitalism and are guided by perspectives and values derived from both systems. During this epoch, different forms of society coexist in conflict and mutual dependence. The economy of knowledge was initiated by a capitalism that cannot contain this new context of production. Therefore, rather than see the world as the sum of two independent competing systems, we have to look at it as the result of strong interactions between them as they change each other’s dynamics.” [Richard Levins, “A New Economy of Knowledge.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 67, issue 11, April 2016. Pages 38-46.]

“My sense is that the hopefulness in [certain] texts … will remain rather abstract and insufficiently powerful unless and until it is brought into relation with the work of intentional and reflective grassroots organizing efforts which appear to me to be crucial in the following ways: First, as a locus of the reflexive political judgment, imagination, and experimentation that might produce specific initiatives for nurturing … democratic potential … (and resist assimilative captures by corporate capitalism); second, as a locus of an attentive and powerful public that can be brought to bear in these struggles; and third, insofar as this imagination and power combine to initiate a rich experimental field that could nurture and provoke further political economic reflection. Thus, imaginative scholarship in transformative political economy needs an engaged dialogue and political relationship with the theory and practice of grassroots organizing. Indeed, this need is as great as is the latter for the former.

“… My sense is that community organizing today is in a similar phase, largely beneath the radar of broader public attention and memory. To move beyond these persistent confines and toward something we might—with little sarcasm—call progress, we will undoubt edly need the synergy between transformative political economy and grassroots community organizing. This begins by each remembering, calling, and responding to the other—establishing relationships.”

[Romand Coles, “Awakening to the Call of Receptive Democratic Progress.” The Good Society. Volume 17, number 1, 2008. Pages 43-51.]

“In this essay, I engage one of the more promising modes of democratic organizing in cities and states across the U.S., namely those associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), founded in 1940 by Saul Alinsky.…

“… [A] danger concerns pragmatic politics. The IAF is remarkably successful when it comes to cultivating relationships and receptivity in their pragmatic work. At the same time, pragmatic demands can risk overwhelming some of the deepest and farthest ranging elements of this action. Hence, as organizers and activists get swept up in struggles around immediate issues, time and focus constraints make it is easy for the deeper relation building work to be set aside—especially when a coalition is already sufficiently powerful to win on issues concerning relatively small infrastructural improvements in poor neighborhoods, small job training programs, etc. Forming working relationships with powerful political and economic actors enhances efficacy, but it can dampen efforts to discern paths toward more radical change with respect to these very powers.”

[Romand Coles, “Moving Democracy: Industrial Areas Foundation Social Movements and the Political Arts of Listening, Traveling, and Tabling.” Political Theory. Volume 32, number 5, October 2004. Pages 678-705.]

“Research in experimental economics has cogently challenged the fundamental precept of neoclassical economics that economic agents optimize. The last two decades elaboration of boundedly rational models that try to move away from the optimization approach, in ways consistent with experimental findings. Nonetheless, the collection of alternative models has made little headway supplanting the dominant paradigm. We delineate key ways in which neoclassical microeconomics holds continuing and compelling advantages over bounded-rationality models, and suggest, via a few examples, the sorts of further, difficult pushes that would be needed to redress this state of affairs. Closer collaboration between theoretic modeling and experiments is clearly seen to be necessary.…

“The neoclassical research program, by which we mean the broad body of models and inferences based on the premise that all economic decision making reduces to (rational) optimization of profits or utility, is still—and appropriately still—the ruling mainstream of the discipline’s research, scholarly publication, and microeconomic policy analysis. It has produced an elegant parsimonious, imposing, imperial structure that is by no means without predictive success.

“Yet it can no longer be firmly defended as an appropriate first approximation to reality. Increasingly persuasive evidence has accumulated that the behavioral assumptions underlying the traditional optimization approach are incorrect, and can point analysis in seriously wrong directions. As neoclassical theory has been more clearly elaborated, its serious deficiencies have become increasingly visible.

“Bounded-rationality models of economic decision-making are not novel …. However, generations of scholars proposing boundedly rational approaches to economic analysis have not yet led us to a coherent body of behavior-based (as opposed to optimization-based) theory that can offer a legitimate challenge to the primacy of neoclassical theory in economics scholarship, teaching, and policy analysis.”

[Ronald M. Harstad and Reinhard Selten, “Bounded-Rationality Models: Tasks to Become Intellectually Competitive.” Journal of Economic Literature. Volume 51, number 2, June 2013. Pages 496-511.]

“Currently, there is an extended body of literature dealing with the so-called ‘subjective well-being.’ This concept is complex and reflects a wide set of factors, ranging from objective physiological and medical criteria …, age …, cognitive and emotional components … to life-ability …, living conditions (livability of the environment …), education, income, employment status, gender and marital status …. This subjective assessment of well-being depends on economic and societal factors, such as the characteristics of cultural paradigm, state of human development, respect of human rights, political stability, economic freedom, distribution of income, and the structural and institutional aspects of labour market ….

“In the respective literature, there should be made a careful distinction between two approaches. The first refers to the ‘objective’ conditions of well-being; the second addresses the life satisfaction itself. The environmental factors contribute to the external framework, which can enhance or inhibit an individual’s internal perception in regard to her/his life quality. Still, the existence of the corresponding factors does not automatically guarantee a positive evaluation of life.”

[Bogdan Dima and Ştefana Maria Dima, “Policies for Happiness in the Global Village.” Journal of Heterodox Economics. Volume 3, issue 2, 2016. Pages 17-53.]

“… it [the Marxist false–consciousness hypothesis] assumes that economic well-being is the key component of subjective well-being. In fact, as we will see, personal relationships and even leisure satisfaction are as strongly associated with wellbeing as economic factors. It would be hard to make a case that, when poorer people say their marriages, relationships with children, friendships and leisure are satisfying, their perceptions are somehow false. Second, the view that poorer people are unaware of alternative societies against which to evaluate their own perhaps implies that other social groups do make wider ranging comparisons. This seems true only to a very limited extent. The evidence is that almost everybody makes social comparisons with those who are close to them: family, friends, neighbours, workmates …. Almost nobody evaluates their lives by the highest international standards!

“An alternative view that lower income people are just resigned to their fate also does not stand up. Resignation implies lowered expectations and low positive affect. In fact there is a fairly strong relationship between people’s reports of life satisfaction and their positive affect scores …. Life satisfaction is associated with cheerful moods, and this is as true for low income as for high income people. In this context the accurate statement to make about low income people is that, on average, their satisfaction levels, positive affect and expectations are a little lower than those of high income people. There is no basis for a verdict of false consciousness.”

[Bruce Headey and Alex Wearing. Understanding Happiness: A theory of subjective well-being. Melbourne, Australia: Longman Cheshire Pty Limited. 1992. Pages 44-45.]

“Our key result is that the estimated subjective well-being-income gradient is not only significant but also remarkably robust across countries, within countries, and over time. These comparisons between rich and poor members of the same society, between rich and poor countries, and within countries through time as they become richer or poorer all yield similar estimates of the well-being-income gradient. Our findings both put to rest the earlier claim that economic development does not raise subjective well-being and undermine the possible role played by relative income comparisons.

“These findings invite a sharp reassessment of the stylized facts that have informed economic analysis of subjective well-being data. Across the world’s population, variation in income explains a sizable proportion of the variation in subjective well-being. There appears to be a very strong relationship between subjective well-being and income, which holds for both rich and poor countries, falsifying earlier claims of a satiation point at which higher GDP [gross domestic product] per capita is not associated with greater well-being.”

[Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Volume 39, number 1, spring 2008. Pages 1-102.]

“Unionization contributes to subjective well-being through a variety of mechanisms. Some are direct, in the sense that they affect organized workers as individuals per se. In this way, a society has greater average satisfaction as union density increases because the benefits of organization apply to a larger share of society’s members. Others are indirect, affecting both the organized and unorganized. Aggregate levels of well-being thus increase with density because greater organization alters social arrangements so that they better contribute to a generalized improvement in living conditions. All are ultimately political in that union density itself is universally agreed to be substantially (though not entirely) determined by governmental policy ….” [Benjamin Radcliff, “Class Organization and Subjective Well-Being: A Cross-National Analysis.” Social Forces. Volume 84, number 1, September 2005. Pages 513-530.]

“Acceptance of self-reported measures of well-being, subject to the many caveats that subjective measurement requires, could have a profound impact on economics. First, subjective measures of well-being would enable welfare analysis in a more direct way that could be a useful complement to traditional welfare analysis. Second, currently available results suggest that those interested in maximizing society’s welfare should shift their attention from an emphasis on increasing consumption opportunities to an emphasis on increasing social contacts. Third, a focus on subjective well-being could lead to a shift in emphasis from the importance of income in determining a person’s well-being toward the importance of his or her rank in society. Fourth, although life satisfaction is relatively stable and displays considerable adaptation, it can be affected by changes in the allocation of time and, at least in the short run, by changes in circumstances.” [Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger, “Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being.” Journal of Economic Perspectives. Volume 20, number 1, winter 2006. Pages 3-24.]

“At a theoretical level, wealth should predict higher SWB [subjective well-being] because greater resources allow people a greater ability to achieve some of their goals and also because high income confers higher status. In terms of the goals provided by [Abraham] Maslow’s … hierarchy of needs, income confers advantages in terms of basic physical needs, security, and the actualization of one’s abilities (due to the greater freedom of action afforded by increased income). It appears that possessing a high income is the goal of a large number of people throughout the world. Because goal success is a predictor of SWB …, it seems likely that those with greater incomes will possess greater SWB.” [Ed Diener, Marissa Diener, and Carol Diener, “Factors Predicting the Subjective Weil-Being of Nations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Volume 69, number 5, November 1995. Pages 851-864.]

“Psychologists’ knowledge of SWB [subjective well-being] is rudimentary; a stronger scientific base is necessary to make unequivocal recommendations to societies and individuals about how to increase happiness. I hope, however, that the above review makes it clear that scientific knowledge about SWB is possible and desirable. Societies need to afford the same importance to SWB as they do now to economics: tracking the phenomenon, supporting research to understand it, and educating people about it. To create a better society where happiness is ubiquitous, a major scientific effort to understand quality of life is needed. If psychologists’ institute a national survey to track SWB, it is more likely that it will become an outcome variable that is considered in policy decisions.” [Ed Diener, “Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index.” American Psychologist. Volume 55, number 1, January 2000. Pages 34-43.]

“… [There have been] numerous sociological luminaries as contributors to the theoretical hybrid [cultural economy]: [Karl] Marx, [Friedrich] Engels, [Thorstein] Veblen, [Max] Weber, [Michel] Foucault, [Georg] Simmel, [Walter] Benjamin and [Georges] Bataille.” [Sarah Hinde and Jane Dixon, “Reinstating Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to cultural economy theorizing.” Journal of Sociology. Volume 43, number 4, 2007. Pages 401-420.]

“A … cultural-economy register draws attention to particular practices of power scripted into an everyday machinery of organization and control that acts not only to safeguard and advance particular economic interests (as Marxian analysis has so effectively shown), but also to authenticate, authorize, and compel in the economic domain ….

“… [Another] register relates to the power and reach of symptomatic or emblematic readings of the economy. The cultural-economy approach, following a long lineage of thought on general models of economic development (eg, [Karl] Marx’s projection of the English experience as the global standard of intensive accumulation, or travels in time and space across the Muslim world of strict Islamic rules on borrowing), pays considerable attention to the role of ideal types of the economy in setting a world standard.”

[Ash Amin with Nigel Thrift, “Cultural-economy and cities.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 31, number 2, April 2007. Pages 143-161.]

“This book can be seen as both a contribution to this growing body of heterodox economic knowledge, and also as an extension of it.…

“… we want to trace out some of the possible approaches to cultural economy that are currently circulating.…

“… [One] approach focuses on symptoms. Interpretations of Euro-American economies as symptoms of general economic modes or models have been a constant of cultural life since at least the time of Adam Smith. These economic readings have had powerful cultural effects. One only has to think of the work of [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels to see the way in which such readings are able to reinscribe how cultures see themselves as a single functioning economic system, which, in turn, is returned to these cultures as an established economic and cultural fact. This is exactly how Marx and Engels were able to project nineteenth-century English capitalism – despite all its peculiarities – as a world economic standard and its class culture as the only culture.”

[Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, “Introduction.” The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, editors. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004. Pages x-xxx.]

“‘Cultural economy’ has been used in multiple ways. We examine four approaches, the difficulties associated with their use, and their implications for research agendas. These four are the sectoral delineation of cultural economy, the labour market and organization of production approach, the creative index definition, and the convergence of formats as a defining feature ofthe cultural economy.” [Chris Gibson and Lily Kong, “Cultural economy: a critical review.” Progress in Human Geography. Volume 29, number 5, 2005. Pages 541-561.]

“… [An] obvious sociological influence on contemporary theories of cultural economy has been the sociology of culture literature, with Pierre Bourdieu’s work being highly significant here …. In positing a relationship between cultural consumption and the reproduction of social class relations, and in proposing that this occurred at least in part through the denial of ‘material’ concepts such as that of class being relevant to the domains of art and culture, Bourdieu established a relationship between the distribution of economic capital and that of cultural capital which places socio-economic relations at the heart of considerations of culture. In championing Bourdieu’s work as a contribution to the sociology of culture, Raymond Williams and Nicholas Garnham observed that ‘the cultural field serves as a marker and thus a reinforcer of class relations … [as] a field in which par excellence the struggle is governed by a pure logic of difference or distinction … [and] because the creation of art as a special social object and practice … objectively depends upon the distance from economic necessity provided by the possession of economic capital’ ….” [Terry Flew, “The Cultural Economy Moment?” Journal of Cultural Science. Volume 2, number 1, 2009. Pages 1-11.]

“… if some local/regional cultures are under serious threat at the present time, others are finding widening and receptive audiences. In fact some places, and nowhere more so than in the heartlands of modern world capitalism — places like New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Tokyo, to mention only a few of the most obvious examples — continue to be unique and highly creative generators of culture, and above all, to function as the bulwarks of a new cultural economy of capitalism. Whatever the political consequences of this predicament-laden situation may be, it does not so much herald a trend to absolute cultural uniformity across the world as it does an alternative and subtle kind of regional cultural differentiation articulated with an expanding structure of national and international cultural niches (adolescents, environmentalists, art collectors, nuclear physicists and so on).” [Allen J. Scott, “The Cultural Economy of Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Volume 21, issue 2, June 1997. Pages 323-329.]

“During the last 40 years cultural economics has attracted researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds such as public economics, employment economics and industrial economics. They subscribe to the idea that markets for cultural goods cannot function optimally as they are subject to a number of problems.…

“It is not our intention here to assess the cultural economy on the basis of Welfare Economics ….

“The cultural economy has always acknowledged the fact that the production of innovative goods involves the use of specific skills.”

[Xavier Greffe, “From culture to creativity and the creative economy: A new agenda for cultural economics.” City, Culture and Society. Volume 7, issue 2, June 2016. Pages 71-74.]

“The impact of cultural economics on the development of economic theory only begins to show in a few instances, as in the case of the ‘Cost disease.’ Most of the contributions discussed are rather recent, and their more general relevance is rarely recognized.… The horizon of cultural economics is wide. The discipline may be exotic with respect to the items which constitute the markets studied. But it is at the center of the issues that economic theory has to be able to deal with in order to be relevant to the problems of post-industrialist economies in the information age.“ [Michael Hutter, “The Impact of Cultural Economics on Economic Theory.” Journal of Cultural Economics. Volume 20, number 4, December 1996. Pages 263-268.]

“I think one can say without exaggeration that in the last five years or so, more has changed in the economics of culture than in any comparably short period in human existence. Probably ever. I think it goes beyond the invention of the printing press in the West, which took some time to have an impact. However, in the United States and in a lot of the world, cultural economics has in my view been completely upended, mostly by new technologies, and I think of our topic as changing very rapidly and that we are all living in a very exciting and in some ways frightening time.” [Tyler Cowen, “Why everything has changed: the recent revolution in cultural economics.” Journal of Cultural Economics. Volume 32, number 4, December 2008. Pages 261-273.]

“A common dualistic couplet deployed in the analysis of the cultural economy is that of culturalisation–economistation. As a dualism this is, on one hand, presented as economic activities being increasingly inflected with cultural topes and performance etc. rather than simple differentiation of value. This has been taken as an account for the deployment of culture to increase market segmentation and develop niche markets in a circumstance of oversupply, or market saturation. Some writers make a link with flexible specialisation and what they term a reflexive turn, that is indexed to growing demand from consumers for an ever differentiated product market (by design) and the organisational and productive means to satisfy it (flexible specialisation). Hence, it is argued, culturalisation is endemic in late capitalism.– [Andy Pratt, “Cultural Economy.” International Encylopedia of Human Geography. Volume Two. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, editors. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Elsevier Science imprint of Elsevier. 2009. Pages 407-410.]

“Exploring and assessing the explanatory reach of this ‘economics as culture’ or ‘cultural economy’ perspective provides one of the central themes of this volume, as a brief examination of the individual chapters makes clear. It does not, however, provide the sole focus. For our term ‘cultural economy’ is also designed to carry another register of meaning or signify another set of debates. This second strand refers to certain epochal claims – often associated with terms such as ‘economies of signs,’ ‘the network society,’ ‘ the knowledge economy,’ and so on and so forth – that we are living through an era in which economic and organizational life has become increasingly ‘culturalized’ ….” [Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, “Cultural Economy: An Introduction.” Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, editors. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2002. Pages 1-19.]

“This critical review contends that accounts of cultural value designed to articulate the specific value of culture within contemporary polity and governance cannot but fail to achieve their objective. Trammeled by economistic utilitarianism on the one side and an uncritical aestheticism on the other, culture’s articulation is either quantitative or mute.…

“This critical review offers a perspective on the contemporary British concern with cultural value from within a family of theoretical positions nominally termed cultural economy. Insofar as the concern with cultural value centres on the desirability, and indeed, the very possibility of providing an account of it from within the group of philosophies of art distinctively described as aesthetic this review argues that cultural value harbours a misconception. The review’s central argument is that the intimations of post-aesthetic … theory, contained in the principle critiques of European and North American modernity, in which theoretical developments can be argued to point towards the dissolution of the foundational eighteenth century categorial distinctions between the aesthetic (the beautiful), the ethical (right conduct) and the cognitive (reason or truth) are to be detected in the specific conditions of contemporary cultural production. Such conditions, it argues, challenge a number of obvious bodies of thought.”

[Calvin Taylor. Cultural Value: A Perspective from Cultural Economy. Leeds, England: University of Leeds. 2015. Pages 2 and 6.]

“Commons are institutional spaces, in which we can practice a particular type of freedom – freedom from the constraints we normally accept as necessary preconditions to functional markets.…

“Commons are a particular type of institutional arrangement for governing the use and disposition of resources. Their salient characteristic, which defines them in contradistinction to property, is that no single person has exclusive control over the use and disposition of any particular resource. Instead, resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone among some (more or less well defined) number of persons, under rules that may range from ‘anything goes’ to quite crisply articulated formal rules that are effectively enforced.…

“What the commons makes possible is an environment in which individuals and groups can produce information and culture for their own sake. It allows for the development of a substantially more expansive role both for nonmarket production and for radically decentralized production. Already we are seeing nonprofit organizations using the World Wide Web to provide information or points of cultural exchange with much greater reach and efficacy than was ever before possible.”

[Yochai Benkler, “The Political Economy of Commons.” Upgrade: The European Journal for the Informatics Professional. Volume IV, number 3, June 2003. Pages 6-9.]

“In the transition to a postcapitalist economy, the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular. Different people can work on it in different places, at different speeds, with relative autonomy from each other. It is not any longer a plan we need – but a modular project design.

“However, our need is urgent.

“My aim here is not to provide an economic strategy or a guide to organization. It is to map the new contradictions of capitalism so that people, movements and parties can obtain more accurate coordinates for the journey they’re trying to make.

“The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy, between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next.”

[Paul Mason. Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2015. Pages 21-22.]

“It’s not clear at which point [Paul] Mason’s postcapitalist transition would definitively issue into a stable new mode of production. The logic of his argument suggests that this would be when the information-based exacerbation of falling profit rates had led to a world in which not just information, but everything had zero marginal cost. If labour is the measure of value, such a state would be a hi-tech Cockaigne of ‘full automation’, where everything from foodstuff production to infrastructure maintenance required no labour inputs at all. Could this be the economics of abundance that [John Maynard] Keynes and [Yevgeni] Preobrazhensky [Russian Cyrillic, Евге́ний Алексе́евич Преображе́нский, Evgénij Alekséevič Preobražénskij] alike looked forward to from the 1930s, and that some thought imminent in the 1960s? We might doubt whether there is really a determinate, achievable ‘everything’ here. Or, if a new mode of production could be fully actualized before such a point, what would be the deciding factor? And what, finally, might prevent related counter-tendencies, such as cheapening labour and materials costs, from stimulating capital anew?” [Rob Lucas, “The Free Machine.” New Left Review. Series II, number 100, July–August 2016. Pages 130-143.]

“[Karl] Marx divides the post-capitalist era into two stages. The first stage is ‘socialism,’ in which there is public ownership of the means of production and payment of wages according. to the amount produced by the worker. The second stage is ‘communism,’ in which there is still public ownership, but workers receive goods according to ‘need.’ Now there are as many interpretations of the word ‘need’ as there are of ‘communism.’ One view of full communism is that of the utopian socialists.…

“The Chinese view of communism, or at least the view presented by Chinese leaders in certain pronouncements within the most recent period, seems to say that ‘need’ should be decided by the state. Goods would be free, but rationed. There would also be a great deal of collective consumption—food, for example, would be prepared by the collective and eaten collectively. It is also implied that enormous abundance for individual consumers is not ‘communist.’

“The modern Soviet definition of communism is quite different from the [Edward] Bellamy view or the Chinese view. It visualizes neither equal wages nor rationing, but rather a complete absence of money, prices and wages. Under pure communism, free goods would be produced under public control and ownership, and consumed by everyone according to his desires. This last interpretation is accepted for the purpose of this article.…

“Socialists have always assumed a great increase in production under socialism as a prerequisite to communism. They assume efficient planning, increased education and research, no unemployment, no wasteful advertising, no monopoly misallocation, no military spending, and so forth. These arguments need not be evaluated here because it is important to examine the objections to communism on their own grounds.”

[Howard J. Sherman, “The Economics of Pure Communism.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 2, number 4, October 1970. Pages 39-50.]

“I am concerned in this paper with three questions: What is the net output of the economic system? How is that output distributed among people? What role do all levels of government play in determining that distribution? The last of these will be emphasized. This paper will proceed as follows: I will briefly discuss empirical studies of income distribution and the distribution of benefits. I will relate these studies to received theoretical doctrines. I will then state the main thesis of my presentation, which constitutes a theoretical framework in which goyernment’s impact on income distribution should be analyzed.…

“Aside from major cases of outright graft and favoritism, I claim that the calculatable impact of government action or neglect is huge relative to the amounts involved in tax and transfer redistribution. Thus I am claiming that the partial analyses which deal with redistribution of before tax income tell us nothing about the impact of government, and would tell us nothing even if they were technically accurate. It is my burden now to demonstrate this quantitative importance. I will give one example of a distribution study which is on the right track, mention other possible studies, and close with some suggestions which go beyond using GNP [gross national product] income measures into the distribution of real welfare measures.”

[Stephan Michelson, “The Economics of Real Income Distribution.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 2, number 1, April 1970. Pages 75-86.]

“By 1980, 42 operating uranium mines and 7 uranium mills were in the vicinity of the Navajo reservation. Approximately 15 uranium projects were under construction on the reservation itself. And although the massive coal development within the area may be viewed as less detrimental to the health of the people, one must consider carefully the part played by these resources in the cumulative level of dependency and environmental impacts. Today 4 coal strip mines (between 20,000 and 40,000 acres each), and 5 coal fired power plants are in operation on the reservation. Much more is planned. As the uranium industry goes through a temporary depression (in the United States) these non-nuclear energy facilities remain, a constant reminder of the economic lifeblood of the region.” [Winona La Duque, “Native America: The Economics of Radioactive Colonization.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 15, number 3, September 1983. Pages 9-19.]

“In this lecture, I shall present a case for pluralism in economics, derived from the complex and ceaselessly changing nature of the world in which we live.…

“Before moving to the second part of my argument, the principle of historical specificity, I will mention two of the important issues that the monolithic mainstream cannot satisfactorily deal with but a pluralist heterodox economics can. The first is the diversity of markets ….

“The second theme is the importance (and complexity) of power in economics, viewed much more broadly than it is in the narrow conception of ‘market power’ that exhausts the mainstream treatment of the subject.…

“If this lecture was being given by feminist economists like Gillian Hewitson or Therese Jefferson, they would have stressed two additional questions: the gender dimension to economic activity, which I have only touched on, and the methodological issues that are implicit in what I have been arguing, especially the questions of ontology stressed by thinkers in the post-structuralist and critical realist traditions ….”

[John E. King, “A case for pluralism in economics.” The Economic and Labour Relations Review. Volume 24, number 1, March 2013. Pages 17-31.]

“Economics is made up of many smaller and overlapping epistemological communities. There are many epistemological communities within mainstream economics. These groups can be defined by fields, but they can also be separated by perspectives, such as rational expectations, monetarism, and mainstream Keynesianism. But these groups recognize a shared identity as economists because they adhere to a set of social norms or rules that determine the acceptance or validity of argument. These norms require formal mathematical modeling or the use of econometric statistical techniques. Although one can consider mainstream economics a unified epistemological community, it is useful to consider the role that fields of study play in the process of critical scrutiny. Fields of study are recognized as specialties. In other words, reviewers with a specialty in industrial organization, for example, do not consider themselves qualified to evaluate research in labor economics.” [Barbara E. Hopkins, “The Institutional Barriers to Heterodox Pluralism.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Voluem 42, number 3, 2010. Pages 338-343.]

“Economics is essential in today’s world, and yet mainstream economists are increasingly under criticism for not taking into account sufficiently many dimensions of real life, such as political and moral values, human development, spirituality, and people’s widely shared aspiration to live more liberated lives. This book offers a critical assessment of contemporary mainstream economics by showing that the discipline has become much too narrow and misses out on the full spectrum of human existence.“ [Christian Arnsperger. Full-Spectrum Economics: Toward an Inclusive and Emancipatory Social Science. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2010. Page 3.]

“The expression full spectrum is a synonym for integral. I have used it in order for Full-Spectrum Economics to be accessible to economists who have never heard of Ken Wilber or the Integral approach, and who would find such an epithet rather grandiose.…

“… Integral Economics … must aim to understand:

[Christian Arnsperger, “Spelling Out Integral Economic Science: The Full-Spectrum Project.” Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Volume 5, number 3, September 2010. Pages 175-193.]

“At the heart of any emancipatory economic geography must be a critique of mainstream economic thinking ….

“An emancipatory economic geography must also move beyond critique, both to provide a deeper understanding of the spatial dynamics and social consequences of capitalism as we know it and to use this understanding as a basis for thinking about other possible worlds.…

“Our point here is simple: quantitative approaches to economic geography can and should be liberated from their needless association with mainstream economics and its own vision of science, truth, and evidence, and be made part of an emancipatory economic geography.”

[Paul Plummer and Eric Sheppard, “Must Emancipatory Economic Geography be Qualitative?” Antipode. Volume 33, issue 2, March 2001. Pages 194-199.]

“The outline of our theory can be expressed as follows. When employment increases, aggregate real income is increased. The psychology of the community is such that when aggregate real income is increased aggregate consumption is increased, but not by so much as income. Hence employers would make a loss if the whole of the increased employment were to be devoted to satisfying the increased demand for immediate consumption. Thus, to justify any given amount of employment there must be an amount of current investment sufficient to absorb the excess of total output over what the community chooses to consume when employment is at the given level. For unless there is this amount of investment, the receipts of the entrepreneurs will be less than is required to induce them to offer the given amount of employment. It follows, therefore, that, given what we shall call the community’s propensity to consume, the equilibrium level of employment, i.e. the level at which there is no inducement to employers as a whole either to expand or to contract employment, will depend on the amount of current investment. The amount of current investment will depend, in turn, on what we shall call the inducement to invest; and the inducement to invest will be found to depend on the relation between the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital and the complex of rates of interest on loans of various maturities and risks.” [John Maynard Keynes. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. 1935. Ebook edition.]

“Perhaps the reader feels that … [the] general, philosophical disquisition on the behavior of mankind is somewhat remote from the economic theory under discussion. But I think not. Tho this is how we behave in the market place, the theory we devise in the study of how we behave in the market place should not itself submit to market-place idols. I accuse the classical economic theory of being itself one of these pretty, polite techniques which tries to deal with the present by abstracting from the fact that we know very little about the future.” [John Maynard Keynes, “The General Theory of Employment.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Volume 51, number 2, February 1937. Pages 209-223.]

“Twenty years ago, Tony Thirlwall … summarised Post Keynesian macroeconomics in terms of six core propositions. First, employment and unemployment are determined in the product market, not the labour market. Second, involuntary unemployment exists, and is caused by deficient effective demand; it is not the result of labour market imperfections, and it would not be eliminated if such imperfections were removed. Third, the relationship between aggregate investment and aggregate saving is fundamental to macroeconomic theory, and causation runs from investment to saving, and not vice versa.… Fourth, a monetary economy is quite different from a barter economy: money is not neutral, finance is important and debt matters. Fifth, the Quantity Theory of Money is seriously misleading …. Sixth, capitalist economies are driven by the ‘animal spirits’ of investors, which determine investment.” [J. E. King, “A Brief Introduction to Post Keynesian Macroeconomics.” Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Volume 39, number 4, 2013. Pages 485-508.]

“… since [John Maynard] Keynes’s whole work is centred about the concept of full employment, it is important to get our notions about that clear. Most people by this time understand that he used this phrase in a peculiar sense. He did not mean by it, as the words in their natural sense imply, a state of things in which the number of persons actually employed is equal to the number of would-be employees. He meant by it this latter number minus ‘frictional unemployment’ associated with imperfections of mobility. It will be convenient to follow his usage here subject to an emendation. I shall regard employment as full when the number of persons actually employed is equal to the number of would-be employees minus frictional unemployment and when there are no unfilled vacancies (except frictional unfilled vacancies). When the number of persons actually employed is equal to the number of would-be employees minus frictional unemployment, and there are unfilled vacancies (over and above frictional unfilled vacancies), I say that there is over-full employment; the degree of over-fullness being measured by the number of unfilled vacancies other than frictional ones.” [A. C. Pigou. Keynes’s ‘General Theory’: A Retrospective View. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. 1950. Pages 4-5.]

“The growth of the Post Keynesian community did not come at the expense of the other heterodox communities. Rather, as heterodox economists became more aware of Post Keynesian theory and Post Keynesians became more involved with the other heterodox communities, heterodox economists in general became members of two or more of the communities. Moreover, because of the overlap of community membership, conferences ceased to be specifically identified with a single community, and community journals published articles by economists who were also members of other heterodox communities.” [Frederic S. Lee, “Mutual Aid and the Making of Heterodox Economics in Postwar America: a Post Keynesian View.” History of Economics Review. Volume 35, issue 1, 2002. Pages 45-63.]

“Perhaps the most fundamental tenet common to all Post Keynesians is the principle of effective demand. This expression has been given a few different meanings …, but it is often associated with three interrelated ideas: the determination of income by expenditure; the determination of employment and output by the producers’ expectations of costs and proceeds; and the possibility of persistent involuntary unemployment, due to a low level of aggregate demand.…

“Another important unifying feature of Post Keynesianism is the emphasis on institutions.…

“Closely related to the emphasis on money is an emphasis on what can be generically, albeit somewhat imprecisely, called Keynesian uncertainty or uncertainty in a strong sense.”

[David Dequech, “Post Keynesianism, Heterodoxy and Mainstream Economics.” Review of Political Economy. Volume 24, number 2, April 2012. Pages 353-368.]

“To study the relationship between inflation and unemployment I have used a small-scale Post-Keynesian model of income distribution and growth that explicitly acknowledges both the influence of aggregate demand on real economic activity and the distributional conflict at the core of the inflation process. The model allows us to show that a long-run downward-sloping Phillips curve can exist when workers have a second mover advantage and strong bargaining power in the labor market (as it corresponds to the Golden Age). Consequently, higher workers’ bargaining power and real wages increase inflation and induce a higher level of aggregate demand and employment. An upward-sloping Phillips curve can arise instead, when firms, having the second mover advantage, use their market power, push real wages down, and decrease the overall aggregate demand in the economy.” [Leonardo Vera, “The Distribution of Power and the Inflation-Unemployment Relationship in the United States: A Post-Keynesian Approach.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 49, number 2, June 2017. Pages 265-285.]

“… much effort has been devoted in post- Keynesian circles (and others, of course) to describing non-competitive (or imperfectly competitive) market structures and their implications for pricing and the investment decision. Much of this work is microeconomic in character and the systemic effects have at best only been sketched. Nevertheless, there are some disquieting aspects that need to be thought about. Before doing so, let me conjecture that with the increase in international competitiveness of the past three decades, in both goods and services, especially financial services, the world economy may be closer to the competitive model, albeit a ruthless jungle red in tooth and claw, than it was when the writings referred to above were first developed. If so, our minds may be put more at ease on that score.” [G. C. Harcourt. The Structure of Post-Keynesian Economics: The Core Contributions of the Pioneers. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Page 155.]

“When writing the book [The Structure of Post-Keynesian Economics: The Core Contributions of the Pioneers], I had in mind two sets of readers: first, undergraduate and graduate students who may be looking for alternative approaches to thinking about theoretical, applied and policy issues in economics. By presenting a structure of the thought (and its origins) that I have found so helpful over my working life I hope to at least interest and possibly even enthuse this first set. Secondly, I also hope that what I have written may interest teachers and researchers in economics, not so much perhaps for the details of the analysis, with which many would be familiar, but for the way in which one person at least sees the interconnections and interrelationships which have emerged as our discipline has evolved and developed.” [G. C. Harcourt, “The Structure of Post-Keynesian Economics: The Core Contributions of the Pioneers.” Review of Current Issues in Economics. Volume 52, special issue, 2006. Pages 5-10.]

“Why post-Keynesian economics and who were its Cambridge pioneers? Maynard Keynes, Richard Kahn, Richard Goodwin, Nicholas Kaldor, Luigi Pasinetti, Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa all started initially, at least in some degree, within the mainstream of their time. They all moved well and truly outside it, attempting to create either a revolutionary alternative or to rehabilitate the classical Marxian tradition, in most cases in the light of the Keynesian revolution. The one exception is Michal Kalecki, whose personal history and independent mind combined to place him virtually always outside the mainstream. The book, though, is not principally concerned with why and how the discontents that led them to change their minds arose. Rather, its principal object is to set out the structures of their alternative approaches in order to suggest modes of thinking about theoretical and policy issues in political economy.” [G. C. Harcourt, “The Structure of Post-Keynesian Economics: The Core Contributions of the Pioneers.” History of Economics Review. Volume 45, winter 2007. Pages 95-105.]

“Most Post Keynesians are not socialists. But almost all are reformers, who advocate major reforms of capitalism, designed not only to help stability, but also to increase equality. There is nothing incompatible between advocating major reforms in the short run and advocating a complete change to socialism in the long run. So a minority of Post Keynesians are also socialists.…

“All Post Keynesian socialists are agreed that any socialist society must be democratic. To understand the issue fully, however, the long and convoluted history of this issue must be briefly mentioned. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels fought in the 1848 revolution for democracy in Germany and they supported every movement for democracy in their lifetime. European socialist parties, from the German Social Democrats to the British Labour party grew up in a struggle for the extension of democracy, including suffrage rights for male workers and for women.”

[Howard J. Sherman, “Socialism.” The Elgar Companion to Post Keynesian Economics. J. E. King, editor. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2003. Pages 313-317.]

“The concept of gender used throughout this paper is social-structural, not individual ….

“… theoretical schools are not simply bundles of abstract principles: they are also sociological entities, with institutionalized practices, shared cultures, and characteristic rhetorical strategies.…

“Once we begin to think about material life diachronically, intertemporally, we open up the possibility of a much more interesting subjectivity. The neoclassical subject, who seeks only pleasure in the instant, cannot worry, hope, regret, care, or feel responsibility for anyone else.… Post Keynesian subjects reflect, learn, and make moral distinctions.…

“To this Post Keynesian approach, it is possible to begin counterposing feminist literatures that also stress subjects who are situated and reflective, constrained by a particular place and time, but still capable of projects, efforts, and hope. We thus open a path to considering the ways in which sentiment, conversation, and the thought that emerges from conversation and reflection might be part of material life …. In the feminist–Post Keynesian synthesis suggested here, we are inevitably in a world in which meanings matter.”

[Colin Danby, “Toward a Gendered Post Keynesianism: Subjectivity and Time in a Nonmodernist Framework.” Feminist Economics. Volume 10, number 3, November 2004. Pages 55-75.]

“When we accept the feminist understanding of the economy as including unpaid work and caring, and take this to the Post Keynesian tradition of macroeconomics, we find a possible connection through the idea of circular cumulative causation. This is the view that all sectors in the economy link together through feedbacks and interdependencies, in which demand is the primal moving force …. Once we recognize that provisioning can be supported not only by paid work and motivations of self-interest and power, but also by unpaid work and caring motivations, unpaid work and caring may be perceived as responses to needs that are not expressed in market demand, either because these needs lack purchasing power, or because markets and states fail to provide the relational aspect that the fulfilment of some needs requires. This makes it possible to analyse links between the monetized economy and unpaid work and caring through feedbacks, spill-over effects, substitution effects, and agency effects ….” [Irene van Staveren, “Post-Keynesianism meets feminist economics.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Volume 34, number 6, November 2010. Pages 1123-1144.]

“The interconnections between the changes needed for a shift to sustainability in different areas also constitute an ecology of change, (and a corresponding ecology of inertia). Change achieved in one area (e.g. energy) will help to ease change in others (e.g. agriculture, transport), and change frustrated in one area can help to frustrate it in others. This creates great scope (and also great need) for synergy in the design and implementation of new policies. Unfortunately the conventional departmental structure of governments and government agencies makes it difficult for them to capture this synergy. The departmentalization of faculties and disciplines in universities and research institutes creates comparable difficulties for them too. This is one reason why so much of the innovative policy work on the new economics of sustainable development has hitherto come – and, to be realistic, will probably continue to come — from outsiders and NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], and not from within professional staffs in government and academe.” [James Robertson. The New Economics of Sustainable Development: A Briefing for Policy Makers. London: Kogan Page. 1999. Page 31.]

“… [American] strategies have created a ‘death economy’ — one based on wars or the threat of war, debt, and the rape of the earth’s resources. It is an unsustainable economy that depletes at ever-increasing rates the very resources upon which it depends and at the same time poisons the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the foods we eat. Although the death economy is built on a form of capitalism, it is important to note that the word capitalism refers to an economic and political system in which trade and industry are controlled by private owners rather than the state. It includes local farmers’ markets as well as this very dangerous form of global corporate capitalism, controlled by the corporatocracy, which is predatory by nature, has created a death economy, and ultimately is self-destructive.” [John Perkins. The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Oakland, California: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2016. Page 19.]

“Instead of speculating about China, we must repent and reform. We need to take a long, hard look at what we in the United States — and our corporations, now gone global — have done. China is trying to emulate a system that is a failure.…

“We in the United States and across the globe must stop using ‘them’ as scapegoats. Just as we must not fear ‘them,’ we must not blame ‘them’ or expect ‘them’ to solve the problem — the global problem of predatory corporate capitalism, a death economy. We need to recognize that ‘they’ are us. We ourselves — each and every one of us — must take responsibility. We must create a new model — one that the Chinese, the Brazilians, the Indians, our own president, our corporate and government leaders, and everyone else can follow.

“It isn’t about changing the mechanics of economics. It is about changing the ideas, the dogmas that have driven economics for centuries: debt and fear, insufficiency, divide and conquer. It is about moving from ideas about merely being sustainable to ones that include regenerating areas devastated by agriculture, mining, and other destructive activities. It is about revolution. The transition from a death economy to a life economy is truly about a change in consciousness — a consciousness revolution.”

[John Perkins. The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Oakland, California: A BK Currents book imprint of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2016. Page 261.]

“… in many cases helping an economy grow only makes those few people who sit atop the pyramid even richer, while it does nothing for those at the bottom except to push them even lower. Indeed, promoting capitalism often results in a system that resembles medieval feudal societies. If any of my professors knew this, they had not admitted it—probably because big corporations, and the men who run them, fund colleges. Exposing the truth would undoubtedly cost those professors their jobs—just as such revelations could cost me mine.” [John Perkins. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. San Francisco, California: A BK Currents book imprint of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2004. Page 26.]

“… I became more familiar with the circumstances surrounding the 1997 Asian economic collapse, also known as the ‘IMF [International Monetary Fund] crisis.’ This debacle began in Asia, where it impacted hundreds of millions of people and resulted in thousands—possibly millions—of deaths from disease, starvation, and suicides, and then spread across the globe. For those willing to listen, it sent a strong message about the true intent of the IMF and the World Bank, a lesson in how not to manage an economy, unless the goal is to further enrich the corporatocracy at the expense of everyone else.” [John Perkins. The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption. New York: Dutton imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2007. Ebook edition.]

“There is … [a particular] source of overindulgence in the ever-increasing complexity of the moral economy. The more numerous the interests, the more difficult the task of attending to their connections and managing their adjustment. Not only is the need of prudence never out grown; it steadily acquires both a greater urgency and a greater difficulty.

“If incapacity may be said to be the metaphysical evil, the taint of the cosmos at large, over indulgence may be said to be the original sin, the taint of life itself. It is life’s offence against itself, the denial of greater life for the sake of the little in hand. It is the perennial failure of the individual interest to unite itself with that universal enterprise of which it is the microcosmic image.…

“The simplest moral economy is that in which two or more interests are reciprocally adjusted without being subordinated. The principle of organization which defines such an economy is prudence. Prudence becomes necessary at the moment when interests come into such contact with one another as provokes retaliation. Thus, for example, interests react on one another through being embodied in the same physical organism. Each bodily activity depends on the well-being of co-ordinate functions, and if its exercise be so immoderate as to injure these, it undermines itself. Moderation gains for special interests the support of a general bodily health.”

[Ralph Barton Perry. The Moral Economy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1909. Pages 86-87.]

“The food riot in eighteenth-century England was a highly-complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives. How far these objectives were achieved – that is, how far the food riot was a ‘successful’ form of action – is too intricate a question to tackle within the limits of an article; but the question can at least be posed (rather than, as is customary, being dismissed unexamined with a negative), and this cannot be done until the crowd’s own objectives are identified. It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractices among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc. This in its turn was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action.” [E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past & Present. Number 50, February 1971. Pages 76-136.]

“A study of the moral economy of peasants can tell us what makes them angry and what is likely, other things being equal, to generate an explosive situation. But if anger born of exploitation were sufficient to spark a rebellion, most of the Third World (and not only the Third World) would be in flames. Whether peasants who perceive themselves to be exploited actually rebel depends on a host of intervening factors— such as alliances with other classes, the repressive capacity of dominant elites, and the social organization of the peasantry itself— which are not treated except in passing here. Instead, I deal with the nature of exploitation in peasant society as its victims are likely to see it, and what one might call the creation of social dynamite rather than its detonation.” [James C. Scott. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 1976. Page 4.]

“… [There is] clandestine and anonymous resistance in Sedaka. It finds expression in the killing of small and, more rarely, large livestock by the poor. Most of the village’s ragtag collection of chickens, ducks, geese, goats, water buffalo, and three beef cattle are owned by well-to-do households. They pose a considerable nuisance to the poor in many ways. Although barriers and chicken wire are often used to bar them, they frequently forage into the nursery beds, paddy fields, and small gardens of the poor, doing considerable damage. The poor are, of course, not the only ones affected (the livestock have, as yet, no class loyalties themselves), but they are the ones most deeply angered. Their anger does not merely stem from the fact that they can least afford the loss; it grows from something that might be called a ‘moral economy of diet.’” [James C. Scott. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 1985. Page 271.]

“Much of the history of social struggle from, say, 1830 to 1950 could, in fact, be written as the attempt to create, in place of the wreckage of local moral-economies, an analogous ‘moral-economy state’ to provide national social insurance along comparable lines-no longer seen as a matter of local reciprocity but as right of citizenship.” [James C. Scott, “Afterword to ‘Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence.’” American Anthropologist. Volume 107, number 3, September 2005. Pages 395-402.]

“… [Some people who not particularly] enchanted by the potential of capitalist development, feared the effects of capitalism on the moral economy. Acquisitiveness, centred on the commodification of goods and relationships, and based upon individual property rights, sanctioned by the pursuit of individual self-interest, were being reproduced by an expanding capitalist economy and threatened the pre-existing ethical framework of economic life. These concerns in the Islamic world followed lines similar to those visible in the writings of Christian socialists and others during the nineteenth century. For a number of Muslim writers, the preoccupation with the moral economy took two forms. Firstly, the ethical regulation of human transactions was seen as part of God’s purpose, and a necessary bulwark against the fracturing of society. Secondly, and specific to the discourse of those concerned about a distinctively Islamic society, there were fears about the particular identity of a society undergoing these changes. Both in the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries, this fear raised the question of the price that a Muslim community might have to pay for success in a world not of its making, seeking to benefit without succumbing to its corruption.” [Charles Tripp. Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism. Camridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pages 31-32.]

“In the paper, I seek, first, to ground the development of this particular moral economy in the history of settlement, production and political struggle in the Mekong Delta and, second, to show how the articulation of this moral economy has shaped not just the distribution of land, but the overall trajectory of economic and social development in the region. In doing so, I aim to fill a gap in the existing literature, providing a bridge between micro-level accounts of local politics and macro-level accounts of political and economic change, both in the Mekong Delta and in Vietnam more broadly.” [Timothy Gorman, “Moral Economy and the Upper Peasant: The Dynamics of Land Privatization in the Mekong Delta.” Journal of Agrarian Change. Volume 14, number 4, October 2014. Pages 501-521.]

“… the moral economy of Africa has obstructed the development of capitalism while the moral economy of Japan has taken the lead in promoting it? This suggests that there is some crucial difference in the form of moral economy between the two regions. It is necessary, therefore, to examine carefully what the cultural particularity of the African peasant economy is and how it is functioning in daily life.…

“Studies of peasant moral economy have drawn attention to the meanings and values inherent in the economic behavior of peasants. Their behavior is often implicitly contrasted with Western economic behavior, which is assumed to be guided by rational calculation and narrowly economic goals …. Rationality and calculation, moreover, are revealed to function not as the principles governing colonial actions, but rather as tropes through which the colonizers represented Western culture and distinguished themselves from those they colonized. Colonial discourse on agricultural development can be read as cultural assertions having as much to do with the social relations of empire as with the cultivation of crops.” [Victoria Bernal, “Colonial Moral Economy and the Discipline of Development: The Gezira Scheme and ‘Modern’ Sudan.” Cultural Anthropology. Volume 12, number 4, 1997. Pages 447-479.]

“What I mean by a moral economy is a web of affect-saturated values that stand and function in well-defined relationship to one another. In this usage, ‘moral’ carries its full complement of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century resonances: it refers at once to the psychological and to the normative.… A moral economy is a balanced system of emotional forces, with equilibrium points and constraints. Although it is a contingent, malleable thing of no necessity, a moral economy has a certain logic to its composition and operations. Not all conceivable combinations of affects and values are in fact possible. Much of the stability and integrity of a moral economy derives from its ties to activities, such as precision measurement or collaborative empiricism, which anchor and entrench but do not determine it.” [Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science.” Osiris. Volume 10, 1995. Pages 2-24.]

“In this article, I attempt to sketch out a verbal ‘model’ of the ‘classical’ economy of historical Islam, one that assembles what is known of its basic ‘building blocks’ in a coherent system that highlights its moral and legal philosophy, and encapsulates its fundamental principles and ‘laws of motion’ in theory as well as its modus operandi in practice.…

“Viewed in its totality, the idealized world of the classical jurists ensures a complete knowledge (of exchanged objects), one that negates avoidable risks and uncertainties (hence potential deceits) regarding performance. As such, their world — it seems — is akin to the perfect-knowledge and perfect-foresight requirements of perfect competition, the central concept of the idealized market system of modern economics …. In both worlds the community’s economic welfare is sought, notwithstanding the difference in their respective moral justification.”

[Salah El-Sheikh, “The Moral Economy of Classical Islam: A FiqhiConomic Model.” The Muslim World. Volume 98, issue 1, January 2008. Pages 116-144.]

“‘Moral economy’ in Africa is characterized by networks of kinship, friendship and neighbourhood based on the norm of ‘generalized reciprocity,’ in which counter-obligations are not always necessary. Another unique aspect is that accumulation of wealth is mainly done in spheres of consumption and social reproduction. It is on this internal logic that we have to contemplate the future development of rural Africa.”

[Kazuhiko Sugimura, “Africain [sic; African] Peasants and Moral Economy.” PEKEA Newsletter. Number 9, January–March 2007. Pages 1-6.]

“The conceptual framing of the research builds upon the notion of moral economy. The theory of moral economy assumes that economic activities are defined and legitimized by moral beliefs, values, and norms …. In particular, agrarian communities are said to share a set of normative attitudes concerning the social relations that surround their local economies. Social networks and culturally legitimized dealings tend to prevail over market-efficient behavior, as they promote the survival of the community under the conditions of scarcity ….” [Katarzyna Cieslik, “Moral Economy Meets Social Enterprise Community-Based Green Energy Project in Rural Burundi.” World Development. Volume 83, July 2016. Pages 12-26.]

“… [There is an] economy of the moral values and norms of a given group in a given moment. I will retain this meaning here in the analysis of the values and norms by which immigration and asylum are thought and acted on and, in a broader sense, which define our moral world …. This moral economy defines the scope of contemporary biopolitics considered as the politics that deals with the lives of human beings.” [Didier Fassin, “Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France.” Cultural Anthropology. Volume 20, issue 3, 2005. Pages 362-387.]

“The ‘moral economy’ used by Slow Food is not so far from the sense that scholars give to this notion in other movements. Indeed it is a growing presence in scientific debates …. The spaces of political action permitted in alternative moral economies allow a renewed commitment. Positive proposals, ‘for’ something – pleasure and conviviality or local economies for example – … now include the movement being ‘against’ something else more explicitly – whether it is industrial agriculture or GMOs [genetically modified organisms].” [Valeria Siniscalchi, “Environment, regulation and the moral economy of food in the Slow Food movement.” Journal of Political Ecology. Volume 20, 2013. Pages 295-305.]

“… we noticed the slippage between national, economic and moral values and how they combine on the person.11 A slippage that we attempted to unpack by examining where and how they cohered or not: for instance, a fat, smoking, drinking, body was repeatedly coded and read as a sign of an unproductive, lazy, non-disciplined, non-self-investing person who was likely to be a drain on the nation through health costs.” [Beverley Skeggs, “The Moral Economy of Person Production: the Class Relations of Self-Performance on ‘Reality’ Television.” Sociologia: Revista do Departamento de Sociologia da FLUP. Volume XX, 2010. Pages 67-84.]

“… I reconstruct the collectively shared repertoire that constitutes the ‘moral economy of inequality’ in Germany. Specifically, I ask which reasons underlie the acceptance of income differentiation based on merit and at which point acceptable income differences turn into objectionable inequalities. My results show that while people agree with abstract inegalitarian principles—in particular the idea of merit—for functional and normative reasons, they are at the same time critical of specific instances of inequality, especially poverty and wealth. These are considered problematic because they are seen as preventing the poor from participating in a way of life seen as the societal norm and enable the rich to set themselves further apart from the rest of society, thereby straining sentiments of community and societal integration.” [Patrick Sachweh, “The moral economy of inequality: popular views on income differentiation, poverty and wealth.” Socio-Economic Review. Volume 10, 2012. Pages 419-445.]

“… we discuss the particular moral-economic characteristics of the civic food networks of the city of Manchester. We will argue that contemporary alternative agri- food economic practices constitute a moral economy organized around relations of solidarity and justice with proximate and distant others, concern for land and for the global environment, social inclusion of the disadvantaged, and the reskilling of everyday life, thus going beyond a narrow understanding of economic value …. However, we also aim to identify the ways in which the moral economy of these networks is conditioned by the character of morality in modern societies, and argue for the former’s potential to contribute to a wider societal transformation of the agri-food system.” [Katerina Psarikidou and Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The Moral Economy of Civic Food Networks in Manchester.” International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food. Volume 19, number 3, 2012. Pages 309-327.]

“Moral Economy is one of several recognized systems of normative behavior that originate from lived experience and people’s intuitive sense of justice. It may be compatible with some formalized top-down theories and it may even be possible to formalize it as a coherent theory, but it did not originate as theory and does not depend on any such theory to function adequately in many communities. Moral Economy occupies the same space as many Western political, economic, and ethical theories, but it also addresses issues ignored by them, especially considerations of exchange and social behavior that are not neatly divided into those three categories.” [Elizabeth D. Mauritz. Moral Economy: Claims for the Common Good. Ph.D. dissertation. Michigan State University. East Lansing, Michigan. 2014. Pages 1-2.]

“Social revolutions and popular protest have been the major focus of Scott’s work in his various books. By examining the cultural and moral disquiet that informs all forms of protest, Scott has provided anthropologists and social theorists a wide-ranging analytical vocabulary for speaking about peace and its inseparable twin-violence. His particular area of expertise has been the arts of repressive peace, and the artfulness of those who elude or defy such silencing technologies. As [James C.] Scott notes in The Moral Economy of the Peasant …, he deals with ‘the nature of exploitation in peasant society as the victims are likely to see it, and what one might call the creation of social dynamite rather than its detonation’ …. By examining closely the extraordinary actions, words, and struggles of ordinary people, Scott shows us that peace is accomplished at great cost. His work reminds us that several generations may die working for a peace they will never see themselves; nevertheless, they continue to work without any diminution in their passion for it, regardless of the consequences.” [K. Sivaramakrishnan, “Introduction to ‘Moral Economies, State Spaces, and Categorical Violence.’” American Anthropologist. Volume 107, number 3, September 2005. Pages 321-330.]

“… the success of the concept of moral economy was not refuted for nearly forty years, a success that went well beyond the circles of the social history of Marxist thought, where it inspired as much enthusiasm as criticism. In the United States, it was the object of a relatively faithful re-appropriation in anthropology, thanks especially to James C. Scott, … a political scientist, whose work on the moral economy of the peasants of Southeast Asia in the early 1980s opened the path to a substantial network of researchers working on economic logic and social mobilization in rural areas in developing countries.” [Didier Fassin, “Moral Economies Revisited.” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales. Volume 64, June 2009. Pages 1237-1266.]

“In Moral Economy [The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia], he [James C. Scott] sought to contrast rebellion and unrest with alternatives to such popular forms of struggle. The tide of national liberation movements in Southeast Asia was clearly subsiding, and he was concerned with predicting future forms of overt and covert rebellion (resistance was not yet a keyword for him) among the Malay peasantry.… As its subtitle, Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, indicates, Moral Economy is based on theoretical conclusions with regard to a limited geographic and cultural area in which Scott has expertise and represents a more nuanced approach to resistance in its various expressions and interrelations with other phenomena. Among other things, it helps explain overt rebellion in times of crisis like the Depression of the 1930s.” [Matthew C. Gutmann, “Rituals of Resistance: A Critique of the Theory of Everyday Forms of Resistance.” Latin American Perspectives. Volume 20, number 2, spring 1993. Pages 74-92.]

“Despite the incompleteness of contracts, a modern economy’s major markets—for labor, credit, and knowledge—can sometimes function tolerably well because social norms and other-regarding motives foster a positive work ethic, an obligation to tell the truth about the qualities of a project or a piece of information, and a commitment to keep promises. ‘The moral economy’ is not an oxymoron.

“The importance of norms and other social motives extends far beyond what we usually term market failures. It encompasses many of the arenas of social life in which the effects of one’s actions on others is not governed by contract: the long-term climatic effects of one’s lifestyle choices, the creation of drug-resistant superbugs through the opportunistic use of antibiotics, and the traffic congestion resulting from one’s choice of a way to get around. The need for social norms to underwrite good governance is likely to increase as these and other problems pose ever-larger challenges to our well-being. The changing nature of work itself—from producing things to processing information and providing care, for example—further suggests that our economies will increasingly be characterized by contractual incompleteness.”

[Samuel Bowles. The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. 2016. Page 34.]

“This synthesis adapts from post-Keynesian economics true/fundamental uncertainty, endogenous money/credit, endogenous expectations, financial innovation, financial fragility and effective demand. These elements are integrated with Marxian crisis theory, adversarial class relations, a conflict-determined distribution of income and its impact on effective demand, the imperative to accumulate and the Marxian concept of competition as distinct from the classical/neoclassical concept of competition. In addition, the social structure of accumulation (SSA) approach and its associated long wave theory is used to establish the institutional mechanisms and change that underlie long-term growth/accumulation. From both approaches, the role of institutions is integrated, particularly with respect to the constitution of the individual economic agent, the formation of expectations and confidence in expectations and as a support system for profitable long-term accumulation.” [Jonathan P. Goldstein, “An introduction to a unified heterodox macroeconomic theory.” Heterodox Macroeconomics: Keynes, Marx and globalization. Jonathan P. Goldstein and Michael G. Hillard, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2009. Pages 36-53.]

“‘Capital theory’ has been used as a shorthand term for the debate known as the Cambridge capital controversies. The reference to Cambridge follows from the dispute having mainly been conducted between prominent figures, or figureheads, attached or aligned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, especially MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Cambridge, England. The two Cambridges stood, respectively, as representatives for mainstream neoclassical economics and its critics from radical political economy.…

“The debate was entirely conducted in terms of choice between linear technologies.…

“… capital theory attained its greatest prominence in the 1970s when radical political economy was considerably stronger than today. Despite the veracity of its empirical and theoretical results, and their acceptance by the mainstream (who conceded that empirical measurement of performance ought to include both supply and demand and not just supply), the mainstream now proceeds as if the Cambridge critique never existed and shamelessly deploys aggregate production functions as if they are without problems.”

[Ben Fine, “Capital Theory.” The Elgar Companion to Post Keynesian Economics. J. E. King, editor. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2003. Pages 51-56.]

“The preoccupation with value is also prompted, we believe, by the recognition of the epochal shift to an ‘economy of enrichment,’ which is the term we suggest in order to refer to the forms of wealth creation that are based on an economic exploitation of the past, in the form of craft, heritage, tradition, identity or, more largely, culture. The idea of enrichment refers to the act of improving the value of something, but we should also understand it in its material connotation, as when we speak of the enrichment of mineral ore. France is an excellent example of an economy almost entirely oriented towards this model of worth, based on the enrichment of legacy and uniqueness.” [Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, “Grappling with the Economy of Enrichment.” Valuation Studies. Volume 3, number 1, 2015. Pages 75-83.]

“The social logic of ‘enriched objects’ is quite distinct from that of the industrial world, to the extent that we can sketch out two ideal-types of economy in schematic form. In this context, the term ‘enrichment’ does not refer to the growth of private fortunes, but rather to the processes that increase the value of objects. The two kinds of economy assess value on the basis of different conventional forms, whose nature will be our principal concern. Any object can be enriched, however ancient or modern it is, and the enrichment can be physical—for example, exposing beams in an old house—or cultural, through the use of a narrative device that highlights certain of the object’s qualities, thereby producing and formatting differences and identities, which are primary resources of enrichment economies.” [Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, “The Economic Life of Things: Commodities, Collectibles, Assets.” New Left Review. Series II, number 98, March–April 2016.]

“The capacity to live ‘within’ capitalist political economy while existing outside of it is paradox, the realm of the ‘independently’ wealthy whose wealth is the product of the ‘system’ now eschewed. This is to argue that Zen as it is laid out below is a political act. But to clear, this point is contextual, particular to the assertion of totalizing political economy, not ‘nature.’ …

“Zen is to clear away the clutter through re-engagement, to exist away from the totalizing hubris of metaphysical ‘knowledge’ as both determination and guide. And to be clear, it is not a singular view, a ‘human’ perspective. It is abandonment of this perspective as dissociated ‘object’ put forward with imperial intent. But again, embedded being does not take place in the metaphysical ether—abandonment of metaphysics isn’t a taking away, it is a homecoming.…

“What the clearing that is Zen makes visible is that capitalism is an imposition, a dim insistence that people ‘accept’ culturally and historically circumscribed religious precepts as they have been reconstituted in a wholly implausible ‘science’ of political economy. To be clear, this isn’t to replace one insistence with another. It is to provide the clearing where imperial insistence has no place.”

[Rob Urie. Zen Economics. Petrolia, California: CounterPunch. 2016. Kindle edition.]

“The present work analyzes the Soviet economic experience in the light of the Marxian concept of capital. The subject of the book is Soviet economy, where economy is understood in its specific Marxian sense of a complex of social relations of production. Entirely subscribing to the materialist point of view, we hold that it is the economy, that is, basically the relations between the immediate producers and their conditions of production. that fanned the foundation of the Soviet society and ultimately determined its politics and other elements of its edifice. Correspondingly. our work is an essay in the critique of political economy – in the Marxian sense of the expression – and not an exercise in economics or even in political economy. All the basic categories employed in the book are [Karl] Marx’s, as they appear in his original texts.…

“The debate on the Soviet question – wherever it appears in the book – is basically with the tendencies within the broad spectrum of the left. For those on the right, neither Marx nor an analysis of the Soviet economy in the light of Marx’s theoretical categories has been of any importance except perhaps as scholastic curiosities. Needless to add, there is nothing personal about this debate. The individuals concerned appear here uniquely as representatives of certain tendencies, and, in the debate, issue is taken with those tendencies.”

[Paresh Chattopadhyay. The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience: Essay in the Critique of Political Economy. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers. 1994. Pages xii-xiv.]

“Relational economics is useful in debates about how capitalism has become detached from political control, and in dealing with the more negative impacts of our economic system and ways of working on our personal, family and community lives. It can also aid thinking about how to deal with complex challenges that affect whole sectors and systems of economic activity, for example energy production and use.…

“There is … more to relational economics than just a focus on individual and business relationships. For example, the behaviour of systems with many players can be ‘emergent’ (in other words, different from the sum of individual actions). Complex feedbacks or reinforcements, institutional and policy changes, technological shifts, and the increasing scale and scope of economic activity, have all led to systems that seem beyond capture, understanding and control. But this complexity points to a need to try to understand connections rather than to retreat yet again into abstraction and equations.…

“… Relational thinking can also assist in finding new ways to re-empower people or rebalance power (for example through networks or unions of the self-employed to enable effective voice and action, or to provide collective and cheaper services); or new ways to restore morality and ethics (for example, through peer groups in the economy with codes of practice); or it can assist in providing identity and points of security (again through forms of mutual economic support). It can also help to increase effectiveness and productivity (for example diverse multi-stakeholder groups and networks can enable decision-making, ‘distributed’ production, information sharing, or innovation).”

[Andrea Westall, “Relational economics.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Issue 49, winter 2011. Pages 94-104.]

“Psychoanalysts understand how clients struggle to stop thinking like their parents. In our political work and in our professional gatherings, we psychoanalysts have to try to stop thinking like a nation or like a state. In order to claim the freedom to stop thinking like the state, we have to make sacrifices—a sacrifice of identity, security, and having one’s feet on the ground in a place called home. It’s time to leave home, to get outside the box, to press for a relational economics, to help the leader become good enough, to fight for an empathic foreign policy devoted to standing in the shoes of the other. To do this, we have to make some sacrifices: sacrifices in which we act to lose home, suspend identity, and refuse the offer of security. We make these sacrifices in the yearning hope of finding home, identity, and security once again.” [Andrew Samuels, “The Renaissance of Western Politics: The Good-Enough Leader, Relational Economics, and an Empathic Foreign Policy.” Tikkun: to heal, repair, and transform the world. Volume 24, number 4, July–August 2009. Pages 43-49.]

“The purpose of this paper was to initiate a discussion of group learning from an economic perspective by invoking the relational economic framework advanced by [Karl] Polanyi …. Polanyi’s economic frame was used to describe aspects of an educational economy that necessarily incorporates meaningful interaction amongst educational stakeholders such as teachers and students. Within this integrated scenario, reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange were specified as key attributes that should co-exist when group learning occurs in contemporary classrooms.” [Eisuke Saito and Matthew Atencio, “Group learning as relational economic activity.” Educational Review. Volume 66, number 1, February 2014. Pages 96-107.]

“Reciprocity, as a form of integration, and symmetrical organization went together. This may be the true explanation of the famous duality in social organization. Indeed, we may ask in regard to preliterate society—ignorant of bookkeeping—how could reciprocity be practiced over long stretches of time by large numbers of peoples in the most varied positions unless social organization met the need halfway by providing ready-made, symmetrical groups, members of which could behave towards one another similarly? The suggestion carried important implications for the study of social organization. It explains, among other things, the role of the intricate kinship relations often found in savage societies where they function as the bearers of social organization.

“Since there is no separate economic organization and, instead, the economic system is embedded in social relations, there has to be an elaborate social organization to take care of such aspects of economic life as the division of labor, disposal of land, organization of work, inheritance, and so on. Kinship relations tend to be complicated because they have to provide the groundwork of a social organization that substitutes for a separate economic organization.…

“We have an institutionally separate economic system in our society, and an important integrating concept in our economy is that of an aggregate of interchangeable economic units. Hence the quantitative aspect of economic life. If we possess ten dollars, we do not as a rule think of them as ten individual dollars with separate names but as units that can be substituted one for another. Without such a quantitative concept, the notion at an economy is hardly meaningful.”

[Karl Polanyi. The Livelihood of Man. Harry W. Pearson, editor. New York: Academic Press imprint of Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Publishers. 1977. Pages 52-53.]

“According to [Karl] Polanyi, the supercession of liberal capitalism by some form of fascism could already be foreseen before 1914. The monopolistic and corporatist developments which eventually led to the emergence of national socialism were inherent in the deficiencies of market capitalism. He predicted that the ‘next period of the capitalist age’ will produce an ordered, regulated capitalism. Its strength will be found in the impersonalization of human relations and the concentration of capital, as the enrichment of individual life and the ‘culture of consciousness’ are replaced by a dehumanizing materialism.” [Kari Polanyi-Levitt and Marguerite Mendell, “Karl Polanyi: His Life and Times.” Studies in Political Economy. Volume 22, spring 1987. Pages 7-39.]

“The improvements in economic methodology that are suggested in this paper may be summarized under the heading of relational economics. An important aspect of this methodology is an emphasis on inter-organisational relations. Industrial organisation is perhaps the field of mainstream economics that traditionally focuses most clearly on these relations. It will be argued below that this field is currently undergoing a process of ‘natural’ expansion of its scope – an expansion which will enable it to take centre stage in the emerging methodology of relational economics.” [Eran Binenbaum, “Towards a Relational Economics: Methodological Comments on Intellectual Property Strategy, Industrial Organisation, and Economics.” Working paper number 2005-04. University of Adelaide. Adelaide, Australia. June, 2004. Pages 1-30.]

“The purpose of this book is to provide an outline of a political economy of the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]. It is my intention to grapple with that system’s real—as opposed to imagined, imposed, or believed—contradictions. The advent of glasnost′ [Russian Cyrillic, гла́сность, glásnostʹ, ‘openness’] has shifted the study of the USSR away from a process of detection. There are more facts and statistics available, and truer histories as well. What remains urgently needed is a theoretical analysis that is neither apologetic nor ideologically opposed. The regime is still producing its own apologetics, even if they are of a more sophisticated kind, while much of the Western literature can only analyze the USSR in terms of orthodox economics, ideologically committed, as it is, to the market.

“The task of this book is, therefore, to take part in the discovery of the nature of the laws governing the USSR. In this endeavor it tries to describe the changing social relations in the country. At this point the reader may object that there are numerous such books available, both inside and outside the USSR. While the objection is valid, the fact is that Soviet writings have hitherto been of the purest apologetics, based neither on fact nor on theory. On the other hand, much of the work of the same kind in the West has been vitiated by a parallel attempt to impose a preexisting idea or concept on reality. While there are interesting insights to be found in much of this work, it is less than useful for purposes of understanding.”

[Hillel Ticktin. Origins of the Crisis in the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2015. Page 6.]

“… we must return to use that which has been sacrificed by economics – the environment. Such an operation requires the invention of a ‘new use,’ as we cannot continue to exploit the environment as a dead resource that is included in our production but excluded from our community. Even the very concept of ‘the environment’ encompasses this tension. The reduction of ‘nature’ to the ‘environment’ signals that the former has no intrinsic value but is only a resource ready to be exploited by capitalism …. Post-growth appears to be a possible opportunity to return both the economy and nature to a new use. Such use should render inoperative the sacred powers that are currently being transposed into discussions about ecology and economy.” [Christian Garmann Johnsen, Mette Nelund, Lena Olaison, and Bent Meier Sørensen, “Organizing for the post-growth economy.” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization. Volume 17, number 1, February 2017. Pages 1-21.]

“The existing configuration of social forces under consideration must be understood in terms of the material and ideological determinants of historical change that effectuated them. The most recent epochal shift from which transnational class formation emerged was driven by the restructuring and stabilization of capitalist fractions in the wake of the crisis of the Keynesian-Fordist model, which had guided global economic policy in the post-war capitalist world …. Unable to maintain capitalist growth in the winding down of the post-war boom, the crisis of accumulation opened the door for structural transformation ….” [Shawn Nichols, “Transnational Capital and the Transformation of the State: Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).” Critical Sociology. OnlineFirst edition. November, 2016. Pages 1-21.]

“To tackle our immediate and long-term economic challenges, we must reject austerity economics and embrace a reality-based economic agenda. The plan we propose here embodies that approach, an approach we call ‘prosperity economics.’ Prosperity economics recognizes that we must make investments in productivity to build our economy, that individually and collectively we need basic securities to move confidently into the future, and that a strong democracy undergirds a strong economy.

“We turn first to the intellectual underpinnings of prosperity economics and its three pillars: growth, security, and democracy. We then turn to describing the key policies that will be needed to strengthen these pillars and put us on a path toward greater global competitiveness and shared prosperity.…

“Our history as well as a growing body of economic theory and research point to a very different model for economic success than that pushed by austerity economics. Our alternative, ‘prosperity economics,’ is a set of established findings based on recent currents of scholarship and real-world experience. Prosperity economics has a distinctive goal: shared prosperity. It also has a distinctive prescription: policies and institutions that broadly distribute opportunities for economic success, create the preconditions for productivity among all workers, and provide the broadest possible space for people to shape their own economic lives through voice in the workplace and through democratic politics. Shared prosperity, in other words, is a means as well as an end. As we all share in the production of prosperity, we all share in its rewards.

“The central idea of prosperity economics is this: Our prosperity is generated by everyone. It does not just drip down from current economic winners, but flows from all of us who work hard to gain skills and climb the economic ladder. It is generated by the common investments and sources of security we agree on as members of a democracy, by the stock of technology and knowledge fostered by these investments—a socially generated stock of productive capacity that is far and away the greatest source of our wealth—and by democratic political institutions that ensure that today’s economic winners do not lock in their position and thereby undermine the openness and dynamism of the economy overall.”

[Jacob S. Hacker and Nate Loewentheil. Prosperity Economics: Building an Economy for All. Privately published. Creative Commons. 2012. Pages 14-15.]

“For progressives, reclaiming the high political ground by addressing the bread-and-butter concerns of the middle class is the key to not just broadly shared prosperity but also long-term political success. As the last two years suggest, however, picking the ball back up won’t be easy. Progressives will have to grapple with the decline of the organizations, UUe [United Union Employees] labor unions and broad-based civic associations, that informed Americans about what was at stake in political debates and helped them shape what government did. They will have to break the Democrats’ unholy alliance with Wall Street. Above all, they will need to put forth a clear alternative to the anti-government mantra of tax cuts, deregulation, and programmatic cutbacks—one that is far more compelling than the grab bag of deficit reduction and modest new initiatives that defined the Democratic economic message for so much of the 1990s and 2000s.” [Jacob S. Hacker, “Reclaiming Middle-Class America.” The American Prospect. Volume 22, number 2, March 2011. Pages A3-A5.]

“I’ll make the case that community-based economics constitutes an alternative to both capitalism and socialism; that it is very much in keeping with the Greens’ [Green Party’s] valuation of diversity and decentralization; and that it has the potential to resonate with the public/electorate—and therefore should be highlighted in our organizing work and electoral campaigns. In terms of developing economic policy, Greens should understand that communitarian social relations are more important than economic property relations.…

“If Greens advocate regionalization of economic activity and hold out a vision of diverse and decentralized communities, it would be contradictory for us to advocate uniformity in regard to property relations or a single economic system as ‘best‘ for all communities. Economic diversity would mean that in some regions the preponderance of the means of production might be publicly owned and controlled. In other regions only the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy might be socialized. Some communities might opt to hold most things in common, going far beyond socialization of just the means of production. Others may disavow public enterprise, preferring an economic model based on locally-owned private businesses. In other cases there may be a tradition of co-ops (which are private). Most likely, varying mixtures of public and private enterprise would be the rule.…

“The communitarian perspective of the Greens can encompass market relations here and economic planning there. It can encompass the profit motive and the desire to ‘start one’s own business,’ or municipal socialism with workers’ control. What it cannot encompass is unlimited accumulation of capital. Community-based economics implies that economic activity be local and humanly-scaled. The building of far-flung economic empires (epitomized by modern transnational corporations) and the concentration of wealth and power are anathema to this vision.”

[Steve Welzer, “Community-Based Economics.” Synthesis/Regeneration. Number 21, winter 2000. Online publication. No pagination.]

“When I talk about community-based economics as an alternative to capitalism and socialism, I am defining the latter two as modern large-scale economic systems. So, by this definition, primal communities that owned all things in common had not ‘instituted socialism,’ and merchants selling exotic spices during the time of the Roman Empire were not capitalists in the modern sense (they were engaging in private enterprise within the context of an economic system based on slave labor).” [Steve Welzer, “Community-Based Economics: Answers to Respondents.” Synthesis/Regeneration. Number 23, fall 2000. Online publication. No pagination.]

“The concept of economic surplus, in its most basic form, consists of the difference between what a society produces and that quantity of production needed to reproduce the society in the next period. The economic surplus so defined is not contextually specific, and is therefore applicable to all societies and production forms. The production of an economic surplus hence requires production beyond the subsistence level of output for a society. Within the context of monopoly capitalism, the economic surplus is more specifically defined as what is left of the potential output once essential consumption—that is, the consumption necessary for social and material reproduction—has been met.” [Mary V. Wrenn, “Surplus Absorption and Waste in Neoliberal Monopoly Capitalism.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 68, issue 3, July–August 2016. Pages 63-76.]

“The working class’s general condition thus can be described in terms of precariousness, where the constant threat of being thrown into the “surplus population” of the unemployed and underemployed only intensifies over the course of capital accumulation. For Engels, this was an integral part of the theory of an ‘unemployed reserve army of labor’ that constituted the whole basis for bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat.” [R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Working-Class Precariousness: Its Relevance Today.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 67, number 11, April 2016. Pages 1-19.]

“The surplus at issue is the result of growth in the productivity of social labor exceeding that of the price paid for labor power. Let us assume, for example, that the rate of growth in the productivity of social labor is about 4.5 percent per year, sufficient to double the net product over a period of about fifteen years, corresponding to an assumed average lifetime for capital equipment. Department I consists of investment goods which equal invested profits and Department II consists of wage goods which equal wages. To simplify the argument we will assume that for both Departments the organic compositions and the rates of growth of labor productivity are fixed. To permit changes in those parameters would force us to use algebraic notation for the model, which might easily be done but could make it harder for non-mathematicians to understand. Taking those complications into account would change nothing in the conclusions illustrated by the model, provided only that real wages increase less than the net product.” [Samir Amin, “The Surplus in Monopoly Capitalism and the Imperialist Rent.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 64, issue 3, July–August 2012. Pages 78-85.]

“It is generally understood that a crucial key to economic development rests on the reinvestment of the available economic surplus. Profits from agricultural, mining, and industry provide the means for economic growth. There is no guarantee that this surplus will be used for useful investments. The profit makers may use the surplus to build grandiose palaces, hire hordes of servants, or engage in war. The surplus may thus be wasted, harming the people. And if the surplus is diverted or if it is wasted, a poor country will remain poor. A major reason for the poverty of the poor countries, for the ever widening gap in wealth between poor and rich countries, is that surplus produced in the poor countries is being diverted to the rich countries.” [Editors, “A Prizefighter for Capitalism: Paul Krugman vs. the Quebec Protesters.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 53, issue 2, June 2001. Pages 1-5.]

“The capital invested in … [certain] sectors is used for the creation of credit and thus is not used for the creation of (surplus) value. Credit is the alter ego of debt and a debt can be neither value nor the representation of value (money). [Karl] Marx was scornful of the idea that credit (and thus debt) can be value, wealth. Consequently, Marx called fictitious that capital that creates debt rather than value. As such, it does not produce value and surplus value. Yet, it must be rewarded with profits, otherwise capitalists would not move from the productive to the unproductive (fictitious) sectors. These profits are then fictitious, not because they are the result of, say, accounting tricks but because they are profits originating from debt creation. Yet, when they are cashed in for money, they become money profits and participate in the redistribution of the value created in the productive sectors.” [Guglielmo Carchedi, “From the Crisis of Surplus Value to the Crisis of the Euro.” World Review of Political Economy. Volume 3, number 3, fall 2012. Pages 288-312.]

“Because of the heavy pressure of population in labour surplus economics like India and its rapid increase, the demand for food increases at a fast rote. The existing levels of food consumption in these countries are very low and with a little increase in per capital income, the demand for food rises steeply.” [Naiyer Azam and Md. Sarfraz Ul Haque, “Agriculture Play Crucial Role in the Life of Indian Economy.” International Journal of scientific research and management. Volume 3, issue 3, 2015. Pages 2239-2245.]

“… [One] reason for the slow growth of trade unions has been the attitude of the Government, in these countries, which too conscious of the need to keep production going regardless of the human and social costs involved, has discouraged, and in many cases, prohibited the expression of industrial conflict rather than trying to resolve it. Some Governments have not realized that conflicts cannot be resolved by their suppression; they can only be resolved through a process of mutual give and take, which is only possible through strong trade union institutions, particularly in labour surplus economics where, otherwise, the individual worker is in a weak bargaining position in relation to the employer.” [Syed M. Nasir. Labour Problems in the Industrialization of Developing Countries. M.A. thesis. Lakehead University. Thunder Bay, Ontario. March, 1972. Pages 15-16.]

“… there is a pronounced tendency to deduce Marxían propositions about socio-economic systems from the ratíonal behaviour of decisionmakers. It is this feature which makes analytical Marxists also rational choice Marxists. And it allows them to be seen as a reaction to [Louis] Althusser’s structuralism, which dominated the Marxian intelligentsia in the 1960s …, and to Sraffian political economy, which at the same time sought to convert Marxism into a surplus economics founded on structuralist principles …. Nevertheless, rational choice Marxists have made no systematic attempt to engage either form of thought directly, nor have they given any indication that they think it worthwhile to do so. In fact rational choice Marxists rarely discuss the work of Marxists other than [Karl] Marx, and they give the impression that they do not hold most work in Marxism after Marx in very high esteem.” [M. C. Howard and J. E. King. A History of Marxian Economics: Volume 11, 1929-1990. Hampshire, England: Macmillan Education Ltd. 1992. Page 336.]

“The ‘contradiction in the law of value’ could be considered, following [Karl] Marx, in terms of ‘invariance postulates’: by providing an analysis of how specific value magnitudes were equal to certain price-profit magnitudes so that the rate of profit itself could be represented as the ratio of surplus value to capital value. It could also be conceptualised, again in conformity with Marx, as a problem of deriving endogenous price-profit variables from exogenously given value data. And this is the superior way of stating the problem. Once solved in this form, the solution to the problem in the first specification is a relatively trivial matter. Moreover, it highlights the question of in what sense values can legitimately be classified as exogenous, and the related issue concerning the ‘logical priority of values.’ [J.] Lehr alone approached the task in this way; the others kept to the confines of the first procedure. However, it was Lehr’s work which received the least exposure, so that his methodology, as well as his own specific conclusions, did not immediately command the influence it deserved.” [M. C. Howard and J. E. King. A History of Marxian Economics: Volume I, 1883-1929. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1989. Page 37.]

“When we join Homo Economicus with the three main additional elements of love, groups, and trade networks, we arrive at a picture of humanity constantly in the grips of the forces of greed and love, with group formation as the main instrument of those forces. Greed leads individuals to abandon their previous informal ties with family and clans for more anonymous ties with supermarkets, clients, and employers. Greed leads individuals with common material interests to set up new collectives in order to prevent other greedy individuals or groups from dominating them. The collectives then start to lead a life of their own, loved by the weaker ones within them and by those with a strong wish to have a cause. Love is also what underpins friendships and teams, which are crucial components in anything humans do. Greed leads individuals to set up hierarchical groups that serve their private interests. Love continuously erodes the power of any individual leader, in that it supports the genesis of the many small reciprocal groups that develop individual agendas within any large hierarchy.” [Paul Frijters with Gigi Foster. An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. 2013. Page 344.]

“In this book Paul Frijters and Gigi Foster take a risk opening the Pandora’s box of neoclassical economics. They open the lid a little bit, just to stick in a hook and bring out what they call ‘love.’ The book is an attempt to describe the changes to the economics landscape when love is in the air. The views get a bit glaring and dizzy for the untrained eye of the neoclassical economist, and sometimes hard to understand without the help of some friends from biology, psychology, sociology or political science. However, once the economist changes his hat for the one they wear out in the street, the landscape becomes a lot more familiar. All of a sudden academic puzzles like tax compliance or voting behaviour can be trivially explained.” [Pablo Guillen Alvarez, “An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks.” Review article. Economic Record. Volume 89, issue 287, December 2013. Pages 584-585.]

“This chapter presents what neither [Karl] Marx nor [Friedrich] Engels ever provided: a systematic, nondeterministic class analysis of communist societies. To be clear, Marx, Engels, and others within and without the Marxian tradition did produce diverse conceptualizations of communism, and they still do.…

“… In simplest terms, one part of the population does such necessary and surplus labor and receives back the fruits of the necessary labor for their own reproduction. These laborers deliver the fruits of their surplus labor—the ‘surplus’—to another part of the population that then distributes it to still another part. A class analysis in this sense classifies individuals in a society in terms of their relationship to this surplus.…

“This concept of class defined in surplus labor terms is very different from the other concepts that have prevailed in discussions of socialism and communism to date.…

“… our analysis, which is focused on class in terms of surplus labor, is distinguished by not asserting that class is what determined the rise and fall of the USSR. Ours is not a determinist class analysis intended to confront alternative analyses arguing that what determined Soviet history was politics, bureaucracy, technical productivity, or any other essentialized cause. Instead, we produce a class analysis of communism and the USSR to draw attention to aspects that other analyses overlooked and to relationships that they missed.…

“… the meaning of class and class analysis depends on the accumulating linkages drawn between class and the infinity of nonclass aspects of social life. Whenever a new linkage is drawn between class and some previously untheorized nonclass aspect of a society, new light is shed on our understanding of class; it is further concretized. However, as a result, old formulations are changed, old conclusions questioned, and new questions posed.”

[Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff. Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2002. Ebooks.com edition.]

“The basic analytical tool adopted by [Stephen A.] Resnick and [Richard D.] Wolff is their conception of the social organization of surplus, i. e. the production, appropriation and distribution of surplus. Accordingly, the workers produce more than the goods corresponding to their necessary labor. The rest is the surplus, which is received by the same group or is appropriated by a distinct social group. The receiver or appropriator of the surplus then decides on its distribution inside and outside the group. This type of class analysis concentrates on the social groups producing, appropriating, distributing and receiving the surplus. It concentrates also on the interdependence of those groups; on the possibility of simultaneous existence of multiple social organizations of the surplus; on the interaction of class and non-class processes (property, markets, planning, power, politics, culture etc). The authors argue that the absence of those class elements from communist theory and practice after Marx led the labor movements which came to power to travel the wrong path in relation to the transition process from capitalism to communism.” [Michalis Hatziprokopious, “Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR.” South-Eastern Europe Journal of Economics. Issue 01, 2003. Pages 131-143.]

“Economists must engage with environmental issues such as the biodiversity crisis and heterodox economics provides a more fruitful set of tools than the orthodox approach for doing so. Biodiversity refers to the variability of living organisms at the genetic, species and ecosystem levels and the ecological complexes or interdependencies between species …. Through our economic activity, humans have reduced biodiversity to the point where it can be classified as being at crisis-point. For example, there have been 100 well documented extinctions of birds, mammals and amphibians over the last 100 years; and the extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times the extinction rate experienced without human influence …. In Australia, a biodiversity hotspot, 27 of approximately 350 native mammals have become extinct since European settlement …. Across all taxonomic groups there has been a decline in population sizes and/or ranges for the majority of species … and 10-50% of mammals, birds, amphibians, conifers and cycads are threatened with extinction …. Genetic, species and ecosystem diversity has declined substantially at a global level and species interdependencies have been compromised.” [Neil Perry and David Primrose, “Heterodox Economics and the Biodiversity Crisis.” Journal of Australian Political Economy. Issue 75, winter 2015. Pages 133-152.]

“Heterodox authors can no longer afford to be disunited by useless polemics, reproducing out-of-date divisions. Nevertheless, it is neither by preaching new ‘syntheses,’ nor by submitting themselves to the neoclassical mainstream, that they will manage to mobilize forces for the rebuilding of a genuine critical alternative. Today more than ever, the question remains: How can we move beyond the failures of the past to construct an authentic development project in a post-capitalist alternative—one that is social, or better yet, socialist? This is the question that has animated the heterodoxies in development economics from the beginning.” [Rémy Herrera, “The Neoliberal ‘Rebirth’ of Development Economics.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 58, issue 1, May 2006. Pages 38-50.]

“… our broad strategy has been to show common knowledge to be a sufficient antidote for scepticism, while freedom to be a necessary antidote for dogmatism. We are justified in relying upon our commonsense beliefs in the objectivity of science, yet the history of the progress of science has been a history of the discovery of errors in our beliefs, requiring us to place as much importance upon the ubiquity of error as upon the possibility of knowledge. In turn this shows there to be perfectly objective grounds for valuing freedom, namely, that it is necessary for the progress of our knowledge and understanding and rationality itself, in all the manifold diversity that these concepts may be understood. We are also justified in relying upon our commonsense beliefs that some things are objectively right and others objectively wrong, without having to deduce how we know what is right or wrong in a particular case from some or other allegedly unquestionable, ultimate, moral prime or principle. What may be right or optimal in one case or context or circumstance simply may not be so in another. Furthermore, what we believe to be right in a given context, just as what we might believe to be true, is itself open to question and discussion. Again it is the active exercise of freedom which should be the antidote to dogmatism. The degree of authority resting in a claim of expertise in a given context depends squarely on the weight of reasons in its support and the degree of rational criticism it would be possible for it to successfully withstand. Where freedom is suppressed, whether deliberately or accidentally, whether in a grand or a petty tyranny, and claims to expertise are prevented from being examined for errors with a fine-tooth comb, there would be no genuine authority to be acknowledged.” [Subroto Roy. Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2005. Pages 107-108.]

“What the Gandhian Economy aims at is to furnish all people with their full requirements of food, clothing, shelters educations medical care, sanitations hygiene, etc. These are our primary needs and it is not beyond our capacity to meet them if we will only concentrate our efforts in this direction. Over and above these, if we asplre for luxuries and indulgences, man’s life combines wasted in the effort to acquire such things. Therefore, if any planning is to he done for our country, it should be with definite reference to and emphasis on our subsistences such as food grains, vegetables, fruits, growing of cotton, and obtaining building materials for simple dwellings.” [J. C. Kumarappa. The Gandhian Economy and Other Essays. Wardha, India: The All-India Village Industries Association. 1949. Page 4.]

“If we desire to usher in a world set and organized for peace and good will, there is no other way than to control our greed and curb our avarice. To achieve this on a nation-wide scale, it is imperative that the profit motive be sterilized from large-scale production by reserving all centralized industries to the ownership and control of the state. Handicrafts and cottage industries are non-violent in a large measure, and can be left with impunity in the hands of private individuals even with the incentive to profit, as such an economy has its own limitations and does not lend itself to exploitation generally. Maybe life in such a society cannot be based on a multiplicity of wants, but there are other considerations much more vital than material possessions.” [J. C. Kumarappa, “Handicrafts and Cottage Industries.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Volume 233, May 1944. Pages 106-112.]

“You cannot build non-violence on a factory civilization, but it can be built on self-contained villages. Rural economy as I have conceived it, eschews exploitation altogether, and exploitation is the essence of violence. You have, therefore, to be rural-minded before you can be non-violent, and to be rural-minded you have to have faith in the spinning wheel.…

“Now I have no historical proof, but I believe that there was a time in India when village economics were organized on the basis of such non-violent occupations, not on the basis of the rights of man but on the duties of man. Those who engaged themselves in such occupations did earn their living, but their labour contributed to the good of the community. A carpenter, for instance, ministered to the needs of the village farmer. He got no cash payment but was paid in kind by the villagers. There could be injustice even in this system, but it would be reduced to a minimum.”

[M. K. Gandhi. Panchayat Raj. R. K. Prabhu, compiler. Ahmedabad, India: Jitendra T Desai. 1959. Page 14.]

“The Indian candidate for patron saint of the emerging philosophy of social ecology is, in my view, one of Mahatma Gandhi’s closest associates, J. C. Kumarappa. A prophet with as little honor in his in his country as [Lewis] Mumford in his [i.e., the U.S.], it was Kumarappa who, at the Mahatma’s behest, developed an ideological justification for the ‘village-centered economic order.’ The moving spirit behind the All India Village Industries Association and the All India Spinners Association, Kumarappa spent four decades studying the village economy of India, with a view to rehabilitating it on sound social and what we would now call ecological principles.

“Strewn through Kumarappa’s writings are observations with profound environmental consequences. This remark, for instance, clearly an elaboration of [Mahatma] Gandhi’s concept of swadeshi [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, स्वदेशी, svadeśī, ‘self-sufficiency’], can well serve as a basic condition for ecological responsibility: ‘If we produce everything we want from within a limited area, we are in a position to supervise the methods of production; while if we draw our requirements from the ends of the earth it becomes impossible for us to guarantee the conditions of production in such places.’”

[Ramachandra Guha, “Toward a Cross-Cultural Environmental Ethic.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. Volume 15, number 4, fall 1990. Pages 431-447.]

“To explicate, postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist perspectives can all be counted as part of economic heterodoxy today. But traditional Marxist theory is as ‘modernist’ as the neo-classical school, subscribing with the same vigor to Enlightenment values. Here I would like to make some preliminary comments about a non-modern challenge to economics. The nonmodern challenge must be careful to steer clear of the violent (anti-modern) tendencies shown by religious fundamentalisms resurgent today (the self-styled Islamic fundamentalists with their proclaimed hatred of modernity, for example), on the one hand, and the paralyzing moral and epistemic relativism of postmodernism, on the other hand. It is here that we may draw inspiration from two prominent early-twentieth century Indian thinkers, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his long-time collaborator, Joseph Cornelius Kumarappa.” [Amit Basole, “The Economics of Ahimsa: Gandhi, Kumarappa, and the Non-Modern Challenge to Economics.” Privately published paper. January, 2005. Pages 1-19.]

“Economic development, for [Mahatma] Gandhi, is not merely an increase in per capita income, but a structural transformation in the economy consistent with the principles of locality (swadeshi [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, स्वदेशी, svadeśī, ‘indigeneity’]), social justice (sarvodaya Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, सर्वोदय, sarvodaya, ‘community development’]), and small-scale industry (gramudyog [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, ग्रामोद्योग, grāmodyoga, ‘village industry’]). This can only result from civilizational change; a rejection of the urban industrial civilization and its substitution by a village-centered economy and society based on the principles of satya [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, सत्य, satya] (Truth) and ahimsa [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, अहिंसा, ahiṃsā] (non-violence). In Gandhi’s writings and work we find a unique effort to utilize mass politics in order to effect such a civilizational change through the construction of a lokavidya-based economy [Sanskrit/Saṃskṛtam, लोक विद्या, loka vidyā, ‘common knowledge’].” [Amit Basole, “Whose Knowledge Counts? Reinterpreting: Gandhi for the Information Age.” International Journal of Hindu Studies. Volume 18, number 3, December 2014. Pages 371-414.]

“The lokavidya perspective envisions that the craft traditions that have been reduced to niche presence have the capacity to fulfill the daily needs of ordinary people. [Mahatma] Gandhi’s handicrafts program is of the latter variety. But such a political program will not gain credibility unless lokavidya itself is not seen as a primitive relic but as a dynamic knowledge tradition that serves people’s needs.” [Amit Basole. Knowledge, Gender, and Production Relations in India’s Informal Economy. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Massachusetts. Amherst, Massachusetts. February, 2012. Page 173.]

“For the most part, assertions about time-diagnostic characterisations of the current state of capitalism, the causes and processes of specific crisis dynamics inherent to this current form of capitalism, and the asymmetrical forms of international networks or formative transnational power relations remain weak or chaotic. In order to overcome these existing deficiencies, this paper will argue from an analytical perspective that situates itself in regulation theory and allows itself to be characterised as an extended neo-Gramscian IPE [international political economy] approach.…

“… Neo-Gramscian IPE understands hegemony as a consensually supported modus of transnational development that goes beyond the relationship between states …. A second characteristic of neo-Gramscian IPE is a particular understanding of the state. Accordingly, the state represents a specific institutionalised arena of social (class) struggles …, whose mode of operation is dependent on societal power relations and socioeconomic, cultural, and ideological structures of reproduction.…

“Third, the sustainability of international and transnational hegemony structures is not just the product of the interaction between state and civil society, but should also be understood as a product of the given conditions of socioeconomic (re)production.… Fourth, the emergence of national or transnational ‘historical blocs’ is contingent to the extent that it depends on the ability of social and political actors to universalise their interests in the form of generally accepted ideas, norms, rules, and institutions.…

“Finally, the fifth characteristic is that neo-Gramscian IPE, in order to disassociate itself from ‘problem-solving theories’, likes to explicitly refer to itself as ‘critical theory’ ….”

[Hans-Jürgen Bieling, “Comparative analysis of capitalism from a regulationist perspective extended by neo-Gramscian IPE.” Capital & Class. Volume 38, number 1, February 2014. Pages 31-43.]

“… the neo-Gramscian school, perhaps the most self-conscious attempt to transcend state-centrism, portrays the rise and fall of GMSs [global monetary standards] in terms of successive hegemonic orders that seem disappointingly familiar, given the lengthy expositions on method, ontology and episteme ….” [Matt Hampton, “Hegemony, class struggle and the radical historiography of global monetary standards.” Capital & Class. Volume 30, number 2, summer 2006. Pages 131-164.]

“The paper is primarily concerned with the practice of producing inferior quality goods by reducing the quantity of inputs used in the production process, or mixing inputs with cheaper constituents. The proposed term for this practice, ‘industrial seigniorage,’ is based on the historical privilege of feudal lords (from Old French seigneur), who—possessing the right to mint gold coins—made a profit by adding cheaper base metals to the bullion. The present, essentially exploratory investigation attempts to delineate the widespread existence of such practices in various industrial sectors. It strives to explain the fundamental elements of consumer behavior that enable this practice to exist and discusses the effects of industrial seigniorage on several social issues. The attempt of the paper is finally to show that contrary to the ideology of capitalism, competition does not necessary lead to benefits for consumers or to an increase in product quality.…

“… Based on the historical practice of feudal lords who derived a profit from adding base metals to the minting of gold coins, the term proposed for this practice is ‘industrial seigniorage.’ ‘Industrial debasement’ could also be used, as debasement refers to the practice of lowering the value of a currency, such as gold and silver coins, for financial gain (to a sovereign) at the expense of citizens, whereas seigniorage is, historically (in times when coinage was the prerogative of sovereigns and feudal lords), the profit derived from the addition of base metals to gold and silver, resulting in debased coinage.”

[Jordan Melmiès, “Industrial Seigniorage: The Other Face of Competition.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 49, number 2, June 2017. Pages 286-302.]

“The continued fall-out from the global crisis of the post-2007 period has led to a return of the concept of capitalism to public debate, triggering an ongoing discussion of the causes of the crisis, their connection with the underlying, ‘deeper’ dynamics of this mode of production, and the varied responses to the turmoil. From a critical political economy viewpoint, the need to acknowledge the general and systemic nature of the crisis, whilst also remaining aware of the considerable range of ways in which it has been and is playing out across different parts of the world, is absolutely central if one is to articulate a persuasive analysis and critique of capitalism in all of its forms.” [Ian Bruff and Matthias Ebenau, “Critical political economy and the critique of comparative capitalisms scholarship on capitalist diversity.” Capital & Class. Volume 38, number 1, February 2014. Pages 3-15.]

“New slavery is also defined as ‘work for no pay and under the threat of violence’ …. This definition excludes bad forms of servitude and people pushed into bad labour conditions by poverty. However, the element of being paid or not is probably less important than the elements of being forced to work against one’s will and under threat of violence, often with restrictions on freedom of movement through either physical ties or by withholding of passport or identity papers. In its contemporary form, slavery violates many other rights over and above the right not to be enslaved, such as the rights to freedom, property and fair remuneration for labour. The violence and the mental degradation that come with most forms of slavery are violations of the internationally protected right to be free from torture and inhumane and degrading treatment. Contemporary forms of slavery include bonded labour, trafficking, the worst forms of child labour, forced marriage and the abuse of domestic migrant workers. These now involve many times the number of people the transatlantic slave trade ever involved.” [Christien van den Anker, “Contemporary Slavery, Global Justice and Globalization.” The Political Economy of New Slavery. Christien van den Anker, editor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. 2004. Pages 15-36.]

“The Political Economy of New Slavery is … a timely book, and a useful addition to existing literature, bringing together views from both academics and activists on what it calls new forms of contemporary slavery. While recognising that the term ‘contemporary slavery’ may conjure up sensationalist imagery through its association with older, transatlantic forms, the book begins by arguing that there are parallels between the older and newer forms of slavery.” [Dina Abbott, “The Political Economy of New Slavery.” Capital & Class. Volume 28, number 3, winter 2004. Pages 220-222.]

“Indigenous economics is concerned with the basic fabric of existent economic life, with such economic activities as the production of export or other cash crops, subsistence farming, cattle raising, fishing (for cash or subsistence), internal trading in foodstuffs, transportation, economically motivated migration (to cities, industries, and farms), indigenous credit-granting systems, and so forth. Far from being identified with either premonetary or subsistence economics, our subject is more concerned with ‘cash activities,’ not because of their greater importance, for here there is much variation, but for the practical reason that the cash sector is easier to study. Nor are we particularly interested in the old-fashioned evolutionary ideas which would identify ‘progress’ with a shift from subsistence to cash agriculture, for we know that most West African farmers produce both for subsistence (‘own consumption’) and for cash, and that an increase in the one type of activity may actually enhance a growth in the other; it is the structure of the relationship between the two types of activity which is interesting and important.” [Polly Hill, “A Plea for Indigenous Economics: The West African Example.” Economic Development and Cultural Change. Volume 15, number 1, October 1966. Pages 10-20.]

“In terms of applying the neotraditionalist ideology framework to the United States, there is an extensive literature on the role of indigenous governments in contemporary indigenous economics and development in the United States and Canada …. However, there is little that is critical of the actually-existing processes and practices of indigenous governments and political economies. Instead, most portray indigenous governments as either benevolent or at least neutral when it comes to matters of organizational structure, public and social policy, and policy outcomes. The actions of indigenous governments are often presented as merely the manifestation of the collective will or the genuine self-determination of a given indigenous community. In fact, the ideology behind United States Federal Indian Law and Policy since at least the 1970s is commonly referred to in academic and policy circles as the ‘self-determination period’ ….” [Samuel W. Rose, “Two thematic manifestations of neotribal capitalism in the United States.” Anthropological Theory. Volume 15, number 2, June 2015. Pages 218-238.]

“Studying ‘the art of living,’ Confucian economics assumes that the nature equips people with the will to live and provides them also with adequate, even inexhaustible resources. All they need to survive is to work hard enough. Since work is a moral choice, Confucians consider ‘work ethics’ the primary factor in creating national wealth. Within Confucian type of ethics, people are expected to work not for themselves but rather for the sake of others. This assumption puts Confucian economics in the category called moral economics. The reason why work is done collectively is that the basic ‘work unit’ in any society is family, with work done either for family’s own sake or for the market. Family is said to be the unquestionable axis of economic life, since family is where the strongest impulse to work is located within. This leading impulse is a compassion for others, or more specifically the familial love. With this emphasis on family, Confucian ‘moral economics’ can also be categorized as a type of family economics.” [Kazimierz Z. Poznanski, “Confucian Economics: The World at Work.” World Review of Political Economy. Volume 6, number 2, summer 2015. Pages 208-251.]

“The paradox of the new traditional Confucian economy in the two Koreas is that while both of them are officially anti-Confucian, they are both deeply influenced by Confucian ideas, practices, and institutions. New traditional economies seek to be technologically advanced high-income societies while having important elements of their economies embedded in a broader sociocultural context, usually that of a religion …. However, in most such economies this search involves a political movement actively seeking to bring about or increase this embedding, with examples such as Iran and Islamic economics being prominent. Within East Asian nations, most that are somewhat new traditional Confucian in their orientation, such as Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore, have leaderships that are sympathetic to their Confucian heritage, if not necessarily actively pushing it …. This contrasts with both of the Koreas, where there is official opposition to Confucianism as a doctrine to influence society in both nations, even though it has long been argued that Korea is the most Confucian of all countries.” [Rosser, J. Barkley, Jr., and Marina V. Rosser, “The Paradox of New Traditional Confucian Economics in the Two Koreas.” Comparative Economic Studies. Volume 58, issue 1, March 2016. Pages 119-138.]

“‘Right Livelihood’ is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist economics.…

“… No one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth modern economics.

“Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from ‘metaphysics’ or ‘values’ as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.”

[E. F. Schumacher. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper Perennial imprint of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 2010. Ebook edition.]

“The most famous proponent of Buddhist economics is EF Schumacher, whose work dates from the 1970s. The paper’s first contribution is to revise and update the work of Schumacher and others on Buddhist economics. There are two reasons for why a revision is necessary. First, the allegedly changing spirit of capitalism implies a constant need to revise alternative, critical perspectives, such as Buddhist economics. I argue that Schumacher’s critique was directed against heavy capitalism (characterized by big businesses, stable structures) rather than today’s light capitalism (individualism, flexibility). Second, I argue that the critical nature of Schumacher’s Buddhist economics offered in the 1970s has not been sustained. Rather than being translated as a critical philosophy, it will be argued that Buddhism has been, in the translation of Buddhism from one cultural context to another, received in the West as a method for coping and for harmony. Preparing for the main contribution, I advance the view that Buddhism must have a critical potential to become a real future for capitalism.” [Thomas Taro Lennerfors, “A Buddhist future for capitalism? Revising Buddhist economics for the era of light capitalism.” Futures. Volume 68, April 2015. Pages 67-75.]

“The term Buddhist economics was first introduced in Chapter IV of [E. F.] Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful in 1973 as mentioned before. Since then, the concept has been elaborated on by many well-known scholars all over the world.…

“Buddhist economics results from the melding of two words, ‘Buddhist’ and ‘economics.’ ‘Economics’ is a subject developed in the West. It is generally defined as the subject explaining ‘economic activities (production, distribution, and consumption) with the aim for individuals to achieve maximum utility under the condition of resource constraint and for the society to reach maximum welfare under the same condition’ ….”

[Apichai Puntasen, “Buddhist Economics as a New Paradigm Towards Happinesss.” Society and Economy. Volume 29, number 2, August 2007. Pages 181-200.]

“… both Mainstream and Buddhist economics share the idea that the insatiable desire is human’s nature. However, Buddhist economics states that this desire can be managed and transformed to satiable desire by training the mind to create wisdom. Therefore, Buddhism promotes self-management as well as develops one’s abilities. This is a very positive orientation toward human nature as a mastery of one’s own destiny.

“For this reason, Buddhist economics focusses on how to obtain the maximum well being with minimum consumption. Economic activity including consumption must be controlled by an appreciation of moderation and the objective of well-being.”

[Gullinee Mutakalin, “Buddhist economics: a model for managing consumer society.” Journal of Management Development. Volume 33, number 8/9, 2014. Pages 824-832.]

“Today’s economies operate at considerable costs to the Earth and social communities. Climate change, ecosystems degradation, biodiversity loss on the one hand, massive unhappiness and other welfare-diseases, social disintegrations other hand are the most important symptoms of our unsustainable economic practices. It is not a surprise that there is a growing interest in Buddhist economics worldwide as Buddhist economics promotes simple lifestyle and non-economic and social life.” [Laszlo Zsolnai, “Preface: Why Buddhist Economics?” Society and Economy. Volume 29, number 2, August 2007. Pages 139-143.]

“Buddhist economics does not aim to build an economic system of its own. Rather, it represents a strategy, which can be applied in any economic setting at any time. It helps to create livelihood solutions that reduce the suffering of all sentient beings through the practices of want negation, non-violence, caring and generosity.…

“Today’s dominating business models are based on and cultivates narrow self-centeredness. Buddhist economics points out that emphasising individuality and promoting the greatest fulfilment of the desires of the individual conjointly lead to destruction.”

[Laszlo Zsolnai, “Western Economics Versus Buddhist Economics.” Society and Economy. Volume 29, number 2, August 2007. Pagse 145-153.]

“The paper begins with a review of key dimensions of the Buddhist world view that describes the roots of environmental problems and the potential pathways to move towards sustainability. The main section outlines some of the primary characteristics and changes required for an economy derived from Buddhist world views (hereafter noted as BISEs or ‘Buddhist-inspired sustainable economies’). This includes changes involving citizens both as consumers and in their livelihood or producer roles …. Finally, the conclusion overviews the main points and briefly discusses the viability and prospects for utilising and applying Buddhist wisdom in the quest for sustainability.” [Peter Daniels, “Buddhism and the Transformation to Sustainable Economies.” Society and Economy. Volume 29, number 2, August 2007. Pages 155-180.]

“Buddhist economics rejects the simplistic ‘positivist’ assumption that welfare or happiness has a direct positive and linear relation with individual material accumulation. It emphasizes the need for a far more intensive analysis of the true nature of ultimate ends and desirable means and calls for a fundamental re-examination of the nature, and product, of human livelihood activity.” [Peter L. Daniels, “Buddhist economics and the environment: Material flow analysis and the moderation of society’s metabolism.” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 30, number 1/2, 2003. Pages 8-33.]

“This article is part of a much larger work in progress that seeks to formulate a new Interbeing Economic Model. Against the now recognised urgency of unfolding social justice issues related to climate change, I provide a Buddhist deconstructive critique of neo-classical economics which is demonstrated to be the underlying cause of our current problems. A more just and equitable form of distributive justice and economics, based on the concept of interbeing as developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, is posited as an alternative. Interbeing principles also allow us to move beyond the critical theorists’ limited definition of autonomy. A comparative articulation of interbeing autonomy shows that individual consumer driven autonomy is not true autonomy, as it problematically disembodies us from the world. The New Interbeing Economic Model (or, what I differently refer to as systems integrity building economy) is introduced as a possible alternative in order to restore our rights as responsible citizens to be able to interbe in a healthy way. Through this new economic model, I argue, we can move beyond the ill-defined concept of mere sustainability, and toward a healthier regenerative model that promises truly lasting social and ecological justice.…

“… an empirically grounded ecological economics … may follow along the lines of what I will propose in my interbeing economic model ….”

[Glenn Manga, “Interbeing Autonomy and Economy: Toward Enduring Social and Ecological Justice.” Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge. Volume 6, number 3, summer 2008. Pages 113-127.]

“Life and the world are inter-dependent. All living beings consume things that originate in nature. In this way, economy of life is the wholesome inter-relationship of beings, living and non-living, in the world. A ‘wholesome’ inter-relationship is one that is normal, harmless to oneself and to others, and dynamic, and that adjusts to remain in the middle way.…

“The modern economic model following neoliberalism hates regulation. Corporatists and economists advocate for free trade, deregulation, trade liberalization, or other jargons of similar character. At the personal level, the modern economic model also hates self-discipline. It wants people to surrender to greed, which is the engine that keeps the modern economy running. It is unfortunate that the destiny of the running is destruction. Therefore the move toward economy of life needs both spiritual practices and regulation.…

“Resolution 2 [of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu]: Everyone must engage in inter-religious understanding and cooperation

“The second Resolution of Buddhadasa [Bhikkhu] can be expanded to reflect the current global situation. Not only are there different religious groups that we could work with to achieve economy of life, there are people with no religious attachment, and differences in ethnicity, sexual orientation, political ideologies, specific interests, and so on. We could find the way to work with them. Often we find that although we are working toward the better world, we cannot work together. We might share the vision, but we do not share the means. At best we do not cooperate, and at worst we fight each other over the means.”

[Lapapan Supamanta, “Economy of Life: A Buddhist View.” The Ecumenical Review. Volume 67, number 2, July 2015. Pages 192-202.]

“Nowadays, worldly people can study many different approaches to economic, social, and technological development. The universities teach just about everything. Then, regarding spiritual matters, here in Thailand alone we have so many teachers, so many interpretations of the Buddha’s teachings, and so many meditation centers that nobody knows which teaching to accept or which practice to follow.” [Buddhadasa Bhikkh. Keys to Natural Truth. Santikaro Bhikkhu, translator. Bangkok, Thailand: Mental Health Publishing. Undated. No pagination.]

“Imagine that everything is going right for you: you have good health, economic security, a good family, good friends, and good surroundings. Then, this life of yours is cool ….” [Buddhadasa Bhikkh. Buddhadasa’s Anapanasati: Mindfulness with Breathing. Santikaro Bhikkhu, translator. Bangkok, Thailand: The Dhamma Study & Practice Group. 1989. No pagination.]

“The propriety of discussing Hindu economic philosophy, especially if treated as originating from the Vedic times some four thousand years ago, may be questioned. Can we meaningfully speak of economic in a situation where the extent of commercialization itself was very limited and the role of free markets was not significant, let alone the emergence of capitalism? There may not be much role for economics in such a situation, if we recall that economics (or political economy) as a discipline emerged only during about the last 250 years, coinciding with the rise of capitalism. But we are not discussing economics as such in this chapter, but only economic philosophy, in the sense of view point or attitude to things economic worldly, material, or mundane things valued as wealth, and their production, acquisition, and distribution things that are valued in this life. Philosophy suggests more than a mere viewpoint, or like and dislike, and covers theorization, and taking up a reasoned stand on the issues covered. In this sense, it is certainly possible to discuss Hindu economic philosophy and analyze what it was.” [M. V. Nadkarni, “Hindu Economic Philosophy.” The Handbook of Hindu Economics and Business. Hrishikesh D. Vinod, editor. Tenafly, New Jersey: Hrishikesh D. Vinod. 2013. Kindle edition.]

“Real-world application of a Hindu economic theory remains in a nascent state. The practical application of its principles on a personal, national or global level, is not clear, but the goal is. As captured by the great spiritual teacher Sri Aurobindo: ‘The aim of economics would be not to create a huge engine of production, whether of the competitive or the cooperative kind, but to give to men and women – not only some men and women but to all, each in his highest possible measure – the joy of work according to their own nature and free leisure to grow inwardly, as well as a simple; rich and beautiful life for all.’” [Meenal Pandya, “Ethical Economics: How we might cure today’s economic woes with a dose of traditional Hindu wisdom.” Hinduism Today. March 31st, 1998. Pages 36+.]

“The findings clearly show that the amazing sustainability of Bharat’s (i.e. India’s) socio-economic processes, structures and systems, despite the tortures of history visiting her, can be explained by her abiding fidelity to the eternal as the basis of the temporal. This is the very foundation of the sacro-secular character of Hindu culture.…

“Most authorities in oriental studies tend to agree that Hinduism represents the longest surviving civilization and culture, though it may not be the earliest …. This implies that the economic function must have played an integral part in the total scheme of life. Deeper examination reveals that the Hinduworldviewwith respect to the economic function has been practical yet sublime, logical yet noble.”

[S. K. Chakraborty and D. Chakraborty, “The economic function in the Hindu worldview: its perennial social relevance.” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 34, number 10, 2007. Pages 714-734.]

“… it is obvious that the ancient Hindu principles were not particularly against external trade. On the other hand, they were biased towards competitive spirit and free markets, though regulated by the kings. They were also apprehensive of trade protections, cartels and collusions. India was rarely a cocoon. In fact the unwarranted openness was a cause for the loss of India’s independence for some centuries.… The markets and merchants might have been viewed as a necessary evil, but they were not suppressed, only regulated. Formulation of appropriate regulation procedures is a big problem even today.” [N. S. S. Narayana, “Ancient Hindu Principles of Social and Economic Management: Are they against Globalisation?” Journal of Social and Economic Development. Volume 13, number 2, January–June 2011. Pages 1-44.]

“… [The] handbook is a unique and groundbreaking attempt at developing an understanding about the economic and business thinking and practices observed among the adherents of the Hindu religion. Although as the title suggests the handbook focuses mainly on the Hindu religion, this religion has influenced other religions that are native to India such as Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Buddhism in turn has had substantial influence over other Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and Viet Nam, among others. The insights in the handbook therefore have much wider scope than that suggested by its title. The editor of the handbook, Dr. Hrishikesh Vinod, is to be lauded for undertaking and completing this monumental endeavor. He organized a conference at Fordham University to get together recognized scholars with different views and backgrounds on the topic of the handbook. Thanks to his foresight, the collection of essays complied in the handbook have turned out to be rich in diversity, depth, and insights.” [Vijay Gondhalekar, “Handbook of Hindu Economics and Business.” Indian Journal of Economics and Business. Volume 13, number 2, 2014. Pages 311-316.]

“Islam … recognizes the dual nature of human beings. Human beings are selfish as well as altruistic. It does not, however, encourage human selfishness. Instead, it seeks to control human selfishness. It channelizes the selfishness of people to common good and prevents men from hurting others. It energizes their altruistic motives and arouses them to help one another. Consequently, the Islamic economic order visualizes a third sector, besides the private and public sectors, known as the voluntary sector. It recognizes that every individual, besides serving his selfish interests, should play a positive role in promoting common good by helping other human beings. Thus, it propagates that everyone can and should make a contribution to creating a better society.” [Muhammad Akram Khan. An Introduction to Islamic Economics. Islamabad, Pakistan: The International Institute of Islamic Thought. 1994. Page 5.]

“Owners of property are not absolutely free to do what they like: their rights are limited by the good of the community of which they are members, and if they are incapable of respecting such a right, their control should be removed. However, their interest must be protected, their basic needs met and their emotional welfare soothed by good words. This, of course, can only happen to the few among the owners of property.” [Muhammad Ata Al Sid, “Some Fiqh Concepts Related to Economics.” Lessons on Islamic Economics. Volume 1. Monzer Kahf, editor. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: Islamic Research and Training Institute. 1998. Pages 61-76.]

“It is interesting to note that evolution of Islamic economics experienced a course of development similar to the one seen by the main discipline of conventional economics. The history of mainstream economics is generally traced back to Greek philosophical discourses, Roman jurists and administrators, and early Christian fathers. Then there was the so-called ‘great gap’ for about five centuries. During the twelfth century Scholastic Economics emerged which dominated the scene for about four centuries.” [Abdul Azim Islahi, “‘The Genesis of Islamic Economics’ Revisited.” Islamic Economic Studies. Volume 23, number 2, November 2015. Pages 1-28.]

“Greater emphasis has … been laid so far on explaining what the ideal Islamic economic system is, how it differs from socialism and capitalism, and why it could better succeed in helping realize the humanitarian goals. Most of the discussion is of a normative nature – how all economic agents (individuals and households, firms, altruistic organizations, markets and governments) are expected to behave in the light of Islamic teachings. This has been accompanied by some sporadic historical data to show that the system has actually been in existence at different times in Muslim history and that this has produced positive results. This was natural, and in fact necessary. Economics is so closely related to the worldview and the economic system of a society that without clarity about the worldview and the economic system of Islam, Islamic economics may have perhaps groped in the dark for the direction in which to proceed.” [Mohammad Umar Chapra. What is Islamic Economics? Second edition. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: Islamic Research and Training Institute. 2001. Page 46.]

“… when contemporary contributions in Islamic economics are reviewed differences in concepts, assumptions, and methods of analysis among writers will be observed. Though differences in approaches and views are expected among scholars in any field, there should exist among those who belong to the same school, a consensus on the fundamental issues of the philosophy, methodology and the essence of the theoretical structure of their discipline. These basic issues, however, appear to be yet unresolved, while a consensus on them is really needed for a proper and scientific development. Needless to say that disagreement regarding the nature of the new paradigm and its methodology, if remains, would breed controversies and contradictions among Islamic economists, thus hampering the growth and progress of their science. In this paper an attempt is made to discuss and clarify these fundamental issues.” [Abdel-Rahman Yousri Ahmed, “Methodological Approach to Islamic Economics: Its Philosophy, Theoretical Construction and Applicability.” Theoretical Foundations of Islamic Economics: Book of Readings No. 3. Habib Ahmed, editor. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: Islamic Development Bank. 2002. Pages 20-60.]

“In the absence of an organized institution that would coordinate the work on Islamic economics literature, several factors served as instigators to the development of the work on the subject. Five main factors could be said to have helped boost the development of Islamic economic literature at that stage: (a) the personal motivation of the writers themselves who were driven by their own religious zeal to promote Islamic economics, or the Islamic approach to economics, as a means of promoting the religious cause, (b) sponsoring academic and non-academic institutions and organisations that had the pro-motion of Islam within their set of missions, (c) religious societies, (d) Muslim students associations, and (e) dedicated publishing houses.” [Ahmed El-Ashker and Rodney Wilson. Islamic Economics: A Short History. Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2006. Page 350.]

“It was perhaps the wealth generated by oil that provided the real impetus for the revival of Islamic jurisprudence on the subject of finance and commercial law. In the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when newly independent Muslim states were attempting to come to terms with their cultural and religious identities, a handful of Muslim thinkers began speculating on the theoretical foundations of an Islamic economic system, often as an afterthought to their musings about an ideal Islamic state. The state banks of a few Muslim countries held conferences to discuss the subject, a few scholars published papers in journals and, in general, the interest in the subject was academic.” [Sh. Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo, “Introduction to understanding riba.” Interest in Islamic Economics: Understanding riba. Abdulkader Thomas, editor. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2006. Pages 1-9.]

“Islam is an art of living, not a science. What do we do if the science of economics is to be studied so that it can be helpful in the Islamic art of living? Obviously it requires taking salient features of that art into account. We do it at two levels. In theory and analysis these features tell us what is relevant. In policy these features tell us what is important to achieve and what means are available. Man as observed behaving and man as he ought to behave in accordance with Islamic teachings, both need be kept in focus. The science of economics helps in the first task, knowledge of Islam helps in the second. But the two are not in separate watertight compartments when it comes to Muslim behavior. In this case what is observed already has some impact of that knowledge. The impact would differ from time to time, place to place, even from person to person. But a mental exercise, that is, our imagination, can help us guess the likely impact, broadly stated so as to accommodate these differences.” [Dr. Muhammad Nejatullah Siddiqi. Teaching Islamic Economics. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: Scientific Publishing Centre, King Abdulaziz University. 2005. Page 3.]

“The central principle of Islamic economics is prohibition of usury …. Usury is commonly understood as excessive profit on lending out money, and its prohibition is not unique to Islam. In ancient times it used to be a common practice with the inability to pay one’s own debt resulting in slavery. That, however, gradually became socially unacceptable and regulations on interest rates were introduced in most societies. Another reason probably was the effort to prevent exploitation by life-sustaining goods (animals and crops) upon which the Muslim barter-trading community was heavily dependent ….” [Ondřej Šrámek, “Islamic Economics: New Economic Paradigm, or Political Agenda?” New Perspectives on Political Economy. Volume 5, number 2, 2009. Pages 137-167.]

“This paper described the history of Islamic economics in terms of the dynamics between the aspiration and reality. It can be summarized that the history of Islamic economics, which originated in the middle of the twentieth century, is strongly tied to the practice of Islamic finance. In particular, the emergence of the commercial practice of Islamic finance in the 1970s gave strength to the arguments about Islamic economics, and resulted in a division of the discipline into two groups: the aspiration-oriented school and the reality-oriented school. All the issues involving Islamic economics have been argued using this fundamental framework.” [Nagaoka Shinsuke, “Critical Overview of the History of Islamic Economics: Formation, Transformation, and New Horizons.” Asian and African Area Studies. Volume 11, number 2, 2012. Pages 114-136.]

“In discussing the impact of Islamic economics on economic development, I take a rather narrow view of Islamic economics, and focus on the Islamic ban on interest. Such a narrow approach may be justified for three reasons. First, the general Islamic norms of altruism and honesty are common to most ethical systems, religious and non-religious. This is not to say that such norms are unimportant for the market economy. My point is simply that these general norms cannot be expected to influence economic development in a Muslim country in other ways than they affect economic development in a non-Muslim country.” [Kjetil Bjorvatn, “Islamic Economics and Economic Development.” Forum for Development Studies. Number 2, 1998. Pages 229-243.]

“Islamic economics stand primarily on faith and belief. In fact, a Muslim does his economic activities in light of what his religion recommends as guidelines and instructions. He follows the latter because he strongly believes that they help him to distinguish between Good and Bad; between what is allowed and what is forbidden.

“Justice, freedom, moderation, compassion and brotherhood are among the values that helps Islam establish itself in the daily life of Muslim society as well as mankind as a whole. To do that, Islamic economics offers a number of alternative instruments that can help attain those values.”

[Faiçal Boutayeba, Mohammed Benhamida, and Souad Guesmi, “Ethics in Islamic Economics.” Annales. Ethics in Economic Life. Volume 17, number 3, 2014. Pages 111-121.]

“Seen from … [a] Muslim perspective, the globalization of modem capitalism has not ushered in an end to economic history. In the Muslim world, capitalism’s ascent has intensified debates over that which advertisers and marketers in the West have also long made a target: the tastes and lifestyles of millions of citizen consumers, who use goods and services to explore who they are and how they should behave. In all this, one thing seems certain. It is that, for the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims, the culture-wars chapter in the capitalist revolution has just begun.” [Robert W. Hefner, “Islamic Economics and Global Capitalism.” Society. Volume 44, number 1, November/December 2006. Pages 16-22.]

“If … [a] Marxian view is held, it seems infeasible to eliminate the role of functionless financiers in the movement, while maintaining appropriate incentives to the ‘functional’ financiers. Or on other words, we cannot tame the spirit of financialization down without simply killing ‘the golden goose’ – the rentier; and at the same time, continuous financialization is engulfing the real economy. Perhaps, this dilemma can rationalize the partnership strategy upon the profit-loss sharing (PLS) between industrial capitalists and money capitalists (fund providers) widely observed in Islamic finance.…

“… two elements – interest and uncertainty – are the core principles of Islamic finance.”

[Mohammad Dulal Miah and Yasushi Suzuki, “Transcending the Trend of Financialization: The Heterodox vs. Islamic Economics View.” Journal of Economic and Social Thought. Volume 2, issue 4, December 2015. Creative Commons. Pages 226-241.]

“Islamic finance is, what its features and philosophy are and how it works. In particular, the product developers, those responsible for implementation and also the financial experts need to be familiar with the essential requirements of different Islamic modes of business, enabling them to provide financial services relating to retail, corporate and government sectors ensuring Sharī´ah [Arabic/ʿArabiyyaẗ, شَرِيعَة, Šarīʿaẗ, ‘path’] compliance and the best operating procedures. This book is an effort in this regard to make available a textbook-type resource to students, bankers, the business community and the general public. Hopefully it will be useful in providing a sound understanding about the principles of Islamic finance and how they work to form a viable system.”

[Muhammad Ayub. Understanding Islamic Finance. West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2007. Page 18.]

“The negative impacts of the prevailing global economic paradigm and its occasional failures have provided a sound basis for consideration of an alternative economic system.… [T]hough a host of institutions working on the basis of Takāful (the Islamic insurance) are operating in various parts of the world. However, the discipline is yet in the formative phase. There is need to make a comprehensive program while analyzing the diverse experiments having been conducted so far, in this regard. This paper is an endeavor to present and analyze the development of Takāful over time in different regions in the world.…

“Takāful benefits were available from the second year of participation and withdrawal from the scheme was possible only after the completion of two years of participation. The ratio for profit between the company and the participants was 10 and 90 percent respectively.”

[Atiquzzafar Khan, “Islamic Insurance: Evolution, Models and Issues.” Policy Perspectives. Volume 13, number 2, December 2016. Pages 29-62.]

“First, there is the way libertarianism attempts to reconcile us to the new hard times – to the harsher effects ofthe market’s unameliorated operation – by portraying them as somehow noble and unavoidably right. It is a tasteless and self-satisfied manoeuvre which is worse than simply philosophically unsustainable. Second, there is the way it holds market values – ‘efficiency’ and so forth – to be the ultimate moral benchmark in all walks of life, thus bumptiously inflating them and insinuating them into areas where they have no place (by demoting citizens and patients to the status of ‘customer’, for example). Third, there is the way it represents a return to the free market as a universal panacea. I despise this for the way it blocks out and stultifies real, problem-solving thought. Fourth, and libertarianism’s worst feature by far, there is its own, especially characteristic, resort to nostalgia. While caricaturing the post-war changes as, at the very least, a great mistake and as, at worst, no better than Stalinism, it attempts to persuade us that a return to a cold, cruel, class-ridden world resembling that of the 1920s and 1930s would, in reality, resemble the setting up of some cosy version of small town America. It is for this that I hate it most. Such a world has probably never even existed outside the imaginations of [Murray] Rothbard, [Robert] Nozick, Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney.” [Alan Haworth. Anti-libertarianism: Markets, philosophy and myth. London and New York: Routledge. 1994. Page 133.]

“For the Bolsheviks, support for cooperatives inside Russia was a pragmatic measure designed to kickstart the Soviet economy. Thus moving cooperation from a single part of a program for social transformation to a foundational element takes the essentially pragmatic Marxist arguments for cooperation out of context. The power of cooperatives as a transitional economic form, through which they demonstrate the collective labor practices of a post-capitalist society, is subordinate to the strategic problems of creating that society.

“A cooperative is a blanket term referring to an organization in which some aspect of production, distribution, or ownership is conducted collectively, either by business owners or workers inside the firm. The most democratically-run co-ops usually engage in profit-sharing among members, provide health and unemployment insurance, and limit wage differentials inside the firm. This article focuses on cooperation’s potential for creating a radically reformed or even post-capitalist economic order.”

[Greg Sharzer, “Cooperatives as Transitional Economics.” Review of Radical Political Economics. OnlineFirst edition. July, 2016. Pages 1-21.]

“… postneoliberal alternatives—for all their social, ecological, and indeed economic urgency—may be preemptively constrained, if not neutralized. It will continue to be imperative, therefore, to push for radical transformations in interlocal and international regulatory relations, the liminal zones inwhich residual neoliberalisms lurk, through every channel available, including the nation state. New spaces must be carved out not only for a global ethics of responsibility, but also for sustainable forms of sociospatial redistribution—anathema to neoliberalism—which can ultimately only be secured between places, through a reconstitution of sociospatial relations ….” [Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore, “Postneoliberalism and its Malcontents.” Antipode. Volume 41, number S1, 2009. Pages 94-116.]

“I attempt to unpack the “post” in the various postneoliberalism arguments and indicate that despite the desire to transcend neoliberal strictures, there is an irrefutable degree of continuity to neoliberalism that must be understood if we ever hope to abandon this acrimonious version of capitalism to the annals of the past. In the conclusion I offer some thoughts on the frightening nature of the current moment, where neoliberalism’s continuing salience no longer rests on its intellectual project, but on its crisis-driven approach to governance.” [Simon Springer, “Postneoliberalism?” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 47, number 1, March 2015, Pages 5-17.]

“By utilising the concept of overdetermination, postmodern Marxism has been able to resituate the terrain of these debates in a way that retains the efficacy and extends the scope of the Marxian critique of the capitalist social formation. Th is analysis reinterprets the relationship between value and price to overcome the alleged inconsistencies of the traditional interpretation and develops quantitative analysis of prices and values in which the equality of, on the one hand, total value and total exchange-value and, on the other, total surplus-value and total profit both hold simultaneously.

“This rethinking of the traditional framing of the debates thus provides fertile ground for understanding the effects of capitalist class processes on the exploitation of workers and the contradictions engendered by capitalist competition. It strongly rejects the claims of critics that Marxian class analysis is subject to inherent flaws. Indeed, postmodern Marxism provides a formidable intellectual defence of a core claim of Marxian theory: that capitalism can be seen as a systematic but also contradictory and open-ended means by which surplus-labour is produced, appropriated and distributed. Further than this, value theory provides a valuable means by which the overdetermined aspects of this exploitative class process can be brought to view in order to motivate the political project of class-based politics. How, then, does overdetermination contribute to a rethinking of value?”

[David Kristjanson-Gural, “Postmodern Contributions to Marxian Economics: Theoretical Innovations and their Implications for Class Politics.” Historical Materialism. Volume 16, number 2, 2008. Pages 85-115.]

“The U.S. economy needs both radical restructuring to increase publicly funded productive service employment, and revitalization to increase production of high value added, internationally competitive tradable goods that can be exported to pay for necessary imports. As many of these exports will, for the foreseeable future, be manufactured goods, a core high skilled, high value added manufacturing capability must be maintained and/or recreated. These policies must both reverse the alarming growth of inequality in income and wealth that underlies the increasing corruption of democratic politics in the United States, and the inability of the economy to sustainably increase overall prosperity.” [Ron Baiman, “Toward a New Political Economy for the U.S.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 42, number 3, September 2010. Pages 353-362.]

“An immanent critique begins with a description of what the social structure purports to be and proceeds by unveiling the true machinations of the system, revealing the conspicuously hidden contradictions therein …. One type of immanent critique of neoliberalism aims to uncover the contradictions embedded within the neoliberal social structure of accumulation, specifically with respect to the rhetoric and ideology which supports it juxtaposed against the actual mechanics of it. In so doing, immanent critique exposes veiled sources of repression even when the oppressed are not conscious of it …. A central line of inquiry is to examine why a given norm or cultural practice, perceived as counter to human flourishing, is widely accepted within a society …. In the case of neoliberalism, immanent critique must take into account the influence of the powerful on the general population’s interpretation of neoliberalism.” [Mary V. Wrenn, “Immanent Critique, Enabling Myths, and the Neoliberal Narrative.” Review of Radical Political Economics. Volume 48, number 3, September 2016. Pages 452-466.]

“Surveying the literature on the comparable worth or pay equity debate, one often encounters reference to the economic view. In reality however, three major paradigms exist in labor economics today; the prevailing neoclassical paradigm, the radical or Marxian view, and the institutional approach. While the three can be viewed as sharing common objectives (to describe, to predict, and to prescribe) they approach issues from different philosophical frameworks, employ different analytical tools, and lead to very different policy implications. Examining the pay equity issue from the perspectives of the three paradigms suggests different insights into the issue than that usually labelled the economic view.” [Stephen L. Mangum, “The Male-Female Comparable Worth Debate: Alternative Economic Perspectives on an Issue That Cuts Across the Social Sciences.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Volume 47, number 2, April, 1988. Pages 149-195.]

“Before examining what is autistic – or allegedly autistic – about neoclassical economics, I should note that the use of ‘autism’ as a metaphor might be regarded as inappropriate by many of those whose lives are touched by autism, or who are researchers of autism.…

“Post-autistic economics suggests … that economics should emphasise the way the world does work, and not how it might work in a private property/perfect competition/free market utopia. In this context, policymaking depends critically on knowledge gleaned from observation rather than from abstraction. Economic history should be a critical part of post-autistic economics teaching.

“Having expressed my sympathy for the goals of the Post-autistic economics network, I do have reservations about it. First, autism is still too much of a taboo subject to enable it to become an effective metaphor for a protest movement. Second, there is a danger to overreacting to the failings of mathematical economics. Abstract mathematical economics, in its place, has a lot to offer humankind, as indeed does pure mathematics.”

[Keith Rankin, “Autistic Economics.” Journal of Australian Political Economy. Number 50, December 2002. Pages 10-13.]

“The first issue of the Post-Autistic Economics Newsletter appeared in September 2000. It arose out of a conversation the previous month at the World Congress of Social Economics at Cambridge in the UK. Benjamin Balak, then a graduale srudent at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me that some distinguished American universities were eliminating, even as an elective, the history of economic thought from the curriculum, the, idea being that the total absence of competing ideas would facilitate students’ indoctrination into neoclassicalism. I was incredulous. It seemed too much to believe that the closing down of the horizons of economic enquiry could have gone so far. But a quick check with other conferees not only confirmed Balak’s account but also turned up economists faced with redundancy in consequence of this new narrowing of vision.” [Edward Fullbrook, “The Post-Autistic Economics Movement: A Brief History.” Journal of Australian Political Economy. Number 50, December 2002. Pages 14-23.]

“One aspect of simplification that is apparent at the level of public debate is the way that policy conclusions are frequently drawn from limited statistical evidence. While economists and econometricians are generally cautious about specifying policy implications arising from econometric analyses, at the level of broader debate and media coverage there are fewer reservations. This paper explores some of the limitations and potential opportunities for policy-relevant findings from econometrics. In particular, it considers what can and cannot be deduced as a result of an explanatory variable being found to be statistically significant. In addition, it indicates what aspects to address or questions to raise if econometricians and economists are to extend this work to the point where it may be directly applicable in policy debate.…

“This paper has shown that there is a large rhetorical component in the application of results from econometric models to real world issues.”

[Stuart Birks, “Rethinking economics: Logical gaps – empirical to the real world.” Real-World Economics Review (previously called, Post-Autistic Economics Review). Issue 62, December 2012. Pages 51-67.]

“In [Adam] Smith’s famous pin factory example there was an unresolved contradiction: The specialization which comes with the division of labor allows for remarkable increases in productivity. But up to a point at least, the bigger the pin factory the greater the possibilities of specialization and thus of increased efficiency—technically, increasing returns to scale. But since larger firms can achieve a larger scale than smaller firms, there will be a tendency toward monopoly—as [Karl] Marx had insisted. Smith’s more famous metaphor, the invisible hand, however, requires many competitors in which no firm can achieve market control: In this condition, returns to scale will be diminishing rather than increasing. Since growth occurs all the time, how then to resolve this paradox?” [Peter T. Manicas, “Endogenous growth theory: The most recent ‘revolution’ in economics?” Post-Autistic Economics Review (subsequently renamed, Real-World Economics Review). Issue 41, March 2007. Pages 39-53.]

“Obviously, it has become more difficult under these circumstances to collect profit in the conventional commercial way. The technically warranted potential abundance of information with its collective good and cumulative character reduces the commercial producers’ abilities to collect revenue in the ‘markets.’ The corporate efforts to change conditions in order to secure and increase profits, in turn, endanger a continued process of generation of new information, knowledge and cultural material …. Here we may have to face ‘the simple choice between profits and production’ ….

“Increased complexity reflects the overall socialization of production and innovation, in the face of a fragmented and de-regulated economy. The ‘need, then, is for new institutions …’ …. The ‘limitations of information as a commodity now have come to the fore, both in economic analysis and in policy matters’ and call for a’thoroughgoing innovation in organizational design’ to include ‘a very high level of collaboration’ ….

“This renders real-world economics a science of (the joint learning of) appropriate co-ordination rather than a science of isolated individual maximization, general equilibrium and ‘optimality’ ….”

[Wolfram Elsner, “Real-World Economics Today: The New Complexity, Co-ordination and Policy.” Review of Social Economy. Volume 63, number 1, 2005. Pages 19-53.]

“[Henry David] Thoreau’s central theme is that working conditions in a market democracy can easily undermine liberty and erode autonomy. His goal in Walden is to set out strategies by which people might enact their freedom when they face working conditions that are likely to threaten their autonomy and well-being. After a careful reading of Walden we may still be uncomfortable with many of Thoreau’s strategies – his idea of voluntary poverty will not appeal to everyone – but at least we will no longer underestimate Walden’s complexity and subtlety as a reflection about the preconditions for democratic enactment in market societies.” [Brian Walker, “Thoreau’s Alternative Economics: Work, Liberty, Democratic Cultivation.” American Political Science Review. Volume 92, number 4, December 1998. Pages 845-856.]

“[Henry David] Thoreau reminds us that ‘the object of clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this state of society, to cover nakedness.’ On that basis he suggested – and this is his central point here – that any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding to our wardrobes. ‘A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in.‘ Beware, then, he wrote, ‘of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather the new wearer of clothes.’

“Thoreau was of the view that, in terms of what is necessary to life, functional clothing can be obtained very cheaply – ‘at prices to suit customers really’ – or even made at home for a nominal cost. Furthermore, he thought that before we seek ‘finer clothing’ we should first make sure that our pursuits are ‘finer,’ or else we are just relying on the ‘false skin’ of clothing to obtain a false respect. Thoreau wondered how far people would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes. Should this happen, he implied, we would simply have to confer social status on the basis of worthiness, or the like, rather than on the basis of fine dress, which all too often merely represents an accidental and arbitrary possession of wealth.”

[Samuel Alexander. Just Enough is Plenty: Thoreau’s Alternative Economics. Melboure, Victoria, Australia: The Simplicity Collective. 2011. Creative Commons. Page 20.]

“In light of the anti-work outlook [Henry David] Thoreau offers readers, we can propose … [a] credo. Because the fallen world is already redeemed by grace, human beings in general do not have to work ceaselessly in order to overcome a scarcity inherent in nature. Instead, with the right ascetic practices, humans can realize the actual abundance of nature and thereby limit their alienated labor. In doing so, they are freed for other activities, including spiritual pursuits that have no economic productivity. The activity that one undertakes in the time that is thus liberated is properly understood as cooperation with the divine agency of the Holy Spirit operating within the individual. This activity—or inactivity—is a foretaste of eternity.” [Jonathan Malesic, “Henry David Thoreau’s Anti-Work Spirituality and a New Theological Ethic of Work.” Journal of Religious Ethics. Volume 45, number 2, June 2017. Pages 309-329.]

“I learned from my two years’ experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food, even in this latitude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of purslane … which I gathered in my cornfield, boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire, in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries; and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his life because he took to drinking water only.

“The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a well-stocked larder.”

[Henry D. Thoreau. Walden: or Life in the Woods. Boston, Massachusetts, and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 2010. Page 68.]

“There exists a correspondence between socio-economic identity defined by the distribution of these material conditions of social reproduction between social categories, on the one hand, and the psychosocial identity defining the atribution of more or less value to social categories, on the other.

“Socio-economic identity endows psycho-social identity with an energetic aspect defining to what extent social categories in a given historical period of a given society refuse to tolerate each other’s existence, representation in a given (familial, friendly, club, work etc.) setting, individual cases of belonging to both categories, etc.

“On the other hand, the psycho-social identity endows the socio-economic one with an informational aspect that defines what kind of social (economic, national, religious, cultural etc.) categories are included in and excluded from the disposition of material means of reproduction.…

“By taking into account the paradoxical structure of social identity we may advance toward a psycho-economic theory comprehending both psychosocial definition and socioeconomic reproduction of patterns of social identity.”

[Laszlo Garai. Reconsidering Identity Economics: Human Well-Being and Governance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan imprint of Springer Nature. 2017. Ebook edition.]

“In the wake of the global financial crisis, societies across the world are attempting to manage potentially destabilizing levels of youth unemployment and underemployment. New terms have entered the popular lexicon such as ‘generation jobless,’ ‘the new underclass,’ and ‘the precariat’ in order to describe a generation of young people struggling to acquire secure livelihoods in the most dismal labor market since the Great Depression. This article draws on analytical resources from critical sociology of education and heterodox political economy in order to critique orthodox economic diagnoses of generational precarity as a human capital problem. It argues that while neo-Keynesian accounts provide an important corrective to certain aspects of conventional (neoclassical/neoliberal) viewpoints, they ultimately fall short of the explanatory power of Marxian analysis, particularly concerning the primacy of class relations and the contradictory role of employment within an increasingly crisis-ridden global capitalism.…

“… the article draws on analytical resources from critical sociology of education and heterodox political economy in order to critique orthodox neoliberal and neo-Keynesian diagnoses and prescriptions for addressing generational precarity. Drawing examples mainly from the United States and Canada, it suggests that education conceived as human capital development for youth employment is largely an ideological construct that obscures and individualizes underlying structural tensions and contradictions. It argues that while neo-Keynesian accounts provide an important corrective to certain aspects of conventional (neoclassical/neoliberal) economic viewpoints, they ultimately fall short of the explanatory power of Marxian analysis, particularly concerning the primacy of class relations and the contradictory role of employment within an increasingly crisisridden global capitalism.”

[Alexander J. Means, “Generational Precarity, Education, and the Crisis of Capitalism: Conventional, Neo-Keynesian, and Marxian Perspectives.” Critical Sociology. Volume 43, number 3, May 2017. Pages 339-354.]

“The concept of the human economy is used in this paper to signify all work, production, actions and transactions needed to provide for the livelihood, welfare and survival of people and families, irrespective of whether they appear in statistics or are counted in monetary terms. It implies also a basic understanding of the necessity to manage the human household in a sustainable way, i.e., how it is in the vital interest of humanity to preserve living nature, the biosphere, in optimal shape for life, cultivation and healthy human habitation.…

“The triangle picture of the human economy … sees these three components [household, cultivation, and industrial production] each having its own right of existence and thus helps us to see the links and dynamism within and between the three. There are links between the macro and micro, monetary and nonmonetary, visible and invisible, living and nonliving, private and public in the reality of human subsistence. Some of these links are within the components, some are between them. And thus we see the need for a new theory of the totality of human actions for sustainable livelihood.”

[Hilkka Pietilä, “The triangle of the human economy: household – cultivation – industrial production—An attempt at making visible the human economy in toto.” Ecological Economics. Volume 20, issue 2, February 1997. Pages 113-127.]

“Academic research and popular writing on nonmonogamy and polyamory has so far paid insufficient attention to class divisions and questions of political economy. This is striking since research indicates the significance of class and race privilege within many polyamorous communities. This structure of privilege is mirrored in the exclusivist construction of these communities. The article aims to fill the gap created by the silence on class by suggesting a research agenda which is attentive to class and socioeconomic inequality. The paper addresses relevant research questions in the areas of intimacy and care, household formation, and spaces and institutions and advances an intersectional perspective which incorporates class as nondispensable core category. The author suggests that critical research in the field can stimulate critical self-reflexive practice on the level of community relations and activism. He further points to the critical relevance of Marxist and Postmarxist theories as important resources for the study of polyamory and calls for the study of the contradictions within poly culture from a materialist point of view.…

“Polyamory is often described by its practitioners as an ethical practice of nonmonogamy. In this paper, I have shown that existing research persistently highlights the exclusive nature of most poly communities in terms of race and class. I have sketched an agenda for future research around the three key areas of intimacy and care, household formation, and spaces and institutions because I believe that without a sustained commitment to socioeconomic equality it is impossible to do justice to the common self-representation of polyamory as an egalitarian practice. I consider it as problematic that research into polyamory has so far shared the disregard for class analysis with most critical work within sexualities studies ….”

[Christian Klesse, “Poly Economics—Capitalism, Class, and Polyamory.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. Volume 27, number 2, June 2014. Pages 203-220.]

“In this article we also adopt the technical definition of the social surplus, but instead of having it emerge as a residual from given total social product, the surplus emerges directly from the act of agency with the total social product emerging as a result. This alternative delineation of the social surplus draws upon aforementioned various heterodox traditions; hence we denote it as the heterodox social surplus approach.

“Economics and especially heterodox economics is about developing theoretical explanations of the social provisioning process. People have social lives; they have families, parents, children, and a history; and they need to be fed, housed, clothed, married and schooled. And, the needed and desired ‘surplus’ goods and services are produced to sustain their socially constructed, meaningful lifestyle. Thus the social provisioning process is a continuous, non-accidental series of production-based, production-derived economic activities through historical time that provide needy individuals and families the goods and services necessary to carry out their sequential reoccurring and changing social activities through time.”

[Frederic S. Lee and Tae-Hee Jo, “Social surplus approach and heterodox economics.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 45, issue 4, 2011. Pages 857-876.]

“The article concludes that monetary policy in Lebanon is feasible, effective, can be independent and should be used for economic stabilisation. The state of the financial markets, as of late, indicates that monetary policy was successful in stabilising prices, inflation and foreign exchange rates and in ending the convalescence period that came after the disastrous economic experience of the war years (1975 to 1990).…

“It is hoped that the success of this article in applying modern monetary theory and policy to a very small country will be of interest to economists working in the area and to policy makers in Lebanon and elsewhere.”

[Samih Antoine Azar, “The Three Tenets of Monetary Policy: Lebanon, 1991–2003.” Journal of Emerging Market Finance. Volume 5, number 1, 2006. Pages 95-120.]

“Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which embraces the principles of chartalism [defined as: ‘The money supply, however, is not fixed by the state, but determined endogenously through economic activity. The state puts money into circulation through fiscal policy and removes it through taxation. The rest is accumulated as bank reserves, which are drained through monetary management in support of monetary policy.’] and functional finance, makes the fundamental distinction between a sovereign and nonsovereign economy. The former issues a fiat (non-convertible) currency which floats on foreign exchange markets. In a sovereign economy, the consolidated government sector (Treasury and Central Bank), a currency issuer, can never become insolvent vis-a-vis its national currency denominated obligations …. This reflects the capacity of the central bank to act as lender of last resort.” [Martin Watts, Timothy Sharpe, and James Juniper, “Reformation or exodus: Assessing the future of the Euro.” The Economic and Labour Relations Review. Volume 25, number 3, 2014. Pages 465-483.]

“Modern monetary theory (MMT) is part of the post Keynesian tradition ….

“In this paper we argue that the incorporation of MMT principles enhances the post Keynesian framework, principally with respect to recognizing the distinction between an economy with a sovereign and nonsovereign currency, the role of the payments system, and the implications for the design of macroeconomic policy to achieve sustained full employment and price stability. In particular, by understanding the implications of full fiscal-monetary sovereignty, MMT strengthens post Keynesian arguments in favor of fiscal measures to deal with the influence of the GFC [Global Financial Crisis] on unemployment and effective demand. Also, after a careful assessment of alternative policy proposals, we argue that the ELR [employer of last resort] offers the best option for sustained full employment and price stability.”

[James Juniper, Timothy Sharpe, and Martin Watts, “Modern monetary theory: contributions and critics.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Volume 37, number 2, winter 2014–2015. Pages 281-307.]

“Contrary to the popular myth that the central bank controls the money supply, it does not. This variant criteria is fully explained in MMT [modern money/monetary theory] literature, along with the fact that banks do not make loans (create money) from deposits or reserves. Significant with regard to this variant criterion is how the goal of stability became inconsistent with the goal of the Fed to control the money supply ….” [F. Gregory Hayden, “Network Analysis for Modern Monetary Theory.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 47, number 2, June 2013. Pages 575-584.]

“The dominant paradigms in monetary economics today are the overlapping generations models … and cash-in-advance models …. Overlapping generations models basically ignore the medium of exchange role, concentrating on money’s store of value function. Cash-in-advance models simply impose the medium of exchange role by an ad hoc restriction that goods can be acquired only using money. These approaches are useful when we are interested only in getting money into the system so that we can proceed to analyze some substantive economic issues, but they have no hope of explaining endogenously either the nature of money or the development of monetary exchange.” [Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and Randall Wright, “On Money as a Medium of Exchange.” Journal of Political Economy. Volume 97, number 4, August 1989. Pages 927-954.]

“The modern path of monetary theory evolved rapidly at the end of the twentieth century. Alongside the traditional debate on the neutrality of money, the publication of the 1989 article of [Nobuhiro] Kiyotaki and [Randall] Wright [‘On Money as a Medium of Exchange’] marked a shift as it contributed to revive some old – but neglected – monetary issues.” [Andrés Álvarez and Vincent Bignon, “L. Walras and C. Menger: two ways on the path of modern monetary theory.” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. Volume 20, number 1, February 2013. Pages 89-124.]

“As is well-known, in the past two decades the exponents of modern monetary theory (MMT) have been at the forefront in advocating the Keynesian (or Kaleckian) logic of this proposition, filling a theoretical vacuum in post Keynesian thinking. This gap is indeed surprising, given the importance of the proposition. This has perhaps been taken for granted, but it should not be. The way MMT scholars have supported the proposition has however been controversial and has perhaps not helped its penetration in post Keynesian theories. In short, the question is that MMT consolidates the Treasury and Central Bank (CB) so that the latter automatically creates purchasing power in favor of the former’s decisions to spend.” [Sergio Cesaratto, “The state spends first: Logic, facts, fictions, open questions.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Volume 39, number 1, January 2016. Pages 44-71.]

“MMT [modern monetary theory] is in essence a restatement of well-understood accounting relations that show the potential to finance budget deficits by printing money. However, accounting relations are not enough to guide policy. There is also need for macroeconomic theory that explains the consequences of fiscal policy under alternative financing arrangements. However, there is nothing new about MMT and the theory it uses is simplistic and inadequate for the task.” [Thomas I. Palley, “Money, Fiscal Policy, and Interest Rates: A Critique of Modern Monetary Theory.” Review of Political Economy. Volume 27, number 1, January 2015. Pages 1-23.]

“There are many different versions of the [British] Alternative Economic Strategy (AES), some of which are so modest that they hardly deserve such a grandiose name. For example, the Cambridge Economic Policy Group calls for a traditional Keynesian package consisting of little else but reflation of the economy, import controls and an incomes policy. In what follows I shall use the name AES in a more restrictive sense to cover the fairly radical programmes put forward by the Labour Left and the Communist Party. These programmes differ in some respects, but their basic proposals are as follows:

[Bob Rowthorn, “The Politics of the Alternative Economic Strategy: The Alternative Economic Strategy is the Left’s great strength But it lacks vision and, above all, it must be seen as part of a political strategy.” Marxism Today. January, 1981. Pages 4-10.]

“The following models of alternative economy are discernable in the publications of ANGM [Anti-Neoliberal Globalization Movement] groups and their affiliate members:

[Mi Park, “Imagining a Just and Sustainable Society: A Critique of Alternative Economic Models in the Global Justice Movement.” Critical Sociology. Volume 39, number 1, January 2011. Pages 65-85.]

“This book proposes a ‘political economy of the senses’ as a synthesis of these two approaches, Marxist and radical democratic, whose urgency is indicated by the theoretical innovations in recent decades of movements like Occupy, the World Social Forum, the Zapatista movement, and the uprisings against neoliberal austerity throughout Europe. With the notion of a political economy of the senses, I propose a form of critique that joins an analysis of abstract dynamics of political economy and capital accumulation with an understanding of the experiential and aesthetic dimensions of neoliberal society. As such, a political economy of the senses takes seriously the relationship between economics and subject formation and seeks to understand political subject formation as affected not only by cognitive modes of the critique of neoliberalism but perhaps more fundamentally by forms of critique that touch on the affective, embodied, and sensate dimensions of political experience. Moreover, it understands political practices as themselves performative of theory and in this sense entails what I call the materialization of critique. I understand the materialization of critique as the shift from a form of theory that is merely cognitive to a form of theory that is understood as embodied in material objects, practices, and events themselves. My vehicle for constructing the political economy of the senses, as I will elaborate, is the concept of reification from the critical theory tradition.” [Anita Chari. A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique. New York: Columbia University Press. 2015. Page 17.]

“… [Anita] Chari’s answer to the problem of political economy’s positivism, on the one hand, and radical democracy’s utopianism, on the other, will be found in a ‘political economy of the senses’; or, put more briefly, in art. Inevitably one feels one has trodden this ground before. But the transition is contrived elegantly, via a detailed navigation through Adorno’s shifting treatment of the concept of reification …. Each of [Theodor] Adorno’s three major works in which reification is central falls down, for Chari, in a way that art does not.” [Timothy Bewes, “Take that, Frankfurtists.” Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left. Number 200, November–December 2016. Pages 54-57.]

“Here, we sketch how IKE [imperfect knowledge economics] formalizes imperfect understanding and reflexivity by opening mathematical models to the growth of knowledge, that is, to unanticipated changes in participants’ understanding of the process driving outcomes. IKE enables an economist to acknowledge his own imperfect understanding, as well as that of market participants.

“IKE explores the possibility that individual behavior and market outcomes exhibit context-dependent regularities that begin and cease to be relevant at moments that no one can fully foresee. IKE partly opens its models to Knightian uncertainty by formalizing such regularities with qualitative and contingent conditions.”

[Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg, “Fallibility in formal macroeconomics and finance theory.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 20, number 4, December 2013. Pages 386-396.]

“… imperfect knowledge economics (IKE) jettisons conventional models’ core premise and how doing so helps to overcome these models’ epistemological flaws. By opening economic models to change, that is, at least in part, indeterminate, and by recognizing imperfect knowledge on the part of economists, IKE explores the frontier of what empirically relevant mathematical macroeconomic and finance models can deliver.…

“Our critique of contemporary economic science suggests that addressing its models’ epistemological and empirical difficulties requires opening them to non-routine change and imperfect knowledge. A key aspect of such a research program involves according market participants’ forecasting behavior an autonomous role.”

[Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg, “Change and expectations in macroeconomic models: recognizing the limits to knowability.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 20, number 2, June 2013. Pages 118-138.]

“The paper discusses synthetically an epistemological question in the field of economics: how to translate a real problem into formal terms without a substantial loss of significance for its solution in policy making. The discussion will challenge the plausibility of the basic assumption of ultra-rational subjects who act independently of each other and will propose a research programme in Imperfect Knowledge Economics ….

“Two principles lie at the heart of Ike [Imperfect Knowledge Economics] thought, one that economics is a social science, mostly interpretative, which means economists can make only qualitative forecasts in certain fields, and the other that there are systemic risks to control as prices can fluctuate a lot and for a long time.”

[Giuseppe Garofalo, “Irreducible complexities: from Gödel and Turing to the paradigm of Imperfect Knowledge Economics.” Quality and Quantity. Volume 48, number 6, November 2014. Pages 3463-3474.]

“Colonialism has erected a very visible, impenetrable ceiling, no matter how ambitious or smart a black person might be. Higher positions were only for the British.…

“In the Kenya of the 1920s and 1930s, the separation in terms of social position and income was not nearly complete; it was complete. As there were no higher positions available for blacks, there were no lower positions available for whites. This is what in the economics of inequality is technically called ‘no overlap’ between the two distributions: Anyone who was white was better off than anyone who was black.”

[Branko Milanovic. The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality. New York: Basic Books imprint of the Perseus Books Group. 2010. Page 93.]

“… the effect of globalization on global inequality will depend on history, that is on whether populous countries happen to be poor or rich at a given point in time. To see this, assume for a moment that globalization has a positive impact on the growth rates of populous and poor countries, and has no effect on within-country income distributions. This will, in the current constellation of world incomes …, mean that India and China would be expected to catch up with the rich world, while their national distributions will not change, and global inequality will tend to decrease. There would be both mean-income convergence and reduction of global inequality. But let us decouple the poor and populous countries. Suppose that India and China are rich (and still populous) and let most poor countries be relatively small. Now, mean income convergence will continue, but the effect on global inequality will be ambiguous. China and India will benefit from the pro-big bias of globalization, but since they would be rich, globalization will be less beneficial to them than to poor countries. These two effects will pull in opposite directions, and global inequality may go down or up. Moreover, if populous countries are generally poor, the convergence effect is nil, globalization on average favours small countries and leads to the widening of national income distributions, then the overall effect must be to increase global inequality.” [Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality: What It Is And Why It Matters?” Working paper number 26. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. New York. Pages 1-17.]

“… what will happen to elasticity as the economy recovers. Is there likely to be a symmetrical movement that, accordion-like, after having first pushed people below the poverty line, then raises them above it? Whether this occurs depends on the shape of future growth. If income growth occurs first at the top and the middle levels of income distribution, then inequality will continue to rise and poverty will remain stable. This seems to have been the case in Poland, the only transition economy in which real GDP [gross domestic product] has grown for four consecutive years (1992–95). While GDP grew by 5 percent between 1992 and 1994 (and real personal incomes grew by 4 percent), the poverty rate in 1994 was still slightly higher than in 1992, as inequality seems to have risen. But when growth ‘trickles down,’ sharp declines in poverty could result, as relatively large segments of the population now hovering around the poverty line are pulled above it. Several elements suggest that such an optimistic scenario is likely. Most of the poor in transition economies do not represent a distinct ‘underclass’ as they do in Latin America …: their educational achievements are not much lower than those of the rest of the population; their access to social services; their ownership of consumer durables and apartments is also close to that of non-poor segments of the population. The declines in their incomes are recent and are not yet reflected in a marked deterioration of their asset ownership. If it takes a long time for income growth to ‘trickle down,’ however, these relatively favorable elements will be lost.” [Branko Milanovic. Income, Inequality, and Poverty during the Transition from Planned to Market Economy. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank. 1998. Page 73.]

“I offer now to the reader the duty—or the pleasure—of taking the first step on the road to the study of global inequality, and perhaps ultimately to global governance, and the world as one.” [Branko Milanovic. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press. 2016. Page 14.]

“Calculating global inequality is a relatively recent exercise that began to be undertaken only at the close of the twentieth century. Even the very concept of global inequality is new. Investigations of the topic have been stimulated by two related developments: globalization, which brought to our attention the problem of large differences in incomes between people living in different countries, and, for the first time in history, the availability of detailed household survey data for most of the world. Crucial events leading to the second development were the opening of China (with household surveys, after the hiatus during the Cultural Revolution, restarting in 1982); the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, which opened to researchers the data on income distribution that had previously been treated as a state secret; and, finally, the expansion of survey methodology and data gathering to cover many African countries (thanks largely to the World Bank).” [Branko Milanovic. Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press. 2016. Page 73.]

“World or global inequality treats, in principle, all individuals in the world the same. It is concerned with their individual incomes and ranks them from the poorest to the richest regardless of the country where they live. Such world inequality can still, of course, be disaggregated into that part of inequality that is due to the differences in mean countries’ incomes in the same way as overall inequality in a given country can be decomposed into a part of inequality due to differences in mean regional incomes.

“The source of data for world income distribution are household surveys (HS). Since household survey data for several important countries or regions of the world have become available only comparatively recently (e.g., China since the early 1980s, USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] in the second half of the 1980s, and many African countries in the 1990s), we cannot calculate world distribution that would cover at least 80 to 90 percent of world population for any date prior to mid-1980s.82 Recently there have been a number of attempts to calculate world inequality applying two different approximations.”

[Branko Milanovic. Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 2005. Page 101.]

“Assignment to country is fate, decided at birth, for approximately 97% of the people in the world: less than 3% of the world’s population lives in countries where they were not born. Moreover, as the differences between mean country incomes are large—more than two-thirds of global inequality between individuals is due to national income differences—to what nation one gets ‘allocated’ is indeed of significant import for one’s life chances. By being ‘alloallocated’ to a country, a person receives at least two ‘public’ goods—average income of the country and inequality of income distribution—that are unalterable by one’s own effort. They will be referred to as circumstances …. To be more precise and to account for the fact that citizenship at birth is not necessarily the same as citizenship over the rest of the person’s life and, moreover, that citizenship and residence may not coincide, we speak of ‘residence’ rather than of ‘citizenship.’” [Branko Milanovic, “Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live?” The Review of Economics and Statistics. Volume 97, number 2, May 2015. Pages 452-460.]

“Is there a link between globalisation and global inequality? This is a very contentious issue. There are, in principle, three channels whereby globalisation, for the moment and somewhat conveniently defined as ‘openness,’ affects global income distribution. First, openness affects countries’ growth rates. Most economists agree on the association of openness with enhanced growth, but not on whether openness is more ‘friendly’ to poor or rich countries. Obviously, if it were to the latter, global inequality would tend to go up. Second, openness affects national income distributions, although again not necessarily in the same direction in poor and rich countries. The simplest theory would predict that openness would reduce inequalities in poor countries (unskilled labour there would gain with openness) and increase inequalities in rich countries (for the opposite reason). This is not what we have observed, as inequality (as we have seen) has tended to go up in both types of countries. Third, openness might affect differently populous and small countries (at the same income level). Now, depending on how each of these channels ‘behaves’ the overall effect will vary. In the best of all possible worlds, globalisation would provide an extra ‘growth premium’ for poor countries’ growth rates, would be neutral (or pro-equality) with respect to national income distributions, and would help more populous than small countries. In that case, globalisation would necessarily lead to lower global inequality.” [Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Inequality: Branko Milanovic looks at changing patterns of global inequality, and different ways of measuring it.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Issue 37, winter 2007. Pages 58-65.]

“The studies of global, and a fortiori, global pre-industrial inequality are a relatively recent phenomenon and they are few in numbers. Obviously, the reason is the lack of household survey data that are needed to estimate global inequality, that is, income. The lack of household surveys and their variable quality are problems that plague even contemporary studies of global inequality. They are much more severe for the studies of past inequality. But even the very concept of global inequality – that is, of measuring and comparing incomes of (theoretically) all individuals in the world – is a new one, both because the idea of such a study had to wait for a more advanced stage of globalization to take hold, and because it crucially depends on the availability of purchasing power parity estimates that are needed to convert incomes expressed in national currencies into a single global numeraire.” [Branko Milanovic, “A short history of global inequality: The past two centuries.” Explorations in Economic History. Volume 48, number 4, December 2011. Pages 494-506.]

“Government spending is expected to be propoor, and the real interest rate, due to the typically high concentration of capital assets in the hands of the income-rich, is expected to be prorich. Control variables are added for regional effects as well because one of the strong results of the inequality literature is that there are regional patterns in income distribution …. Broadening the range of the control variables also addresses another potential source of endogeneity: having another omitted variable jointly determine inequality and the right-side variables. Increasing the number of controls on the right side tends to cover most of the bases for such an effect.” [Branko Milanovic, “Can We Discern the Effect of Globalization on Income Distribution? Evidence from Household Surveys.” The World Bank Economic Review. Volume 19, number 1, 2005. Pages 21-44.]

“In 2005, Milanovic’s Worlds Apart distinguished three different concepts of global inequality. The first compared the different countries of the world in terms of GDP [gross domestic product] per capita. This ‘UN’ measure of inequality remained basically stable from 1950 to 1980—if we discount a blip around 1960, when a number of African countries became independent and were thus included in the statistics for the first time—and then rose steeply from 1980 to 1995, thereafter levelling off on a high plateau. The second approach weighted the countries by population, giving due importance to China and India.…

“Milanovic’s latest book, Global Inequality, now offers a striking set of theses about the patterning and dynamics of inequality at a planetary level, with speculations on its future trends and political implications. Drawing on his analysis of international household-survey data from 1988 to 2011—the era of high globalization, the fall of the Soviet bloc, the rise of China and the financial crisis—Milanovic offers a remarkable illustration of how the world’s income has been redistributed across the planet ….”

[Göran Therborn, “Dynamics of Inequality.” New Left Review. Series II, number 103, January–February 2017. Pages 67-85.]

“One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end. Maybe not soon, but probably before too long; humanity has never before managed to craft an eternal social system, after all, and capitalism is a notably more precarious and volatile order than most of those that preceded it. The question, then, is what will come next. Rosa Luxemburg, reacting to the beginnings of World War I, cited a line from Engels: ‘Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.’ In that spirit I offer a thought experiment, an attempt to make sense of our possible futures. These are a few of the socialisms we may reach if a resurgent Left is successful, and the barbarisms we may be consigned to if we fail.

“Much of the literature on post-capitalist economies is preoccupied with the problem of managing labor in the absence of capitalist bosses.…

“There are … four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance versus scarcity and egalitarianism versus hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism.”

[Peter Frase, “Four Futures.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 5, winter 2012. Pages 26-34.]

“If economics is more monolithic than most social sciences, it is less so than it seems from the outside. Radicals should think of it as terrain, not the enemy itself. Many of its strategic points favor the enemy, but parts of it are open for contest. Occupying economics is about widening and shoring up the space in which radicals can survive, so as to develop analysis aimed at social movements. It is not about politicizing economics, because economics has always been politicized.” [Mike Beggs, “Occupy Economics.” Jacobin: Reason in Revolt. Issue 5, winter 2012. Pages 11-44.]

“When my coauthors and I began our first study of the families in bankruptcy back in the early 1980s, we accepted the conventional wisdom that we would encounter lower class Americamarginally employed or chronically unemployed people with little education and poor economic prospects. After all, who else would go bankrupt? To be sure, the incomes of the families filing for bankruptcy were low. In 1981, about a quarter of the families were below the poverty line, and half were sandwiched between poverty and median incomes. By 2001, those numbers had dropped even further, with about half below the poverty line and another 40% sandwiched between poverty and median income in the United States. When the households in bankruptcy are segregated by race, the most salient feature is their similarity. Income differences among different groups filing for bankruptcy are modest; at the time of filing, most of the families have quite low incomes.” [Elizabeth Warren, “The Economics of Race: When Making It to the Middle Is Not Enough.” Washington and Lee Law Review. Volume 61, number 4, fall 2004. Pages 1777-1799.]

“From the ratios of median money income it is clear that the highest post-World War II relative income period for Negroes was in the early 1950’s. While there was a low point in the ratio of Negro to white income in the late 1950’s, Negro proportionate income in the early 1960’s was lower than in the early 1950’s. This may suggest to some degree an over-all relative worsening of the Negro’s position over a twelve-year period. To be in a position to make any such inference when the Ameri-can commitment and philosophical thrust is toward an elimination of the statistical differences between Negro and white involvement and benefit levels in American life is more than sufficient evidence that in some seriously significant way our plan for progress has been thwarted. It is this crucial message which has been heard acutely not only in Watts [in Los Angeles, California] but also in twenty other major big-city trouble spots recently identified by federal officials. It is this same message which is heard in Bogalusa [in Louisiana] and Boston [in Massachusetts] and in nearly every community in America in which Negroes live.” [Nathan Wright, Jr., “The Economics of Race.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Volume 26, number 1, January 1967. Pages 1-12.]

“The high cost of discrimination—and I shall focus on the Negro as representative of all racial minorities in the American economy—is so plain and compelling that it may seem almost superfluous to examine it. Yet, the numbers that have been developed to document this cost deserve our attention, if only for their cumulative shock effect as a backdrop for an analysis of economic causes and cures.…

“The thirty-year lag in black income distribution is another index of how far the Negro has been left behind.”

[Walter W. Heller, “Economics of the Race Problem.” Social Research. Volume 37, number 4, winter 1970. Pages 495-510.]

“… our findings have implications about the need for and efficacy of policy interventions designed to achieve equal treatment for groups subjected to discriminatory treatment and stigmatization. Racial stigma and its attendant presumption of inferiority—biogenetic or otherwise—has consequences for the historical trajectory of black–white disparities in social and economic outcomes. In this context, traditional public policy interventions based on ensuring equal treatment of blacks can have limited efficacy, as historically based racial stigma constrains whites to view blacks as being less than equal. The eugenics movement clearly viewed blacks and whites as biologically and genetically unequal, and not worthy of equal treatment.” [Gregory N. Price and William A. Darity, Jr., “The economics of race and eugenic sterilization in North Carolina: 1958–1968.” Economics and Human Biology. Volume 8, issue 2, July 2010. Pages 261-272.]

“… government programmes often benefit the most prosperous members of the targetted group at the expense of the poorer. Affirmative action programmes, which force employers to hire a certain percentage of an ethnic group, are intended to help the most disadvantaged segments of a minority. But the constant for lower wages …. The result is that affirmative action programmes help only the most prosperous minority members while hurting those who most require assistance. The propensity of government intervention to hurt minorities will be more clearly understood through an analysis of the economics of discrimination.” [John Majewski, “The Economics of Race and Discrimination.” Economic Affairs. Volume 8, number 3, February/March 1988. Pages 23-29.]

“The inclusion of institutional context in economics resulted in the dissemination of many theoretical trends alternative to mainstream economics. They are collectively identified under the common term of ‘institutional economics’ composed of various, often opposite strands. While theoretical considerations, which can be regarded as their offspring, are burdened with over 100 years of legacy, their empirical testing seems to be still at the initial stage. However, the research reflecting the spirit of various approaches to institutionalism seems to be relevant also to some aspects of urban and regional studies.…

“Studies on urban and regional development can draw from the intellectual heritage of institutionalism which assumes, among other things, that historical trajectories of development, as well as formal and informal relations, determine the ways in which economic entities accomplish their goals. In a broader context, institutional environment (especially the one shaped under the conditions of spatial proximity), is not only a framework, but also a potential source of new ideas and it contributes to sustainable growth and competitiveness.”

[Mariusz E. Sokołowicz, “Institutional perspective of urban and regional economics – selected areas of empirical application.” Journal of Economics and Management. Volume 19, number 1, 2005. Pages 45-62.]

“This dissertation explores issues in urban and regional economics in three essays, Essays one and two are related in that both investigate aspects of poverty in the United States. Even in a rich nation like the United States poverty is one of the most pronounced and persistent economic problems. Essays one and two add to our understanding of poverty from an urban and regional perspective by using innovative distribution sensitive measures of poverty proposed by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. Essay one applies recently developed statistical inference procedures for the Sen index of poverty to test for differences in poverty across time and among urban and regional areas. Poverty is estimated using two measures of family well-being, cash income and comprehensive income. Cash income underpins the official U.S. government poverty statistics, but comprehensive income provides a more reliable indicator of family resources and wellbeing. Essay one helps us to better understand the question of who are the urban poor and where are they located.

“Essay two also uses cash and comprehensive income Sen indexes of poverty, but investigates a different question What impact does sustained economic growth. especially the long expansion in the 1990s have on poverty when poverty is appropriately measured? Essay two uses pooled time series and regional cross section regression analysis to provide a more robust test of the relationship between poverty and economic growth over the past two decades.

“The third essay is unrelated to poverty, but continues a study in regional economics by using a dynamic general equilibrium regional model to determine the economic impacts of the National Missile Defense program on the Alabama economy and multi-county sub-regions in north Alabama and south central Tennessee.”

[Christopher K. Johnson. Essays in Urban and Regional Economics. Ph.D. dissertation. The University of Alabama. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. 2003. Pages 1-2.]

“A Marxist approach to urban and regional economics cannot simply rely on what [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels said about cities or regions. They did not devote systematic study to spatial issues, although they discussed them in a number of contexts. Relations between country and city entered into their historical works. In political debates, as over the strategy of the Paris Commune, they took geographical questions seriously. Nonetheless, to derive a Marxist methodology of urban-regional studies, one must synthesize an approach out of scattered specific remarks on urban growth and regional differentiation, and from more general aspects of Marxist theory.

“… Marxist method involves both a study of forces in long-term change, and a study of the specific political economy of class-divided modes of production. This section first discusses the treatment of cities within Marx’s and Engels’ historical theory, and then turns to their treatment of capitalism, discussing the role of uneven development and urbanization within their general treatment of accumulation, and the spatial flow of values within their more formal short-period economic model.”

[Matthew Edel. Urban and Regional Economics: Marxist Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2007. Page 33.]

“For many years the large corporation’s role in society and the model of corporate governance has been the subject of controversy. Concern over the corporate role and whether corporate decision makers should consider the interests of ‘stakeholders’ other than the shareholders stems from the aggregation of resources and the resulting economic, social, and political power inherent in the corporate form. This article begins by analyzing two popular legal theories, Law and Economics and Critical Legal Studies, and their efforts at defining the corporate role in society and the interests of various constituencies in corporate decision making. The article then develops the concept of humanistic economics, a human needs orientation to policy making. Finally, the article attempts to apply the human needs approach to broadening the scope of corporate decision makers to include a concern for human beings, primarily employees, who form a constituency of the corporation. Emphasis is placed on the creation and development of economic organizational structures which will further human growth as part of a larger interest in the quality of life.” [Lewis D. Solomon and Kathleen J. Collins, “Humanistic Economics: A New Model for the Corporate Constituency Debate.” The Journal of Corporation Law. Volume 12, issue 2, winter 1987. Pages 331-353.]

“No unregulated market economy has ever produced full employment for any extended period of time. Since the thirties, every major capitalist democracy has had to intervene in markets through government deficits, which directly and indirectly create jobs and keep wages high, and through taxes, labor protection, and income support policies, which prevent extreme economic inequalities. Far from drowning the private sector, these policies have created demand for unused human and capital resources and led to increased private saving and investment. National debts and stronger economies have grown together. Good wages also assure a modicum of labor peace.” [John Quell, “Humanistic Economics: Back to the Future.” The Humanist. Volume 55, number 3, May 1995. Pages 46-47.]

“Differences in income distribution might be better understood as a reflecttion of the way firms and societies treat actual or perceived differences among workers and citizens. Some businesses manage to treat human beings as equal. By this1 do not mean that they harbor the absurd belief that all of us possess the same skills and interests. Equality means that we believe all human beings have mental and physical skills which are capable of continuous development and a willingness to deploy these in the interest of larger causes. Because each person is capable of making significant contributions, each should be nurtured both in education and in opportunities on the job. Enterprises andorganizations which make such assumptions have been not only more egalitarian in income distribution but more productive as well.” [John Quell, “Humanistic Economics: The Politics of Race Bashing.” The Humanist. Volume 55, number 2, March 1995. Pages 35-36.]

“This book is an attempt to put into writing what I have learned in my journey so far. It is an attempt to pose all the questions—that continue to perplex me—to the larger audience out there. It is a humble acknowledgement of the fact that while capitalistic goals beset our day-to-day lives, there is more, much more one can do to create positive, sustainable impacts by calling upon human endeavor, not for the purposes of economic gain alone, but bundling such gains intrinsically, and irrevocably with social gains. The book is divided into three parts—starting with the industry, moving on to the players and attendant issues/ opportunities, culminating with a part on perspectives and way forward. Each of the three parts contains chapters that look at particular facets of the ‘impacts’ the global sourcing industry is meant to create, or has been able to. Within each chapter there are various questions that form the crux of this book. I have tried to provide perspectives and in some cases potential solutions to the issues addressed by each question. I have tried to tie in the solutions to socio-economic impacts—so as to maintain the reader’s attention with the subject at hand—and not get carried away into the larger aspects surrounding macroeconomics or geo-politics. I am neither qualified nor an expert in either of these two subjects, but surely an avid observer and learner.” [Bobby Varanasi. Humanomics: Making Sense Of The Socio-Economic Impacts Of Global Sourcing. Bloomington, Indiana: AuthorHouse LLC. 2014. Kindle edition.]

“… [One] question is the ethical: can a businessperson can be ethical without abandoning her business? What then was the role of ethical change in the Bourgeois Revaluation of 1600-1800 in the Industrial Revolution. One might reply that the seven primary virtues of any human life—prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope, and love—also run a business life. Businesspeople are people, too. ‘Bourgeois virtues’ would therefore not be a contradiction in terms. On the contrary, capitalism works badly without the virtues—a fact long demonstrated by economic sociologists, and now admitted even by neo-institutional and behavioral economists. The virtues can be nourished in a conversation about the market, and often have been. You can see why the neologism ‘humanomics’ is appropriate here: a serious inquiry into the ethical context of the Industrial Revolution (and of development in presently poor countries, too) would require collaboration between the social sciences as behavior and the 5 humanities of philosophy, anthropology, history, and even theology as meaning (as in Robert Nelson’s books on economic theology).” [Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, “Language and Interest in the Economy: A White Paper on ‘Humanomics.’” Privately published paper. 2010. Creative Commons. Pages 1-6. Retrieved on November 9th, 2016.]

“Humanomics is a nascent interdisciplinary program to teach and research a humanistic science of economics. Economics and the humanities are often perceived as fundamentally disconnected. Economics asks why Homo sapiens is the most prosperous species in the history of the planet, but the tools of the discipline are inadequate to account for the wide range of human motives. In economics the human predicates of feeling, wanting, thinking, and knowing have been boiled down to the single motivation of naked ‘self-interest.’ What does prosperity have to do with justice, courage, faith, hope, and love? The answer in economics is, ‘That’s for the humanities to ponder.’” [Editor, “Humanomics.” Website. Chapman University. 2016. Retrieved on November 9th, 2016.]

“… I gradually realised the obvious: that I could not simply walk away from economics because it shapes the world we inhabit and its mindset had certainly shaped me, even if through my rejection of it. So I decided to walk back towards it and flip it on its head. What if we started economics not with its long-established theories but with humanity’s long-term goals, and then sought out the economic thinking that would enable us to achieve them? I tried to draw a picture of those goals and, ridiculous though it sounds, it came out looking like a doughnut— yes, the American kind with a hole in the middle. The full diagram is set out in the next chapter, but in essence it is a pair of concentric rings. Below the inner ring— the social foundation— lie critical human deprivations such as hunger and illiteracy. Beyond the outer ring— the ecological ceiling— lies critical planetary degradation such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Between those two rings is the Doughnut itself, the space in which we can meet the needs of all within the means of the planet.…

“Sugary, deep-fried doughnuts hardly seem a likely metaphor for humanity’s aspirations but there was something about the image that struck a chord in me and in others, so it stuck.…

“With the Doughnut in hand, I pushed my old textbooks aside and sought out the best emerging ideas that I could find, exploring new economic thinking with open-minded university students, progressive business leaders, innovative academics and cutting-edge practitioners. This book brings together the key insights I have discovered along the way— insights into ways of thinking that I wish had crossed my path at the outset of my own economics education, and that I believe should be part of every economist’s toolkit today. It draws on diverse schools of thought, such as complexity, ecological, feminist, institutional and behavioural economics. They are all rich with insight, but there is still a risk that they will remain separated in silos, each school of thought nestled in its own journals, conferences, blogs, textbooks and teaching posts, cultivating its niche critique of last century’s thinking. The real breakthrough lies, of course, in combining what they each have to offer and to discover what happens when they dance on the same page, which is just what this book sets out to do.”

[Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21ˢᵗ-Century Economist. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing. 2017. Kindle edition.]

“With the advent of neoliberalism, we have witnessed the production and widespread adoption within many countries of what I want to call the politics of economic Darwinsim. As a theater of cruelty and mode of public pedagogy, economic Darwinism removes economics and markets from the discourse of social obligations and social costs, while at the same time savagely cutting social protections, waging war on unions, and destroying democratic public spheres. The results are all around us ranging from ecological devastation and widespread economic impoverishment to the corporatization of higher education and the increasing incarceration of large segments of the population marginalized by race and class.” [Henry A. Giroux, “The Disappearing Public Intellectual and the Crisis of Higher Education as a Public Good.” Trans-Scripts. Volume 3, 2013. Pages 6-26.]

“The coming revolution will not have as its goal the elaboration of a five-year plan in order to out-produce capitalism in ‘steel, cement and electricity,’ to return to our initial quote from [Leon] Trotsky (though it may do that, incidentally, as part of its realisation of more fundamental tasks). It will rather, for starters, dismantle worldwide the several hundred million jobs, from Wall Street’s ‘quants’ to tolltakers, existing solely to administer capitalism, freeing that labour power for socially useful activity and combining it with the several billion people marginalised by capitalism altogether, to radically shorten the working day for all. With the dismantling of the car-steel-oil-rubber complex still at the centre of both capitalist production and consumption (not to mention capitalism’s ‘imaginary’) the social labour time lost in commutes and traffic jams alone, in North America, Europe and East Asia, largely a product of the post-World War Two urban, suburban and exurban development schemes framed by real estate priorities, will be regained by society; similarly with the huge expenditure of fossil fuels made necessary by the conscious suppression of mass transit by the auto and oil industries, as a cursory tour of most American cities will reveal. Unravelling the full social, material and energy costs of urban, suburban and exurban space as it currently exists will already be a giant step toward the full de-commodification of human life.” [Loren Goldner. Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment: Russia, Turkey, Spain, Bolivia. Leiden, the Netherlands, and Boston, Massachusetts: Brill. 2016. Page 51.]

“The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, as it is expressed in capitalist practice, is the development of the productive forces to the point where any technological innovation intended to increase the rate of surplus value and thus the rate of profit of an individual capital creates more capitalist titles to the total surplus value than it adds to the total surplus value available to become profit, interest and ground rent.…

“What distinguishes the phase of the real domination of capital (wrongly characterized as ‘monopoly capital’ by the non-Marxian current of ‘radical economists’) from the earlier phase, is that the total V, as a component of the ratio S/C+V is not enlarged, but recomposed (by the destruction or the stagnation of labor power, by a cheapening of the production of the material content of working-class consumption, by primitive accumulation intended—as in the 19ᵗʰ century—to reduce the global wage, and finally by the reduction of the cost of labor below reproductive levels, which has been the case for the United States since roughly 1965.

“The phase of real domination therefore expresses, in a concrete historical fashion we will attempt to analyze in detail, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, and it expresses this on a global scale: the productive forces have reached a level where any technological innovation produces more (fictive) capitalist titles to the total surplus value than it adds to that surplus value. The capital relationship can no longer maintain itself; it must therefore destroy an important portion of labor power, or labor power must destroy it.”

[Loren Goldner. The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class Terrain. Privately published book. Undated. No pagination.]

“Obviously, as a dialectical Marxist, I understand that both sides of the process, the objective and subjective elements influence each other reciprocally. In the class struggle these factors fuse. One cannot ‘wait’ until the ‘objective’ conditions are there and only then allow the ‘subjective’ factors to come into play. That would be an inadequate, mechanical view, which is alien to me. But, for the purposes of the analysis, I had to use the process of abstract isolation of individual elements in order to show the essential function of each element. [Vladimir] Lenin often talks of the revolutionary situation which has to be objectively given, as the precondition for the active, victorious intervention of the proletariat. The purpose of my breakdown theory was not to exclude this active intervention, but rather to show when and under what circumstances such an objectively given revolutionary situation can and does arise.” [Henryk Grossmann (1931 letter to Paul Mattick) in Rick Kuhn, “Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism.” Historical Materialism. Volume 13, number 3, 2005. Pages 57-100.]

“The empirical fact of the displacement of workers through machinery has nothing to do with the Marxist theory of immiseration or with the process by which workers are ‘set free’ due to the general law of capitalist accumulation and its historical tendency. The setting free of workers through machinery which [Karl] Marx describes in the descriptive portion of his book is an empirical fact. The theory of immiseration and breakdown … is a theory derived in a deductive manner, on the foundation of the law of value, from the fact of capitalist accumulation. It is a theory that makes no sense apart from the law of value.…

“Even if Marx did not actually leave us a concise description of the law of breakdown in any specific passage he did specify all the elements required for such a description. It is possible to develop the law as a natural consequence of the capitalist accumulation process on the basis of the law of value, so much so that its lucidity will dispose of the need for any further proofs.”

[Henryk Grossmann. Law of the Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System. Abridged. Jairus Banaji, translator. Pacifica, California: Marxists Internet Archive (Marxists.org) ebook edition. 2005. Creative Commons. No pagination.]

“To avoid any misunderstandings: This is not meant as a critique of political economists of mass media. I do not see this limited appropriation of Marxist concepts as a failure of this academic field. My point is very different. I want to argue that this limited appropriation made complete sense in the age of mass media. It has a logic to it that lies very much in mass media technologies. This will be discussed in more detail in the following section. It should also be noted, very much in line with my argument, that over the last decade, which marks the transition from mass media to distributed media, [Karl] Marx has been rediscovered by political economists. Even more so, he has been rediscovered in ways that are not just rehearsals of the base and superstructure debate.…

“… it might be hard to come up with a rationale as to why political economy of media needs to engage with value theory in the first place. In fact this is not the point I want to make. I do think however, that Marx’s labour theory of value (understanding labour in this broad meaning of the term) would open up new paths for empirical research. If it makes sense to see value as the power to act and to see it as the power to create social relations, if value is about how people give meaning to their own actions, then a political economy of communication, a political economy of distributed media would be in a perfect position to redefine what political economy means and to establish … a political economy from below. This would be research on value that is focused not on structures but on subjectivities and their desires to create, to connect, to communicate, to share, to work together and to give meaning to all these things.”

[Andreas Wittel, “Digital Marx: Toward a Political Economy of Distributed Media.” tripleC: Cognition, Communication, Co-operation. Volume 10, number 2, 2012. Creative Commons. Pages 313-333.]

“Traditional economists analyze the relations among incomes, prices, amounts spent, saved and invested, and the like, by studying the behavior of markets. Behavioral economists study the behavior of people by analyzing the processes of spending, saving, investing, price-setting, including such psychological factors influencing behavior as people’s motives, attitudes, and expectations.” [George Katona and Donald J. Harris, “Behavioral Economics.” Challenge. Volume 21, number 4, September/October 1978. Pages 14-18.]

“… the major theme I wish to address is the importance of behavioral economics in bringing economic ideas to successful results. Behavioral economics is really the application of methods from other social sciences—particularly psychology—to economics. Behavioral economics is central to institutional innovation because it rounds out the details, the frictions or imperfections that might make some grand idea for a new economic institution unworkable if not appropriately dealt with.” [Robert J. Shiller, “Behavioral Economics and Institutional Innovation.” Southern Economic Journal. Volume 72, number 2, October 2005. Pages 268-283.]

“Over the past 20 years, researchers have incorporated an increasing number of results from behavioral economics into macroeconomic models. There are two main reasons for this change. First, it has become clear to macroeconomists that models based on assumptions of optimizing behavior in many cases have difficulty accounting for key real-world observations. Hence researchers have used behavioral economics assumptions with the aim of making their model predictions better fit the data. Early attempts to do this were criticized as being ad hoc. The force of this criticism has been reduced by the second reason for incorporating behavioral economics results into macroeconomics: cognitive psychologists and experimental economists have documented a number of systematic deviations between the decisions of human beings and those of the ‘economic man.’” [John C. Driscoll and Steinar Holden, “Behavioral economics and macroeconomic models.” Journal of Macroeconomics. Volume 41, September 2014. Pages 133-147.]

“Behavioral economics incorporates insights from psychology and sociology into standard economic theory to betterunderstand human behavior. It is often complemented by experimental evidence on actual behavior. Together these two fields suggest that people have non-standard preferences (such as preferences for fairness, time-inconsistent preferences and reference dependent preferences), they have non-standard beliefs (e.g., they are overly self-confident about their abilitiesor they hold self-serving beliefs) and they engage in non-standard decision making by responding to framing of choices or emotions ….” [Alexander Kocha, Julia Nafziger, and Helena Skyt Nielsen, “Behavioral economics of education.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. Volume 115, July 2015. Pages 3-17.]

“Behavioral economics agrees with the standard economic model that markets and incentives play a key role in shaping people’s behavior. However, behavioral economics departs from the standard model in acknowledging three human behavioral traits: bounded rationality, bounded willpower, and bounded selfishness. The current paper elaborates on these three traits and introduces several constructs used by behavioral economists that are relevant to public health and health behavior change.” [Tryggvi Thorgeirsson and Ichiro Kawachi, “Behavioral Economics: Merging Psychology and Economics for Lifestyle Interventions.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Volume 44, number 2, February 2013. Pages 185-189.]

“Behavioral economics is a reaction against the restrictive assumptions of the marginalist revolution. Behavioral economists seek to introduce more ‘realistic’ assumptions regarding the behavior of economic agents. Behavioral economics attempts to use concepts and insights from the other social sciences to replace, modify or enrich the current array of profit and utility maximizing models used by mainstream economics.” [Richard E. Hattwick, “Behavioral Economics: An Overview.” Journal of Business and Psychology Volume 4, number 2, December 1989. Pages 141-154.]

“The key thesis of B.E. [behavioral economics]—that systematic biases are built into people’s choices that prevent utility maximization (from here on, optimizing choices)—is subject to different interpretations, and B.E. would benefit if this matter were clarified. One can hold that these systematic limitations are found in all people, are ‘congenital’ or even wired in (a ‘universalistic’ interpretation); or that they are found only among some people (a ‘particularistic’ interpretation); or that one and the same person can sometimes optimize and at other times cannot (an ‘oscillating’ interpretation).” [Amitai Etzioni, “Behavioral Economics: Toward a New Paradigm.” American Behavioral Scientist. Volume 55, number 8, August 2011. Pages 1099-1119.]

“There is a wide range of behavioral economics papers generally. Some papers pursue better understanding of how individuals decide, particularly about economic transactions. Others pursue the properties of economic equilibriumgiven a model of how people decide (possibly with heterogeneity in individual behavior) and amodel of the underlying economic environment. Others pursue policy implications. Some of these are in areas where there must be policy (for example, taxation) and ask how the insights from behavioral economics might change existing policy analyses. Others open up newareas where government intervention might be successful (for example legislating defaults in 401k plans).” [Peter Diamond, “Behavioral economics.” Journal of Public Economics. Volume 92, numbers 8–9, August 2008. Pages 1858-1862.]

“The behavioral patterns of the poor, we argue, may be neither perfectly calculating nor especially deviant. Rather, the poor may exhibit the same basic weaknesses and biases as do people from other walks of life, except that in poverty, with its narrow margins for error, the same behaviors often manifest themselves in more pronounced ways and can lead to worse outcomes. In what follows, we illustrate the kinds of insights that might be gained from a behaviorally more realistic analysis of the economic conditions of the poor, and we propose that alternative policies for alleviating poverty be considered.” [Marianne Bertrand, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir, “A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty.” The American Economic Review. Volume 94, number 2, May 2004. Pages 419-423.]

“The main aim of research in behavioral economics is to explain hitherto unexplored issues that have been regarded as anomalies. This term is frequently used in the behavioral economics literature to expose irregularities in mainstream economics. The areas marginalized by conventional economic theory are the focal point of behavioral economics.” [Justyna Brzezicka1 and Radosław Wisniewski, “Homo Oeconomicus and Behavioral Economics.” Contemporary Economics. Volume 8, issue 4, October 2014. Pages 353-364.]

“More than in other scientific (sub-)disciplines, any appreciation of behavioral economics depends on accepting its account of the history of economics. Behavioral economists, like everyone else, have their own view of the history of their (sub-)discipline which favors their own contributions and emphasizes the field’s importance. But on top of that, the argument for behavioral economics is explicitly premised on the historical view that mainstream neoclassical economists indeed believe all human beings are always perfectly rational.” [Floris Heukelom, “Mainstreaming behavioral economics.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 21, number 1, March 2014. Pages 92-103.]

“When economists analyze decisions, people are assumed to be capable of performing complex mental calculations involving time preferences, probabilities, and the expected utility of the outcomes. Behavioral economists, however, suggest that our preferences are not always consistent or well defined …; choices often depend on their contexts or on how they are framed.” [Huriya Jabbar, “The Behavioral Economics of Education: New Directions for Research.” Educational Researcher. Volume 40, number 9, December 2011. Pages 446-453.]

“The objective of this paper is to summarize a growing list of recent papers that document aspects of behavior in market settings that also deviate from the forecasts of the standard theory. This research area is known as Psychology and Economics (or Behavioral Economics). The evidence suggests deviations from the standard theory in each step of the decision-making process: (1) nonstandard preferences, (2) incorrect beliefs, and (3) systematic biases in decision making. For each of these three steps, I present an example of the laboratory evidence, introduce a simple model if available, and summarize the strength and weaknesses of the field evidence. Since the focus of the paper is on the field evidence, I do not survey the laboratory evidence or the theoretical literature.” [Stefano DellaVigna, “Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field.” Journal of Economic Literature. Volume 47, number 2, June 2009. Pages 315-372.]

“The literature in economics has also largely disregarded awards despite the recognition of the importance of incentives. However, there is some literature in economics that provides insights into isolated aspects of awards. A typical way for (standard) economists to look at awards would be in terms of the signal sent …, in terms of the competition induced …, and in terms of incentives in a principle-agent relationship in a firm …. While these approaches are useful, they are hardly able to capture and reveal the many different aspects involved in the workings of awards. In psychological economics, which combines economic methods with insights from psychology, certain other aspects relevant to understanding awards have been discussed. Of particular relevance are analyses of status incentives …, of rewards as feedback …, of social recognition …, of reciprocity …, and of identity ….” [Bruno S. Frey and Susanne Neckermann, “Awards: A View from Psychological Economics.” Zeitschrift für Psychologie / Journal of Psychology. Volume 216, number 4, 2008. Pages 198-208.]

“… the idea of enhancing performance by pay-for-performance is under certain conditions wrong in itself. This criticism can be substantiated by psychological economics or behavioral economics ….

“We prefer the expression ‘psychological economics,’ rather than ‘behavioral economics,’ for two reasons. First, economists had already examined human behavior before this new field emerged. Second, … the term ‘behavioral’ … [could be] misleading since it may be confounded with the ‘behaviorist’ approach in psychology.”

[Margit Osterloh, “Viewpoint: why variable pay-for-performance in healthcare can backfire—Evidence from psychological economics.” Forum for Empirical Scholarship. Volume 2, number 1, 2014. Pages 120-123.]

“… we have been considering psychological economics (and indeed economics as a whole) only as a positive, explanatory science, which aims at giving the fullest possible account of the functional relations (cause and effect, if you like) among stimuli and responses connected with economic goods. In such a study we have no interest in states of consciousness as such; they are data useful to us only so far as they are links in our explanatory chains, and the psychological theory most in harmony with the general standpoint of natural science is coming to consider that the most useful and fundamental account of behavior can be given ultimately in physico-chemical terms, mental states being used only as frequently necessary or convenient mirrors reflecting the underlying mechanics.” [Z. Clark Dickinson, “Quantitative Methods in Psychological Economics.” The American Economic Review. Volume 14, number 1, March 1924. Pages 117-126.]

“One of the inspirations for BPE [behavioral political economy] is behavioral economics, which has taken off as one of the most significant field-defining developments in economics in the last one-and-a-half decades. Behavioral economics is predicated on the recognition of the importance of departures from the classic assumptions of rational agency for explaining a variety of behavioral phenomena identified by empirical scholars. At its best, it proceeds by bridging the micro-level laboratory findings of experimental economists with the aggregate behavioral patterns found in observational studies. The model of theoretical inquiry as micro-macro bridging, is, of course, the gold standard of economic reasoning and has been the gold standard in political economy since its inception as a field. In this sense, theoretical BPE is of a piece with that tradition, both in the form of inquiry and in the expected rigor, but whereas micro is assumed to be the classic form of rational agency in classic political economy, BPE substitutes for that assumption a model (or models) of agency with elements explicitly derived from experimental evidence.” [Dimitri Landa, “Behavioral Political Economy, Argumentation, and Democratic Theory.” The Good Society. Volume 24, number 1, 2015. Pages 86-97.]

“Explanations of individual behavior in politics should rely on the same motivational assumptions that guide the economic analysis of market behavior. And the systemic processes that generate political outcomes should be understood as reflecting the interplay of supply and demand. That is what Political Economy—to be understood as the application of economic analysis to the study of political processes—is all about. In its standard (neoclassical) variant, aligning the motivational assumptions means, of course, to model agents as maximizing their expected utility not only in the marketplace, but also in the political arena — as voters, politicians, lobbyists or bureaucrats.… [M]otivational symmetry does not necessarily translate into behavioral symmetry, given the weak incentives to invest in rational decision-making that prevail in the realm of collective decision-making. This holds in particular for voters, whose perfectly rational individual behavior may lead to catastrophic collective outcomes, because in the political arena, individual feedback and learning mechanisms are much weaker and more indirect than in the marketplace.” [Jan Schnellenbach and Christian Schubert, “Behavioral political economy: A survey.” European Journal of Political Economy. Volume 40, part B, December 2015. Pages 395-417.]

“… if a marginally increased support for constitutional changes surpasses the required threshold level, it might not be reversible after the constitutional moment has passed. Secondly, newly created agencies and programs generate a transitional gains trap, in which stakeholders will oppose future policy reversals ….

“The findings of this paper also have important implications for economic development. Democratic countries with a population less inclined toward market economic principles, such as many post-socialist countries during the 1990s …, could be susceptible to the behavioral effects described above. In this situation, the confirmation bias could work against the development of market economic institutions by creating institutional stickiness.”

[Petrik Runst, “Crisis and belief: confirmation bias and the behavioral political economy of recession.” Constitutional Political Economy. Volume 25, number 4, December 2014. Pages 376-392.]

“What might research in behavioral political economy entail? Although the precise details will arguably be made clear in the actual work carried out in the future, some possible (and, in our view, desirable) broad features of such research can be identified. First, the most natural extension would be to offer an explicit and well-motivated modeling of political actors in theoretical models and to conduct experiments that investigate the rationality of voters, politicians and bureaucrats. These findings would then be incorporated into the overall analysis, together with the explicit modeling of economic agents and experimental results of economic decision-making. As in behavioral economics, not only lab but also field experiments could be conducted. Second, in addition to the study of individual decision-makers, the research field could benefit from system-level analyses as well that take into account how political institutions affect behavior. As mentioned above, economic decision-makers, although cognitively limited on an individual basis, may act as if they were rational in market exchange governed by certain institutions.” [Niclas Berggren, “Time for behavioral political economy? An analysis of articles in behavioral economics.” Review of Austrian Economics. Volume 25, number 3, September 2012. Pages 199-221.]

“Evidence that the public’s aggregate demand for government is price-sensitive supports a coherent behavioral account of the failure of starve the beast policies to reduce government spending. While prior systematic analyses have demonstrated elected policymakers’ failure to reduce future public expenditures when revenue collections decrease, our analysis provides evidence for a behavioral mechanism that motivates policymakers’ actions. The electorate’s response to deficit spending increases the political costs to politicians of reducing government spending. This insight into public responsiveness to the perceived price of government offers some guidance about how to construct policies to restore fiscal balance that might win public support.” [Joseph Daniel Ura and Erica M. Socker, “The Behavioral Political Economy of Budget Deficits: How Starve the Beast Policies Feed the Machine.” The Forum. Volume 9, issue 1, article 7, 2011. Pages 1-20.]

“A behavioral political economy framework is built on the basis of prospect theory to explain the induced and imposed institutional changes during China’s market reform, giving special attention to the integrated effects of economic and political institutions. According to prospect theory, how rulers frame their decisions – in the prospects of gains or losses, influences how much risk they will take. China’s market reform has been largely framed in the prospects of economic gains, for which the continuously growing private sector is the driving force. China’s central government adopts a growth-oriented incremental reform that coincides with the prediction of prospect theory.…

“There have been numerous studies of China’s institutional changes since 1978, but few, if any, provide a view from a behavioral political economy framework. This study attempts to address this deficiency in the literature. This analysis is based on a behavioral political economy framework that integrates behavioral economics with political economy.”

[Yongjing Zhang, “A view from behavioral political economy on China’s institutional change.” China Economic Review. Volume 23, issue 4, December 2012. Pages 991-1002.]

“… it is clear that inter-imperial rivalries are not irreconcilable, nor fundamental; they are not produced by capitalist accumulation. Geopolitical conflicts can be overcome without hampering accumulation, and indeed have to be overcome in order to facilitate it. Of what use would a British or German empire, or even a European empire, be to the big European multinationals, when they are already taking over the world? And, anyway, don’t European firms share a fundamental interest with the big U.S. multinationals in removing all obstacles to accumulation and all limits to the expansion of production and trade? Don’t they also have a common interest in overcoming the restrictions deriving from the various states’ national policies, when it is this kind of policy that determines those obstacles and limits?

“My argument is that today’s great capitalists have a fundamental interest in overcoming inter-imperial rivalries rather than exacerbating them, even though certain capital sectors of certain nations frequently seek to exploit the outdated imperial ambitions of the political classes. Based on this thesis, I propose a preliminary definition of ‘global imperialism’: a system of control of the world economy without substantial inter-imperial contradictions. By ‘substantial’ I mean: resulting from the force that gives economic substance to imperialist ambition, that is, capitalist accumulation.”

[Ernesto Screpanti. Global Imperialism and the Great Crisis: The Uncertain Future of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press. 2014. Page 52.]

“This article proposes a classification of capitalist forms on the basis of two concepts, ‘property rights regimes’ (PRRs) and ‘accumulation governance structures’ (AGSs). The former defines the way in which the ownership of wealth and surplus value is distributed, the latter the institutional systems governing the uses of surplus value to sustain accumulation. Three PRRs – ‘concentrated private property,’ ‘diffused private property’ and ‘state property’ – and four AGSs – ‘goods markets,’ ‘companies markets,’ ‘external hierarchies’ and ‘internal hierarchies’ – are defined. Various historical forms of capitalism are described as resulting from particular combinations of PRRs and AGSs. Then a few ideal types are outlined: ‘classical capitalism,’ ‘market-oriented corporate capitalism’ and ‘bank-oriented corporate capitalism.’ Finally a hypothesis is advanced as to how capitalism evolves, namely that historical transformations of PRRs and AGSs tend to pave the way for the emergence of ‘autonomous capital’: accumulation is controlled through complex systems of external hierarchies among firms; the large concerns which are in command of these hierarchical structures are collectively self-owned and formally controlled by their managers through strategic cross-shareholding; no external shareholder exerts effective control.…

“… in classical capitalism, the very essence of capital, i.e. control of the production process in the firm, was still based on a sort of personal relation. Living labour is dominated by ‘dead labour,‘ but this exists as an active subject only in as much as it is privately owned by a person.”

[Ernesto Screpanti, “Capitalist Forms and the Essence of Capitalism.” Review of International Political Economy. Volume 6, number 1, spring 1999. Pages 1-26.]

“Names matter. In particular, naming subfields of economics can help economists to see connections they otherwise might not have seen between their own research agenda and the research agenda of other economists. A well-chosen name can foster esprit de corps within a subfield and help in explaining the unifying ideas in that subfield to students. This paper is an argument for the appropriateness of the name ‘cognitive economics’ for a growing subfield of economics, and for the importance of the research that has been done and can be done in cognitive economics. It also discusses key themes in cognitive economics and the issues they raise.

“It is important to stress that (if the name I propose is deemed acceptable) research in cognitive economics has already been underway for a long time. However, as a participant in this subfield, it seems to me that research in this area has been growing in recent years. I argue here that there are great opportunities for further research in cognitive economics.”

[Miles Kimball, “Cognitive Economics.” The Japanese Economic Review: The Journal of the Japanese Economic Association. Volume 66, number 2, June 2015. Pages 167-181.]

“What might a ‘‘cognitive economics’’ look like? Here, I wish to explore three promising, and very different, links. First, and perhaps most obviously, the ‘‘rational economic agent’’ may be enriched by understanding the operation and limitations of the cognitive mechanisms from which economic and other decisions are constructed. Thus, cognitive science can export knowledge into economic realm. Second, economics provides powerful technical machinery for analysing distributed information processing systems: markets, not just minds, can be thought of as computational machines. Cognitive science may benefit from importing some of this machinery, to understand distributed cognition across people, and perhaps also information processing within the person. Third, and perhaps most promising, cognitive science and economics can jointly contribute to new rational theories of human thought and behaviour, upon which accounts of individual and collective behaviour can be constructed. Here, I briefly illustrate, in turn, the opportunities that may be available if we further explore each of these links, before concluding.” [Nick Chater, “Can cognitive science create a cognitive economics?” Cognition. Volume 135, February 2015. Pages 52-55.]

“In cognitive economics, bounded rationality, with its paradoxical formulation, is the cornerstone of individual rationality. One way to resolve the paradox of bounded rationality consists in attributing all sorts of procedural knowledge to individuals, enabling them to proceed fairly directly towards their goals. Different authors have used different terms to refer to this knowledge: heuristics, production rules, situation/action patterns, habits. It can manifest itself in the form of explicit knowledge or, more likely, as implicit know-how. When it is explicit, it makes reasoning possible.…

“If agents do not use explicit procedures for the optimisation of their objective function, fresh attention must be given to their effective selection procedures. Substantive rationality focuses on a property of the result of the procedure: it must be one of the optima. What follows is a complete reversal of the meaning of rationality: instead of being focused on the result of the procedure, rationality is now focused on the procedure itself and the procedural knowledge it makes use of. This procedural knowledge also contains the satisficing rules that enable the search to be stopped.… The principle of procedural rationality is thus derived from that of bounded rationality.”

[Paul Bourgine and Jean-Pierre Nadal. Cognitive Economics: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Berlin, Germany, and New York: Springer-Verlag. 2003. Pages 4-5.]

“‘Cognitive Economics’ is a newcomer to economic research. As of now, only a few publications bear its name, and it saw its first European and its first international conference in 2004 and 2005 respectively. This book, carrying the new subdiscipline’s name as its title, collects 27 articles from fields as diverse as economics, artificial intelligence, logic, psychology and physics. With many of the articles being surveys, the book serves both as an introduction to the field – nine essays explicitly cover the ‘disciplinary bases for cognitive economics’ – as well as a ‘tool for future research.’ The anthology fulfils these two purposes well. Researchers interested in bounded procedural rationality, social influence on individual decisionmaking and the dynamics of adaptive social systems can learn modelling techniques from outside their fields, and they are offered a wealth of suggestions on how to apply them fruitfully to economic problems.” [Till Grüne-Yanoff, “Cognitive Economics: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” Review article. Economics and Philosophy. Volume 22, 2006. Pages 448-455.]

“Through a life narrative, be it conveyed in an interview, autobiography, or oral history, we can study an individual’s sense of self and location in society. The narrative selects and organizes the events and meanings that bound an individual to a community. We also unearth traces of change in the community, of solidarities broken and new ones established. How this social and cultural history fits with more standard historiographical practices in the history of economics is unclear. Our study was tentative and did not seek to establish a definite history of URPE [Union for Radical Political Economics]. Further research is warranted in studying the gamut of radical subjectivities. Nor did we attempt to match in detail our narrative of shifting identities to existing intellectual histories. Indeed, how have changes to the radical community, for instance, with the emergence of the women’s caucus, reshaped theoretical research? This is an empty canvas, but one that we can fill with the colors of enthusiasm, commitment, imagination, and a deep respect for the many different lives that inhabit the economics profession.” [Tiago Mata and Frederic S. Lee, “The Role of Oral History in the Historiography of Heterodox Economics.” History of Political Economy. Volume 39, supplement 1, 2007. Pages 154-171.]

“Cognitive economics examines the process of extraction of information from the environment through perception, and the development of knowledge through communication. In this framework, information exists to the extent that it becomes embodied in the brain as a pattern or in an artifact (capital) designed to act as a surrogate for the brain. Instead of focusing on the allocation of existing informational resources, cognitive economics focuses on the production of new knowledge. To the extent that cognition is conditioned and restricted by the mechanism of brain and mind, it is all but impossible to understand how information and communication matter without a fair idea of the way in which people gain knowledge. This is the main reason for cognitive economics to focus on the protocols leading to cognition.…

“Evolutionary economics is built on the assumption of limited cognitive capabilities for both humans and organizations. This entails a continuous process of trial and error. And since the cost of thinking is not zero, once some appreciation of context has been arrived at, routines, conventions, and standard procedures are adopted that would appear to ensure survival or satisfying performance.”

[Gilles Paquet, “Evolutionary cognitive economics.” Information Economics and Policy. Volume 10, issue 3, September 1998. Pages 343-357.]

“Identifying religious concerns for wellbeing as a renewed project is but to illustrate its historic interests in, and major contributions to, our understanding of wellbeing. The pursuit of happiness is deeply embedded in human history, certainly from the ancient Greeks’ focus on eudaimonia or happiness as the good life, and the necessary virtues associated with its pursuit …). The early and medieval Christian tradition of Augustine and Aquinas located that Greek tradition in a deeply Christian framework, interpreting the pursuit of wellbeing as conforming to God’s purposes, a telos [Greek/Hellēniká, τέλος, télos, ‘end’ or ‘purpose’] which could only be fulfilled in the afterlife, as essentially ‘an ultimate goal of self-fulfilment’ ….” [John Atherton, “Introductory essay: Developing an overview as context and future.” The Practices of Happiness: Political economy, religion and wellbeing. John Atherton, Elaine Graham, and Ian Steedman, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Pages 1-19.]

“The idea that happiness is to be found in the struggle for change, within a world of complexity, echoes an Aristotelian teleology in which a life properly lived is concerned with discovering and pursuing distinct ends, and the ‘good life’ is not just a desired end but is discovered in the pursuit of the telos.” [Malcolm Brown, “Happiness isn’t working, but it should be.” The Practices of Happiness: Political economy, religion and wellbeing. John Atherton, Elaine Graham, and Ian Steedman, editors. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2011. Pages 75-85.]

“Like economics, the history of the neuroscientific study of behavior also reflects an interaction between two approaches – in this case, a neurological approach and a physiological approach. In the standard neurological approach of the last century, human patients or experimental animals with brain lesions were studied in a range of behavioral tasks. The behavioral deficits of the subjects were then correlated with their neurological injuries and the correlation used to infer function. The classic example of this is probably the work of the British neurologist David Ferrier …, who demonstrated that destruction of the precentral gyrus of the cortex led to quite precise deficits in movement generation. What marks many of these studies during the classical period in neurology is that they often focused on damage to either sensory systems or movement control systems. The reason for this should be obvious; the sensory stimuli presented to a subject are easy to control and quantify – they are observables in the economic sense of the word.” [Paul W. Glimcher, Colin F. Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Russell A. Poldrack, “Introduction: A Brief History of Neuroeconomics.” Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain. London and San Diego, California: Academic Press imprint of Elsevier. 2009. Pages 1-12.]

“… for neuroeconomists, neurobiology can provide physical ‘anchor points’ for psychological and economic constructs. By assuming a physical reference, these constructs can be open to some form of observation or, at least, of detection. It is important to note that, in general, neuroeconomists do not appear to support an elimination of the theoretical vocabulary of cognitive psychology and behavioural economics in favour of an observational neurobiological one. Rather, when they argue about the replacement of the ‘as if assumptions’ that have never been empirically well supported, they actually deal with the definition of the nature of the entities to which the constructs of cognitive psychology and behavioural economics refer.” [Giuseppe Lo Dico, “Neuroeconomics, identity theory, and the issue of correlation.” Theory & Psychology. Volume 23, number 5, October 2013. Pages 576-590.]

“For neuroeconomists, knowing more about functional specialization, and how regions collaborate in different tasks, could substitute familiar distinctions between categories of economic behavior (sometimes established arbitrarily by suggestions which become modeling conventions) with new ones grounded in neural detail.” [Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Drazen Prelec, “Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience Can Inform Economics.” Journal of Economic Literature. Volume 43, number 1, March 2005. Pages 9-64.]

“The last few years have witnessed impressive progress toward understanding the neurobiology of decision making …. This progress reflects the individual and collaborative efforts of scholars from a variety of intersecting disciplines. The pace of discovery plainly establishes the viability of neuroeconomics as an independent, self-sustaining field, one that addresses a new set of fascinating and scientifically meritorious questions. Many participants in this area of inquiry, as well as interested observers, hope neuroeconomics will also eventually make foundational contributions to the various traditional fields from which it emerged, including economics, psychology, and artificial intelligence. My purpose here is to evaluate its potential contributions to economics.” [B. Douglas Bernheim, “On the Potential of Neuroeconomics: A Critical (but Hopeful) Appraisal.” Working paper number 13954. National Bureau of Economic Research. Cambridge, Massachusetts. April, 2008. Pages 1-63.]

“… much research in cognitive neuroscience, including much of neuroeconomics, has taken a turn and now seeks to uncover the computations being carried out in the brain. The focus has turned to particular brain regions and networks in an effort to understand what they are doing and how they interact to produce behavior. While this detour has certainly hampered the short-run impact of neuroeconomics on mainstream economics, in the long run it will hopefully yield a stronger foundation on which to base neuroeconomic research.” [Arkady Konovalov and Ian Krajbich, “Over a Decade of Neuroeconomics: What Have We Learned?” Organizational Research Methods. OnlineFirst edition. May 2016. Pages 1-16.]

“A proponent of NE [neuroeconomics] may concede that NEs rarely succeed in predicting individuals’ choices beyond limited time spans. At the same time, she might claim that NEs [neuroeconomists] can make significant predictive advances in this respect by categorizing agents into different types. This claim relates to the following two-step procedure …. First, neural findings are used to identify characteristics (e.g., attitudes to risk) that supposedly predict agents’ behavior across choice domains. Second, the distribution of agents’ types is used as a primitive in models that predict choices probabilistically over non-negligible temporal intervals.” [Roberto Fumagalli, “Neural Findings and Economic Models: Why Brains Have Limited Relevance for Economics.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Volume 44, number 5, September 2014. Pages 606-629.]

“Located at the intersection of neuroscience, economics, and psychology, the field of neuroeconomics converges around behavioral deviations from the model of the human being as Homo economicus, a rational actor who calculates his choices to maximize his individual satisfaction. Neuroeconomists look to the biological substrate of the brain for clues to the puzzles of consumer action – why people often make decisions to buy, sell, invest, and trade in ways that seem to go against their best interest. Going a step farther than behavioral economists, who argue that policy designers need to take seemingly ‘irrational’ choices into account, neuroeconomists insist that they need to understand how such choices get made in the brain.” [Natasha Dow Schüll and Caitlin Zaloom, “The shortsighted brain: Neuroeconomics and the governance of choice in time.” Social Studies of Science. Volume 41, number 4, August 2011. Pages 515-538.]

“In the past few years there has been an increasing interest in applying neuroscience techniques to address questions in business and economics research. The majority of applications of neuroscience techniques to problems in this field can be found in neuroeconomics, where these techniques are used to explore specific research questions with regard to cooperation, trust, risk assessment, reputation, social norms, and many more …. Neuroeconomics, an interdisciplinary research field at the intersection of economics and neuroscience, investigates the neural foundations of economic behavior. In this research paradigm, behavioral tasks adopted from experimental economics are merged with neuroscience methods to investigate the neural and neurochemical systems involved in the processing of these tasks.” [Stefan Volk and Tine Köhler, “Brains and Games: Applying Neuroeconomics to Organizational Research.” Organizational Research Methods. Volume 15, number 4, October 2014. Pages 522-552.]

“… what are we to make of some of the major claims in the neuroeconomics literature? Is it good, interesting economics? We first consider some general issues to do with samples, statistics and procedures. These are troubling, and need to be made explicit because they are blurred in the existing literature, but in the end not the stuff that we should use to pass judgment on the potential role of neuroeconomics. We then examine three illustrative areas of substantive research that should be of immediate interest to economists: discounting over time, social preferences and trust, and the strategic sense that we expect to see in subjects playing games. The theme to emerge is that many confounds that are known in the experimental economics literature are glossed, and the contribution is to simply tack on some neurological data to help tell the preferred story.” [Glenn W. Harrison, “Neuroeconomics: A Critical Reconsideration.” Economics and Philosophy. Volume 24, number 3, November 2008. Pages 303-344.]

“Though [Pope] Francis sees business as noble, he stridently condemns ‘the principle of profit maximization’ because it ‘reflects a misunderstanding of the very concept of the economy’ …. He warns that ‘[t]he economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings,’ and he chastises those ‘obsessed with profits.’ ‘We need to reject a magical conception of the market, which would suggest that problems can be solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals.’ When he meets with business groups, he calls on them to make the jobs of their employees—and the lives of these workers’ families—secure and stable rather than to focus solely on the bottom line. He exhorts them to relieve ‘mothers and fathers of families [of] the worry of not being able to give a future, or even a present, to their children’ and to act ‘in such a way that one task creates another, one responsibility creates other responsibilities, hope generates other hopes’ ….” [Robert M. Whaples, “The Economics of Pope Francis: An Introduction.” Independent Review. Volume 21, number 3, winter 2017. Pages 325-345.]

“Whether and under what conditions a thing is useful to me, whether and under what conditions it is a good, whether and under what conditions it is an economic good, whether and under what conditions it possesses value for me and how large the measure of this value is for me, whether and under what conditions an economic exchange of goods will take place between two economizing individuals, and the limits within which a price can be established if an exchange does occur—these and many other matters are fully as independent of my will as any law of chemistry is of the will of the practicing chemist. The view adopted by these persons rests, therefore, on an easily discernible error about the proper field of our science. For economic theory is concerned, not with practical rules for economic activity, but with the conditions under which men engage in provident activity directed to the satisfaction of their needs.” [Carl Menger. Principles of Economics. James Dingwall and Bert F. Hoselitz, translators. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute. 2007. Page 49.]

“The Austrian Cabinet in whose journalistic department [Carl] Menger served in the early 1870s—before his appointment in 1873 as assistant professor at the University of Vienna—was composed of members of the Liberal Party that stood for civil liberties, representative government, equality of all citizens under the law, sound money, and free trade. At the end of the 1870s the Liberal Party was evicted by an alliance of the Church, the princes and counts of the Czech and Polish aristocracy, and the nationalist parties of the various Slavonic nationalities. This coalition was opposed to all the ideals which the Liberals had supported. However, until the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, the Constitution which the Liberals had induced the Emperor to accept in 1867 and the fundamental laws that complemented it remained by and large valid.

“In the climate of freedom that these statutes warranted, Vienna [Austria] became a center of the harbingers of new ways of thinking. From the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century Austria was foreign to the intellectual effort of Europe. Nobody in Vienna—and still less in other parts of the Austrian dominions—cared for the philosophy, literature, and science of Western Europe. When [Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz and later David Hume visited Vienna, no indigenes were to be found there who would have been interested in their work. With the exception of [Bernard] Bolzano, no Austrian before the second part of the nineteenth century contributed anything of importance to the philosophical or the historical sciences.”

[Ludwig von Mises, “The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics.” Austrian Economics: An Anthology. Bettina Bien Greaves, editor. Irvington–on–Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education. 1996. Pages 53-76.]

“The Austrian analysis uses as its data human nature and the realities of the human predicament. Individual human values and human actions, amidst limited means including perceived knowledge, are placed at the center of economic science. The factors of human error, the uncertainty of the future, and the inescapable passage of time must receive their due attention this analytical approach cuts through the seeming complexities of an advanced market economy and provides a basic understanding of the economic process by examining essential market elements. Dispelled is any mystique surrounding the economy, market prices, business profits and losses, interest rates, inflation, and economic recessions and depressions. These phenomena are not inexplicable nor without cause, as will be shown in subsequent sections.

“This book, as its title indicates, presents an overview of basic Austrian theory. Its focus is on the free market or capitalist economy. The seminal works of the Austrian economists surely cannot be neglected for a deeper understanding of the topics herein discussed. These original works must be consulted, especially in order to obtain a thorough appreciation of the serious implications of governmental intervention into the market process, which is now rampant Suggested readings for expanded understanding are provided at the end of each major section.”

[Thomas C. Taylor. An Introduction to Austrian Economics. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute. 1980. Page 11.]

“A deep theme of Austrian economics has been that of spontaneous order or self-organization of the economy. The origin of this theme dates to the putative founder of the Austrian School, Carl Menger, with his theory of the spontaneous emergence of money for transactions purposes in primitive economies being an archetypal example ….

“This essay will consider more thoroughly the relationship between the concepts of emergence and complexity and the roles that they have played in Austrian economics as well as more broadly in philosophy and science. An important point is that both of these concepts do not possess precise meanings; they are ‘terms of art’ within philosophy. However, while closely linked through the general idea of a whole being ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ (or at least not equal to that sum), they are not identical, with complexity being the broader concept. It must also be recognized that focusing on such concepts has not been central to, or even particularly a part of, certain branches of Austrian economics or of much concern to some of its adherents.…

“… emergence can be seen as a part of the broader complexity concept. Indeed, it is hard to conceive of an example of emergence that could not also be viewed as representing a complex dynamic.”

[J. Barkley Rosser Jr., “Emergence and complexity in Austrian economics.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. Volume 81, issue 1, January 2012. Pages 122-128.]

“At first glance, there is good and sufficient reason to criticize any attempt to link Ayn Rand and Austrian economics, such as is attempted in the present collection of essays. After all, the school of thought founded by this novelist and philosopher is non-controversially called ‘Objectivism,’ while the Austrian or Praxeological School of economics—epitomized in the works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard—is well known as the ‘Subjectivist School.’ But the polar opposites implied by these appellations are more apparent than real. For while ‘objectivism’ for Rand meant an insistence on objective reality, ‘subjectivism’ for the Austrians has nothing to do with its rejection. Rather, Austrian subjectivism focuses on the claim that consumer tastes are subjective, and that prices reflect this phenomenon.” [Walter Block, “Ayn Rand and Austrian Economics: Two Peas in a Pod.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Volume 6, number 2, spring, 2005. Pages 259-269.]

“… there has been a divergence in the use of methodological individualism within economics, and this chasm is one of the defining characteristics of a unique paradigm of Austrian economics. It is also important to realize that the development of economics has not been uniform, and that a number of influential scholars have used a weaker concept of methodological individualism than the dominant mainstream.” [Anthony J. Evans, “Only individuals choose.” Handbook on Contemporary Austrian Economics. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2010. Pages 3-13.]

“There has been a revival of interest in Austrian economics in the last ten years by a small but growing group of economists. The modern Austrian ‘research program’ is many-faceted. It is in part a doctrinal exegesis of the masters. Besides the obvious value of such work to historians of thought, some of it also sheds light on certain modern debates (e.g. in capital theory), as well as suggests that certain early Austrians (in particular, [Friedrich] Hayek) were as aware of the problems of expectations, costly information, and knowledge dissemination as the revisionist Keynesians claim that [John Maynard] Keynes was. Another aspect of their program is the reintroduction of a thoroughly subjectivist viewpoint into economics, and the tracing out of the implications of that reintroduction in such fields as consumer and demand theory and the theory of costs. Other work has focused on the crucial role of the entrepreneur in a market economy, and the development of the notion of market process to replace the idea of market equilibrium.” [Bruce J. Caldwell. Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the Twentieth Century. Revised edition. London and New York: Routledge imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa PLC business. 2003. Page 117.]

“Recent economic turbulences such as the ‘Great Recession’ and its consequences have led many economists to look for alternatives to mainstream economics, which they consider to be inadequate in explaining these events and providing remedies for them.…

“This justifies a re-examination of the foundations of Austrian Economics and an attempt to evaluate its potential for replacing or at least modifying the edifice of neoclassical economic theory and its policy prescriptions. As Carl Menger is generally acknowledged to be the founding father of the Austrian School of Economics, it seems like a good idea to examine his work and contrast it with contemporary Austrian Economics, which is indeed the aim of the present paper.”

[Reinhard Neck, “On Austrian Economics and the Economics of Carl Menger.” Atlantic Economic Journal. Volume 42, issue 3, September 2014. Pages 217–227.]

“The thesis of the paper is that Austrian economics (AE) and new institutional economics (NIE) are methodologically incompatible. This casts doubts on the coherence of the programs that are trying to unite these two branches.…

“By arguing on different (and incompatible) theoretical contexts, AE and NIE manage to affirm the principle of the maximum autonomy for private capital and for implementation of policies of privatization and deregulation, even in those cases in which the standard neoclassical competitive model (the only other theoretical approach they take into consideration) would prescribe the opposite.”

[Giulio Palermo, “The Convergence of Austrian Economics and New Institutional Economics: Methodological Inconsistency and Political Motivations.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 33, number 2, June 1999. Pages 277-286.]

“In the Austrian literature, much attention has been given to questions of equilibration—or, perhaps more accurately, whether and to what extent such a process takes place—and the usefulness of equilibrium constructs like the ERE [evenly rotating economy] once equilibration has been taken into account …. The consensus, if one exists, is that equilibration occurs for small departures from equilibrium. How small is small and what results from departures beyond this critical threshold remain contested issues. These concerns surely deserve the attention they have received.” [William J. Luther, “Evenly rotating economy: A new modeling technique for an old equilibrium construct.” The Review of Austrian Economics. Volume 27, number 4, December 2014. Pages 403-417.]

“Having established the fundamental differences in the behavioral foundations of Austrian and neoclassical economics, it is worth considering whether if one of these approaches is accepted, the other can ever be justified. The answer … is yes. Models are simplified depictions of reality, and their simplifying assumptions are a virtue. The real world is a complex place—too complex to understand just by observation alone—and the purpose of a model is to create a simplified framework that is analogous to some features of the real world, but easier to understand. Indeed, if real-world economic phenomena could be understood just by observing them, there would be no reason to model those phenomena. The virtue of a model that is simpler than reality is that if someone can understand the model, and if the model works in a manner analogous to the real world, then that person can gain some understanding about the real world. But because all models are simplified depictions of reality, no model can be ideal for understanding every aspect of the real world. Those aspects of the real world that are assumed away in the model cannot be explained by it, and often, unrealistic assumptions lead to inaccurate conclusions about the real world.” [Randall G. Holcombe, “The behavioral foundations of Austrian economics.” The Review of Austrian Economics. Volume 22, number 4, December 2009. Pages 301-313.]

“The article analyzes basic reasons for renewed interest in [phenomenologist] Alfred Schutz’s works by the Austrian economists in the context of postmodern criticism of aprioristic methods of praxeology and foundational paradigm as such. It also deals with the possible applications of Schutzian method of telescopic ideal type on the problem of spontaneous order and shows this method as a possible alternative to [Friedrich] Hayek’s evolutionary approach. Phenomenological method that creates a baseline for Schutz is only useful to an extent to which the structures of spontaneous order can be grounded in individual consciousness. In cannot, therefore, be used to answer the question of the origin of spontaneous order but it can provide some answers regarding its reproduction.…

“Schutz cannot answer the question of the origin of spontaneous order that has no correlate in individual consciousness …. Nevertheless, we can still use Schutz’s understanding sociology and his methodology when solving the problems connected with the reproduction of this order which happens through the means of socialization and gradual constitution of our image of the world including the primitive models of social coordination that can be traced to the individual consciousness.”

[Petr Špecián, “To the Interpretation of Spontaneous Order.” E-Logos: Electronic Journal for Philosophy. Volume 17, 2013. Pages 1-11.]

“It seems to me that Austrian economics has two distinctive doctrines. The first (I accept that Particular Austrians regard it as much the more important) may be described as the Supremacy of Demand, or, better perhaps, the Supremacy of Marginal Utility. This is opposed not only to the Classical (or Marxist, or even sometimes Keynesian) determination of value by cost, but also to the Marshallian halfway house, in which both Utility and Cost play a part, like the blades of a pair of scissors, as [Alfred] Marshall said. The second Austrian doctrine, not at all the same as the first, is insistence on the nature of production as a process in time, with the temporal relations between inputs and outputs occupying a similarly commanding position. There are relations between these two doctrines, but they are separate. It is possible to hold to one without attaching much importance to the other.” [Sir John R. Hicks, “Is Interest the Price of a Factor of Production?” Time, Uncertainty, and Disequilibrium: Exploration of Austrian Themes. Mario J. Rizzo, editor. Lexington, Massachusetts: LexingtonBooks imprint of D. C. Heath and Company. 1979. Pages 51-63]

“… throughout this book we will define ‘socialism’ as any institutional restriction or aggression on the free exercise of human action or entrepreneurship.… Socialism is any system of institutional restriction or aggression on the free exercise of human action or entrepreneurship which ordinary people, politicians, and scientists usually justify as one capable of improving the functioning of society and of achieving certain ends and objectives considered good. An in-depth study of socialism as we have just defined it requires a theoretical analysis of the concept and its implications, an analysis which permits us to clarify whether or not an intellectual error is involved in the belief that it is possible to improve the system of social coordination via the institutional coercion socialism always entails. Also called for is an empirical or historical interpretative study of the different instances of socialism identifiable in the real world, an interpretation to complete and enrich the conclusions drawn from the theoretical examination. Finally, it will be necessary to embark on an analysis in the field of the theory of social ethics, with the purpose of clarifying whether or not it is ethically admissible to attack the most intimate and essential characteristic of man: his ability to act creatively. As we indicated in the introduction, we will devote the subsequent chapters of this book to addressing in extenso [Latin, in extensō; not comparable] the first of these questions, and we will leave the necessary historical and ethical analyses for future research.” [Jesús Huerta de Soto. Socialism, Economic Calculation and Entrepreneurship. Cheltenham, England, and Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing. 2010. Ebook edition.]

“Political integration (centralization) and economic (market) integration are two completely different phenomena. Political integration involves the territorial expansion of a state's power of taxation and property regulation. Economic integration is the extension of the interpersonal and interregional division of labor and market participation. In principle, in taxing and regulating private property owners and market income earners, all governments are counterproductive. They reduce market participation and the formation of wealth. Once the existence of a government has been assumed, however, no direct relationship between territorial size and economic integration exists. Centralization can go hand in hand with either economic progress or retrogression. Progress results whenever a less taxing and regulating government expands its territory at the expense of a more exploitative one. If the reverse occurs, centralization implies economic disintegration and retrogression.” [Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “The Western State as Paradigm.” Society. Volume 35, number 5, July/August 1998. Pages 21-25.]

“The most concentrated and sustained attack against the possibility of an effective socialist economy has come from the Austrian School of economics. Professor [Jesús Huerta] de Soto attempts to make his case by stringing together the ideas of the School’s various historical and current luminaries, including [Carl] Menger, [Ludwig] von Mises, [Friedrich August von] Hayek, [Murray] Rothbard and [Israel] Kirzner. In the process, he glosses over what are some significant differences among the Austrians themselves. Just because they are all against socialism does not mean that lumping their ideas together constitutes a cogent argument against socialism.” [Mark Jablonowski, “Socialism, Economic Calculation and Entrepreneurship.” Review article. Science & Society. Volume 76, number 2, April 2012. Pages 277-279.]

“The field of our science is human action, not the psychological events which result in an action. It is precisely this which distinguishes the general theory of human action, praxeology, from psychology. The theme of psychology is the internal events that result or can result in a definite action. The theme of praxeology is action as such. This also settles the relation of praxeology to the psychoanalytical concept of the subconscious. Psychoanalysis too is psychology and does not investigate action but the forces and factors that impel a man toward a definite action. The psychoanalytical subconscious is a psychological and not a praxeological category. Whether an action stems from clear deliberation, or from forgotten memories and suppressed desires which from submerged regions, as it were, direct the will, does not influence the nature of the action.” [Ludwig von Mises. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. The Scholar’s Edition. Auburn, Alabama: The Ludwig von Mises Institute. 1998. Page 12.]

“Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental and incidental circumstances of the concrete acts. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied by its assumptions and inferences. Whether people exchange commodities and services directly by barter or indirectly by using a medium of exchange is a question of the particular institutional setting which can be answered by history only. But whenever and wherever a medium of exchange is in use, all the laws of monetary theory are valid with regard to the exchanges thus transacted.” [Ludwig von Mises, “The Treatment of ‘Irrationality’ in the Social Sciences.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Volume 4, number 4, June 1944. Pages 527-546.]

“… [A] praxeological reflection demonstrates that there exists between these two phenomena a necessary concatenation. An improvement in the external conditions of well-being makes possible a corresponding increase in population figures. However, if the additional quantity of the means of sustenance is completely absorbed by rearing an additional number of people, nothing is left for a further improvement in the standard of living. The march of civilization is arrested; mankind reaches a state of stagnation.” [Ludwig von Mises, “Ludwig von Mises on the Limitation of Offspring.” Population and Development Review. Volume 10, number 3, September 1984. Pages 539-544.]

“One may begin by asking, What are the basic postulates of phraxeology? Clearly, the ‘fundamental axiom’ that all human action is rational is to be included, but what about such categories as teleology and the valuation process, cause and effect, time, and the uncertainty of the future: are they equally fundamental? And just what is meant by such terms as teleology and ‘uncertainty’; their definitions are far less precise than that of rationality in the Misesian system.…

“… it was not my intention to launch a comprehensive assault on phraxeology. The point of all of this is simply to suggest that a critique of Misesian methodology which adheres to the categories and methods employed by praxeologists themselves is possible and should be attempted.”

[Bruce J. Caldwell, “Praxeology and its critics: an appraisal.” History of Political Economy. Volume 16, number 3, 1984. Pages 363-379.]

“I wrote ‘Praxeology and its critics: an appraisal’ … because I was dissatisfied with the way that much methodological work is done today, and I wanted to provide an example of an alternative way to undertake methodological criticism In the article I analyze phraxeology, the methodological position associated with the Austrian, Ludwig von Mises. Because I criticize both phraxeology and some of the arguments brought against that position, I knew from the start that the article was not going to be wildly popular.” [Bruce J. Caldwell, “Towards a broader conception of criticism.” History of Political Economy. Volume 18, number 4, 1986. Pages 675-681.]

“… there is the … declaration that ‘in the praxeological view, action is rational by definition.’ To that view, even ‘a man who is swayed from the pursuit of his own best interests by falling prey to a fleeting temptation is yet acting “rationally” in the praxeologícal sense. In the praxeological view, the man has simply substituted a new set of ends ….’ This forces us into concluding that praxeologicaI judgments are intended as true only in relation to assumed (fixed) programs. They depend completely on a tendency of human beings which demands that given programs be respected. It is said that ‘the selection of an end can never, as such, be judged in regard to its rationality ….’ One cannot avoid the implication that praxeology as an a priori injunction must be somehow equivalent to a plea that ends remain invariable: consilia sunt servanda! [counsels are to be observed!]” [Claudio Gutiérrez. Epistemology and economics. Contribution to the logical analysis of economic theory. Ph.D. dissertation. Universidad de Costa Rica (University of Costa Rica). San José, Costa Rica. 1969. Page 224.]

“Prof. [Claudio] Gutiérrez in several places seems to think that an a priori statement must be deduced or known without ‘any help from experience,’ or without ‘close intercourse with experience.’ This may well be true with some definitions of ‘experience,’ but with the ordinary language understanding of the word ‘experience’ it is certainly not true. For instance, consider ‘all red objects are colored objects,’ a paradigm a priori statement. The truth of this statement most certainly cannot be known without any help from experience.” [Walter Block, “A comment on ‘the extraordinary claim of praxeology’ by Professor Gutiérrez.” Theory and Decision. Volume 3, 1973. Pages 377-387.]

“Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals. This concept of action contrasts to purely reflexive, or knee-jerk, behavior, which is not directed toward goals. The praxeological method spins out by verbal deduction the logical implications of that primordial fact. In short, praxeological economics is the structure of logical implications of the fact that individuals act. This structure is built on the fundamental axiom of action, and has a few subsidiary axioms, such as that individuals vary and that human beings regard leisure as a valuable good.” [Murray N. Rothbard, “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics.” The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics. Edwin Dolan, editor. Kansas City, Missouri: Sheed and Ward. 1976. Pages 19-39.]

“The radical subjectivism of the Austrian school of economics is a special case of [John] Dewey’s ways of knowing. Austrian economists adopted an Aristotelian deductive approach to economic issues such as social behavior and exchange. In Dewey’s contrasting view, the scientist commends new, alternative ways of knowing to the scientific community, offering more profound insight or more efficacious practical applications. Alternative ways of knowing which do not offer practical or intellectual benefits are to be rejected. Dewey’s transactional strategy, asserting knowledge as ways of knowing, suggests a broader and more fundamental critique of the socialist position in the calculation debate. The arguments presented by the Austrian school can be reformulated in terms of Dewey’s transactional philosophy.…

“The radical subjectivism of the Austrian school leads to the contradictory conclusion that the market knowledge of entrepreneurial planners, including consumer preferences, is subjective, but the scientific knowledge of economists is objective, at least provided it is correct. In other words, the knowledge of economics supposedly has the property that it may be objectively true or false, and purports to occupy a higher level of understanding than the subjective knowledge of market participants. Scientific knowledge asserts an ontological absolute.”

[Robert Mulligan, “Transactional Economics: John Dewey’s Ways of Knowing and the Radical Subjectivism of the Austrian School.” Education and Culture. Volume 22, number 2, 2006. Pages 61-82.]

“My sense is that there is an alternative [to capitalism], and that the reality of it is farther along than we suppose. When we can’t see this, it’s because we’ve left no room for it in our imagination. If it’s hard to talk about, it’s because it doesn’t yet have a name. I suggest we call it the generative economy. It’s a corner of the economy (hopefully someday much more) that’s not designed for the extraction of maximum financial wealth. Its purpose is to create the conditions for life. It does this through its normal functioning, because of the way it’s designed, the way it’s owned—like an employee-owned solar company.” [Marjorie Kelly. Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution. San Francisco, California: A BK Currents book imprint of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2012. Page 2.]

“Large corporate boats can operate only in designated areas. Instead of permitting limitless liberty to absentee owners for the seeking of wealth—by hired hands indifferent to local custom—Maine set spinning a new governing pattern. It operates by generative principles, like the principle that the right of extraction has limits. That the right to make a living comes before the right to make a killing. That fairness for the many is more important than maximizing by the few. That sustaining the prosperity of larger living systems, both human and wild, is the root condition for the flourishing of all. And that these new economic principles are to be grounded in governance of, by, and for the community. Fairness, sustainability, community: the fundamental values of the generative economy are all at work. Through design.” [Marjorie Kelly. Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution. San Francisco, California: A BK Currents book imprint of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2012. Page 138.]

“Set aside for a moment the task of trying to imagine the entire world embodying a generative economy; the real world always departs from our ideals. The reality of democracy is far from ideal—but still the democratic values of liberty, justice, and equality remain our ideals. Where are the corollary ideals in the world of the economy? The regulatory approach of stopping this or preventing that is not about ideals. That’s why few people burn with a zeal for regulation. We need regulation; we will always need it, and more of it. But it’s time to dream a deeper dream, the dream of an economy that is built around ideals like fairness, community, and sustainability—an economy that in its normal functioning tends to create fair and just outcomes, benefits the many rather than the few, and enables an enduring human presence on a flourishing earth.” [Marjorie Kelly. Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution. San Francisco, California: A BK Currents book imprint of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2012. Page 210.]

“The problem is in our internal maps, and rethinking these can require some vilification of outmoded views. But we must remember that we’re vilifying the value system of wealth discrimination—not the wealthy themselves. Respect for the right to attain wealth is integral to the American psyche. Many of us would like to acquire wealth one day, and the possibility of doing so should remain open—though it should become broadly open, to employees as much as entrepreneurs, to community members as much as stockholders. And as we broaden the potential to attain wealth, we should also change the mechanism by which much concentration of wealth arises, which is inheritance.

“Wealth should not be dispersed entirely, as communism attempted to do. Communism aimed for equality of outcome, when the more proper remedy is equality of opportunity. Communist theory did correctly identify property (wealth) as the source of the problem, but in seeking to eliminate private property altogether, it eliminated incentive. Without the engine of self-interest, the system foundered.

“The point is not to do away with wealth but to change the system design that gives illegitimate power to wealth—just as in the fight against sexism, the point was not to do away with men but to change the system that gave illegitimate power to men.”

[Marjorie Kelly. The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy. San Francisco, California: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2003. Pages 103-104.]

“Political Economy has been called the dismal science, and as currently taught, is hopeless and despairing. But this, as we have seen, is solely because she has been degraded and shackled; her truths dislocated; her harmonies ignored; the word she would utter gagged in her mouth, and her protest against wrong turned into an indorsement of injustice. Freed, as I have tried to free her—in her own proper symmetry, Political Economy is radiant with hope.

“For properly understood, the laws which govern the production and distribution of wealth show that the want and injustice of the present social state are not necessary; but that, on the contrary, a social state is possible in which poverty would be unknown, and all the better qualities and higher powers of human nature would have opportunity for full development.”

“And, further than this, when we see that social development is governed neither by a Special Providence nor by a merciless fate, but by law, at once unchangeable and beneficent; when we see that human will is the great factor, and that taking men in the aggregate, their condition is as they make it; when we see that economic law and moral law are essentially one, and that the truth which the intellect grasps after toilsome effort, is but that which the moral sense reaches by a quick intuition, a flood of light breaks in upon the problem of individual life. These countless millions like ourselves, who on this earth of ours have passed and still are passing, with their joys and sorrows, their toil and their striving, their aspirations and their fears, their strong perceptions of things deeper than sense, their common feelings which form the basis even of the most divergent creeds—their little lives do not seem so much like meaningless waste.”

[Henry George. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry in the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1886. Page 503.]

“It is not merely the ease with which indirect taxes can be collected that urges to their adoption. Indirect taxes always enlist active private interests in their favor. The first rude device for making the collection of taxes easier to the governing power is to let them out to farm. Under this system, which existed in France up to the Revolution, and still exists in such countries as Turkey, persons called farmers of the revenue buy the privilege of collecting certain taxes and make their profits, frequently very large, out of the greater amount which their vigilance and extortion enable them to collect. The system of indirect taxation is essentially of the same nature.

“The tendency of the restrictions and regulations necessary for the collection of indirect taxes is to concentrate business and give large capital an advantage. For instance, with a board, a knife, a kettle of paste and a few dollars’ worth of tobacco, a competent cigar-maker could set up in business for himself, were it not for the revenue regulations. As it is, in the United States, the stock of tobacco which he must procure is not only increased in value some two or three times by a tax upon it; but before the cigar-maker can go to work he must buy a manufacturer’s license and find bonds in the sum of five hundred dollars.”

[Henry George. Protection or Free Trade: An Examination of the Tariff Question With Especial Regard to the Interests of Labor. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company. 1911. Page 75.]

“The whole weight of taxation would be lifted from productive industry. The million dollar manufactory, and the needle of the seamstress, the mechanic’s cottage, and the grand hotel, the farmer’s plough, and the ocean steamship, would be alike untaxed. All would be free to buy or sell, to make or save, unannoyed.

“Imagine this country with all taxes removed from production and exchange! How demand would spring up; how trade would increase; what a powerful stimulus would be applied to every branch of industry; what an enormous development of wealth would take place. Imagine this country free of taxation, with its unused land free to those who would use it! Would there be many industrious men walking our streets, or tramping over our roads in the vain search for employment?”

[Henry George. Our Land and Land Policy: Speeches, Lectures and Miscellaneous Writings. New York: Doubleday and McLure Company. 1901. Page 113.]

“The body politic is more obvious to our eyes, and, so to speak, makes more noise in our ears, than the unseen and silent body economic, from which it proceeds and on which it depends. Thus, in the intellectual development of mankind, it and its relations are noticed sooner and receive names earlier than the body economic. And the words so made part of our mental furniture, afterwards by their analogies furnish us with words needed to express the body economic and its relations when later in intellectual growth we come to recognize it. Thus it is that while the thing civilization must in the natural order precede the body politic or state, yet when in the development of human knowledge we come to recognize this thing, we take to express it and its relations words already in use as expressive of the body politic and its relations.

“But without at present pursuing further that record of the history of thought that lies in the meaning of words, let us endeavor to see whence comes the integration of men into a body economic and how it grows.”

[Henry George. The Science of Political Economy. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd. 1898. Page 28.]

“… [There] followed the mortal remains [of Henry George], mounted high upon a draped and garlanded funeral car, drawn by a double line of led horses. Behind came the vast, winding column of those, riding and walking, rich and poor, high and low, distinguished and unknown, who wished to pay homage to the dead man’s worth and high-born principles—moving along without pomp or demonstration, save only the fluttering of occasional trade union banners. Chief in the multitude were such as had personally known and talked with Henry George, who had accepted his teachings and were counted among the faithful. Now in the closing drama they followed their friend and leader, so eloquent in death that all the world seemed to reverence—gathering each present shifting scene, each past look and word, to leave as a priceless heritage to their furthermost posterity.” [Henry George, Jr. The Life of Henry George: By His Son Henry George, Jr. New York: Doubleday and McLure Company. 1900. Page 610.]

“Commitment to a Georgist program of public finance could have long-run welfare implications exceeding those described by the previous section. We consider a shift in expectations that discourages investment in land even after the George tax is repealed. Now, when calculating the net present value of land, the buyer considers not only the tax rate for the current period but his expectation for the tax rate in future periods as well. Under these assumptions, the effects of a Georgist tax remain even after repeal, but this distortion declines in time. The slower expectations are to adjust to sudden changes in the tax code, the longer the effect of the distortion. This would not be the worst case, though, as a drastic change in the tax code of this magnitude may fundamentally effect expectations about the social contract. Therefore we should direct our attention to the political economy effects of a Georgist tax.” [Zachary Gochenour and Bryan Caplan, “An entrepreneurial critique of Georgism.” Review of Austrian Economics. Volume 26, number 4, December 2013. Pages 483-491.]

“… ironic though it may appear, it is my contention that (if one excludes anarchism, which, advocating no government at all, need offer no theory on how to fund one) Georgism is the most consistently libertarian of all systems of political economy. Even a minimal state must be supported. So the question arises: Shall government, however limited, be supported by true taxes, even if light ones, which are imposed upon all forms of wealth, no matter how produced? Or shall it be supported by something that is not actually a true tax at all, but rather a charge for the use of a natural good in limited supply, the value of which is socially, not individually, produced? If society supports itself through a fund of its own creation (now largely siphoned off into the hands of privilege), the wealth created by individuals may be left to that extent in their own hands. What could be more libertarian than this?” [Robert V. Andelson, “Neo-Georgism.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Volume 63, number 2, April 2004. Pages 545-569.]

“George was dismissed by many economists and others as a quack, crank, radical, or whatever, garnering a favorable reception and attention by a relatively few true believers, but no mass of economists interested in the actual implementation of his ideas and policy. Yet a century ago George had a huge popular following both in the United States and abroad.

“In addition, the Georgian single tax was seen not only as an attack on property writ large, whereas it might have been seen as a defense of productive property, but as an ally of socialism, which attacked all private ownership of the means of production. The opposition to George, his policies, and his ideas was not entirely a casual affair.

“The opposition was also highly organized, not least by the Catholic Church, a major owner of land. Moreover, once the choice lands in the United States were taken into private ownership, the passivity of the majority was reinforced by what Thorsten Veblen called the vested interests in control of the media, the colleges and universities, the churches, the farm associations, and the political parties—together the principal organs of generating and spreading ideas.”

[Warren J. Samuels, “Why the Georgist Movement Has Not Succeeded: A Speculative Memorandum.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Volume 62, number 3, July 2003. Pages 583-592.]

“Does the land tax satisfy the Georgist principle of equality of opportunity to produce using natural resources? To the extent that the loss of occupation of a piece of property is a loss of opportunity for a person that cannot be compensated for in monetary terms, the payment of rent fails to satisfy the principle of equality of opportunity to produce using natural resources. It might be thought that insofar as rent payment equalizes monetary values it satisfies the principle by providing enough. In fact, however, the ability of the payment of rent to satisfy the principle of equality of opportunity to produce using natural resources is contingent. The contingency rests on the pattern of land holdings at the time of institution of the land tax. For that pattern might leave many with no land upon which to produce.” [Darrel Moellendorf, “World-ownership, self-ownership, and equality in Georgist philosophy.” International Journal of Social Economics. Volume 36, number 4, 2009. Pages 473-488.]

“[Henry] George thought it necessary to knock down both the wages fund doctrine and the Malthusian theory of population in order to show that neither provided a convincing account of the persistence of poverty amidst the growing affluence of an industrial civilization, the real reason being the growing rental share that leaves only a dwindling share going to wages and profits.” [Mark Blaug, “Henry George: rebel with a cause.” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. Volume 7, number 2, summer 2000. Pages 270-288.]

“Why should socializing all or most of either land or rent while concurrently reducing to the same degree the government’s levy on other property or income be characterized as ‘a socialist scheme’ any more than the usual, converse, practice? Any political system funded by compulsory payment is to that extent, by definition, socialistic.” [Robert V. Andelson, “On Separating the Landowner’s Earned and Unearned Increment: A Georgist Rejoinder to F.A. Hayek.” American Journal of Economics & Sociology. Volume 59, issue 1, January 2000. Pages 109-117.]

“Historically, Henry George played a significant role in the development of the characteristically British, non-Marxian variety of individualist and collectivist socialism. But no less significant was the role he played in the development and growth of the British Liberal party and of British Liberalism. In the Liberals’ program, the demand for land taxation, based on George’s analysis of the causes of poverty, was to play a tremendous role. And that politician who, more than anyone else, fought to place the land question foremost among the later policies of the Liberals was Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914).” [Michael Silagi and Susan N. Faulkner, “Henry George and Europe: George and His Followers Awakened the British Conscience and Started a New, Freer Society.” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Volume 50, number 2, April 1991. Pages 243-255.]

“… heterodox economic analyses of property law may offer property law a discourse that satisfies the competing considerations animating the field.…

“… liberated from the reductive requirements of abstract modeling—the hallmark of neoclassical economics’ scientific approach—heterodox economics self-consciously and transparently embeds its values and social philosophies into its descriptions and its prescriptions. Especially in an era in which voices in mainstream economics are paying increasingly sustained attention to heterodox economic substantive critiques, it is this latter quality that maintains the largely marginalized status of heterodox economics within contemporary economic thought. However, it is this latter quality that makes heterodox economics a viable candidate to relieve property law’s discontents.…

“… in liberating property from the methods, questions, and values presupposed by mainstream economics, it offers new horizons for the reconceptualization and reconciliation of property’s circular dilemmas.”

[Lua Kamál Yuille, “Toward a Heterodox Property Law and Economics.” Texas A&M Law Review. Volume 2, issue 3, article 9, 2015. Pages 489-500.]

“The regional agro-economic impacts of global neoliberalism can be felt across the levels of biocultural organization, down as far as the virion and molecule. The exploration of such connections may well be a cutting-edge question for the twenty-first century. A growing public- and animal-health literature suggests that current patterns of agro-economic exploitation raise the risk of a new pandemic, whether triggered by an RNA virus like Ebola or sars [severe acute respiratory syndrome], or by some other pathogen. Ecosystems in which ‘wild’ viruses are controlled by the rough-and-tumble of environmental stochasticity are being drastically streamlined by deforestation and plantation monoculture. Pathogen spillovers that once died out relatively quickly are now discovering chains of vulnerability, creating outbreaks of greater extent, duration and momentum. There is a possibility that some of these outbreaks may come to match the scale of 1918’s influenza pandemic, with a global reach and high rates of incapacitation and mortality.” [Rob Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, “Ebola’ Ecologies: Agro-Economics and Epidemiology in West Africa.” New Left Review. Series II, number 102, November–December 2016. Pages 1-13.]

“… we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living.” [Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hants, England: 0 Press. 2009. Page 2.]

“The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself.” [Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hants, England: 0 Press. 2009. Page 4.]

“Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? is a provocative account of the prevailing ideological conditions of contemporary capitalist society. It is a short polemical analysis of the powerful ideological grip that capitalism exerts on the collective psyche, destroying our capacity to imagine political alternatives. This is Fisher’s first book, but many readers may be familiar with his website, ‘k-punk,’ which brings radical criticism to bear on a broad range of cultural subjects and issues. The same wide-ranging eclecticism is evident in this book in which the author draws on a welter of examples and ideas from both ‘popular culture’ and ‘high theory’. Fisher’s style of exposition has a fast-paced, free-wheeling quality to it reminiscent of Slavoj Žižek’s writing – and, indeed, there is a Žižekian audaciousness to many of the ideas that Fisher puts forward.” [Ed Rooksby, “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?” Review article. Historical Materialism. Volume 20, number 1, 2012. Pages 222-231.]

“We have … regarded wages as consisting of the necessary subsistence of the workers and thus entering the system on the same footing as the fuel for the engines or the feed for the cattle. We must now take into account the other aspect of wages since, besides the ever-present element of subsistence, they may include a share of the surplus product. In view of this double character of the wage it would be appropriate. when we come to consider the division of the surplus between capitalists and workers, to separate the two component parts of the wage and regard only the ‘surplus’ part as variable; whereas the goods necessary for the subsistence of the workers would continue to appear, with the fuel, etc., among the means of production.” [Piero Sraffa. Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory. Bombay, India: Vora & Co, Publishers PVT. LTD. 1963. Page 10.]

“Everyday experience shows that a very large number of undertalings—and the majority of those which produce manufactured consumers’ goods—work under conditions of individual diminishing costs. Almost any producer of such goods, if he could rely upon the market in which he sells his products being prepared to take any quantity of them from him at the current price, without any trouble on his part except that of producing them, would extend his business enormously. It is not easy, in times of normal activity, to find an undertaking which systematically restricts its own production to an amount less than that which it could sell at the current price, and which is at the same time prevented by competition from exceeding that price. Business men, who regard themselves as being subject to competitive conditions, would consider absurd the assertion that the limit to their production is to be found in the internal conditions of production in their firm, which do not permit of the production of a greater quantity without an increase in cost. The chief obstacle against which they have to contend when they want gradually to increase their production does not lie in the cost of production—which, indeed, generally favours them in that direction—but in the difficulty of selling the larger quantity of goods without reducing the price, or without having to face increased marketing expenses.” [Piero Sraffa, “The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions.” The Economic Journal. Volume 36, number 144, December 1926. Pages 535-550.]

“One can only wonder what is the good of a quantity of capital or a period of production which, since it depends on the rate of interest, cannot be used for its traditional purpose, which is to determine the rate of interest.” [Piero Sraffa, “Production of Commodities: A Comment.” The Economic Journal. Volume 72, number 286, June 1962. Pages 477-479.]

“… only under conditions of equilibrium would there be a single rate; and that when saving was in progress there would at any one moment be many ‘natural’ rates, possibly as many as there are commodities; so that it would be not merely difficult in practice, but altogether inconceivable, that the money rate should be equal to ‘the’ natural rate.” [Piero Sraffa, “Money and Capital: A Rejoinder.” The Economic Journal. Volume 42, number 166, June 1932. Pages 249-251.]

“I claim that Sraffian economics, however rigorous in its use of the simultaneous equations method, the second of our three versions of mathematical rigor, is irrelevant to our understanding of the real world and, judging by its failure to draw any policy implications, is largely irrelevant to the major concerns of modern economists. I have in mind such issues as environmental pollution, poverty both at home and abroad, race and gender inequalities, the governance of corporate industry, and macroeconomic policies aimed at combating inflation or deflation. This is not a judgment based simply on my opinion, which is ultimately no better than yours. Relevance is not a matter for individual opinion but a social judgment of the community of professional economists. We assess that judgment by inspecting the professional literature, by citation counts, or by any of the other methods of bibliometrics.” [Mark Blaug, “The Trade-Off between Rigor and Relevance: Sraffian Economics as a Case in Point.” History of Political Economy. Volume 41, number 2, summer 2009. Pages 219-247.]

“Sraffian economics has had two main themes: a critique of neoclassical economics and the rehabilitation of the classical approach to political economy. The former reached its apex in the Cambridge Capital Controversies, in which the Sraffians won the war but lost the peace, but it is in the latter that we find the constructive aspects of Sraffian economics. Sraffian economics is perceived by Sraffians as a rehabilitation of the classical political economy of [Adam] Smith, [David] Ricardo, and [Karl] Marx. What the Sraffians get from classical political economy is a concentration on issues revolving around the production and dispersement of the social surplus and an interest in the determination of natural values (prices of production in Marxian terminology, long-term equilibrium prices in Marshallian). Methodologically, Sraffians follow one aspect of classical political economy—the use of abstract models and logical deductions as the main theoretical tools with which to devise theories. The historical analysis of classical political economy, which played such an important role in the thought of Smith and Marx, is relegated to a very minor role.” [Charles M. A. Clark, “An Institutionalist Critique of Sraffian Economics.” Journal of Economic Issues. Volume 26, number 2, June 1992. Pages 457-468.]

“[Piero] Sraffa makes it clear that he is referring to a capitalist economy when he says he concentrates his attention on the problem of ‘division of the surplus between capitalists and workers’ …. [Karl] Marx explicitly disregards capital and wages, as we have seen; and when he talks about the conditions of production he refers to a hypothetical ‘production in general.’ Sraffa shows that this abstraction is illicit; that, if we want to explain the value of goods as a phenomenon determined by the social conditions of production, we cannot leave out of consideration the class relationships instituted in the ‘value-creating process.’ And since these relationships can be defined only by reference to the specific mode of production within which they are given, it is not permissible to abstract from the mode of production in explaining the value of goods, nor is it permissible to disregard capital and wages.” [Ernesto Screpanti, “Sraffa after Marx: a new interpretation.” Review of Political Economy. Volume 5, number 1, January 1993. Pages 1-21.]

“Whenever we apply labor to the economy we generate a surplus of produced goods, but, loosely speaking, we also “use up” some of nature. This problem is invisible in the simple Sraffian model where the only primary input is homogeneous labor and there are no primary inputs from nature. We could continue to sidestep the problem even while recognizing that production uses natural resources if we stipulate that whenever we apply the entire labor force to the economy we never use up more of nature than is regenerated naturally during the year. This is essentially what would be the case if the world were still ‘empty,’ in the words of ecological economist Herman Daly, and therefore nature were infinitely bounteous compared to the magnitude of throughput generated by human economic activity.” [Robin Hahnel, “Environmental Sustainability in a Sraffian Framework.” Review of Radical Political Economics. OnlineFirst edition. August, 2016. Pages 1-12.]

“When, in February this year, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei [the Lincean Academy] had a large conference in Rome on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Piero Sraffa, they were celebrating the memory of an extraordinary intellectual, one who published remarkably little but significantly influenced contemporary economics, philosophy, and the social sciences. Sraffa’s intellectual impact includes several new explorations in economic theory, including a reassessment of the history of political economy (starting with the work of David Ricardo).…

“The ‘economist Sraffa’ is often separated out from his other roles. This is partly because Sraffa was professionally an economist, but also because his economic contributions seem, at least superficially, to stand apart from his philosophical ideas. Even though he published only a few articles and one book, apart from editing David Ricardo’s works, Sraffa is also a much-cited author in economics.”

[Amartya Sen, “Sraffa, Wittgenstein, and Gramsci.” Journal of Economic Literature. Volume 41, number 4, December 2003. Pages 1240-1255.]

“If choice is originative, it can be effective, it can give a thrust to the course of things intended to secure its ends. In order to secure its ends, choice must apply a knowledge of what will be the consequence of what. But the sequel of an action chosen by one man will be shaped by circumstance, and its circumstances will include the actions chosen now and actions to be chosen in time to come by other men. If, therefore, choice is effective, it is unpredictable and thus defeats, in some degree, the power of choice itself to secure exact ends. This is the human predicament.…

“There are two questions which the chooser of action must ask himself: (1) how do these rival answers compare with each other when I consider them as things desirable or undesirable, regardless of their seeming power, or lack of it, to come true; (2) how do they compare in respect of their seeming power to come true? We shall refer to these two comparisons as those of desiredness and standing. When the source of desiredness or its opposite is of some special kinds, it will be possible for the action-chooser to say not only that he prefers one answer to another, but by how much, in terms of some unit meaningful to him.”

[G. L. S. Shackle, “Decision: The Human Predicament.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Volume 412, March 1974. Pages 1-10.]

“When all life’s questions are answered for any one of us, life itself will surely have ceased to hold for him any interest or purpose. Are we then to say that so long as a man finds a theory interesting he does not yet believe in it ? And if we constrict the notion of belief to this extreme degree, are we therefore to forbid him to act upon, teach, or think with any theory that he still finds interesting? An absurd and artificial dilemma, perhaps you will say. But if it be once admitted that a theory which we take invariably, absolutely, and unquestioningly for granted, and which we regard ourselves as having explored to the uttermost so that all its implications, and the consequences of acting on it, are known, could have no power of stimulating thought and indeed would be incapable of being any longer the object of thought, it follows of necessity that all the theories which have any active role in an economist’s mental life and in his work must be ones that he can still cast doubt upon, can question and suspect, can feel to be incompletely worked out, and to hold unknown possibilities for good or evil when used as the basis of policy.” [G. L. S. Shackle, “Economics and Sincerity.” Oxford Economic Papers. Volume 5, number 1, March 1953. Pages 1-12.]

“I believe it is sometimes said that if we are to be able to claim that a given variable is cardinal, we must provide it with a unit interval and a zero point. If, by the nature of what we seek to measure, only one possible unit and only one possible zero point offer themselves, cardinality is complete. For some purposes, however, we shall be content, on a certain condition, with a lesser cardinality in which those two elements can be arbitrarily chosen; this condition is that the expression of a given magnitude in terms of one pair of these elements can always be re-expressed in terms of any other pair merely by a linear transformation.” [G. L. S. Shackle, “Expectation and Cardinality.” The Economic Journal. Volume 66, number 262, June 1956. Pages 211-219.]

“By expectational vista I mean the entire assemblage of conjectures or assumptions about future situations which exists in the mind of an individual at any moment. Let us assume that these expectations specify the values which a number of variables will assume at certain fixed dates, and are not concerned with the non-quantitative aspects of events or situations. A ‘situation’ thus means a set of specific values of certain variables.” [G. L. S. Shackle, “Expectations and Employment.” The Economic Journal. Volume 49, number 195, September 1939. Pages 442-452.]

“Decision … is choice, but it is choice amongst thoughts. Before a man can choose a course of action he must imagine the possible, the available courses. Before he can know which to choose he must imagine, for each such course, as many as he can of its possible outcomes. Decision involves imagination, it is an act of imagination, it is choice amongst the products of imagination. The apparent power, precision and penetration of the modern mathematical and statistical techniques of choice are in themselves a testimony to this elusiveness of the objects of choice. To call them objects is, indeed, itself misleading. They are figments. My first proposition is that decision is choice amongst the products of imagination.” [G. L. S. Shackle, “Policy, Poetry and Success.” The Economic Journal. Volume 76, number 304, December 1966. Pages 755-767.]

“What is left of the distinction between rational conduct? Conduct is judged, by an outside observer, to have been rational when it has brought consequences which, at the moment of experiencing them, the individual finds superior to any others he now judges he could have secured. Does this mean that, in any other case, his conduct at some earlier date was ‘mistaken’? By what right does the later moment claim jurisdiction over the earlier? The earlier had its own enjoyments by anticipation towards which, in their actuality at the moment of decision, the later moment can contribute nothing and from which its conflicting evaluation has the right to detract nothing. The two moments are eternally exclusive ofe ach other and wholly incomparable. Rationality means something only for for the outside observer.” [G. L. S. Shackle, “Time and Thought.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Volume 9, number 36, February 1959. Pages 285-298.]

“In making decisions over the assignment of legal rights, the polity often profoundly influences the capacity of individuals and firms to participate in the market. Market forces are channeled by a legal power structure—a structure that was typically the source of conflict and reworked out in policy process. The assignment of legal rights is one determinant of who has power and who is exposed to this power (i.e., vulnerable to being injured). For example, if the upstream polluter has the right to dump toxic waste in the river, and acts in accordance with this right, then injury is inflicted on the downstream pollutee; if the downstream pollutee has the right to clean water, then the burden of having to dispose of the toxic waste is visited on the upstream polluter.” [Richard M. Dawson, “The Shacklean Nature of Commons’s Reasonable Value.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Volume 17, number 1, autumn 1994. Pages 33-44.]

“[G. L. S.] Shackle has consistently criticized economists for not presenting the assumptions underlying the concept of ‘time’ which they are using. ‘Time’ is a concept that is usually neglected even in methodological discussions. Neoclassical economics, particularly, has treated this problem in a rather light way, approaching time as just another ‘space dimension.’

“The importance of an unambiguous statement on the concept of time cannot be exaggerated. Until one deals explicitly with the concept of time one cannot analyze the concept of changes in the economic system.”

[Fernando Carvalho, “On the Concept of Time in Shacklean and Sraffian Economics.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Volume 6, number 2, winter 1983–1984. Pages 265-280.]

“… I will introduce what I have dubbed an ontology of socialism, which is derived from Marxist political economy, and outline its three core principles.…

“… socialism constitutes a non-reified economy in which the responsibility for organising human material life is vested in human beings themselves, and that material reproduction is managed for concrete human purposes.…

“… socialism demands the de-commodification of human labour power without the reinstatement of extra-economic compulsion.…

“… the re-entrenchment of the use value dimension of socio-material life.”

“… If there is one signal conception animating the ontology of socialism it is the view that contrary to a hitherto received Marxist convention, a genuine socialism is not institutionally prefigured by capitalism, but in its most fundamental incarnation is to be approached as the antithesis or institutional opposite of capitalism.”

[Richard Westra, “Marxian economic theory and an ontology of socialism: a Japanese intervention.” Capital & Class. Volume 26, number 3, autumn 2002. Pages 61-85.]

“Econophysics has successfully utilized four powerful tools from physics to explain economic and financial behaviour: (1) non-linearity, (2) scaling properties, (3) statistical mechanics and (4) the Cauchy and Levy distributions. These tools have more robustly described many types of economic and financial behaviours (such as income and wealth) than the Gaussian distribution; and further, econophysical models have been able to describe many ‘nooks and crannies’ of economic and financial behaviour which heretofore have not been able to be modelled by traditional economic and financial tools.” [Russ Ray, “Econophysics: finance, economics and physics.” Applied Economics Letters. Volume 18, number 3, February 2011. Pages 273-277.]

“… the author does not claim to be able to predict the arrival of shocks and dislocations in financial assets. Instead behavioural econophysics attempts to model traders’ reactions to profits and losses incurred due to shocks. After a release of economic indicators, those traders caught on the wrong side are often forced to change the direction of their positions due to the use of leverage that grossly amplifies losses, breaching their risk limits.” [Christopher A. Zapart, “Econophysics: A challenge to econometricians.” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. Volume 419, February 2015. Pages 318-327.]

“… while econophysicists have made strong claims about the superiority of their approaches, even going so far as to argue that econophysics should replace standard economics as such, the critics have argued that there have been some serious flaws in much econophysics work, including ignorance of relevant work in economics, inappropriate use of statistics, excessive and unwarranted assertions of finding universal laws, and a failure to provide adequate theory for the models used. Again, as with the complexity debate, points made by both sides are found to have some reasonableness.” [J. Barkley Rosser, “Econophysics and Economic Complexity.” Advances in Complex Systems. Volume 11, number 5, October 2008. Pages 745-760.]

“This so-called ‘interacting agents hypothesis’ leads naturally to comparison with complex systems science, and models from statistical physics and condensed matter physics. A central idea there is that in complex systems (very roughly, systems with vast numbers of strongly, nonlinearly interacting parts) there are properties (of the unit complex system) that are determined by the parts’ interactions, and do not depend on the specific properties of the parts. This leads to the possibility of having apparently unrelated systems behaving in similar ways: the properties are then said to be ‘universal.’ The idea here, then, is that financial systems are complex systems and can be described using the same models and concepts from other complex systems theories. For this reason many econophysicists view their subject as ‘the statistical physics of financial markets’ or the study of ‘financial market complexity.’” [Dean Rickles, “Econophysics for philosophers.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Volume 38, issue 4, December 2007. Pages 948-978.]

“Econophysics, created outside economics by physicists from statistical physics, studies economic phenomena, and more specifically financial markets, usingvarious models and concepts imported from condensed matter and statistical physics. This recent approach is often presented as a field between physics and economics, and more particularly financial economics …. Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity refer to different levels of integration of several disciplines. Analyzing these types of integration, this article shows that despite the fact that econophysics is regularly described as an interdisciplinary approach, it is in fact a multidisciplinary field. Beyond this observation, we note that recent developments suggest that econophysics could evolve towards a more integrated field.” [Christophe Schinckusa and Franck Jovanovic, “Towards a transdisciplinary econophysics.” Journal of Economic Methodology. Volume 20, number 2, June 2013. Pages 164-183.]

“Econophysics, which emerged over a decade ago, applies various models and concepts associated with statistical physics to economic (and financial) phenomena. This new field of research generates a lot of methodological debates and it is often presented in the economic literature as a very fragmented discipline. Few methodological links between economics and econophysics have been emphasized in the literature (except the origins of scaling laws that were discovered by [Vilfredo] Pareto in his studies of the distribution of income in the upper reaches of society). This paper proposes a link by analyzing the methodological connections between econophysics and mainline theories of economic uncertainty.” [Christophe Schinckus, “Economic uncertainty and econophysics.” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. Volume 388, issue 20, October 2009. Pages 318-327.]

“… [An] active area of empirical investigation for econophysics has been industrial structure and its evolution. As with financial markets, large amounts of generally reliable data are available in this area, too. It should be said that some of the econophysics literature is perhaps less original and/or well established than physicists might appreciate. Decisive evidence on the right-skew distribution of firm sizes, for example, has been both available and well known in industrial economics for many years …. Plausible candidates in the economics literature to represent the empirical size distribution are the lognormal, the [Vilfredo] Pareto and the Yule. The main problem is in capturing the coverage of small firms. Recent attempts to do this, such as on the population of US firms, lend support to a power-law distribution linking firm sizes probability densities with the size ranking of firms. However, this may well be an as yet unexplained outcome of aggregation, because the findings seem not be robust with respect to sectoral disaggregation. A more decisive finding by econophysicists is that the variance of firm growth rates falls as firm size increases, although this too was anticipated in the early 1960s.” [Mauro Gallegati, Steve Keen, Thomas Lux, and Paul Ormerod, “Worrying trends in econophysics.” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. Volume 370, issue 1, October 2006. Pages 1-6.]

“Econophysics tools have developed in the context of physical theories that predict certain aggregate properties, and so focus on the measurement of these properties. The utility of these tools for the social sciences is, however, limited by the fact that they were developed in very different empirical contexts than those that face a social scientist. Social scientists often employ data sets of limited size, which raise issues of the accuracy of estimates that do not arise in natural science contexts.” [Steven N. Durlauf, “Complexity, economics, and public policy.” Politics, Philosophy & Economics. Volume 11, number 1, February 2012. Pages 45-75.]

“Bioeconomic work to date falls into two broad groups. Work by most economists looks to rational choice as paradigm. In contrast, many biologists and sociobiologists utilize a broader notion of survival value, which incorporates rational choice as a subset.…

“Bioeconomics is a one-factor theory based on hierarchy, which can exlain both economics and politics. In bioeconomics, the strong dominate the weak, economically, politically and socially. Experiments have shown that when, say, 20 chickens are placed together for the first time, they engage in vigorous combat for about an hour until the pecking order is determined, from 1 to 20. Thereafter, when conflicts arise, each chicken typically defers to superior chickens and dominates inferior chickens. The pecking order is much more than a social process.”

[Stephen P. Magee, “Bioeconomics and the Survival Model: The Economic Lessons of Evolutionary Biology.” Public Choice. Volume 77, number 1, September 1993. Pages 117-132.]

“The early literature in bioeconomics was concerned with the open access harvest of common-pool fishery resources as well as their optimal management. While it may be difficult to imagine, as late as 1945 many believed marine fishery resources to be effectively unlimited in absolute terms and only limited in availability due to cost constraints …. With the growth of industrial fishing in the post World War II era, this belief quickly gave way to an understanding that fish stocks could indeed be overfished, triggering the need for scientists and managers to understand this phenomenon. Early bioeconomic models began to emerge in this context as a means to understand the role of rent or profit seeking in the overexploitation of a common-pool renewable resource. The economic history of whaling, sealing, and fishing provided motivation for early bioeconomic work with many examples of resource depletion and occasionally extinction.” [Jon M. Conrad and Martin D. Smith, “Nonspatial and Spatial Models in Bioeconomics.” Natural Resource Modeling. Volume 25, number 1, February 2012. Pages 52-92.]

“In this article, our aim is not to attempt another definition of the anticipated or promised transformative restructuring represented by the so-called bioeconomy. It is instead to look at how science and technology studies (STS) scholars have gone about theorizing the bioeconomy and to critique some of the ‘bio-concepts’ that they have come up with. We are interested in how they have gone about thinking/rethinking the relationship between the life sciences and their capitalization.” [Kean Birch and David Tyfield, “Theorizing the Bioeconomy: Biovalue, Biocapital, Bioeconomics or … What?” Science, Technology, & Human Values. Volume 38, number 3, May 2013. Pages 299-327.]

“Bioeconomics is the discipline originating from the synthesis of biology and economics. It is an attempt to bridge, through the concept of holism and interdisciplinary methodology, the empirical culture of biology and the literary culture of economics and thus finish with … ‘the two cultures.’ Bioeconomics is a paradigmatic shift in the development of the economy-environment disciplines such as natural resource economics, environmental economics and ecological economics. The paradigm shift is really an endeavour to make the invisible visible: in the case of bioeconomics the aim is to make visible all the weaknesses of the socioeconomic activity based on the neoclassical theory and the competitive capitalist ideology.” [Younes Nademi, “BioEconomics and NanoEconomics.” Advances in Environmental Biology. Volume 5, number 9, 2011. Pages 2611-2613.]

“Human social organization has evolved with the purpose of resolving or minimizing conflicts between members of the community. Successful economic development obviously relies upon such social organization. The problem of devising social institutions that reduce conflict without destroying individual freedom and initiative, or establishing privileged classes, is one of the main themes of history.

“In the case of marine resources, the evolution of conflict-reducing institutions is still at an early, trial-and-error stage. In view of the increasing economic importance of these resources, delays in establishing effective institutions are especially unfortunate.”

[Colin W. Clark, “Bioeconomics of the Ocean.” BioScience. Volume 31, number 3, March 1981. Pages 231-237.]

“International development economics arose to address the problems of misery and suffering of the ‘underdeveloped areas’ of the world as part of the ‘Fair Deal’ that President Harry Truman in his inaugural address in 1949 announced for the entire world. But it really came to its own in the 1960s with the decolonization of the countries of Africa that then became members of the United Nations. The newly-independent countries of Africa with the countries of Asia, independent since World War II, and the nations of Latin America, independent since the 19ᵗʰ century, would be grouped together and known as the Third World. The United Nations designated the 1960s as the Development Decade, and the United States under President John F. Kennedy for its part launched the Alliance for Progress. In the sixty-year history of international development economics, various goals and objectives have been proposed and posited as ends to be pursued by development policies, programs, and efforts.

“International development ethics addresses and assesses value assumptions and ethical questions that underlie development goals, ends, and means, especially in the Third World/Global South. It explains, justifies, applies, and extends ethical reflection on development policies, projects, and institutions from the local and national to the regional and global levels.”

[M. D. Litonjua, “International Development Economics and the Ethics of the Preferential Option for the Poor.” Journal of Third World Studies. Volume 30, number 1, spring 2013. Pages 87-119.]

“… the primary focus is on non-capitalist spaces within the global political economy, with a particular empirical focus on Oaxaca in southern Mexico …. Rather than examining how it has been that capitalism has managed to survive, grow and prosper, the article explores how non-capitalist spaces remain and why they should be considered important for transformative activity. The contention will be that the survival and reinvention of noncapitalist social practices and spaces have created a barrier to the further expansion of capital, and are now providing inspiration for alternative developmental trajectories. This has presaged intensified forms of social conflict between the state and indigenous peoples …. To be clear, the wider socio-economic setting in which these non-capitalist practices are situated and re-created is not dismissed. Instead, these are viewed as the dialectically related product of unevenly exercised hegemony. Whilst non-capitalism is inevitably subjected to structural the influence of capitalism, the danger in focusing overwhelmingly on the dynamics of capital is explicitly acknowledged.” [Chris Hesketh, “The survival of non-capitalism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Volume 34, number 5, October 2016. Pages 877-894.]

“Economic Imperialism is the claim of some economists that the methodology of neoclassical economics has superior scientific qualities and should be adopted by most or all social sciences. The paper first shows why such a dominant claim could develop among economists but in no other science and then goes on to point out the shortcomings of this claim of methodological superiority. These critical remarks are also relevant for methodological controversies within economics between a mainstream and heterodox economists.…

“In fact one can distinguish between two forms of Economic Imperialism (EI). A milder form, sometimes called the ‘economic approach’, which recommends the application of the neoclassical method in all social sciences but admits that other basic methods may be useful too, and ‘economic imperialism’ in a narrower sense which looks at the economic method as the only or at least most dominant path for scientific discovery.”

[Kurt W. Rothschild, “Economic Imperialism.” Analyse & Kritik. Volume 30, 2008. Pages 723-733.]

“The methodology – or better: the methodologies – employed by economists have proved to be powerful instruments for building valuable theoretical models and deriving useful explanations and predictions. There is no doubt that other social sciences can benefit from applying these methods in some of their problems. But they are not very helpful in ail social sciences and in all situations (including several fields in economics.) At the same time there is no doubt that economists can (and do) learn a lot from the research and research methodologies in other social of sciences. There is no sensible basis for advocating ‘Economic Imperialism.’ With a research free of methodological bias the different approaches in all sciences can act as a ‘box of tools’ from which those specimens can be chosen which seem to be best suited for the problems and situations under consideration.” [Kurt W. Rothschild, “A Note on ‘Economic Imperialism.’” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik / Journal of Economics and Statistics. Volume 221, number 4, July 2001. Pages 440-447.]

“… [The] special methodological achievement and the considerable insights it can provide for many aspects of the market process which is responsible for the inhibitions of neoclassical economics to open itself without prejudice to important additional factors. This concerns not only the power problem but also numerous other sociological and psychological phenomena like institutions, bounded rationality, fairness, and solidarity. Not only is there a reluctance to accept important insights from other social sciences, there exists also an economic arrogance expressed in ‘economic imperialism’ which urges the other social sciences to copy the methods of neoclassical economics because it alone is declared to be ‘scientific.’” [Kurt W. Rothschild, “The absence of power in contemporary economic theory.” Journal of Socio-Economics. Volume 31, number 5, 2002. Pages 433–442.]

“Economics must, by the very nature of its subject, be a multi-paradigmatic science. If some questions and areas permit the use of highly sophisticated closed models, so much the better. But there is no need to put these above less axiomatic and more open theories and models which offer better approaches to certain fields. The belief in a hierarchy of theories based on formal ‘scientific’ qualities lies behind the excesses of ‘economic imperialism within economics itself and stretching beyond it.’ Such attitudes carry the danger that more promising avenues are overlooked or deliberately bypassed.” [Kurt W. Rothschild, “To RAP or not to RAP, is that the question?: Reflections on a book by Melvin Reder.” Journal of Economic Studies. Volume 29, number 6, 2002. Pages 439-445.]

“In this article, we argue that the project of an egalitarian market economy should be the foundation of left political economy. In recent years some intellectuals on the Left have supported the role of markets as a (comparatively) efficient mechanism for allocating scarce resources but argue that this should still be combined with full public ownership of productive assets. Such proposals would not however realize the full potential of an egalitarian market economy. We argue that, in seeking to pursue efficiency and greater equality, a left programme should promote the broadest possible individual ownership of productive assets as well as new collective ways of monitoring and controlling the ways in which they are managed.” [Andrew Gamble and Gavin Kelly, “The New Politics of Ownership.” New Left Review. Series I, number 220, November–December 1996. Pages 62-97.]

“President Xi Jinping [习近平, Xí-Jìnpíng] has emphasized the need to uphold and develop a Marxian political economy for the twenty-first century, adapted to China’s needs and resources. The bulletin of a conference on China’s economy of the Communist Party central committee, held in December 2015, accordingly stressed the importance of eight major principles of ‘socialist political economy with Chinese characteristics.’ These principles and their applications are discussed below, along with some comments on their varying interpretations among Chinese intellectuals. We hope to clarify the official theoretical model behind China’s economic ‘miracle,’ using the terms and concepts prevalent in China today.

[Cheng Enfu and Ding Xiaoqin, “A Theory of China’s ‘Miracle’: Eight Principles of Contemporary Chinese Political Economy.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 68, issue 8, January 2017. Pages 46-57.]

“Sado-monetarism threatens health in other ways. Because the purpose of this branch of Procrusteanism is intended to aid the rich at the expense of the poor, nobody should be surprised that it is associated with increases in both poverty and inequality. Richard Wilkinson is at the center of a rich literature that identifies the negative health effects of inequality. Here again, the causal link is stress, which inequality spreads throughout society. This stress harms the rich as well as the poor, suggesting further evidence of the dysfunctionality of capitalism, even by the standards of its intended beneficiaries.

“Even though traumatization may harm the rich as well as the poor, the initial impact of a sado-monetarist tightening of the economy strikes the jobs of low-wage workers, pushing people who were just getting by into destitution. Over and above stress-related maladies, the poor often live crowded together in unhealthy conditions without nearby sources of good food. Lack of access to quality medical care compounds the health threats of poverty.”

[Michael Perelman. The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers. New York: Monthly Review Press. 2011. Page 52.]

“Sado-monetarism is not so much a matter of monetary discipline, as most economists would have it, but of class discipline. In the 1960s, Harry Johnson, a conservative professor from the University of Chicago, writing in a journal dominated by the conservative perspective of his school, offered a shockingly honest evaluation of the class bias of monetary policy. ‘From one important point of view, indeed, the avoidance of inflation and the maintenance of full employment can be most usefully regarded as conflicting class interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, respectively, the conflict being resolvable only by the test of relative political power in the society and its resolution involving no reference to an overriding concept of the social welfare.’” [Michael Perelman, “Sado-Monetarism: The Role of the Federal Reserve System in Keeping Wages Low.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Volume 63, issue 11, April 2012. Pages 27-35.]

“Research examining radical economic subjectivity processes involved in creating alternative economies remains extremely scarce.…

“One’s perspective on radical economic subjectivity processes will be influenced by how one views economic globalization. If local context is seen as subordinate to larger structures then it follows that the resistant subject will likely not see context as being important to building economic alternatives. This occurs within the conventional political economy literature, which also has the tendency to homogenize the impacts of global political economy upon people’s lives. The global is seen to contain and define the local ….

“In terms of radical economic subjectivity processes, this disparate literature raises numerous questions as to the relationship between the radical economic subject and the state.”

[Julie Steinkopf Rice, Emily R. Cummins, and Aprildawn Willeford, “Crossing Borders: Building Radical Economic Subjectivities along the USA/Mexico Border from Sites of Privilege.” Critical Sociology. Volume 37, issue 6, November 2011. Pages 721-737.]

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