![Review of Eric Helleiner, Stefano Pagliari and Hubert Zimmerman (editors), Global Finance in Crisis: The Politics of International Regulatory Change, Routledge, 2010, pp. 216](/api/image/getissuecoverimage?id=picture_2012_47074.jpg)
We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Financial stability features prominently among the goals of several postcrisis macroeconomic policies around the world. Being a systemic characteristic, financial stability requires a systemic analysis, which only macroeconomics can offer logically. Yet, the current way of doing macroeconomics is not up to the task, as it is grounded on socalled microfoundations. Considering macroeconomics as the science of aggregating data obtained at microeconomic level can lead indeed to conclusions that are either misleading or wrong. This paper points out that the true foundations of macroeconomics are macroeconomic, and that understanding the working of monetary economies of production and exchange requires a conceptual rather than a mathematical treatment of economic issues at a systemic level.
More...
Practicing academic economists are reported to pay little attention to work being done by economic methodologists. This is an unfortunate situation for the subfield of economic methodology as well as for the discipline of economics at large. If the subfield of economic methodology does not succeed in communicating with practitioners of the larger discipline of which it is a part, its rationale is seriously brought into question. And when practitioners of a scientific discipline do not pay heed to methodological questions, the discipline is destined to stagnation and possible degeneration.In order to contribute to an amelioration of the noted unfortunate state of affairs, this paper argues the case for purposeful philosophically informed approaches through which economic methodologists may prove themselves helpful and valuable to the practitioners of the discipline. A scheme of descriptivecritical analyses of economic texts is set forth as a means of enhancing academic economists’ awareness of, and interest in, philosophical questions embedded in, and vital to, their practices. Moreover, it is argued, and exemplified, how philosophically minded methodologists may contribute constructively to processes directed towards establishing and developing economic theories and analyses.
More...
This paper draws upon the scholarship of interdisciplinarity to argue that Economics, like all disciplines, should be open to a wide range of theories and methods, and the study of all relevant phenomena. A classification of the different methods and theory types used by scholars identifies key strengths and weaknesses of each. Different schools of heterodox [that is, non-neoclassical] economics, as well as neoclassical economics itself, emphasize different sets of theory and method. Each thus has a unique contribution to make to a holistic understanding of the economy. At present, different heterodox schools, like neoclassical economics itself, tend to act as if it were thought that their theory and method were superior. This paper urges a quite different attitude: different heterodox schools, as well as neoclassical economics, should be seen as complements rather than substitutes. That is, the insights of different schools of thought within Economics can and should be integrated just as disciplinary insights are integrated within interdisciplinary scholarship. The classification also identifies valuable theory types not presently embraced by any heterodox approach. Heterodoxy needs also to embrace the causal linkages between economic and diverse non-economic phenomena; the paper outlines a strategy for organizing the complex understandings that emerge from such a project. Some might recoil at the complexity of an academic enterprise that embraces such a wide range of phenomena, theory, and method; this paper shows how these diverse investigations can be organized in terms of the classifications presented such that all economists could readily appreciate the contributions of others. The paper also makes suggestions regarding the daily practice of heterodox economists, and draws lessons for heterodoxy from interdisciplinary research practice.
More...
Until recently, the “intellectual” was a figure associated with many myths. Karl Marx abandoned a career as a bourgeois academic and journalist to become a permanent political exile; György Lukács gave a pen to a KGB officer, after he had been asked to lay down arms; Kuroń and Modzelewski wrote a “Letter to the Party,” and as a result they spent years in prison; Sartre declined the Nobel Prize… Now the figure of the intellectual is dead. The contemporary Polish academic could not be more distant from this topos. The contemporary Polish academic is a conformist and careerist producing articles in the same way a factory worker produces commodities. However, in contrast to the latter, the former is unable either to reflect on or to fight for anything, even himself. But although bourgeois economists believe that “There has been history, but there is no longer any” and will be content to convert intellectuals into wage labourers, history is only just beginning. Total alienation, the subsuming of the faculty of thought to the accumulation of capital, demands total rebellion.
More...
The previous three essays (Jennings 2019) and the first in this second series were originally drafted 30 years ago in 1988-1990. They aimed to present a more realistic concept of choice in economics. These four essays serve as a precursor to my subsequent work. The first three essays (Jennings 2019) addressed these issues. Essay One started with the notion of ‘opportunity cost’ and the ‘problem of invisibility’ as a case for open discourse. The second essay introduced two metaphors for economic behavior: the ‘neighborhood store’ and the ‘chessboard’, to raise issues of incomplete knowledge, time and social process. The third essay focused on interdependence: a ‘transport’ metaphor shows a balance of substitution and complementarity, opening institutional questions of competition and cooperation. These three essays set up an ethical theory of planning horizons. The fourth essay outlines a theory of ethics based on rational bounds. The endless interdependence of choice makes rational limits essential; surprises show the border of prior awareness of radiant outcomes. Our ethics align private with social incentives; wherever relations show affinity, competition is self-defeating: cooperation is more efficient, especially in education. Learning extends horizons, suggesting the failure of rivalrous systems. How incentives shape planning horizons is central to social well-being. The fifth essay develops this view with regard to institutions. Where substitution is not the basic character of our relations, competition fails. We see rivalry as productive and think ‘collusion’ is suspect, on an assumption of opposition with no room for consilient aims. But am I discomfited by your success or enriched thereby? Substitution may not be so general, if cooperation expands our horizons in a complementary way. The sixth essay poses a horizonal research agenda. How incentives shape behavior is central to well-being. Substitution and competition lead to fragmentation, when nothing complete can be understood through isolated design. Everything connects, so we must approach understanding thus. Economics – severed from honor, ethics, civilization, climate and ecological loss – cannot grasp these horizonal issues. Our short attention spans bring harm; competitive frames support a myopic culture in self-destruct mode. This is where substitution has failed; a cultural evolution is needed, starting with realistic concepts of choice.
More...
A universal grammar of economic explanations is characterized by the means-end rationality principle, which can be understood by drawing a conceptual distinction between its two facets: theoretical abstraction and empirical content. The former serves as a pure form of economic way of thinking and thus delimits the capacities of economists to perceive and understand the manifold human behaviour. The latter provides economists with objects of thought and renders the discipline empirically relevant. Given the implications of the two facets of rationality, the main task of economics as a descriptive science is to incorporate appropriate empirical content into the pure rational framework with the aim of better explaining and predicting human behaviour. As a prescriptive science, economic inquiry should draw on the persuasion and communication skills of its practitioners, thereby influencing the state of the economy through changing the means and ends of the decision makers in question.
More...
Nordhaus’ contribution to climate change economics is well-known and, for many, praiseworthy. But his refusal to acknowledge his normative stances is philosophically problematic. This article explores his arguments about philosophy in the economics of climate change found in his review of the Stern’s Review (2007). It concludes that Nordhaus nonetheless relies on normative, ethical assumptions, whose oversight hinders the finding of a solution to the problems he tries himself to solve.
More...
Drawing upon the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari this essay puts forth the argument that in finance capitalism debt resolution performs as an elusive promise and an appearance that re-constitutes unpayable debt. A close elaboration on Nietzsche’s conceptual cartographies of the relation between the flows of Apollo and Dionysus and on the contextualization of this relation within capitalist frames that, as this essay demonstrates, Deleuze and Guattari explore in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus contributes to the argument that in finance capitalism unpayable debt is performatively constituted through illusions of debt resolution. To date little work offers a performative approach of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the differential relation between the two flows of capital that constitute unpayable debt, including the ties between these flows and Nietzsche’s grasp of the differential relation between Apollo and Dionysus. As a result the performative strategies that constitute, justify, and reproduce unpayable debt in finance capitalism remain relatively unexplored. This essay draws upon the works of Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari and adds a performative methodology on the ongoing discussions on debt in order to address the practices that infinitize debt under the gaze of financial capital.
More...
In Marx’s thought, is ‘law of value’ a particular law of capitalism (historicism) or a general law of the economy (naturalism)? To clarify this ambiguity, this article proposes to employ the social ontology of Cornélius Castoriadis. For it, ‘labour’ is not a substance, but a recent historical creation through which, finally, the capitalist mode of production expresses a fundamental truth about all society’s way of being. From this perspective, we explore some consequences of this deconstruction for the theory of value as current neo-Marxist approaches may employ it today in their economic analyses.
More...
In today‘s context, the title implies taking the pandemic as the proof of the weak/at least disputable capacity of humans to control the world. However, as the pandemic as such is not a simple biological phenomenon but a social-biological one, so the above implication is false because the humans do not constitute a homogenous entity in front of nature/the pandemic. The multiple social divisions explain both that the responsibility for the creation of the pandemic is not the same for all humans (and was not, even much before the pandemic), and that the consequences of the pandemic are not equally endured by all (and they have never been, even much before the pandemic), and nor is the problem of control of the world tackled in the same manner by all. Actually, the paper only sketches an investigation of the human control of the world rather echoing the coexistence of human brittleness with the societal conditions that weaken or strengthen/even create it. The reason of this sketch is that the control is the intentional aspect of human activities –and for humans this intentional aspect is related to values, and not only to adaptations made by the ―machine structure of life itself –and thus the direct results of the human intentions can be confronted with their broader and indirect consequences. And, because this relationship is mediated by knowledge, more precisely by science, the contradictions between various types of intentions and the present visible results of their consequent actions deny the festive image from different origins about the incontestable progress in the human control of the world. In this sense, the point is that fragmented advances in science and technology –regardless of the general use of their application –do not converge towards unitary, coherent and effective control of the world and even less towards human control. The capacity to control the world and the state of fragility of humans are mutual criteria, insomuch as they depend on the class and community membership of the individual. The dialectic of the individual‘s-community‘s-species‘ control in the world is highlighted. What does control mean –much beyond the well-known discussions about the original meanings of (the word) cybernetics –and what does human control mean are questions that the paper only opens.If some aspects of the style could suggest a ―manifesto highlighting a rough attitude towards the correlations analysed by the scientific research of the human-nature and human-human relationships it is because of the moment of world emergency challenging the solving of the contradictions which are not new but have entered the phase of uncontrollable storm. Generally, all the manifestos were based on the authors‘ belief that they responded to unique moments in the human history. The present article, contributing to the scientific demonstrations about the above relationships and the conditions of solving them, shows one of the conclusions of these demonstrations as feature of the present moment: that there is no longer time and space for further deploying the cognitive and social model that does not control the world emergency.
More...
The paper develops an argument for the criteria that a theory of ignorance should meet. It starts from the distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental action. Usually, the latter is considered irrational and the former rational as being based upon known cause-effect relations whilst the latter is not. I argue that the former requires a reasoned basis in predictive knowledge of cause and effect, without which good council is either for inaction or non-instrumental action. The argument proceeds by exploiting mainstream statistical methods to explore an example of a ‘metric of advised ignorance’ to guide explicit reasoned choice allowing rejection of instrumental action in favour of inaction or non-instrumental action. The argument then explores a case study of how such rejection is disallowed by official requirements in International Development Assistance (aid) that contexts must always be believed predictive and so action organised as instrumental. This shows the basic irrationality of mainstream policy rationality. The paper then discusses wider social epistemological issues of this irrationality and concludes with a list of criteria a theory of ignorance should meet.
More...
Pluralism in economics appears to be a double-edged sword: we need more than one theory to grasp and explain the entire economic world, yet a plurality of possible explanations undermines the aspiration of the economic discipline to provide ‘objective knowledge’ in the singular of the ‘one world one truth’ conception. Therefore, pluralism is often equated with relativism and obscurantism. In this article, I will explore both the demand for pluralism and the fear of relativism and obscurantism, scrutinising each position in order to evaluate their respective justification and devising a methodological proposal that may appease both the defender and the sceptic of economic pluralism.
More...
This essay serves as a response to Kurt Smith, who wrote a philosophical and historical commentary on my 2018 essay entitled ‘Crises, confidence and animal spirits: exploring subjectivity in the dualism of Descartes and Keynes’ in The Journal of Philosophical Economics. It also provides a rejoinder to my original commentary on the role of animal spirits in relation to dualism in the work of Descartes and Keynes. I address Smith’s historical-philosophical response to my work in three ways. First, I revisit Gilbert Ryle’s concept of the intellectualist legend with respect to understanding the Cartesian tradition of thought and expand upon my own exegetical approach in order to clear up the thorny issue of determining and asserting authorial intention. Second, I address the problem of establishing analogies between texts and disciplines. In order to do so I will revisit my earlier critique of the concept of ‘the Economy’ and show that, contra to Smith’s reading, it is not in fact analogous to Descartes’ ‘human being.’ Finally, I open up a fresh exploration of the nature of the relationship between economic rationality and economic system, looking at the broader economic vision of Keynes and some of his notorious opponents – Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
More...
Until the 1990s, the most used research and teaching materials for economists were print journal articles and print books. Since the Internet was commercialized in the 1990s, economists have used digital technologies in research and teaching. Journal articles and books are now more easily accessed. Online subscription systems allow economists to acquire electronic study and research materials in real time. Researchers can access a wealth of teaching and research materials freely and openly. In this essay [1], I focus on Wilfred Dolfsma and Ioana Negru’s The Ethical Formation of Economists (Dolfsma and Negru 2019) and claim that digital economics research requires a global understanding of ethics consistent with the values of scholarly practices. In the absence of scientific ethics, digital tools and software can harm the members of scholarly communities internationally and become a source of scientific misconduct. Economics should be taught as part of a system of scientific ethics.
More...