nep-hpe New Economics Papers on History and Philosophy of Economics
─────────────────────────────┐
Issue of 2019‒12‒09
28 papers chosen by
Erik Thomson (University of Manitoba)
http://ep.repec.org/pth72
[Selections by Humberto Barreto for SHOE list.]
1. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Eugenics and
Socialist Thought in the Progressive Era: The Case of James Medbery
Mackaye
Foresti, Tiziana
3. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - "Keynes, Mill
and Say's Law: A Comment on Professor Ahiakpor's Mistaken Defence of Mill"
Grieve, Roy H
4. American Gothic: How Chicago Economics Distorts `Consumer Welfare` in
Antitrust
Mark Glick
5. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - The
Environmental Turn in Natural Resource Economics: John Krutilla and
"Conservation Reconsidered"
Banzhaf, H. Spencer
6. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - READING KEYNES
AT THE ZERO LOWER BOUND: THE GREAT DEPRESSION, THE LIQUIDITY TRAP, AND
UNCONVENTIONAL POLICY
Sutch, Richard
7. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Keynes, Mill,
and Say’s Law: A Comment on Roy Grieve’s Mistaken Criticisms of Mill
Ahiakpor, James C.W.
9. “Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - The
Contribution of Robert Torrens to Ricardo’s Theory of Natural Wage”
Rosell, Olivier
10. Keynes Between the Classics and Sraffa: on the Issue of the Numéraire
M. Magnani
11. Journal of History of Economic Thought Preprints- Ricardo and
Ricardians on the Order of Culivation
, BIDARD
12. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Keynes, Public
Debt and the Complex of Interest Rates
Aspromourgos, Anthony
13. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Limits to
Arbitrage and Interest Rates: A Debate Between Keynes, Hawtrey and Hicks
BRILLANT, Lucy
14. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Hawtrey,
Austerity, and the "Treasury View," 1918-25
mattei, clara
15. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Sir James
Steuart on the Origins of Commercial Nations
Menudo, José M.
17. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Antonio De
Viti De Marco, the principle of minimum means, and political competition
Fossati, Amedeo; Montefiori, Marcello
18. How Behavioural Economics Relates to Psychology - Some Bibliographic
Evidence
Braesemann, Fabian
19. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Review of
Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left
Schumacher, Reinhard
21. The transformation of economic analysis at the Federal Reserve during
the 1960s
Acosta, Juan; Cherrier, Beatrice
22. Shortcomings of experimental economics to study human behavior: a
reanalysis of Cohn et al. 2014, Nature 516, 86–89, ‘‘Business culture and
dishonesty in the banking industry’’
Hupé, Jean-Michel
23. Dobrogea School of Economics
ARTENE, Alin
24. What is replication?
Nosek, Brian A.; Errington, Timothy M.
25. The ordinary business of macroeconometric modeling: working on the
Fed-MIT-Penn model (1964-1974)
Cherrier, Beatrice; Backhouse, Roger
26. A Happy Choice: Wellbeing as the Goal of Government
Frijters, Paul; Clark, Andrew E.; Krekel, Christian; Layard, Richard
27. Produire un fait scientifique: Beveridge et le Comité international
d'histoire des prix
Demade, Julien
28. Theories of the Causes of Poverty
Brady, David
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
1. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Eugenics and
Socialist Thought in the Progressive Era: The Case of James Medbery
Mackaye
Foresti, Tiziana
The article proposes an analysis of James MacKaye’s socialism and its
relation to eugenics in the early years of the Progressive Era. In this
respect, our work, showing as it does the pervasiveness of eugenics
independently from traditional ideological boundaries, represents a further
contribution to the Eugenics in the Progressive era debate inaugurated by
Thomas Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics
in the Progressive Era (2016). At the same time, this paper contributes to
the strand of literature that deals with the economic elaboration of the
idea of differential capacities for happiness, of which the works of Levy
and Peart represent the most recent examples. MacKaye is almost an unknown
character today, but in his day he was quite influential and his peculiar
brand of socialism deserves some critical attention.
Date: 2018–03–25
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:tzcef&r=hpe
3. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - "Keynes, Mill
and Say's Law: A Comment on Professor Ahiakpor's Mistaken Defence of Mill"
Grieve, Roy H
This note is a reply to James Ahiakpor's critical blast against my 2016
paper on the subject of Keynes, Mill and Say's Law. Professor Ahiakpor has
apparently missed the point I was trying to make: his slings and arrows hit
no targets.
Date: 2018–01–03
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:43bmg&r=hpe
4. American Gothic: How Chicago Economics Distorts `Consumer Welfare` in
Antitrust
Mark Glick (University of Utah)
Since the publication of Robert Bork`s The Antitrust Paradox, lawyers,
judges, and many economists have defended `Consumer welfare` (CW) as a
standard for decisions about antitrust goals and enforcement priorities.
This paper argues that the CW is actually an empty concept and is an
inappropriate goal for antitrust. Welfare economists concede that there is
no credible measurable link between price and output and human well-being.
This means that the concept of CW does not legitimate limited antitrust
enforcement, nor does it justify the exclusion of other antitrust goals that
require more active enforcement practices. This paper contends that
antitrust policy is not welfare based at all, and that if it were, antitrust
policy and enforcement would differ significantly from the Chicago School
vision. Without the fiction that economists can establish that in the short
run lower price and higher output measurably increases welfare more than
other goals, recent defenses of the CW standard resolve down to arguments
based on unsupported assumptions.
JEL: K21 L40 N12
Keywords: U.S. Consumer Welfare, Goal of Antitrust Law, New Brandeis
School, Chicago School of Economics.
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:thk:wpaper:99&r=hpe
5. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - The
Environmental Turn in Natural Resource Economics: John Krutilla and
"Conservation Reconsidered"
Banzhaf, H. Spencer
Environmentalism in the United States historically has been divided into its
utilitarian and preservationist impulses, represented by Gifford Pinchot and
John Muir, respectively. Pinchot advocated conservation of natural resources
to be used for human purposes; Muir advocated protection from humans, for
nature's own sake. In the first half of the 20th century, natural re-source
economics was firmly in Pinchot's side of that schism. That position began
to change as the post-war environmental movement gained momentum. In
particular, John Krutilla, an economist at Resources for the Future, pushed
economics to the point that it could embrace Muir's vision as well as
Pinchot's. Krutilla argued that if humans preferred a preserved state to a
developed one, then such preferences were every bit as "economic." Either
way, there were opportunity costs and an economic choice to be made.
Date: 2018–05–21
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:ca7eb&r=hpe
6. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - READING KEYNES
AT THE ZERO LOWER BOUND: THE GREAT DEPRESSION, THE LIQUIDITY TRAP, AND
UNCONVENTIONAL POLICY
Sutch, Richard
John Maynard Keynes’s analysis of the Great Depression has strong parallels
to recent theorizing about the post-2008 Great Recession. There are also
remarkable similarities between the two historical episodes: the collapse of
demand for new fixed investment, the role of the zero-lower-bound liquidity
trap in hampering conventional monetary policy, the multi-year period of
near-zero short-term rates, and the protracted period of subnormal
prosperity. A major difference between then and now that monetary
authorities in the recent situation actively pursued an unconventional
policy with massive purchases of long-term securities. Keynes couldn’t
convince authorities of his era to pursue such a plan, but it was precisely
the monetary policy he advocated for a depressed economy stuck at the zero
lower bound of nominal interest rates.
Date: 2018–03–13
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:vzykd&r=hpe
7. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Keynes, Mill,
and Say’s Law: A Comment on Roy Grieve’s Mistaken Criticisms of Mill
Ahiakpor, James C.W.
Employing different meanings of classical concepts of saving, capital,
investment, and money, and incorrectly attributing the assumption of full
employment of labor and a world of certainty to classical analysis, Keynes
(1936) faulted Say’s Law as irrelevant to the real world. Roy Grieve (2016)
ignores previous clarifications of Keynes’s misrepresentations and
misunderstandings of Mill’s restatements of the law. He employs similar
misrepresentations and misunderstandings of Mill’s explanations as Keynes.
His model of Mill’s analysis is incapable of explaining how variations in
relative prices, the value of money, and interest rates coordinate
production, consumption and savings decisions in a monetary economy.
Date: 2017–11–29
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:ys8dt&r=hpe
9. “Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - The
Contribution of Robert Torrens to Ricardo’s Theory of Natural Wage”
Rosell, Olivier
This paper reconsiders the anteriority of Torrens’ theory of natural wage to
that of Ricardo. Ricardo was influenced by Torrens’ thinking when writing
the chapter on “Wages” of the Principles. For many historians of economic
thought, this influence is limited to Torrens’ focus on the sociocultural
aspect of necessity goods, which determine the natural price of labor. While
this interpretation is consistent with that of Ricardo, we argue that the
anteriority of Torrens to Ricardo more generally focuses on the method used
by the latter to justify the indexation of money wages on the money price of
subsistence goods. Finally, this paper shows that the tribute paid to
Torrens by Ricardo paradoxically explains the misunderstanding of his theory
by posterity.
Date: 2018–01–03
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:kxaed&r=hpe
10. Keynes Between the Classics and Sraffa: on the Issue of the Numéraire
M. Magnani
The paper sketches a coherent history of the choice of the measure standard
from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to Sraffa’s Production of Commodities.
As neither the Smithian labour commanded unit nor the Ricardian-Marxian
labour embodied one provide a general solution to the dilemma concerning the
finding of an invariable standard, the author shows the shortcomings of both
methods in an analytically rigorous way. Several years later, the largely
unacknowledged fourth chapter of the General Theory once again tackles the
matter of measuring aggregate values adopting a net approach and introducing
an ad hoc unit. Concerned by the inherent difficulties of the operation,
Keynes starts from an harsh criticism towards Pigou’s notion of national
dividend to end up asking himself a number of questions that makes him
partially lean towards the later Sraffian approach as presented in
Production of Commodities, though his stance is not fully compliant either
with the premises or the aims of Piero Sraffa’s theoretical framework. In
the final part, a general solution based on net labour productivity is
considered.
JEL: B12 B14 B24 B51
Date: 2019–11
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1139&r=hpe
11. Journal of History of Economic Thought Preprints- Ricardo and
Ricardians on the Order of Culivation
, BIDARD
The Ricardian dynamics are based on the study of the order of cultivation
when demand increases. Sraffa criticized Ricardo for having assumed that the
incoming method is defined by a natural order and stressed that the law of
succession of methods is based on a profitability criterion. Then, in the
case of intensive cultivation, the question is whether the incoming method
is indeed more productive than the one it replaces. Sraffa’s argument relies
on the positivity of rent. However, there is a flaw in his reasoning and a
failure of the Ricardian dynamics is possible. Post-Sraffian scholars have
misunderstood that construction and have substituted a static approach for
it. The critiques they address to Sraffa are better understood by returning
to Ricardo and Sraffa's own methodology. Fifty years ago, mathematicians
rediscovered Ricardo's approach independently and worked out a powerful
algorithm inspired by it.
Date: 2018–03–14
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:dzy53&r=hpe
12. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Keynes, Public
Debt and the Complex of Interest Rates
Aspromourgos, Anthony
John Maynard Keynes consistently offered qualified endorsement of Abba
Lerner’s “functional finance” doctrine – the qualifications particularly
turning on Keynes’s attentiveness to policy management of the psychology of
the debt market. This article examines Keynes’s understanding of the
possible influence of public debt on interest rates, from 1930 forward. With
the multiplier a mechanism whereby debt-financed public investment generates
matching private saving (net of private investment) plus public saving, it
becomes possible for Keynes to conclude that increasing public debt need not
place upward pressure on the level of interest rates, so long as policy can
successfully manage the psychology of the debt market. This particularly
concerns long interest rates and hence, the term structure of rates. His
theory of the term structure enables Keynes’s conviction that policy can
manage and shape long rates. The conclusion considers also whether Keynes’s
caution concerning public debt and interest rates retains relevance today.
Date: 2018–04–04
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:mf2sc&r=hpe
13. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Limits to
Arbitrage and Interest Rates: A Debate Between Keynes, Hawtrey and Hicks
BRILLANT, Lucy
This paper deals with a debate between Hawtrey, Hicks and Keynes concerning
the capacity of the central bank to influence the short-term and the
long-term rates of interest. Both Hawtrey and Keynes considered the central
bank’s ability to influence short-term rates of interest. However, they do
not put the same emphasis on the study of the long-term rates of interest.
According to Keynes, long-term rates are influenced by future expected
short-term rates (1930, 1936), whereas for Hawtrey (1932, 1937, 1938),
long-term rates are more dependent on the business cycle. Short-term rates
do not have much effect on long-term rates according to Hawtrey. In 1939,
Hicks enters the controversy, giving credit to both Hawtrey’s and Keynes’s
theories, and also introducing limits to the operations of arbitrage. He
thus presented a nuanced view.
Date: 2018–04–11
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:7f2yv&r=hpe
14. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Hawtrey,
Austerity, and the "Treasury View," 1918-25
mattei, clara
R. G. Hawtrey was not a man of the backwaters. Through the parallel study of
Treasury files and Hawtrey's scholarly publications, this work reveals his
direct influence upon the most commanding minds of the Treasury and the Bank
of England, the two institutions that, after WWI, shared primary
responsibility over the British austerity agenda. After the war, Hawtrey
advocated drastic budgetary and monetary rigor in the name of price
stabilization. From 1922, Hawtrey admitted the need to decrease the bank
rate; yet he remained an adamant supporter of the Gold Standard, insisting
on its maintenance even if it required further monetary revaluation.
Hawtrey's policy prescriptions stemmed directly from his economic model. The
"crowding out argument," the centrality of credit and of savings, together
with the operational priority of technocratic institutions, were essential
theoretical underpinnings of Hawtrey's agenda: implementing the so-called
"Treasury view."
Date: 2018–07–13
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:2rjw9&r=hpe
15. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Sir James
Steuart on the Origins of Commercial Nations
Menudo, José M.
This paper examines James Steuart’s explanation of the emergence of
commercial nations. Unlike other Scottish thinkers of the time, Steuart
argues that artifice is necessary for the rise of commercial societies. He
uses the term “artificial” to refer to a devised process, one that is an
alternative to the supposedly natural process arising from innate
propensities. The system of trade and commerce is an “artifice” created by
merchants to obtain benefits, and established by the sovereign, for his
ostentation and personal prestige, until it became generalized as a
commercial nation. Steuart's explanation of the emergence of commercial
nations accounts for how individuals become dependent on and subordinate to
the public market. Finally, this paper concludes that Steuart’s Political
Œconomy promotes a science of the artificial that seeks to understand the
functioning of non-natural mechanisms and to create instruments that the
statesman adapts to the needs and objectives of individuals
Date: 2018–02–09
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:utw9p&r=hpe
17. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Antonio De
Viti De Marco, the principle of minimum means, and political competition
Fossati, Amedeo; Montefiori, Marcello
In contrast to the common maxims for good taxation, De Viti de Marco
revolutionized public finance studies by placing collective economic
activity within a theoretical framework, and trying to explain concrete
fiscal phenomena, such as tax incidence or public debt. The polar cases of
cooperative and monopolistic states and the state-factor of production are
usually considered a characteristic of such a framework. Here, we remark
that De Viti’s theory of the cooperative state appears grounded only on the
principles of minimum means and of political competition, and on the
assumption that individual income is a proxy of individual consumption of
general public services. Thus, it appears that the characteristics might be
unessential to the real core of his theoretical framework. Moreover, we
claim that his theoretical framework was not actually applied in his
explanation of concrete fiscal phenomena. Finally, we remark that he seldom
employed marginal tools in his Principî.
Date: 2018–10–03
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:caqu8&r=hpe
18. How Behavioural Economics Relates to Psychology - Some Bibliographic
Evidence
Braesemann, Fabian
Whether behavioural economics has a fundamental influence on economics is
debated by behavioural and heterodox economists as well as by methodologists
and historians of economics. At the core of this debate is the question
whether behavioural economics is shaped by large-scale content imports from
psychology, or whether these transfers have been too selective to challenge
dominant approaches in economics. This study contributes to the debate in
analysing a variety of bibliographic data from the disciplinary boundary
between economics and psychology. Two datasets from the boundary of
behavioural economics and psychology are compared to sets of economic and
psychology publications in quantifying the use of mathematics, the share of
empirical contributions, the authors’ academic background, and their
cross-citations via network analysis. In contrast to proposals made by some
methodologists and behavioural economists, the statistical results confirm
content transfers from psychology via behavioural economics only to a
limited extend. The observed level of interaction provides evidence for a
selective import of specific psychological findings by a small number of
established investigators in behavioural economics. These findings were then
intensively debated as divergences from rationality within the growing, but
econ-centered community of behavioural economists.
Date: 2018–08–22
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:83jeg&r=hpe
19. Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints - Review of
Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left
Schumacher, Reinhard
A review of Gareth Dale's "Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left"
Date: 2017–11–21
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:nq3mg&r=hpe
21. The transformation of economic analysis at the Federal Reserve during
the 1960s
Acosta, Juan; Cherrier, Beatrice
In this paper, we build on data on Fed officials, oral history repositories
and hitherto under-researched archival sources to unpack the torturous path
toward crafting an institutional and intellectual space for postwar economic
analysis within the Fed. We show that growing attention to new macroeconomic
research was a reaction to both mounting external criticisms against the
Fed’s decision-making process and a process internal to the discipline
whereby institutionalism was displaced by neoclassical theory and
econometrics. We argue that the rise of the number of PhD economists working
at the Fed is a symptom rather than a cause of this transformation. Key to
our story are a handful of economists from the Board of Governor’s Division
of Research and Statistics (DRS) who paradoxically did not always held a
PhD, but envisioned their role as going beyond mere data accumulation and
got involved into large-scale macroeconometric model building. We conclude
that the divide between PhD and non-PhD economists may not be fully relevant
to understand both the shift in the type of economics practiced at the Fed
and the uses of this knowledge in the decision making-process. Equally
important was the rift between different styles of economic analysis.
Date: 2018–09–30
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:vdy2z&r=hpe
22. Shortcomings of experimental economics to study human behavior: a
reanalysis of Cohn et al. 2014, Nature 516, 86–89, ‘‘Business culture and
dishonesty in the banking industry’’
Hupé, Jean-Michel
In the wake of financial scandals, Cohn and collaborators published a
headline-grabber study in the field of behavioral economics. M.C. Villeval
(2014) summarized the main message as follows, in News and Views of the
Nature issue where the Cohn study was published: the “experiment shows that
although bank employees behave honestly on average, their dishonesty
increases when they make decisions after having been primed to think about
their professional identity.” Cohn et al. thus provide evidence that “the
incentives and the business culture developed in the financial sector may
undermine the honesty norms of ordinary employees.” This study may have
important consequences for policy, since, Villeval continues, “it is crucial
to ensure a business culture of honesty in this industry to restore trust in
it.” Villeval also argues that “from a scientific perspective, this study
[…] supports the economic theory of social identity […], links this theory
with the economic analysis of lying behavior [… and] shows how behavioural
economists can contribute to a broader reflection in science about how
people manage their 'multiple selves' ”. Here I show that the use of flawed
statistics methods, yet employed routinely in so-called “evidence-based”
science, led the authors to distort the “evidence”. I am also using this
data-set as an interesting example to explore how we can use modeling and
simulations to provide a fair account of the information and uncertainty
conveyed by the data, based on Confidence Intervals. I provide the R-code.
Based on this paper, I question the contribution of behavioral economics to
the understanding of human behavior and conclude with considerations on
honesty and science.
Date: 2018–03–20
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:nt6xk&r=hpe
23. Dobrogea School of Economics
ARTENE, Alin
At present, we have all the necessary elements to be able to claim that
"Dobrogea Economics School in Constanta" really exists in the Romanian and
European academic landscape. Among these elements, we take into account
those related to tradition, university education programs, valuable teaching
staff, material basis, results / scientific visibility, etc. This article
provides an approach to the establishment and further development of the
Faculty of Economics at "Ovidius" University of Constanta. The continuous
development of the collaboration relations with other universities -
Romanian and foreign -, with governmental or private institutions, with the
business environment, etc. confirms that today there is a Dobrogean School
of Economics and, moreover, it has all the chances to last forever.
Date: 2018–05–15
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:hwn8a&r=hpe
24. What is replication?
Nosek, Brian A. (University of Virginia); Errington, Timothy M. (Center
for Open Science)
Replications are inevitably different from the original studies. How do we
decide whether something is a replication? The answer shifts the conception
of replication from a boring, uncreative, housekeeping activity to an
exciting, generative, vital contributor to research progress.
Date: 2019–09–10
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:metaar:u4g6t&r=hpe
25. The ordinary business of macroeconometric modeling: working on the
Fed-MIT-Penn model (1964-1974)
Cherrier, Beatrice; Backhouse, Roger
The FMP model exemplifies the Keynesian models later criticized by Lucas,
Sargent and others as conceptually flawed. For economists in the 1960s such
models were “big science”, posing organizational as well as theoretical and
empirical problems. It was part of an even larger industry in which the
messiness for which such models were later criticized was endorsed as
providing enabling modelers to be guided by data and as offering the
flexibility needed to undertake policy analysis and to analyze the
consequences of events. Practices that critics considered fatal weaknesses,
such as intercept adjustments or fudging, were what clients were what
clients paid for as the macroeconometric modeling industry went private.
Date: 2018–10–15
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:39xkz&r=hpe
26. A Happy Choice: Wellbeing as the Goal of Government
Frijters, Paul (London School of Economics); Clark, Andrew E. (Paris
School of Economics); Krekel, Christian (London School of Economics);
Layard, Richard (London School of Economics)
In this article, we lay out the basic case for wellbeing as the goal of
government. We briefly review the history of this idea, which goes back to
the ancient Greeks and was the acknowledged ideal of the Enlightenment. We
then discuss possible measures on which a wellbeing orientation could be
based, emphasising the importance of acknowledging the political agency of
citizens and thus their own evaluations of their life. We then turn to
practicalities and consequences: how would one actually set up
wellbeing-oriented decision-making and what difference should we expect from
current practice? We end by discussing the current barriers to the adoption
of wellbeing as the goal of government, both in terms of what we need to
know more about and where the ideological barriers lay.
JEL: I3 A10 H10 H83
Keywords: subjective wellbeing, life satisfaction, public policy,
political economy, social welfare
Date: 2019–10
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12720&r=hpe
27. Produire un fait scientifique: Beveridge et le Comité international
d'histoire des prix
Demade, Julien
This book tells the story of a largely forgotten enterprise: that of the
International Scientific Committee on Price History. If this endeavour can
nevertheless still be of interest today, it is not only because failures
offer insights into social dynamics as well as successes do ; nor is it
solely because we find, gathered around this failed enquiry, a slew of very
famous names, and names indeed which one would not expect to stumble upon in
this context – there is Beveridge and Kautsky, Bloch and Malinowski. First
and foremost, it is because the object of this enquiry offers a rare
opportunity to bridge the divide between national scientific traditions as
well as between disciplines – such as history and economy, or epistemology
and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Thus, the initially narrow scope
of this study opens up to a vast field of enquiry, as the object of this
study shifts to determining how a particular class of objects – those deemed
scientific – are produced, and how epistemological, theoretical and
institutional issues interact in this process. Indeed, the conversion of
past prices (as they appear in the archives) into historical prices taken as
scientific facts, raises diverse and crucial questions : on the respective
standing of social and natural sciences, about monetarism, or on the
transition from the academic field of the Humboldtian scholar to that of big
science. Viewed through the prism of this particular case, these issues will
appear in a new light for the simple reason that, in the case at hand,
fields of enquiry which are ordinarily examined independently are found to
be tightly interrelated.
JEL: B15 B16 B23 B25 B31 N01
Keywords: history of prices;William Beveridge;international scientifique
committee on price history;Thorold Rogers; Georges d'Avenel;
Date: 2018
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:97119&r=hpe
28. Theories of the Causes of Poverty
Brady, David
There has been a lack of debate between and frameworks for theories of the
causes of poverty. This essay proposes that most theories of poverty can be
productively categorized into three broader families of theories:
behavioral, structural, and political. Behavioral theories concentrate on
individual behaviors as driven by incentives and culture. Structural
theories emphasize the demographic and labor market context, which causes
both behavior and poverty. Political theories contend that power and
institutions cause policy, which causes poverty, and moderates the
relationship between behavior and poverty. I review each theory’s arguments,
contributions and challenges. Further, I explain how to integrate, classify
studies into, and distinguish between theories. Ultimately, I argue that
poverty research would benefit from more explicit theory and theoretical
debate, as well as greater interdisciplinarity and integration between
studies of the U.S., rich democracies, and developing countries.
Date: 2018–10–15
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:jud53&r=hpe
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
This nep-hpe issue is ©2019 by Erik Thomson. It is provided as is without any
express or implied warranty. It may be freely redistributed in whole or in
part for any purpose. If distributed in part, please include this notice.
General information on the NEP project can be found at http://nep.repec.org.
For comments please write to the director of NEP, Marco Novarese at
<[log in to unmask]>. Put “NEP” in the subject, otherwise your mail may be
rejected.
NEP’s infrastructure is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance of
Massey University in New Zealand.
|
