Archive

The best new economic thinking in an age of the dominance of rent-seeking will be Marxian economic thinking

The old political-economic thinking of Karl Polanyi was never properly absorbed into “mainstream” North Atlantic economics: recognizing that land, labor, and finance are not really “commodities” returns institutions and social processes to the center of economic analysis.

This paper finds its origins in two important developments within mainstream economics since the financial crisis, both of which analyze the economy from the viewpoint of what Schumpeter (1954) referred to as the domain of “real” analysis of a modern market economy in contrast to “monetary” analysis.

Caring Economics is about a new way of thinking about human prosperity. In mainstream economics, prosperity is a matter of consumption, income and wealth. By contrast, Caring Economics conceives of prosperity in terms of deeper sources of durable human wellbeing.

The SSGAC is a research infrastructure designed to stimulate dialogue and cooperation between medical researchers and social scientists. The SSGAC facilitates collaborative research that seeks to identify associations between specific genetic markers (segments of DNA) and behavioral traits, such as preferences, personality and social-science outcomes.

Behavior genetics is the study of the relationship between genetic variation and psychological traits. Turkheimer (2000) proposed “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics” based on empirical regularities observed in studies of twins and other kinships. On the basis of molecular studies that have measured DNA variation directly, we propose a Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics: “A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.”

Income and wealth inequality have been rising in the past three decades. Surprisingly, inequality has been largely ignored in the literature and practice of monetary policy. However, due to the crisis, this question has been gaining more attention.

Recent years have witnessed the flourishing of a body of economic literature concerned with the search for empirical evidence of a positive relation between political connections, economic rent and the value of firms. The present paper contributes to the strand of this literature that deals with the quantitative measurement of the value of the political connections of firms.