生产劳动力的劳动时间的探讨

传统经济学的劳动力价值理论只有生产劳动力的生产费用(物化劳动),没有生产劳动力的劳动时间(活劳动)的耗费。劳动力的生产也有劳动时间的耗费。劳动力的自然再生产时间不形成劳动力的价值,劳动力的社会再生产时间、即学习劳动的时间形成劳动力的价值。劳动力价值包括两个部分:一是生产劳动力的物化劳动,如生活费用和学习费用等;二是生产劳动力的活劳动即学习劳动。     

论社会进步的标准

社会进步主要基于公共生活演进的自然逻辑,而非应然的价值观和典章制度。如同城池是社会文明的最初门槛,社会的先进与落后主要反映在当今大都市的治理体系中。放弃而今流行的各种两分标准,着眼于国家在生存竞争中的兴衰,作者以两个前提下的三大标尺去解释和衡量社会形态的先进与落后。两个前提是:先进基础设施的密集程度和国防的强大程度。三大标尺是:维护公共财产及其使用秩序的程度,精算公权使用成本与收益的程度,以及劳动者再生产的社会化/均等化程度。可用三个要素证伪上述理论:能否粘合精英与平民,给较大规模的国家提供较强内聚力;能否对国外群体产生较强吸引力;能否为技术与知识的创造和普及提供较优越的环境。     

Property and Economic Power as Issues in Institutional Economics

In the first part of this two-part paper, I presented an "irenic" reconciliation of the three apparently contradictory definitions of "institution" within original institutional economics (OIE), employing the methodology of critical institutionalism. The critical institutionalist reconciliation of these definitions conceptualizes institutions as an emergent process by which the internal and necessary relations of social structure as collective action, mediated through agency, results in the control, expansion, and liberation of the individual action of social actors in transactions. In short, an institution is the emergent process of social structure actualized in transactions (social action). Institutions, therefore, not only have a structural existence, but also an actual existence as they are the process of the emergence of the actual (in transactions) from the structural. Institutions are multi-level processes and cannot be reduced to structures, actions, behaviors, or patterns of behaviors. In this part, I demonstrate the significance of this reconciliation in two areas. The first is its ability to further differentiate the institutional definition of economics as "the science of social provisioning" from the mainstream definition of economics as "a relationship between ends and scarce means" by decomposing the institutional definition into its productive and distributive processes. The second is its usefulness in modeling the interaction of non-economic social institutions with economic institutions at varying levels of detail. I also introduce critical institutional analysis, and use as a method, for model-building and use it to build models of communal, feudal, and industrial capitalist economies.     

The Future Be Damned: Economists’ Optimism and Nuclear Proliferation

Lower income households make much heavier use of costly financial services, such as payday loans, check cashing services, auto title loans, and many more. These services are crafted for, targeted to, and distributed through outlets in lower income neighborhoods. In other words, there are extensive provisioning systems designed specifically to deliver such products and services to these households. Such marketing aimed at lower income groups reduces both their wealth and welfare relative to upper and upper middle groups.     

The Emptiness of Peasant “Rationality”: “Demirationality” as an Alternative

This article discusses consumption as a social process that is part of social provisioning and is in an evolutionary interplay with other social processes. The analysis provides grounds for a context-specific research that explores consumption in the context of a culture-nature life process, and draws on material from various disciplines. The article seeks to contribute to the literature on social provisioning as an organizing concept in heterodox economics. The first section explains what is meant by social process and delineates its elements. The second section formulates a categorization of social processes, and locates a consumption process within a system of culture-nature life processes. The rest of the article delineates the elements of the consumption process, providing illustrations based on literature from various disciplines. Specifically, the third section discusses consumption activities. The fourth section discusses institutions and systems of provision of goods and services. The fifth section applies the concept of habits of life and thought to the consumption process. Finally, the article concludes that the formulated analysis transcends dualisms such as social-economic, cultural-material, society-nature, and micro-macro, and draws implications for heterodox economics.     

Feminist Ecological Economics and Sustainability

Synopsis New developments in feminist ecological economics and ecofeminist economics are contributing to the search for theories and policy approaches to move economies toward sustainability. This paper summarizes work by ecofeminists and feminist ecological economists which is relevant to the sustainability challenge and its implications for the discipline of economics. Both democracy and lower material throughputs are generally seen as basic principles of economic sustainability. Feminist theorists and feminist ecological economists offer many important insights into the conundrum of how to make a democratic and equity-enhancing transition to an economy based on less material throughput. These flow from feminist research on unpaid work and caring labor, provisioning, development, valuation, social reproduction, non-monetized exchange relationships, local economies, redistribution, citizenship, equity-enhancing political institutions, and labor time, as well as creative modeling approaches and activism-based theorizing.      

Social Surplus Approach and Heterodox Economics

Given the emphasis on social provisioning in heterodox economics, two of its central theoretical organizing principles are the concepts of the total social product and the social surplus. This appears to link heterodox economics to the social surplus approach associated with the classical economists and currently with Sraffian economists. However, heterodox economics connects agency with the social surplus and the social product, which the Sraffians reject as they take the level and composition of the social product as given. Therefore the different theoretical approach regarding the social surplus taken in heterodox economics may generate a different but similar way of theorizing about a capitalist economy. To explore this difference is the aim of the article.     

R. H. Tawney as Political Economist

The paper argues along the lines of John Kenneth Galbraith in his analysis of the American “affluent society” during the “Golden Age,” when social unbalance between private wealth and public services was expanded by modern capitalism. In industrialized or developing economies, investment in public services was constrained by fiscal or ideological reasons favoring market provision. This evolution had significant impact on welfare.     

“Ending Welfare as We Know It”: The Symbolic Importance of Welfare Policy in America

In this paper, I offer a framework for analyzing non-market oriented household activities in a way that overcomes some issues about defining the boundaries among household activities. I utilize the concept of a social process and discuss how unpaid household activities are part of labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes. Next, I explain the importance of introducing economic class and social class processes into the framework, as well as the importance of making a distinction between the two. Economic class accounts for the basics of the capitalist economy, and social class opens contexts of variation. The framework allows for a multidimensionality of individuals and opens the question of unpaid activities varying in categorization based on economic class. Also, it helps the economic analysis of capitalism consider that maintaining a household lifestyle directly involves and pertains to unpaid household activities that are part of each of the delineated labor, care, recreation, and consumption processes.     

Six Misconceptions of Procompetition Policy

Original institutional economists and the transaction cost economist, Oliver Williamson, have inquired into social provisioning of goods and services. Original institutional economists could build upon the achievements of Williamson’s static approach. This might be done by incorporating the struggle for power into his analysis of governance structures. The struggle for power, which might be socially motivated, materializes in the form of a change in (i) mark-up, (ii) the institutional environment of governance structures, (iii) the instruments of governance structures, or (iv) the dimensions of transactions. A series of behaviors might be enforced that endorse these changes. Simultaneously, rules might be circumvented by bounded socialized actors who oppose them. In turn, this fosters further amendments, as I show by references to Obamacare.     

Index Volume XII – 1978

This paper presents and evaluates Don Lescohier's contribution to labor economics, and specifically to labor market policy. Lescohier, a prominent member of the Wisconsin Institutional School, put the labor market in the center of his investigations and tried to examine many of the factors that determine its efficient functioning, differentiating his study from the labor studies that focused on the individual — mainly union — worker. His analysis was essentially influenced by the progressive political climate of his time, the heterodox thought of some \"non-Marshallian\" British economists like Beveridge, and the newly emergent field of personnel management. Lescohier ardently proposed the creation of a federal-state centralized system of employment offices, which would undertake the difficult task of organizing the American labor market after the end of World War I. His work constituted both an interesting and significant case study, and thus deserves a higher position in the history of labor economics.     

Social Capital and Women’s Labor Force Participation in Chile

ABSTRACT

Using data from Chile, this study analyzes the relationship between different forms of social capital and women’s labor force participation, accounting for both endogeneity problems and differences among women of different economic strata. First, the results suggest that only some types of social capital are relevant for labor force participation: namely, networks with weaker yet far-reaching connections, including higher-status individuals. There are neither empirical nor theoretical reasons to believe that women have better access to such networks than men. Second, this type of social capital is only relevant for the economic integration of the richest women, failing to increase labor force participation among women of the other 80 percent of households. Thus, this study concludes that policies targeted at women’s economic integration based on the presumption that women have more social capital than men are deeply flawed.     

Solving the U.S. Trade Deficit and Competitiveness Problem

We compare the analytical approach of John R. Common and Ronald H. Coase to institutional analysis and social provisioning. In particular, we examine their similarities in (i) the definition and role of institutions in the economy, (ii) the allocative (social provisioning) role of institutions in the economy, and (iii) the inescapable and unchanging role of institutions in shaping the social provisioning process. We contend that Commons and Coase had more in common than did Coase and many of his followers in the “new institutional economics.” In particular, the two had strong similarities in both (a) their insights into the nature of institutions in the legal-economic nexus that is the foundation of the economy and (b) their methods for conducting economics research. Because this role of institutional evolution is, as Warren Samuels noted, an inescapable and unchanging part of an economy’s social provisioning process, it will remain an integral part of any such work in the future, regardless of the “school of analysis” or methodological approach.     

Theory of Public Choice: A Review Article

In this article, we analyze at a conceptual level some of the more relevant effects of the neoliberal takeover on the provision of social costs, including employment, health care, and nutrition. Adopting key perspectives of Karl Polanyi and other thinkers, we develop our examination under the seemingly perpetual conflict between markets and social reproduction. We argue that financialization has both expanded market spaces and changed relationships within those spaces. The ever-greater domination of financial markets means that employment has become increasingly more precarious in the strict spaces of the labor market. At the same time, financialization has steadily eroded the social forms that exist outside of formal markets, greatly weakening the mechanisms through which societies can both defend themselves from predatory markets and reproduce themselves with some degree of purpose and hope for the future.     

山西农村老年照料的个案研究

利用\"社会照料\"的理论,通过对永济市农村老年照料模式的个案研究,从三个维度分析了农村老年照料传统模式的特点,指出了传统模式的优势和面临的挑战。     

The Next Great Depression II: The Impending Financial Collapse

I seek to put social provisioning into perspective with regard to the financial instability issue in capitalism. My analysis rests on an institutionalist-Minskyian endogenous instability assumption and maintains that monetary/financial stability is a peculiar public good or specific commons since it concerns all of society and its viability in time, not individuals involved in private financial relations. Consequently, the provision of financial stability becomes essentially a matter of public policy and requires the intervention of public power in order to prevent finance from becoming a public “bad.” This result relies on the distinction between private “normal” goods and ambivalent/transversal money (and related financial relations). I point to the necessity of a public organization and tight regulation of finance and financial markets, when standard equilibrium models assume that social optimum and stability can be provided by private self-adjustment and market prices mechanisms.     

Local Labor Systems and Agricultural Activities: The Case of Tuscany

The features of the Italian economy cannot be properly understood without taking into account the territorial organization, in particular, the so called local productive systems. The Italian National Statistical Institute provides a partition of the Italian territory into Local Labor Systems (LLS) on the basis of the Population Census data. LLS are a set of contiguous municipalities with a high degree of self-containment of daily commuter travel. This paper focuses on a study of the structural characteristics of agriculture activities in the LLS of Tuscany on the basis of the micro-data from the last General Agricultural Census. The main aim is to provide a picture of the economic activities of the LLS by using data from the Population and the Industrial censuses also.