The Relationships of Religion to Economics

The relationships between religion and economics are both complex and controversial. In this paper is explored one method for organizing those relationships. Four categories are examined which help identify possible options: economics separate from religion economics; in service of religion; religion in service of economics; and religion in union with economics. The paper begins with a definition of what is included under the headings of religion and economics. Next, each of the four categories is described and discussed. Conclusions close the paper.     

An economics for development and peace: With a particular focus on the thought of Ernst F. Schumacher

Ernst F. Schumacher'sSmall is Beautiful seems thoroughly persuasive even at the turn of the century, as reckless material development is increasingly recognized as a threat to peace. This article describes how his thought was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's and Schumacher's ways of thinking are considered as alternative development theorees, different from any of those stemming from laissez-faire economics or Marxism. The formulation and proliferation of Schumacher's ideas about intermediate technologies are traced in both Indian and global contexts, to evaluate their sufficiency as bases for development. Moreover, their implications for contemporary economics are discussed, with the assistance of Amartya K. Sen's concepts of “capability,” “sympathy” and “commitment,” which are in clear contrast to the conventional concept of “economic man.” Finally, it is concluded that Schumacher's alternative development theories and practices, as well as Sen's economics, may play important roles in development and peace studies in the 21st century.     

Towards a New Political Economy of the Crisis: Getting What Went Wrong Right

Not only did the global financial crisis transform the prevailing institutions, policies and practices of contemporary capitalism, it also had a profound impact upon the discipline of economics itself. From 2008 a different crisis, one of public legitimacy, engulfed academic economics as critics railed against its failure to predict the onset of unprecedented global economic turmoil. But despite the public focus upon the failings of mainstream economics, the rise of alternative disciplinary and epistemological perspectives has been muted. Scholars of international political economy (IPE), unconstrained by the debilitating equilibrium assumptions of neoclassical economics and keenly aware of the intimate connectivity between politics and economics, might justifiably have expected to make gains during the economics profession's darkest hour. That they have not managed, thus far, to substantially unsettle the intellectual and institutional predominance of economics should not, however, be a source of dismay. Political economy scholars possess the analytical tools to produce a much-needed counterpoint to prevailing academic economics. It is with demonstrating that capacity, and restating the holistic merits of political economy scholarship, that this Special Issue is concerned. Bringing together a number of diverse theoretical perspectives and employing a wide range of conceptual categories, this Special Issue showcases the rich variety of IPE scholarship and its collective capacity to generate much deeper and more holistic analyses of the global economic crisis than those provided by the reigning economics orthodoxy, and in doing so, to get what went wrong right.     

Re-framing the urban blight problem with trans-disciplinary insights from ecological economics

Similar to circumstances in the field of economics, market fundamentalism dominates urban blight policy spaces in the U.S. despite criticisms of the paradigm. Unlike the unified alternative that ecological economics (EE) provides to conventional economic theory, however, disagreement over the meaning of “blight” has prevented a commonly held pre-analytic vision and policy agenda from forming in critical blight scholarship. This paper asserts that “applied EE” offers a framework in which to develop such a vision, and to strengthen the inchoate critical blight policy stream. We draw on the EE theory and concepts to argue that blight can be understood as a stock that accumulates in an urban system as a result of underinvestment into real property. Our conceptualization of the problem has several important implications for public policy. A brief illustration compares the relative efficacy of one city's characteristically neoliberal blight policies with more “EE-consistent” policies in a second city to show that the latter might in fact outperform the former.     

Reply to Frederic Lee's Comment on “The Citation Impact of Feminist Economics”

Abstract

This essay is a response to “A Comment on the Citation Impact of Feminist Economics,” by Frederic Lee, which appears in this issue ofFeminist Economics.

Frederic Lee's comment is a valuable addition to our understanding of the intellectual interactions between feminist economics and other schools of heterodox thought, and demonstrates how much can be learned by studying citation patterns.     

A Discrete-Time Hazard Analysis of the Role of Gender in Persistence in the Economics Major

So much has been done in terms of measuring the impact of economics courses on student knowledge and understanding of facts, concepts and principles, and so little research has dealt with the possible effects on student political attitudes, that this study by Scott and Rothman should be of great interest to economics instructors. The authors address themselves to George Stigler's assertion that “the education of an economist makes the person who receives it more conservative.” They report on the use of their own “Social Opinion Questionnaire” and how it was employed to investigate “the different effects, if any, introductory economics and introductory psychology have on opinions related to economic issues.”     

The distance between Buchanan's “An Economic Theory of Clubs” and Tiebout's “A Pure Theory of Local Public Expenditures”. New insights based on an unpublished manuscript

This article introduces Buchanan's comment on Tiebout's “A Pure Theory of Local Public Expenditures”. It helps us to understand the nature of the relationship between Buchanan and Tiebout. Usually, it is claimed that Buchanan modelled Tiebout's insights, that there exists a Buchanan-Tiebout hypothesis, and that Buchanan in 1965 complemented what Tiebout had written in 1956. We show that Buchanan could not have written “An Economic Theory of Clubs” as a complement of “A Pure Theory of Local Public Expenditures”. He disagreed with Tiebout's ideas on mobility because he saw mobility as a cause of inefficiencies and not a cause of homogeneity in groups. This is what we show by putting Buchanan's comment on Tiebout into historical perspective. It appears that Buchanan interpreted Tiebout 1956 from the perspective of his works on fiscal federalism from the early 1950s. We show that there is a continuity between Buchanan's work from the early 1950s and his works in the early 1970s; and Buchanan's way of reading Tiebout is part of it. Hence, when he wrote “An Economic Theory of Clubs”, Buchanan was convinced that Tiebout was wrong and that he was offering an alternative framework for public economics.     

Natural Images in Economics: A Review Essay

An extended review of Philip Mirowski's edited collectionNatural Images in Economic Thought. Examines the roles of metaphors; the relationships between metaphors of the “natural” and the “social”; the significance of metaphoric reasoning, for economics, with regard to questions of meaning, ontology and epistemology; the discursive, or rhetorical, nature of economic theory; and significant historical and interpretive issues pertinent to economic thought.     

Is Gerard Debreu a Deductivist? Commentary on Tony Lawson's Economics and Reality

Tony Lawson has argued that the methodology of neoclassical economics is deductivist: in constructing their formal models, economists hope to be able to provide explanations based on laws, as described by the deductive-nomological model of explanation. This article argues in contrast that neoclassical economics cannot be understood as following just one methodology. It is argued that neoclassicism exhibits two methodologies, one “official” and one tacit. The former is empiricist, and corresponds to the practice that has been described by Lawson. The latter, which can be called “hypothetico-deductive rationalism”, amounts to the position that knowledge of the world can be obtained without any empirical verification of one's assumptions, simply by exploring the implications of the assumptions one makes.     

Not-So-Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Risk Taking

Based on a growing body of experimental and other studies, two recent economics survey articles claim to find “strong evidence” that women are “fundamental[ly]” more risk-averse than men. Yet, much of the literature fails to clearly distinguish between differences that hold at the individual level (categorical differences between men and women) and patterns that appear only at the aggregate level (statistically detectable differences in men's and women's distributions, such as different means). There is a resulting problem of possible misinterpretation, as well as a dearth of appropriate attention to substantive significance. Additionally, one of the two surveys suffers from problems of statistical validity, possibly due to confirmation bias. Applying appropriate, expanded statistical techniques to the same data, this study finds substantial similarity and overlap between the distributions of men and women in risk taking, and a difference in means that is not substantively large.     

A New Look at the High School Economics Texts

Townshend-Zellner shows that, as a group, high school economics texts have improved substantially during the last decade. “It is now possible,” he asserts, “to recommend to high schools a significant number of texts … which substantially meet the minimum criteria set by the canons of our professional discipline.” There are still problems, however, in that “… the quality of the acceptable texts now runs strongly ahead of the typical teacher's preparation in economics.”     

Remembering Joseph M. Becker,S.J.

“Critique” of the Neoclassical paradigm in economics is a vital intellectual contribution in its own right. The prevailing wisdom and last word in economics, enforced by the socializing experiences of young would-be economists, is that if you can’t build a better theory immediately, without resources or access to debate and discussion, you have no right to criticize the existing paradigm, This requirement cuts off challenge and debate in economics, strongly deters the development of alternative theories, and leads to a weaker, less interesting economic science.     

The Relative Effectiveness of Three Methods of Teaching Principles of Economics

Research on the impact of learning style preferences is very rare in economic education. This article reports the results of a project in which the student's preferred learning style and the instructor's teaching style were included as variables in a regression model. Those favoring independent styles achieved significantly more than students favoring dependent styles. Changes in student attitudes towards economics were also taken into account. The researchers assert that the addition of these variables also “greatly increases the power of the model to explain variation in student achievement and attitudes concerning economics.”     

Shifting the paradigm: Value in feminist critiques of economics

“Critique” of the Neoclassical paradigm in economics is a vital intellectual contribution in its own right. The prevailing wisdom and last word in economics, enforced by the socializing experiences of young would-be economists, is that if you can’t build a better theory immediately, without resources or access to debate and discussion, you have no right to criticize the existing paradigm, This requirement cuts off challenge and debate in economics, strongly deters the development of alternative theories, and leads to a weaker, less interesting economic science.     

Rights: Why do they matter,and to whom?

Following Sen, social choice theorists often formulate rights in terms of relationships between individuals' preferences and social preferences. An alternative “procedural” formulation treats rights as properties of game forms. This paper reviews the debate between the proponents of these two approaches, focusing in particular on Sen's claim that the procedural approach is inflexible in its refusal to make trade-offs between rights violations. It looks at different answers to the question, “Why do rights matter?” It argues that, if a contractarian answer is given, there are good reasons not to make trade-offs.     

A Note on Attitude as a Factor in Learning Economics

Although one might naturally assume that students interested in economics will learn more in an introductory course than those not interested in the subject, this assumption had to be tested. Using a specially designed “Questionnaire on Student Attitude Toward Economics” on a pretest and posttest basis, and accounting for previous course work, the student's verbal and quantitative skills, and student program requirements, Karstensson and Vedder employed linear multiple regression analysis and found a positive relationship between precourse attitude and course grade. Changes in student attitude which occurred during the course were also analyzed.     

Consumption volatility and income persistence in the permanent income model

Deaton's “excess smoothness” question can be reformulated by focusing attention on total income rather than labour income: the permanent income theory predicts that the relative volatility of consumption is equal to total income persistence, a fact that is contradicted by empirical evidence. This formulation is more general than the original one in that it is independent of the value of the interest rate, the univariate dynamics of labour income and the information set of the representative consumer. When properly formulated, the excess smoothness problem cannot be solved within Quah's superior information model; as a consequence, the interest of alternative solutions such as aggregation models is increased.     

THEORY OF THE STATE, GOVERNMENT TAX AND PURCHASING POLICY, AND INCOME DISTRIBUTION

Until recently, there has been virtually no discussion among professional economists of the impact of government expenditures on the distribution of income.¹ Neoclassical economics has traditionally shown little interest in distributional issues. Little is said beyond the assumption that factors are paid their marginal products. Micro economics is said to take a “neutral” stance with regard to distributional issues. Static efficiency of allocation is attainable for any income distribution, and consequently, so the parable goes, no income distribution is superior on purely economic grounds to any other. Macro economics also purports to be neutral with respect to distribution. Government expenditures in Keynes' model appear as an undifferentiated blob called “G”. The only interest macro economics takes in distribution issues is concerned with the marginal effect of redistribution on the marginal propensity to consume out of income. Keynesian economics, therefore, is unable to say whether one form of government expenditure is superior to another so long as both accomplish macro objectives. When orthodox economists have approached the issue of the government's distributional impact, they have until recently focused solely on its use of taxes and transfer payments. Public finance has traditionally ignored the expenditure side of state activity since, after all, government activity was a necessary evil, benefiting no one. Gillespie's path-breaking study in 1965 finally acknowledged the utility of government spending, but his analysis and those that have followed in the orthodox tradition have been hampered by a number of awkward premises. First, the orthodox studies of fiscal incidence implicitly accept the view of the government as a neutral arbiter rather than a protagonist of the dominant classes in society. Second, benefits of government services are assumed to be accurately measured by outlays. Thus, if we find that the government spends four times as much on highways as on police, it is assumed that the utility of highways is four times that of police even though one cannot even imagine the continuity of the status quo without the police while many responsible citizens argue that we should drastically curtail outlays on roads. Obviously, the utility of the police in terms of system maintenance exceeds that of the more expensive highway expenditures. Third, it is assumed that for each dollar spent by the government, only one person will benefit when, in fact, many disparate groups can benefit from the same expenditure. A dollar spent on education benefits the student as well as hislher employer. Fourth, Gillespie and his orthodox followers ignore any effect of the government on the pre-tax, pre-transfer distribution of income which they take as given. A hypothesis which we examine in this paper is that the government has an enormous influence over the shape of the pre-tax, pre-transfer income distribution. A more general criticism of previous studies of fiscal incidence is that they suffer from a poorly defined theory of the state. This assertion is most clzarly illustrated by the categorization in previous studies of a wide variety of public exp-enditures as “public goods” (such as national military expenditures). The benefits of these “public goods” are allocated among various income groups in several ways, for example on the basis of wealth ownership (both productive and consumptive) or on a per capita basis. The method of allocation chosen has enormous consequences for one's estimate of overall fiscal incidence. According to Herriot and Miller, those with incomes over $50,000 either receive a net benefit of 4.5 percent of their total income from the government or lose 42.1 percent, depending upon the allocation formula chosen for public goods. Previous studies have taken an agnostic position with respect to the appropriateness of the several allocative assumptions. But this is merely simple empiricism without theoreticai foundation, and thus the formulation of specific hypotheses which employ scientific procedures is impossible. What is needed to provide an interpretation of the data is a well-articulated theory of the state-an area to which we turn our attention in the next section of this paper.     

Gender and economics; Islam and Polygamy - a question of causality

Beginning by contrasting and comparing the fields of (feminist) anthropology and economics, this essay is a response to parts of Barbara Bergmann's article, “Becker's Theory of the Family: Preposterous Conclusions.” In attempting to expose the fallacies in Becker's discussion of the altruism of polygamous families, Bergmann stereotypes polygamous families and conflates Muslims and polygamous societies in the process. Further, she assumes oppression, arguing that most women in the polygamous families (i.e., Muslims) under discussion have an “abysmal status.” This essay argues for acknowledging our social location as researchers, not overgeneralizing about highly diverse societies and the varieties and experiences of women's lives, not assuming oppression, and viewing neither Islam nor polygamy as necessarily central determinants of the conditions of women's lives. Qualitative and quantitative examples of variations in African, Asian, and Middle Eastern women's lives are given – intersecting Muslim/non- Muslim, polygamous/nonpolygamous, Arab/non-Arab, poor/not-so-poor/ rich, rural/urban, and high/low “status” (with variations in health, politics, economics, and family life within and among countries).     

The Freiburg school and the Hayekian challenge

At first sight and in terms of explicit references, the relationship between Hayek and the early Freiburg School seems to have been one of mutually benign neglect. It took several decades before the “Hayekian challenge” was fully understood in Freiburg; in a way one could even argue that the challenge arrived in Freiburg only with Hayek himself in 1962. This delay can mostly be explained by different foci of attention. Hayek’s evolutionary economics and his classical-liberal social philosophy centers around the problem of private, dispersed knowledge. The (early) Freiburg School’s economics and its ordo-liberal social philosophy centers around the problem of private, concentrated power. This difference of perspective has consequences and can partly be explained by the different intellectual sources the proponents were drawing upon, and the different political struggles they were engaged in.