Weber’s spirit of capitalism and the Bahamas’ Junkanoo ethic

The Protestant ethic which, according to Weber, contributed to economic development in the West is only one of a variety of work ethics that can be identified and studied. In the Bahamas, for instance, a definite Junkanoo ethic colors economic life. Junkanoo is a semiannual carnival-like festival that is the quintessential Bahamian cultural experience. This paper argues that Weber’s Protestant Ethic can serve as a model for telling culturally aware economic narratives and uses Weber’s approach to discuss the role that the Junkanoo ethic has played in the economic success of the Bahamas (the richest country in the West Indies). JEL Classification B25, B41, O54, Z13     

A prospective on macrocybernetic process management systems

In an editorial in the February 1996 issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change Professor Linstone noted that “the rapid pace of technology has not been matched by the pace of human change.” Were we to drop our perspective a bit lower, a similarly troublesome imbalance within technology itself becomes apparent: the rapid rate of increase in the complexity of process-related technologies relative to the much slower rate of increase in the sophistication of process control systems. The conclusion at which most technological forecasts seem to arrive is that there will be a continuation—perhaps even an acceleration—of the trend toward more intricate and sweepingly extensive processes (production-related and otherwise). If so, there is the specter of a steadily increasing shortfall between requirements and capabilities, and hence the likelihood of even grander technological embarrassments. This article considers two ways in which this shortfall might be kept in check. Increases in the intricacy of processes can be met, and to a considerable extent are already being met, by exchanging conventional process control facilities for enhanced alternatives. Less certain is how expansions of project scope might best be accommodated. One possibility is to consider exchanging process control systems for broader-purview process management systems. Hence the focus in this article is on prospects for the development of macrocybernetic constructs.     

Social and solidarity economy and social and solidarity commons: Towards the (re)discovery of an ethic of the common good?

This research poses the ethic of the common good and the institutions of the social and solidarity economy (SSE) as the foundation of commoning practices. Specifically, it illustrates how the latter may contribute to regenerating the commons, fostering open and shared access to key productive resources and essential goods and services. The analysis focuses on social and solidarity commons (SSC), defined as all those relational practices that contribute to the accumulation and regeneration of human and social (as well as other types of) critical capital. To achieve this research goal, this study collected new and old issues debated in the academic literature concerning the geographic nature of commons and their juridical and economic treatment within socioeconomic disciplines. Then, a historical overview of the commons highlights their dynamic and multifaceted nature and illustrates how they have often been co‐owned and co‐governed according to shared rules and norms. Within this general framework, SSC are introduced, and a role for the institutions of the SSE is proposed to foster an ethic of the common good as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for expanding and enforcing people's participation in commoning practices.     

An interactive perspective of managers’ functional experience and managerial ties of new ventures in transition economies

ABSTRACT

Using a sample of new ventures in China, this study examined the roles of the two different types of managerial resources, i.e. managerial ties and functional experience, simultaneously and interactively. It suggests that both of them have positive influences on new venture performance, and managerial ties remain the main factor that contributes to firm success. Political ties have a positive effect on sales growth but have an inverted U-shaped relationship with profit growth of new ventures, while the effect of business ties on firm performance is monotonic and positive. Finally, it suggests that the complementary effect occurs between political ties and functional experience, while the substitution effect occurs between business ties and marketing experience.     

Homo moralis

This paper is explores the relationship between ethics and liberal market orders both as a form of justifying those orders and as a way of being within such orders. The argument shows that there are a number of tensions and ambiguities between ethics and liberal market orders perhaps best captured as differences between visible and invisible hands. Two prominent attempts to adjudicate these tensions—that of Buchanan and McCloskey—are examined and a matrix for thinking about the relation between ethics and liberal market orders is developed. My own approach to resolving the tension in light of that matrix is outlined, which paradoxically suggests that on the one hand, liberalism is justified for having a certain suspicion of ethics while on the other hand is the political and social theory most encouraging of it.     

A quasi-competitive price basis for intersystem comparisons of economic structure and performance

The use of endogenously determined product and factor prices—to be termed “eigenprices”—is proposed for the comparative evaluation of structural characteristics and crucial performance criteria across different systems. The eigenprices are algebraically defined and a methodology for their computation is proposed. A special appendix tests the computability of these prices and their derivatives, and offers comparative orders of magnitude for a variety of countries.     

Global Income Divergence, Trade, and Industrialization: The Geography of Growth Take-Offs

This article formalizesthe theoretical interconnections among four post–industrialrevolution phenomena—the industrialization and growth take-offof rich northern nations, massive global income divergence, andrapid trade expansion. In stages-of-growth model, the four phenomenaare jointly endogenous and are triggered by falling trade costs.In the first growth stage (with high trade costs) industry isdispersed internationally, and growth is low. In the second (mediumtrade costs), the North industrializes rapidly, growth take-off,and the South diverges. In the third (low trade costs), highgrowth and global divergence become self-sustaining. In the fourthstage, when the cases of ``trading' ideas decreases, the Southquickly industrializes and converges.     

A Spatial Theory of Positive and Negative Campaigning

In order to explore the content of electoral campaigns, this paper makes two modifications to Hotelling's model of spatial competition. First, we assume that agents inherit initial locations and engage in costly relocation. Second, an agent's relocation is affected by her rival's actions. We investigate how a candidate allocates resources between positive campaigning—which influences voters' perceptions of her own ideology—and negative campaigning—which influences her opponent's perceived ideology. Our theory predicts that the candidate who is perceived as having less attractive personal attributes runs a relatively more negative campaign. The theory's implications are illustrated for the 1988 presidential election.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C7, H0.     

Historicising Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory,challenging the normative foundations of liberal International Political Economy

David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage is now two centuries old, but it remains at the heart of economists’ theories of international trade. It also continues to provide the underlying economic ethic for liberal International Political Economy (IPE). Ricardo’s numerical illustration of the mutually shared gains from specialisation and trade involved complementary structures of comparative advantage being exhibited by a productively superior hypothetical ‘Portugal’ and a productively inferior hypothetical ‘England’. Yet, the historical back-story of actual eighteenth-century trading relations between the two countries reveals Portugal’s repeated struggles to meet its treaty obligations to the English in the context of the European quest for empire. Those difficulties persisted even when it harnessed its (less profitable) commercial trade to (much more profitable) slave trading practices. Ricardo’s account of the purely mathematical logic of comparative advantage writes out of economic history the centrality of both imperial wars and African slavery to the early English and Portuguese experience of ‘free’ trade. Given this historical back-story, liberal IPE thus appears to be in urgent need of new normative foundations to decouple it from these highly illiberal economic processes.     

Toward Subnational Democracies of Scale: Tensions between Democratic Legitimacy,Legality, and Effective Governance

Although democracy is often discussed as a universally applicable ideology, the liberal democratic state tends to assess democracy on the basis of government institutions. This paper argues that democratic institutionalism favours national governments and makes it difficult for subnational governments to expand their governance capacity and exercise additional powers. Greenland, Shetland, and Tresco (Isles of Scilly) serve as case studies of different subnational strategies for exercising greater governance capacity: 1) Actual adherence to democratic form (Greenland), 2) Symbolic adherence to democratic form (Shetland), and 3) Operating external to democratic form (Tresco). Despite the efforts of local governance actors, governance in these three island communities has proved problematic in terms of democratic legitimacy, legality, and/or effectiveness. It is argued that pressure toward the development of liberal democratic government institutions can in fact decrease the quality of subnational democracy. This requires a reassessment of definitions of democracy and authoritarianism. It is necessary to pursue place-specific and community-sensitive democracies of scale if we wish to democratically empower local communities.     

Institutional economic theory: the old versus the new

The object of this paper is to make some limited comparisons between the ‘new’ institutionalism of Williamson, Schotter, Hayek and others and the ‘old’ institutionalism, particularly of Veblen. It is argued that a fundamental feature of the ‘new’ institutionalism in which it contrasts with the ‘old’ is its close attachment to the idea of the abstract individual of classic liberal ideology. This attachment is found even in those minority subsets of ‘new’ institutionalists who are hostile to promarket policies, or non-neoclassical in matters of theory. Consequently, ‘old’ institutionalist warnings against proceeding on such individualistic assumptions should not be ignored, despite the value of much ‘new’ institutionalist analysis.     

New information technology in India: The electronics riddle

The paper provides a critical assessment of India's electronics policy from its very inception to the present time. It is argued that despite its narrow scope and many shortcomings, the Indian government's new electronics policy based on the principle of liberalization is a step in the right direction. A much wider and speedier development of advanced electronics technology and its application in critical areas—e.g., transport and communication systems—is recommended for India and other similarly situated “non-electronic” developing countries. The implication of missing the electronics revolution by these countries would be their continuing dependence and backwardness.     

Tournaments, minimum wage, and money non-neutrality

To reconstruct the micro-foundation of Keynesian macro-economics, the efficiency wage theory has generally been considered a success in providing a plausible explanation for the existence of involuntary unemployment. However, little has been said about how monetary policy causes fluctuations in aggregate employment and output in the efficiency wage theory. This paper extends Lin and Yang’s [Econ. Inq. 39 (2001) 644] shirking-type efficiency wage model with tournaments to account for money non-neutrality. A distinct feature of our model is that, due to the adoption of tournaments, there will be a hierarchical wage structure rather than a flat wage in the economy. As will be argued, the labor market characterized in this paper is in a sense a reversion to Keynes’ General Theory, but also an improvement upon it.     

Unfolding Social Hierarchies

Consider a large population of finitely-lived agents organized into n different hierarchical levels. Every period, all those placed at each level are randomly matched to play a given symmetric game. Based on the resulting outcome, a ρ-fraction of agents who (within their own level) attain the highest payoffs are promoted upwards. On the other hand, newcomers replacing those who die every period enter at the lowest level and choose irreversibly the strategy to be played for the rest of their life. This choice is made, with some noise, by imitating one of the strategies adopted at the highest level.  In this setup, the unique long-run behavior of the system is fully characterized for the whole class of 2×2 coordination games and two alternative variations of the model. The results crucially depend on the key “institutional” parameters ρ and n. In particular, it is shown that inefficient behavior prevails in the long run (even when risk-dominated) if promotion is only mildly selective—high ρ—and the social system is quite hierarchical—large n. In a stylized manner, these parameter conditions may be viewed as reflecting a sort of institutional deficiency that impairs economic performance. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C70, C72, C73, D72.     

Contingent knowledge and technology development

It is widely recopnized that many different opes and forms of knowledge contribute to technology development. Formal codified knowledge, tacit knowledge, informal knowledge and cultural knowledge have all recently been addressed. However, one other particular form of knowledge—the contribution of knowledge/information embodied in the working context—has not been directly or explicitly addressed to the same extent. Tet this form of knowledge—'contingent knowledge'—it is argued, plays a crucial but under-appreciated role in technology development and innovation. In this paper, the concept of contingent knowledge is further explicated and illustrated by means of examples, and the strategic and practical implications are drawn out.     

社会关系再构建、职业阶层与农民工收入

在分析社会关系再构建和职业阶层与收入这一传统议题时,从两个方面对原有研究框架进行了扩充:一是在职业阶层的划分中纳入自雇经营;二是将社会关系再构建的作用分为了通过职业阶层影响收入的间接作用和对特定职业阶层就业者收入的直接作用两种。利用实地调查数据对提出的理论假设进行了检验。运用访谈资料对研究结果进行了解释并探讨了研究结果的政策含义。     

On the political economy of skill in the advanced industrial nations

The importance of education and training policy is being enhanced by its increasingly high profile as a competitive strategy in the age of global capitalism. This article argues that human–capital theory, because it objectifies skill and fails to uncover its social context, offers an inadequate framework for understanding the relationship between the economy and skill systems. An adequate economic framework for understanding changes in education and training systems must be linked to a theory of institutional change in the economy. The article used one such theory, in building on the contributions of the regulation school but concludes that, contra the ideology of post–Fordism and of liberal political economists, a high–wage/high–skills strategy is only one route for capital accumulation in the 1990s, and that this route will only be achieved through conflict. The article concludes that, this used alongside other policies, a progressive education strategy which could be linked with the usage of high skills in industry would have some chance of success in the current era.     

Postwar Reconstruction: Some Insights from Public Choice and Institutional Economics

A successful reconstruction is characterized by a widespread coordination problem, combined with potential pockets of conflict. We analyze the array of relationships that take place in the reconstruction process – political, economic and social – by considering under what circumstances they are situations of conflict or coordination. Historical attempts at reconstruction provide further understanding of how to achieve success.JEL Classification: N40, O1, P11, Z13.     

Economic Liberalism and the State: Dismantling the Myth of Naïve Laissez-Faire

The article offers a critique of the prevailing understanding of the relationship between neoliberalism and classic nineteenth-century liberalism in contemporary international political economy (IPE) and offers a redefinition inspired by Polanyi and Gramsci. Within critical IPE studies, a consensus has emerged that neoliberalism cannot be reduced to a simple attempt to roll back the economy and let loose free-market forces. However, this insight relies on contrasting neoliberalism with a classic liberalism, that is, a simple attempt to implement just this naïve laissez-faire ideology. In contrast, this article argues that nineteenth-century liberalism is also characterised by an active use of state and legislative power. Through a historical study of two cases from nineteenth-century Britain, Poor Law reform and the Gold Standard, the paper will argue that state action played a central role even during the heyday of laissez-faire liberalism. With a starting point in Polanyi’s dictum that ‘laissez-faire was planned’, this reinvestigation will point towards a need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the distinctions between economic theory, ideology, and practical policy, as well as pointing towards a general reinterpretation of the role of the state in liberal economic ideology.     

Limit orders,asymmetric information,and the formation of asset prices with a computerized specialist

We analyze the existence of equilibrium in an asset market under asymmetric information. Price formation is modeled as a bilateral sealed bid auction where uninformed and informed traders submit limit orders to a computerized specialist. The computerized specialist is programmed to sell to the highest bidder and buy from the seller asking the lowest price. We show that this mechanism — which is designed to model the Globex and RAES trading institutions used in Chicago, London, New York, Paris, and Germany — yields an equilibrium in which the bid-ask spread is endogenously random and the passive specialist earns nonnegative profits.