Economic Reforms in Socialist Economics: A Comment on Petr

Abstract:

The pre-WWII approaches to trade unions were mainly based on the theoretical and methodological viewpoints of early institutional economics. Trade unions were conceived of as politico-economic organizations whose members were motivated by relative comparisons, and also were concerned with issues of equity and justice. In the post-war period, there was a major theoretical and methodological shift toward the idea of unions as optimizing economic units with well-defined objective functions, which are optimized subject to purely economic constraints. This conceptual transformation took place mainly through the Dunlop -Ross debate, in which John Dunlop conceived of unions as analogous to business firms, as opposed to Arthur Ross’s institutional and political approach. However, after decades of analytical developments, the current state of trade union theory has not produced very impressive theoretical results. We trace the historical development of the economic analysis of trade unions from a methodological perspective. We also examine the methodological reasons for the dominance of Dunlop’s approach, and the current state of – and the contemporary criticism toward – the established theory. Furthermore, we discuss the contemporary efforts to build a more comprehensive approach to trade union theory and trade union objectives, also incorporating Ross’s institutional and political insights.     

Apology and Ambiguity: Adolf Berle on Corporate Power

A sociocognitive foundation for transformative agency requires much deeper exploration to adequately understand the causal origins of human interests, preferences, and choices as they shape both the emergence of institutions and the process of institutional change. In the collegial spirit of rapprochement, reminiscent of earlier efforts at “bridge-building,” our central contention is that the new institutional economics of “late” Douglass C. North (2005) North, Douglass C. Understanding the Process of Economic Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] provides such a sociocognitive approach, as well as an important ontological frame for dealing with embedded agency. This agency may afford original institutional economics a complementary meta-theoretical account of how institutions are formed and changed over time.     

Economic Theory as a Guideline for Government Intervention and Control: Comment

This paper provides an institutionalist analysis of the impasse over labor issues that has stalled much needed reform of U.S. immigration policy. While it is unlikely that institutional economics can dislodge a century of conventional wisdom regarding the impact of immigrants on the labor market, a more modest goal is to refute the mainstream economic assertion that what the United States needs to do is to reduce the supply of immigrants, a conclusion that fuels the disgraceful "war on immigrants" that has long plagued reasonable debate over immigration policy.     

Institutionalist Theories of the Wage Bargain: Beyond Demand and Supply

I distill an integrated structure of institutionalist theories of wage determination, linked by overarching views of reality and key principles, and show that three fundamental propositions connect these into one “extended family.” I then outline ten principles that reflect the models and propositions. While very different in form than the familiar Walrasian price-auction model, this relatively succinct approach to wage determination leads to many testable hypotheses. It also explains questions, such as: Why can the minimum wage not often be raised without causing unemployment? Why has wage inequality increased within occupations and educational levels, as well as between? Why does high pay tend to be accompanied by better benefits, working conditions, and on-the-job training (rather than compensating for the lack of one of these)? The insights of many contemporary institutional economists, including Robert Prasch, are particularly important to this analysis, along with earlier work of John R. Commons, John Dunlop, Lloyd Reynolds, and Lester Thurow.     

Social Provisioning as a Starting Point for Feminist Economics

The past decade has seen a proliferation of writing by feminist economists. Feminist economists are not identified with one particular economic paradigm, yet some common methodological points seem to be emerging. I propose making these starting points more explicit so that they can be examined, critiqued, and built upon. I use the term “social provisioning” to describe this emerging methodology. Its five main components are: incorporation of caring and unpaid labor as fundamental economic activities; use of well-being as a measure of economic success; analysis of economic, political, and social processes and power relations; inclusion of ethical goals and values as an intrinsic part of the analysis; and interrogation of differences by class, race-ethnicity, and other factors. The paper then provides brief illustrations of the use of this methodology in analyses of US welfare reform, gender and development, and feminist ecological economics.     

Institutional Bioeconomics and the Division of Labor: Reflections on Yarbrough & Yarbrough' Paper

The New Institutional Economics might have significant interactions with the economics of non-human societies. Some possibilities are considered in connection with the ideas of Yarbrough and Yarbrough on human societies. First, the need for enforcement may be less when the organisms in question treat one another as resources. Second, theories of the division of labor that have been developed in biology are applicable to human societies. There may be some interesting alternatives to traditional sociobiology as well.     

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.     

照顾提供、性别平等与公共政策——女性主义经济学的视角

中国的市场经济转轨与经济结构的变化提高了人民的收入从而提高了中国妇女及她们家庭的福利。社会经济制度和经济结构的变化同时加剧了妇女在工作和孩子老人照料两者之间的冲突。虽然中国的计划生育政策意味着需要照顾的儿童数量在减少,但是生育率的快速下降以及人口平均预期寿命的延长使中国老年人比例迅速增加,并由此加大了照料服务的需要。妇女的工作与照顾责任的冲突对社会性别平等、对妇女本身及她们家庭的福利都有严重的负面影响。为推动对照顾提供问题的研究和公共政策对照顾提供的关注,介绍女性主义经济学对照顾经济的研究和发达国家照顾问题的公共政策,讨论这些理论和政策对我国的借鉴意义。     

论社会资本对企业技术创新的影响

知识经济的迅猛发展,使企业技术创新更多地体现为一种动态的复杂的社会化知识创造过程。本文力图以企业社会资本理论为基础,从新制度经济学的角度分析了社会资本影响企业技术创新的内在机理。     

The Three Faces of Labor: Sustainability and the Next Wave of Automation

This article develops a model of three faces of labor from Figart, Mutari, and Power’s three faces of wages. This is integrated with sustainability models to locate the process of human and social capital formation and explore issues arising from technological change. The latest wave of automation, involving robotics and artificial intelligence, is expected to be an even greater challenge for worker well-being than globalization and immigration. The model supports a new narrative around labor that incorporates the caring economy as well as a framework for thinking about labor issues and long-term well-being.     

制度经济学三大流派的比较与评析

20世纪二三十年代之后,西方经济学在经济理论上陷入持久的危机。制度经济学派就是在批判传统的主流经济学——新古典主义的基础上发展起来的。制度经济学按其类型一般分为以凡勃仑、康芒斯为代表的早期制度经济学,以加尔布雷斯、缪尔达尔为代表的后制度经济学和以科斯、诺斯为代表的新制度经济学。它们分别代表了三种制度观和三种研究思路与方法,各有其合理性和局限性。目前,国内经济学界往往热衷于新制度经济学的研究与介绍,而对于另外两大制度学派的研究却甚为冷清。只知晓其中一种而忽视其他,很难说就掌握了制度理论的精髓。只有了解制度学派的全貌,并对它们进行比较和鉴别,才能更为深入地了解制度经济学学说,才有可能形成较为客观的认识与判断。     

The Concept of “Progressive” Institutional Change and Its Implications for Economic Policy Formation

Institutional economics has long shown that entrepreneurship plays a critical role in the pursuit of economic development and wellbeing. At the same time, entrepreneurship is complex and evolving. The path between entrepreneurship and wellbeing is not clear-cut, and not all types of entrepreneurial activity are correlated with economic growth. Failure to acknowledge this heterogeneity has important consequences for entrepreneurship policy and human development, particularly where gender is concerned. The paper treats the complexities involved in defining and conceptualizing entrepreneurship, setting the stage for a focus on the gender dimension. As female entrepreneurial activity has risen in many countries around the world, it is important to acknowledge the diversity of such activity and the ways it does (or does not) correspond to an increase in human freedom. Highlighting the differences between necessity and opportunity entrepreneurship, this paper illustrates the formal and informal institutions that shape gender inequity in the entrepreneurial environment. It concludes with some suggestions for addressing this important issue.     

The Gender Gap in Earnings Among Teachers: The Case of Iowa in 1915

This paper draws on the 1915 Iowa State Census Report to decompose the gender gap in earnings into explained and unexplained parts. A novel feature is that the decomposition is performed not only at the mean but also over the entire distribution of earnings. In addition, an entire state, rather than a few cities, is considered. This paper finds that at least 25.6 percent, and probably more, of the gap is unexplained by the main observable characteristics at the mean. More interestingly, the unexplained part grows moving up the distribution of earnings, which indicates the possibility of a glass-ceiling effect for women. Results provide new insight into gender wage gaps among the highly educated, theories and empirical analysis in labor economics, and quantification in the history of education.     

Inside Institutions of Progressive-Era Social Sciences: The Interdisciplinarity of Economics and Sociology

In the Progressive Era, sociology and institutional economics shared some important methodological principles and theoretical constructs. This study explores some of these similarities, focusing on the ideas and theories of Albion Small and Franklin Giddings, who were the most important sociologists in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Since the literature on the history of the interdisciplinarity of economics and sociology is somewhat scarce, this study aims to contribute to this historiography by considering the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of early institutional economics — mainly from the standpoint of Veblenian institutional economics.     

Socialism after Hayek: A Post Keynesian Contribution to Burczak's Theory of Social Justice

The paper presents a brief overview of the basic premise of the Burczak's Socialism after Hayek, and shows that Burczak's “applied epistemological postmodernism” presents a unique unifying ground for heterodox economics, breaking down traditional barriers between right and left. This new approach allows us to revisit the Marx-Keynes-Hayek debates in a more constructive way for a unified theory of social justice. However, we argue that Burczak's system does not automatically guarantee full employment, so it cannot be considered an ideal theory of social justice. A Post Keynesian contribution is presented in the form of the Employer of Last Resort (ELR) program which we argue is compatible and complementary to Burczak's theory of social justice. Finally, we argue that an adequate system design of the magnitude proposed here must be infomed by the principles of institutional adjustment as outlined by J. Fagg Foster.     

Planning and Urban Growth: An Anglo-American Comparison

Understanding the complexity of institutional change is a necessary step in gaining deeper knowledge of economic performance over time, and it is one of the main challenges in the research agenda of institutionalism. Institutional change can be studied using a variety of theoretical approaches. We study some of the main approaches to institutional change in original economic institutionalism and new institutional economics. First, after comparing the approaches of Émile Durkheim and Thorstein Veblen, we focus on the contributions of the instrumental value theory and other original institutional traditions in the study of institutional change. Second, new institutional economics improved on the weak points of rational choice institutionalism regarding institutional change and incorporated the “institutions-as-rules” approach (Douglass North) and the “institutions-as-equilibria” approach (Avner Greif, Masahiko Aoki). We analyze both approaches to institutional change. Furthermore, we present an updated nonintegral overview of approaches to institutional change, show several interconnections between original and new institutionalisms, and conclude that the dialogue between the different theories of institutional change is relevant and beneficial.     

The Health Services Industry: Realism in Social Control

The aim of the paper is to investigate the relationship between institutions and development ethics. In a value context, the center of the discussion between institutions and development ethics is based on confronting ethics as "means of the means," which implies that ethics is not only concerned with the ends of human action but also enters into the value dynamisms of the instruments utilized by development agents in achieving these ends: the means. A common acceptable definition of development ethics is the ethical reflection of the ends and means for any purposeful social-economic activity toward development. Institutions are the social cement that condition and enhance the roles agents play in economic life. We argue that development ethics and institutions are entwined: development ethics influence institutions and institutions influence development ethics.     

Care Data Infrastructure: A U.S. Case Study

This essay emphasizes the need to critically evaluate sources of survey data available to assess interactions between paid and unpaid care provision, including the extent of substitutability between unpaid work time and money expenditures. While it focuses on the U.S., it provides a framework for analysis of data infrastructure in other countries that could facilitate international comparisons and policy analysis.     

A Proposed Methodological Synthesis of Post-Keynesian and Institutional Economics

Post-Keynesian and institutionalist writers have commented on the theoretical and conceptual commonalities between the two schools. Some have suggested a theoretical synthesis based on these commonalities. In spite of these theoretical and conceptual commonalities each tradition has developed significantly different methods of analysis. Instead of theoretical or conceptual synthesis we seek here to present a methodological synthesis.

Institutionalist methods have yielded "plausible" explanations, but these have been too "vague and suggestive" to be consistently used for economic policy. Post-Keynesian methods have policy necessary "rigor," but the similarity to neoclassical methods has exposed post-Keynesian theories to unwarranted synthesis with incompatible traditions.

This essay presents a synthesis of post-Keynesian and institutionalist methodology, one of "plausible rigor," combining elements of "institutional dynamics" with a heuristic framework based on John Dewey's "instrumental logic," and proposes that the resulting approach overcomes weaknesses in the methods of analysis of both schools.     

The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences

An Institutionalist critique that draws from selected contributions of Veblen and Myrdal initiates a convergence debate. Challenged is a Neoclassical interpretation of economic processes expected to lead toward a catching up with respect to per capita output of Germany's poorer eastern region with the richer western region. Economic method is considered, and the Institutionalist School of Thought rooted in contributions of Veblen as well as Myrdal is touted for offering higher levels of explanatory power than the Neoclassical School. We challenge the usefulness of laws in Economic Science, and especially their applicability to the empirical economy. Instead of automatic forces driving a meliorative trend, we seek to establish that human agency and policy play determining roles in affecting economic and societal outcomes in Germany's eastern region.