Crossing the Great Divide: Ostrom’s Coproduction and the Economics of Aged Care

As the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom has attracted the interest of many feminist economists. Best known for her work on common pool resources, Ostrom made numerous theoretical and methodological contributions to economics, many of which are useful for feminist economists. This paper explores Ostrom’s work on coproduction: the active participation of individuals who receive a good or service in the production process. A particular focus is on how Ostrom’s model of coproduction might be applied and extended to capture the characteristics and circumstances of aged care. Data from interviews with women employed in Australia’s aged-care sector are used to inform a discussion of coproduction in aged care and the institutional supports necessary for successful outcomes. Key issues include the skills and resourcing of aged-care workers, and their authority to negotiate care practice with care recipients under current governance arrangements.     

Richard H. Thaler: A Nobel Prize for Behavioural Economics

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an overview of Richard Thaler’s career and the contributions to behavioural economics that earned him the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. It focuses on his role in exposing and making sense of empirical anomalies in orthodox economics, his analysis of mental accounting, and his work with Cass Sunstein on the notion of libertarian paternalism and the ‘nudge’-based behavioural approach to economic policy. It then considers his contributions critically and explores how, unlike previous behavioural economics, Thaler succeeded in getting his new approach to behavioural economics accepted by mainstream economists.     

The diversity of institutional rules as engine of change

The target paper by Elinor Ostrom in this Special Issue carries a clear message about her research agenda: be attentive to institutional diversity, be aware of the danger of ‘monoculture’ and ‘monocropping’ of rules. Although Ostrom was fully aware of the necessity to focus on relevant and simplified variables in order to build general explanations, she deliberately adopted a bottom-up research strategy that opposes the top-down approach dominating social sciences. Her framework, developed through extensive field studies, shows the central role of “clusters” of rules in defining institutions and understanding how they change. My discussion is organized around this privilege conferred to rules. Section 2 posits her contribution, particularly her IAD model, in relation to New Institutional Economics. Section 3 focuses on what I consider her main contribution: her analysis of rules as the strategic point through which changes happen. Section 4 discusses some methodological issues, and Sect. 5 concludes.     

Evolution,institutions, and human well-being: perspectives from a critical social anthropology

The work of Elinor Ostrom is important for those who deplore the fact that the rise of ethnographic methods has led mainstream socio-cultural anthropologists to lose interest in evolution. This trend in anthropology is illustrated with reference to research on property, where Ostrom herself made notable contributions. However, it is argued that her mature work on the evolution of rules and her privileging of low-level institutions do not pay sufficient attention to local cultural notions and reflect the bias of a powerful Western ideology.     

The Economic Contributions of Robert A. Mundell

This is the second in a series of articles surveying the contributions of recent recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. The 1999 recipient of the prize, Robert A. Mundell, has made important contributions in several fields, including the theory of the monetary and fiscal policy mix, the monetary approach to the balance of payments, the theory of optimal currency areas and supply-side economics. This paper provides an overview and critical evaluation of these contributions.     

The Uncommon Insight of Elinor Ostrom

Standard economic approaches to the problem of overuse of common property resources have emphasized two competing remedies: the Pigovian approach of corrective taxation, and the property rights approach of internalizing externalities by means of assigning marketable property rights to individual owners with exclusive claim on the entire commons. Elinor Ostrom pursues a third approach, which is based on case studies of existing communities that have established successful and durable systems of managing common property resources. This paper discusses her work and suggests that economists with an interest in public policy have much to gain from becoming familiar with the work of Ostrom and her co‐authors.     

Margaret G. Reid: Life and achievements

Feminist critics of mainstream economics, and of the neoclassical paradigm in particular, have focused primarily on exposing and questioning the gender biases and androcentric claims to neutrality, objectivity and rationality of the most male-dominated discipline among the social sciences. The scientific method and mathematical sophistry so cherished in the discipline have also come under severe attack from several quarters. However, despite the intellectual ferment and some practical gains for women that these criticisms have engendered, even today the substantial contributions several women scholars have made to the field of economics are not well known or fully acknowledged. This paper traces and highlights Margaret Reid's contributions to the development of some core theories in economics. While several of her male colleagues whose work she had inspired or contributed to have been awarded the Nobel Prize, the discipline of economics still owes a huge debt to Reid and to several other women economists.     

Aumann's and Schelling's Game Theory: The Nobel Prize in Economic Science, 2005

Abstract

Robert Aumann and Thomas Schelling won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 2005. Their work in game theory shows two different approaches to understanding strategic interaction. Schelling's work on the strategic aspects of negotiations, focal points, and self-command is mathematically informal and is based on experimental and inductive knowledge of players' capabilities. Aumann's work on repeated games and common knowledge is mathematically deductive, and assumes highly rational agents. An exploration of their work allows for a comparison of these two approaches.     

Space for virtue in the economics of Kenneth J. Arrow,Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom

Virtue ethics interprets human action as pursuing good ends through practices that develop qualities internal to those final goals. The philosophical approach has been identified as critical of economics, leading in turn to the innovative response that by viewing the market as mutually beneficial exchange, economic practice is in fact defendable on virtue ethics grounds. This defends economics using arguments drawn from virtue ethics, but there is a need also to explore space for virtue ethics within economic theory. Examining key contributions of Kenneth J. Arrow, Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrom, the article notes that virtue ethics’ appreciation of persons’ communicability of ends is increasingly being relied upon within economics, though sometimes under different names. Its strength to interdisciplinary work between economics and philosophy lies in presenting a methodology able to capture how human beings are capable of, though not fixated on, cooperation.     

Barbara Wooteen's lament for economics and vision of a social economics

The British social economist Barbara Wootton (1897–1988), engaged in a searching critique of the narrowness and abstraction of Neoclassical orthodoxy in herLament for Economics (1938), which was provoked by Robbins'Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, and in her reply to Hayek'sThe Road to Serfdom. Her participation in Beveridge's wartime “brains trust” resulted in her Fabian Society pamphlet,Full Employment (1943). This paper examines Wootton's critique of Neoclassical Economics; her vision of a broader, more realistic social economics; her attempts to apply that vision of social economics inThe Social Foundations of Wages Policy (1955), andIncomes Policy (1974), and parallels between her work and North American developments in social economics. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A03DH034 00003     

Holding back from theory: limits and methodological alternatives of randomized field experiments in development economics

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we critically and constructively examine the methodology of evidence-based development economics, which deploys randomized field experiments (RFEs) as its main tool. We describe the context in which this movement started, and illustrate in detail how RFEs are designed and implemented in practice, drawing on a series of experiments by Pascaline Dupas and her colleagues on the use of bednets, saving and governance in Kenya. We show that this line of experiments have evolved to address the limitation of obtaining policy-relevant insights from RFEs alone, characterized as their lack of external validity in the literature. After examining the two prominent responses by leading figures of evidence-based development economics, namely machine learning and structured speculation, we propose an alternative methodological strategy that incorporates two sub-fields, namely experimental economics and behavioral economics, to complement RFEs in investigating the data-generating process underlying the treatment effects of RFEs. This strategy highlights promising methodological developments in RFEs neither captured by the two proposals nor recognized by methodologists, and also guides how to combine different sub-fields of economics.     

The history of economics as economics?

Abstract

This paper critically evaluates the current decline of the relationship between economics and the history of economics, and proposes a framework called the panorama-cum-scenario model for the practice of the history of economics. Starting with the Hegelian thesis that the history of economics is economics itself, the paper argues that such a relationship is necessary but not sufficient because the history of economics is a metatheory addressed to economic theory. The history of economics needs a panoramic view of the subject and a scenario for the construction, interpretation, and evaluation of the system of economics. The panorama-cum-scenario model enables us to work on the history of economics not only by historical and rational reconstruction but also by global reconstruction. Nietzsche's anti-Hegelian viewpoint and Heidegger's hermeneutical standpoint are useful for identifying the role of historical research in developing economic knowledge based on the panorama-cum-scenario model. Several approaches to the history of economics are examined in light of the panorama-cum-scenario model. Schumpeter's history of economics is interpreted as an example of the panorama-cum-scenario model.     

Calls for change. The scientific status of economic theory and the future of democracy: A review of three recent contributions

Abstract

After the last financial crisis, economic theory and economists have largely lost their credibility. Not having been able to foresee and explain the recession, they have clearly shown that a deep methodological reform of the discipline is necessary. With its restrictive assumptions and the self-referentiality of formal models, mainstream economics has indeed become highly unrealistic and therefore unable to face the deep and evident problems of capitalistic society. The books reviewed in this paper try to criticize economic theory from three closely related points of view: the technical drift that has endangered democracy and annulled the role of citizens in public choices, the sometimes obscure role of economists and the way through which articles of low scientific relevance are published, and finally the decisive role of the Nobel Prize in economics to legitimize the market turn begun in the 1970s. Considering such a discouraging picture, it is necessary to ask whether there is still hope for reforming economics and if, possibly returning to the classics of economic thought, it is still possible to carry out a struggle based on ideas and not on dogmatic prejudices.     

On the extraordinary scholarly life and times of Gordon Tullock

Gordon Tullock, who passed away at the age of 92 on November 3, 2014, ranks justly near the top of the list of the “founding fathers” of the public choice research program. Most widely known in the academy as coauthor of The Calculus of Consent (Buchanan and Tullock 1962), Professor Tullock was not named, unfairly in our joint opinion, as co-recipient of James Buchanan’s 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. A good case nevertheless can be made that Gordon earned Nobel laurels on his own account for groundbreaking contributions to the literatures on, among other topics of scholarly study, rent seeking, autocracy, bureaucracy, war and revolution, law and economics and bio-economics. This essay celebrates Gordon Tullock’s major influences on the field of public choice, including his launching of Public Choice, the journal for which both of us have served as editors, and his impacts on scholars working at the many and obviously fruitful intersections of economics and political science.     

The rule approach in evolutionary economics: A methodological template for empirical research

Dopfer and Potts (2008) have proposed a new analytic foundation to evolutionary economics based on the unified rule approach. While they contend that their approach is ontologically and analytically coherent and useful, scholars sympathetic with it, e.g., Ostrom and Basurto (2011), have called for further methodological and empirical specification. In the same vein, this paper seeks to develop the Dopfer-Potts framework by proposing an analytic methodology to translate their rule-based approach into an operational method for identifying and testing hypotheses that relate to rules. It does so by defining a methodology connecting explanandum (response rule) and explanantia (factor rules) at the same level of rules. The concept of a ‘savings rule’ serves as a roving example that later is extended into a case study. The paper offers a methodological template for applied evolutionary analysis in economics.     

The changing face of mainstream economics

This article argues that economics is currently undergoing a fundamental shift in its method, away from neoclassical economics and into something new. Although that something new has not been fully developed, it is beginning to take form and is centered on dynamics, recursive methods and complexity theory. The foundation of this change is coming from economists who are doing cutting edge work and influencing mainstream economics. These economists are defining and laying the theoretical groundwork for the fundamental shift that is occurring in the economics profession.     

Maternal Healthcare in Tajikistan: A Bargaining Framework

Abstract

This study examines women's declining use of maternal healthcare services in post-socialist Tajikistan. Using data from the 2003 and 2007 Tajikistan Living Standards Surveys (TLSS), the findings support previous evidence that a woman's use of prenatal and delivery care depends on her education, household income, and proximity to services. However, previous models have not specified who makes the decision to use maternal healthcare services. This study finds that in Tajikistan a woman shares decision making with her spouse and the eldest woman in the household. There is limited evidence that traditional proxies for bargaining power, such as relative earnings level, affect outcomes. The authors conclude that where women's exit options are limited, surveys evaluating the value of women's assets and their services in the home, as well as questions about decision making, will allow more refined measures of women's bargaining power.     

Consumption,Identity, and the Sociocultural Constitution of “Preferences”: Reading Women's Magazines

This paper shows how the concept of identity may figure importantly into shifts in preferences and patterns of consumption. We explore the 1970s emergence of the “working woman” – a woman who worked outside the home and regarded work as central to her identity. Women's magazines were especially involved in working out the “working woman” image, stressing how products could be used to attain her readily-identifiable appearance and efficient, pleasant home life. As such, they played into a shift in social valuation of female identities – away from those centered on traditional feminine pursuits, towards those centered on intensified labor-force involvement, consumerism, and commodified private life.     

The ancient art of economics

Abstract

This article reviews ancient texts dedicated to the art of economics, narrating how the master was to manage his wife, slaves and things. The discourse on the economy of things focuses on defining the proper limits of wealth. The economy of the slaves included multiple technologies of classification, management and supervision that were to guide the master and the matron in their ‘use’ of slaves. The wife was a freeborn member of the polis who was doomed to spend her entire life in the economy as a governed subject who partakes in government only within the confines of the oikos.     

An Interview with Barbara Bergmann: Leading feminist economist

Barbara Bergmann, Emerita Professor of Economics at both the American University and the University of Maryland, has been a leader in the development and establishment of feminist economics, in scholarly, policy and organizational capacities. Professor Bergmann is particularly known for her crowding model of discrimination. She is the author of an excellent, accessible undergraduate textbook, The Economic Emergence of Women (1986) . She has authored several policy-oriented books, including In Defense of Affirmative Action (1996a), Saving Our Children from Poverty: what the United States can learn from France (1996b) , and What Child Care System for America? (2000). Professor Bergmann is past president of the Society for the Advancement of Socioeconomics, the Eastern Economic Association and the International Association for Feminist Economics. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard in 1959. This interview was conducted at the ASSA meetings in Chicago on 4 January 1998.