Moving Beyond Culturalism and Formalism: Islam,Women, and Political Unrest in the Middle East

ABSTRACT

Scenes of political unrest throughout the Middle East are often coupled with media reports and public debates in the United States that have a recurring theme: the relationship between women and Islam. After discussing the culturalist accounts that portray women as being in grave danger from Islam and in need of Western protection and supervision, this contribution examines an emerging trend in political science developed under the influence of the formalism of neoclassical economics. The study argues that despite ostensibly universal assumptions about human behavior and alleged objectivity, the theoretical foundations of neoclassical economics and its methodological formalism fall short in providing an alternative to culturalism, and, instead, reinforce the misperceptions and misunderstandings about the region.     

Epistemology and the tasks of feminist economics

This paper examines the implications of current epistemological debates for the work of feminist economists. Feminist economists must acknowledge (in accordance with recent developments in the study of science) that (a) inquirers can never be certain whether claims about the world are true; (b) scientific inquiry is permeated with “internal” and “external” values; and (c) beliefs are affected by inquirers' social locations. But feminists should not, it argues, embrace the “relativist” stance of some postmodern thinkers, or reject the ideal of “truth,” or argue that beliefs are strictly determined by inquirers' identities and interests. It seeks to outline an epistemological “middle ground” for feminist economics, between the extremes of exaggerated claims of certainty and a disempowering relativism.     

Long‐Run Growth Differences and the Neoclassical Growth Model

This paper shows that allowing factor income share differences across countries in a modified Solow model can imply differences in output growth rates across countries. Using cross‐sectional data for 52 countries, an empirical illustration shows that the parameters of the modified model are intuitively plausible, jointly significant, and possess modest explanatory power (R² around 0.25). The paper emphasizes the methodological importance of simplifying assumptions on applied theory.     

经济与生态环境系统协调的超边际分析

从新兴古典经济学角度出发,运用超边际分析理论,分别建立了经济系统、生态环境系统最优决策模型;从两模型最优解中推导出经济效益与其外生交易费用正向相关、环境效益与其外生交易费用正向相关的数理关系;最后得到结论:增加外生交易费用是提高经济系统和环境系统效益,进而达到两大系统的双赢与可持续发展的有效途径。     

Developing Critical Thinking by Using the Web in a Principles of Macroeconomics Course

This short exploration details one example of how the web can be used to present, discuss, and search for alternative perspectives on many economic issues as well as to teach students the importance of identifying the author(s) or institution(s) presenting the website information.     

Residential Mobility and the Housing Market in a Two-sector Neoclassical Growth Model

The impact of residential mobility and competitive housing markets on long run growth is examined using a two-sector general equilibrium overlapping-generations model in continuous time. There is an infinity of agents with finite lives who adjust their housing consumption by moving, which is costly. We explore the model's steady-state properties, first with a free housing market, then under rent control when the market clears through restrictions on the frequency of moves. Rent controls do not just reduce welfare; they may increase the steady-state capital-labor ratio.     

Cornelius Castoriadis on the Scope and Content of Neoclassical and Marxian Economics

The paper presents the thought of the political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis on economic methodology and the neoclassical and Marxian traditions. Castoriadis suggested that the scope of economic theory includes the identification of “local” regularities and not the search for invariant “laws.” He criticized the use of equilibrium and the utilitarian framework in the neoclassical tradition and proposed to approach human agency based on the Aristotelian concept of the “social individual.” In addition, he criticized the deterministic nature of the Marxian “laws.” According to Castoriadis, the use of concepts such as the “production function” and “capital” presents a number of caveats.     

Critical Realism,Feminist Epistemology,and the Emancipatory Potential of Science: A Comment on Lawson and Harding

In a recent contribution to this Journal , Tony Lawson (1999) claims that the methodological framework of critical realism fits the "explanatory and emancipatory projects" of feminist economics. This essay challenges his claim on the basis that a "naive" notion of science underlies critical realism. It argues that for feminist economists, a rethinking of traditional notions of scientific inquiry is just as important as the rethinking of methodology, and that one cannot be done without the other.     

Median‐voter Equilibria in the Neoclassical Growth Model under Aggregation*

We study a dynamic version of Meltzer and Richard's median‐voter model where agents differ in wealth. Taxes are proportional to income and are redistributed as equal lump‐sum transfers. Voting occurs every period and each consumer votes for the tax that maximizes his welfare. We characterize time‐consistent Markov‐perfect equilibria twofold. First, restricting utility classes, we show that the economy's aggregate state is mean and median wealth. Second, we derive the median‐voter's first‐order condition interpreting it as a tradeoff between distortions and net wealth transfers. Our method for solving the steady state relies on a polynomial expansion around the steady state.     

Some Comments on the Role of Lesbianism in Feminist Economic Transformation

This paper explores the relationship between feminism and lesbianism, arguing both that feminism has encouraged and supported lesbianism, and that the existence of lesbian feminism supports both feminist goals in general and heterosexual feminists in particular.     

The Impossibility of Entrepreneurship Under the Neoclassical Framework: Open vs. Closed-Ended Processes

In spite of its use to explain market processes, neoclassical economics still has not integrated entrepreneurship into its analyses. This explanatory gap is the consequence of the analytical closed-endedness of the “market” processes described by the neoclassical framework, where social interactions do not result in new unpredictable information. However, entrepreneurship as profit-seeking under uncertainty is an open-ended process characterized by a creatively reflexive and emergent interactive behavior in society. This open-endedness involves the generation of novel, complex, and extensive future information that is not what anyone intended it to be. Neoclassical economics, with its predetermined assumptions on economic behavior, cannot really account for the fundamental uncertainty of open-ended processes because it cannot explain reflexivity or emergence. Therefore, it cannot explain entrepreneurship as either an innovatively cohesive or disruptive behavior that converges toward future market situations.     

Shifting theories: partial perspectives on the household

There is a neglect of networks within cooperative conflict models,which arises because of the patriarchal households assumed.But households are not the same everywhere, because their structureis dependent upon social context, and they are a sub-systemof wider social relations and realities. Understanding households(in this paper female-headed households) requires us to studythe varied contexts in which households are situated and thesocial relations of individuals within these institutions. Usingcontributions from feminist economics and realist social theory,this paper shows how these frameworks can explain the diversityof social reality in household formations and relations.     

Thermoeconomics: Beyond the Second Law

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger's (1945) What is Life? has inspired many subsequent efforts to explain biological evolution, especially the evolution of complex systems, in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the concepts of ‘entropy’ and ‘negative entropy’. However, the problems associated with this paradigm are manifold. Here some of these problems will be highlighted and briefly critiqued. ‘Thermoeconomics’, by contrast, is based on the proposition that the role of energy in biological evolution should be defined and understood not in terms of the Second Law but in terms of such economic criteria as ‘productivity’, ‘efficiency’, and especially the costs and benefits (or ‘profitability’) of the various mechanisms for capturing and utilizing available energy to build biomass and do work. Thus thermoeconomics is fully consistent with the Darwinian paradigm. Economic criteria provide a better account of the advances (and recessions) in bioenergetic technologies than does any formulation derived from the Second Law.     

Ecology,Sustainability, and Care: Developments in the Field

Over the past three decades, scholars and activists have been attempting to enrich the field of economics with both feminist and ecological perspectives. This essay reviews some highlights of such efforts, describes the current state of the field (particularly in regard to notions of “care”), and introduces a short symposium.     

On the Natural and Economic Difficulties to Fulfilling the Human Right to Water Within a Neoclassical Economics Framework

We present a neoclassical economic model of the human right to water using a nonrenewable resource model inclusive of a backstop technology. The right is interpreted as a minimum consumption requirement the government is obligated to fulfill in the event that any one household cannot do so independently. Differing by income levels, households maximize utility by purchasing a composite consumption good and water from two distinct, government-owned sources. Facing physical and financial constraints, the government uses fiscal policy to address potential human rights violations. Reducing the analysis to two periods, we develop a novel approach to compare total welfare levels from a joint human rights and neoclassical economics perspective. We define a human rights welfare standard and discuss cases in which traditional social welfare measures would exceed, violate, or meet this standard. We thus offer a unique way to merge economic analysis with human rights research.     

Competing Models of Socially Constructed Economic Man: Differentiating Defoe's Crusoe from the Robinson of Neoclassical Economics

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe has seldom been read as an explicitly political text. When it has, it appears that the central character was designed to warn the early eighteenth-century reader against political challenges to the existing economic order. Insofar as Defoe's Crusoe stands for ‘economic man’, he is a reflection of historically produced assumptions about the need for social conformity, not the embodiment of any genuinely essential economic characteristics. This insight is used to compare Defoe's conception of economic man with that of the neoclassical Robinson Crusoe economy. On the most important of the ostensibly generic principles espoused by neoclassical theorists, their ‘Robinson’ has no parallels with Defoe's Crusoe. Despite the shared name, two quite distinct social constructions serve two equally distinct pedagogical purposes. Defoe's Crusoe extols the virtues of passive middle-class sobriety for effective social organisation; the neoclassical Robinson champions the establishment of markets for the sake of productive efficiency.     

我国上市公司的投资行为研究:基于新古典理论的检验

从新古典投资理论出发,通过研究我国上市公司投资行为对资本成本的响应程度以及企业投资规模与利润水平的关联程度,笔者发现:(1)我国上市公司的投资行为总体上符合新古典经济理论所期望的利润最大化目标下的企业投资行为范式;(2)由于存在较大的资本存量调整成本,新古典经济理论倡导的干预投资的经济政策对我国企业的投资行为在长期内会发生调节作用,但短期内的作用非常有限。     

A Rent-Seeking Experiment for the Classroom

Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that active learning techniques improve student comprehension and retention of abstract economic ideas such as rent seeking. Instructors can reinforce the concept of rent seeking with a classroom game, particularly one involving real money. The authors improve upon a game first introduced by Goeree and Holt (1999) and later expanded upon by Bischoff and Hofmann (2002). The authors present a version of the game in which students participate in an all-pay auction, risking their own money, and discover first hand the potential inefficiencies of rent seeking. The authors suggest extensions of the rent-seeking game, including discussions of social welfare effects, equity, campaign finance reform, tax simplification, and congressional reforms designed to limit the influence of rent seeking in the economy.     

超计划政府投资现象的公共决策研究

出现超计划投资项目主要是人为原因造成的,政府投资项目决策法治化对超计划投资现象具有遏制作用,必须提供发挥其遏制作用的制度保证。     

Beyond the principle of population: Malthus's Essay

Abstract

After an introductory section, this article reviews reasons and arguments establishing the invalidity of Malthus's construct of a ‘principle of population’. Section 3 propounds that Malthus's theory is located beyond the principle of population, with the oscillation figure as its centre. Section 4 takes note of the trajectory which the Essay describes between natural and moral science, assesses inequality and growth as the two focal points of Malthus's theory and eventually observes Malthus looking forward to a state beyond the dictates of growth.