Max Weber

A bstract .   This paper argues that Weber's outline and research program is only of limited relevance for present-day economic sociology and heterodox economics because Weber had a rather narrow and static understanding of rationality and the economy. Uncertainty, both as a basic fact of economic life and in the interpretation of what rational action means in specific contexts, is missing in his approach. After a short discussion of the secondary literature on Weber's methodology, the paper focuses on the most important writings of Weber on methods and economics (e.g., his outline and some parts of Economy and Society ). The result of our investigation is that Weber shared a rather narrow, neoclassical understanding of the Austrian variant of economics. His important construction of goal-oriented behavior as the major methodological advice to analyze human action presupposes the idealized assumptions of perfect knowledge. His understanding of the market exchange process, price setting, and the functioning of full competition are rather conventional and elementary. Weber's genius did not materialize in the field of economics, but in his sociology of religion and law and in his sociology of domination.     

Paradigms and Novelty in Economics: The History of Economic Thought as a Source of Enlightenment

Over time, economics has experienced paradigm shifts, and there is every reason to think this will continue. In economics, as in the development of technological knowledge, paradigms do not emerge from nowhere, but build on precursors, possibly from other fields. Our understanding of current economic thinking can be enhanced by paying greater attention to the role of paradigms and by using concepts such as myth, plot structure, and cultural endowment, which are typically given greater attention by literary analysts than by economists, to study paradigms. Here we argue that together these can help us better understand how ideas from other times and fields may be combined with our own to generate better research and publications, and that a greater awareness of the history of economics may well be an excellent vehicle for enhancing that understanding.     

When Heterodoxy Becomes Orthodoxy: Ecological Economics in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics

Modern ecological economics emerged in opposition to mainstream economics as a scientific approach with many key heterodox features. Among these are an open systems perspective, transdisciplinarity, and radical criticism of the conventional representation of economic process. The term “ecological economics” was included internationally in the second edition (2008) of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, the most prestigious and widely used dictionary of economics. In our view, however, the entry does little to facilitate understanding of the heterodox features, and theoretical and methodological controversies that have developed in ecological economics over the last two decades.     

The New Microeconomics: A Psychological,Institutional, and Evolutionary Paradigm with Neoclassical Economics as a Special Case

Microeconomics requires a new grounding or formulation that can account for a broader range of socioeconomic behavior than neoclassical economics does. The core of the neoclassical economics research program—the theory of rational choice—has offered insights into the determination of socioeconomic behavior. But other elements need to be integrated into a coherent microeconomic perspective. We introduce such a perspective in which neoclassical economics becomes a special case. This advances our understanding of the determinants of behavior in a coherent and integrated manner. This perspective may form the foundation of an evolutionary and institutional perspective on socioeconomic systems. This has practical value in designing strategy and policy.     

对循环经济的理论认识与实践思考

循环经济既是人类对人与自然、生产与消费认识的飞跃,对现代经济学思维和理念的认识的深化,也是实现人类和自然环境可持续发展的有效途径和必然选择。文章根据我国的国情,认为必须运用宣传教育手段、法律手段、经济手段、管理手段和科技手段来促进我国循环经济的建立和发展,构筑起我国的循环经济体系。     

Uneven landscapes and city size distributions

This paper proposes a new model generating city size distributions that asymptotically follow the log-normal distribution. The log-normal distribution is consistent with Zipf’s law in the top tail, which is known to hold for many countries in different periods. The key feature of our model is that it can express city size as a product of multiple random factors (e.g., climate, geographic features, and industry composition). Each factor alone need not generate Zipf’s law. Our model provides a justification for classical urban economics models that have been criticized for not delivering Zipf’s law, since a single model typically represents only one factor among many present in reality.     

Understanding environmental management practices: integrating views from strategic management and ecological economics

This paper proposes an integrating framework, based on theoretical concepts from the fields of strategic management and ecological economics, to enhance our understanding of environmental management practices (EMPs) and their relationship to sustainable competitive advantage. Starting with an expansion of the resource‐based view of the firm to include the natural environment, the article next engages the interdisciplinary field of ecological economics and its thermodynamic approach to ‘joint production’ to provide additional insights into the challenges and opportunities brought by a bio‐physically constrained economy. Informed by this understanding, the article then categorizes examples of EMPs drawn from the literature and discusses their potential impact on competitiveness. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for future research in the hope that the proposed framework will stimulate debate and lead to a fuller understanding of the impact of environmental management in the 21st century. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Control Theory and Macroeconomic Policy

This Briefing Paper examines the contribution that control theory can make to our understanding of macroeconomic policy. Control theory is an area of study, orginally developed in engineering, which has since been applied to a very wide range of problems not only in engineering but also in biology. ecology, physiology, space exploration and economics. The kinds of questions in economics which conrrol theory could help us to answer include: what objectives should the government be pursuing, infation or unemployment or both, and by what means? what instruments should be used and in what combinations? should the government adopt targets for the money supply or the exchange rate, or concentrate on unemployment and the balance of payments?     

论供应链视角下中国职业篮球联赛表演权的产权归属

通过中国职业篮球联赛供应链的构建,来分析中国职业篮球联赛表演权的具体形成及其表现形式。同时从经济学、著作权法、不完全合同理论三个角度分析中国职业篮球联赛表演权的最终产权归属。旨在对中国职业篮球联赛表演权的归属有个直观、全面的认识,并保护职业篮球运动员、教练员和职业篮球俱乐部的合法权益。     

关于审计失真治理非完全有效的经济学分析

注册会计师出具的审计意见是市场监管的主要手段分,但由于信息偏在和“免费乘车者”等经济学原因,在现实生活中,审计失真治理非完全有效的事例经常发生。本文认为,借鉴成熟市场经济国家经验,结合我国实际情况,强化信息沟通机制和完善“搭便车”抑制机制,寻找法律监督、政府监管、行业自律的相对较佳结合点以趋近完全有效性成为我国审计失真治理的现实选择。     

Problem-based learning: merging of economics and mathematics

We present problem-based learning as a strategy to assist students to integrate both mathematics and economics knowledge as well as develop other skills. We present basic information about problem-based learning, provide an example of an economics problem that could be used in an early undergraduate mathematics course, and provide sources for additional economics problems and information about problem-based learning. While faculty will seldom have a class composed entirely of economics students, the examples that we provide do not require in-depth knowledge of economics but will help undergraduates develop some understanding of the economic world they live in.     

Henry George and the Ethics of Economics

Abstract . Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) is a great ethical masterpiece. Its moral tone distinguishes the book. More than an economics test, it is a philosophic quest for justice, an impassioned declaration of the rule of natural law. Indignantly attacking the contention that economics has no place for natural law or ethics, George exclaims: “She [economics] has been degraded and shackled; her truths dislocated; her harmonies ignored.” On the contrary, George stresses, political economy (economics) is a science, and like all sciences, is governed by natural law. Furthermore, it is basically “moral.” Science must, of necessity, always lead to ethics. Natural law must, of necessity, always lead to morality, or justice.“The law of human progress, what is it but the moral law?” George asks. “Unless its foundation be laid in justice the social structure cannot stand.” The social ill that perpetuates poverty and the manifold evils it causes is private ownership of land and the private privilege of collecting its rent. “The fundamental law of nature, that the enjoyment by man shall be consequent upon his exertion, is thus violated.”     

LEEping into the future of labor economics: the research potential of linking employer and employee data

Linked employer–employee (LEE) data sets are a new and increasingly available tool for research in labor economics. This study indicates a variety of areas in which this tool might be useful and offers a large number of research questions that can be studied with LEE data. Any area where we believe that outcomes are generated by interactions of employers and workers can be profitably analyzed using such data. The answers generated by these studies can enhance our understanding of nearly every labor-market policy.     

The price of labour and understanding the causes of poverty

This paper provides a review of how questions in labour economics link to the central concerns of development economics in understanding the mechanisms that both create, and perpetuate, poverty in some countries and not others and in some areas within countries. The paper frames this link by asking what determines first the price of labour, then the nature of employment open to labour and finally discusses the links from the price of labour to incomes through the assets owned by the poor. The advent of micro data in developing countries has transformed our knowledge of what needs to be explained. While the price of labour clearly depends on education the links between incomes and education are much weaker than is frequently supposed. The finding from micro data that conditioning on a wide range of observable characteristics of human capital still leaves most of the variation in earnings to be explained suggests the importance of understanding what these other factors might be and how they may interact with human capital. One possibility is that markets are segmented so that individuals with the same skills earn different amounts depending on the sector in which they work. Another possible explanation is that the unobserved characteristics of workers are more important than the observed and that processes of matching and search lead to the outcomes we observe in labour markets. It is argued that these explanations are not mutually exclusive and that different processes may operate across labour markets both within and across countries. The review concludes by outlining outstanding research issues in labour economics where new models and data may well provide insights into explaining the extraordinarily diverse range of outcomes we observe for the price of labour in poor countries.     

高职院校经济类专业经济法案例教学探析

在高职院校经济类专业的经济法课程教学中,案例教学是普遍采用的教学方法之一。为提高经济法案例教学的效果,本文分析了经济法案例教学中存在的问题,提出了改进方法。     

TRANSACTION COST ECONOMICS: THE PRECURSORS

Theories commonly progress through four stages, from informal to pre‐formal to semi‐formal and fully formal. This paper reports on the earliest stage of transaction cost economics that extended from the 1920s to the 1970s. That the gestation stage lasted so long is partly because transaction cost economics departed significantly from the then‐prevailing economic orthodoxy. Also, and related, it is an interdisciplinary undertaking. As reported herein, transaction cost economics selectively combines economics, organisation theory and law and is the product of the contributions of some of the finest minds in those three fields.     

Wild Dragons in the City: Urban Political Economy,Affordable Housing Development and the Performative World‐making of Economic Models

This article explores the potential to mobilize in an urban context the key insights of the burgeoning literature on the performativity of economics. It argues that our understanding of contemporary urban political‐economic transformation needs to explicitly recognize the active role of economics in making and remaking the urban world, as opposed to merely describing and analysing it in some kind of passive, detached fashion. It develops this argument through the elaboration of a case study of just such world‐making in action: the growing use in the United Kingdom, since the early 2000s, of economic models for assessing the viability of affordable housing provision in new residential developments. The world of urban redevelopment that such models attempt to describe formulaically has, the article submits, increasingly come to act according to the model and the assumptions it contains; the model, in this sense, has been progressively actualized in the urban landscape. The article conceptualizes such performative economic models as examples of what Michel Callon calls economics ‘in the wild’, and it focuses on the work of the leading commercial developer and marketer of such models in the affordable housing planning environment over the last decade — a consulting company called Three Dragons.     

Economics,Darwinism, and the Case of Disciplinary Imports

The problem of causality in economics is still contended by various epistemological alternatives. The article builds on the received view of Darwinism in economics and examines the way in which economics and biology find common ground in concepts and assumptions that reflect causal commonalities of the natural and the social world. We claim that the role the contingent pattern plays in understanding socioeconomic change provides reasons to concede corrections to a rule‐based causal mechanism. The article concludes on the merits of advancing the ontological equivalent of interdisciplinary studies as one possible standard in reference to which to judge the epistemic adequacy of any import.     

网络经济下锁定效应的经济学本质及成因研究——基于非转移成本的视角

锁定效应在人类的社会经济生活中是广泛存在的,是影响人类生产、生活决策的基本规律之一。锁定现象是指行为主体当前的决策选择受制于前期的决策行为。以往对于锁定效应成因的分析大多基于转移成本,本文则认为仅仅将锁定效应归结为转移成本是不全面的。本文基于收益和机会成本的角度对锁定效应的经济学本质进行了阐述,并在此基础上,探讨了锁定效应的成因,旨在对锁定效应的理解及其在网络经济下的应用提供借鉴。     

Law,Property and Ambiguity: The Uses and Abuses of Legal Ambiguity in Remaking Istanbul's Informal Settlements

What is the role of legal ambiguity in the creation and institutionalization of private property regimes? In what ways does the (ab)use of legal ambiguities affect market‐making processes? I address these questions through a detailed analysis of two large‐scale urban renewal projects in Istanbul that impose a formal private property regime on informal settlements. My research reveals that without the strategic utilization of legal ambiguities and administrative arbitrariness by public and private actors, private property cannot be easily created and hence capitalist markets cannot function efficiently. My findings challenge the assumptions of several social science traditions such as neoclassical and neoinstitutionalist economics, as well as most works within the law and economics tradition regarding the relationship between law, property and economic development. These approaches to economic development are underpinned by the legal certainty that private property entails as the most important element for an efficient economic order. However, in their unconditional support for private ownership, they fail to realize the degree of legal ambiguity and administrative arbitrariness needed to create the private property regime in the first place. As such their arguments remain theoretically and empirically incomplete. A more complete analysis of the relationship between law and economic dynamics must focus on how private property is constructed, and the extent to which legal ambiguities and loopholes are utilized in this process.