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.     

Technological condition for balanced growth: A criticism and restatement

According to prevailing opinion, only the neutral form of technological progress in the Harrod sense is consistent with balanced growth in a one-sector constant returns-to-scale economy. Though various definitions of balanced growth are in use in the literature, the above highly restrictive technological condition is believed to hold for all of them. The paper demonstrates that this belief is not correct. The condition is shown to be false if the definition of balanced growth (i) does not require the constancy of the marginal product of capital (or the interest rate), and (ii) permits the time semiinfinite or indeed any finite balanced growth path. More specifically, under (i) and (ii) there exists a balanced growth path consistent with a significantly wide class of technological changes of the capital-using (labour-saving) form in the Harrod sense. Alternatively, this condition is correct if either (i) the interest rate is required to be constant or (ii) growth is balanced if it is such for all time—that is, for both past and future. The condition is also correct if the socioeconomic institutions are such that the constancy of the savings ratio implies the constancy of the capital share.     

Social capital as a substitute for formality: Evidence from Bolivia

The paper studies the role of social capital in the urban informal sector in Bolivia. It shows that a formal firm has about 6.4 times the sales of an informal firm with no social capital, but informal firms use their social capital to compensate for the lack of formal productivity benefits. By being formal, firms obtain permanent visibility because they can operate a shop or a visible production location and they can produce in locations with better public infrastructure. Informal firms, in contrast, sell in one place – typically in street markets in front of formal shops – and produce in another — typically in the outskirts. Social capital increases accessibility of informal firms and provides them with security benefits at their production location.     

Credit as a Means of Social Provisioning

Depending on one’s vision as to the inherent stability or instability of a market economy, credit either enhances stability or promotes instability. As such, credit either supports or retards social provisioning. Two representative approaches to the role of credit are compared: a DSGE framework and a modern variation of classical political economy. The implications of vision for methodological features are traced. The paper discusses empirical patterns for the American experience since the mid-1970s with respect to their consistency with the visions. If a market economy is inherently unstable, economic and financial stability requires more than monetary policy.     

Social conflict and growth

Despite the predictions of the neoclassical theory of economic growth, we observe that poor countries have invested at lower rates and have not grown faster than rich countries. To explain these empirical regularities we provide a game-theoretic model of conflict between social groups over the distribution of income. Among all possible equilibria, we concentrate on those that are on the constrained Pareto frontier. We study how the level of wealth and the degree of inequality affects growth. We show how lower wealth can lead to lower growth and even to stagnation when the incentives to domestic accumulation are weakened by redistributive considerations.     

The Economic Surplus as a Fund for Social Change and Postneoliberal Governance

The central problem in capitalism today is not one of scarce resources clashing against innate, insatiable wants. Rather, the modern problem of monopoly capitalism is one of abundance of production clashing against scarcity of consumers. Indeed, sustaining growth while fighting against excess capacity proves to be the biggest battle in business today, fought by the capitalist power structure with the tools of neoliberalism and globalization. The economic surplus, roughly sketched, represents that gap between productive resources and consumption, and thus represents the abundance that is possible given current technology. The argument set forth is that the economic surplus remains a powerful tool in describing economic relationships and social justice issues within the context of the Great Capitalist Restoration, but more importantly, that the economic surplus represents a tool for social change. The potential for socially just amelioration and change within post-neoliberal governance is explored with explicit reference to the qualitative and instrumental framework proposed by Ron Stanfield in his somewhat overlooked but incredibly important piece, “The Fund for Social Change” (1992).     

Money as Social Exergy

Synopsis It has been proposed that open thermodynamic systems will act to dissipate available energy gradients by self-organizing into coherent structures that, with time, evolve and develop into nested hierarchies – panarchies – that adapt to internal and external changes according to a characteristic adaptive cycle. This paper seeks to apply these ideas in the purely societal realm by investigating the role of money in economic systems. Money represents the value embodied in goods; a value that is separate from the exact nature of those goods. We suggest that money thereby liberates the ‘free value’ of economic desire and that this free value has properties analogous to energy. The result is the self-organization of structures and systems (‘econosystems’) that dissipate this ‘free value’. Econosystems act at different scales, and nested levels of econosystems form a panarchy, having effects that can be observed. In particular, it appears that money facilitates the creation of relationships between econosystem actors, increasing the connectedness of the econosystems that envelop those actors. We have identified a phenomenon whereby freed social value (i.e. money) can aggregate, or pool, at a larger econosystem scale in structures such as banks. These pools act as gradients that actors at the neighborhood scale can exploit for self-organization in the econosystem. Thus, econosystem actors appear to be freed from thermodynamic constraints by using money as a means of self-organization. However, because of these pools of aggregated social exergy, connectedness is increased at the larger scale of the econosystem. The potential consequence of this dynamic is that money may act to push larger scale econosystems toward a state of heightened vulnerability to collapse, while freeing smaller scale actors from apparent constraints. In this way, we propose that money acts to skew information feedback loops between econosystem actors and larger scale structures such as economies and ecosystems.      

The Ground without Foundation: Territory as a Social Construct

It has been commonplace to regard territory and boundaries as social constructions. It is, however, often left unclear what the social construction of territory really implies and what it explains. As several meanings can be attached to territory, the key question is not whether territory is socially constructed but how it is constructed. This article tries to systemise and sharpen constructivist claims regarding territory. I will argue that two specific constructions merit special attention and help explain the tendency to defend territory by military means. First, territory is often conceived as a (female) body. Second, it is regarded as private property. Both metaphors are interwoven in normative structures that may explain why people fight over territory although in strategic and economic sense it would not be rational to do so.     

Social polarization, fiscal instability and growth

We present a dynamic model of fiscal policy in a simple growth framework where social polarization (of preferences) plays a central role in the evolution of fiscal instability and growth collapse. In a highly polarized society, a deficit occurs endogenously, fiscal spending path becomes more volatile, output collapses, and economic growth rate is reduced along the transition path to a new lower level of output. One novel feature is that the size of fiscal deficit, the magnitude of fiscal volatility, and the size of reduction in output and growth rate are explicitly shown to be increasing functions of the degree of social polarization. This is because of the positive relationship between the polarization of preferences and the incentive for policymakers (or socio-economic groups) to overexploit the government resources in a common pool setting (polarization effect). Thereby, we offer a fiscal instability channel that negatively links social polarization and growth, which is an alternative yet distinct explanation for the empirical finding that social polarization is harmful to growth. Moreover, we fully distinguish the incentive to engage in such short-term policies under political uncertainty from that under polarization. Polarization and political uncertainty are shown to be distinct yet critical to the dynamic coordination failure in the common pool setting.     

Ambulatory care nursing: growth as a professional specialty

Ambulatory care nursing has emerged as a distinct professional nursing specialty. Many characteristics differentiate ambulatory care nursing from other specialty practices, including the settings, the characteristics of the patient encounters and the focus upon groups, communities, and populations, as well as individual patients and their families. A conceptual framework for ambulatory care nursing was developed in 1998 and recently revised, through consensus of leaders in the specialty. The key elements of the Ambulatory Care Nursing Conceptual Framework are the patient, the environment (both internal and external), and the nurse, practicing in three major roles.     

作为社会理论的古典政治经济学

古典政治经济学实际上是一种社会理论 ,它认为社会由诸阶级构成 ,而阶级区分的依据是它们的不同经济职能 ,它们的社会和政治关系由其经济利益定位。斯密的社会阶级经济分析有首创之功 ,但因其未能前后一致地坚持劳动价值论 ,无法提供社会阶级关系的适当解释。李嘉图则在劳动价值论基础上提出了社会阶级冲突的可能性     

On evolutionary technological change and economic growth: Lakatos as a starting point for appraisal

This paper proposes a discussion on evolutionary technological change and economic growth theory, using the Lakatosian Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes as an appraisal criterion. Since the persistence of some inflexibility in this approach made it difficult to capture fundamental features of the scientific undertaking at hand, an alternative hypothesis was explored, that developed by Hoover (Scientific research program or tribe? A joint appraisal of Lakatos and the new classical macroeconomics. In: de Marchi N, Blaug M (eds) Appraising economic theories: studies in the methodology of research programmes. Edward Elgar, Aldershot, 1991). This latter framework is used here not as a formal methodology but rather as a language to find patterns in these theories. This exercise evolved then towards a number of considerations on the confrontation between these evolutionary theories particularly in terms of that which can be seen (in a loose sense) as their “rival research programme”, the new neoclassical growth models.     

Intergenerational Transfer Schemes as Incomplete Social Contracts

Intergenerational transfers are often viewed as emerging from social contracts that specify the terms of trade for some pattern of exchange among generations. Here it is argued that such a view should incorporate contractual incompleteness and the impossibility to ex ante rule out the renegotiation of the social contract. In the present setting, such issues preclude that social contracts implement first-best decisions. Yet, a situation with an incomplete and renegotiable social contract is superior to various other scenarios, including the no-contract solution.     

与时俱进,统筹城乡经济社会发展

坚定不移地走统筹城乡经济社会发展之路,努力实现城乡协调发展,是解决长期以来制约我国经济社会发展的城乡二元经济结构、从根本上解决“三农”问题的新的发展思路和重大战略举措。落实的关键在于加快工业化、城镇化,推进农业现代化。要及时调整工作思路,制定和用好政策,统筹发展规划,统筹生产经营,统筹人力资源开发,统筹社会化服务,始终考虑占人口大多数的农民的利益,把解决“三农”问题放在经济社会发展的优先位置,在全国、特别是农业大省河南,大力推进农业现代化,实现城乡经济社会的协调发展。