Conceptual Displacement: From the Natural to the Social

This paper distinguishes between epistemological naturalism, which it supports, and ontological naturalism, which it opposes. It sketches the emergence of anti-naturalist social theory among nineteenth-century African-American intellectuals and its refinement by twentieth-century feminists. These movements challenged ontological naturalism in the social sciences by substituting social constructionist concepts of race and gender for naturalist ones. Economics awaits a similar liberation. The paper identifies four naturalist concepts—atomism, determinism and biologically determined race and gender differences—as structuring mainstream economic theory. It concludes that ontological naturalism is inconsistent with the application of the epistemology of the natural sciences to the social sciences.     

Economics and the Supreme Court: The Case of the Minimum Wage

In the United States, laissez-faire has been the policy advocated in good times, while social legislation has been called for during crises. One instance of this dichotomy concerns the transformation of the American understanding of minimum wage laws during the early 20^th century. During this time, the view of minimum wage laws changed from one that viewed such laws as theft, to one that saw such laws as being required for distributional justness. We examine the legal-historical debate concerning whether the Supreme Court renounced its policy of laissez-faire individualism in its 1937 ruling finding the minimum wage law constitutional, arguing that it did not. We investigate the free market standard that the Court used to find minimum wage laws unconstitutional in 1923. We demonstrate how the economic conditions of the Depression, coupled with the development of economic theory, explain how the Court eventually found the minimum wage law constitutional.     

The duty of the firm in selling to the poor: A question of the person,justice, and subsidiarity

Mainstream economists do not address the question of the duty of the firm in selling to the poor. To them the issue is normative, and they have taken pains to delimit economics as a positive discipline. They separate value and fact, and engage themselves in questions relating to what is and not what should be. Forensic economists hold a different view. Firms are liable for damages due not just to deception and fraud but to negligence as well, and governments have consumer protection agencies to examine cases involving the duty of the firm well beyond deception and fraud. Social economists reject the argument based on libertarianism and individualism that the firm has only one purpose: increasing shareholder value. Social economists view the firm as having several constituencies — shareholders, managers, workers, customers, suppliers, neighbors, partners — and duties associated with each one. Those duties are grounded in the virtue of justice: to render to another that which is owed. The firm has a duty to its customers, its suppliers, and its employees deriving from the principle of equivalence; to its shareholders and employees from the principle of distributive justice; to its competitors and neighbors from the principle of contributive justice. This article argues that the firm has a special duty in selling to the poor which is grounded in the person of the one who is poor, the three principles of economic justice, and the principle of subsidiarity. Mainstream economists address poverty apart from consumer behavior as if the two were unrelated. This article brings the two together and in so doing helps throw light on the question of the duty of the firm in selling to the poor.     

Poverty: A Concept that is Both Absolute and Relative Because Human Beings are at Once Individual and Social

If we confine attention to the inner dynamics of advanced monopoly capitalism, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the prospect … would be the spread of increasingly severe psychic disorders leading to the impairment and eventual breakdown of the system's ability to function even on its own terms — Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy Pareto optimality is faint praise indeed — A. K. Sen     

Import Contents of Final Expenditures in the United States

This paper applies the Kennedy and Thirlwall method of input-output formulation to study the differential import effect of final expenditures in the U.S. Import contents of consumption, investment, and government expenditures as calculated for 1958, 1963, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1981, and 1984. It also separates import effects of trade expansion, changes in the competitive position, shifts in the level of final demands and changes in the structure of final demands. It is found that the import fractions of the four final expenditures differ substantially, resulting in different income multipliers. [410]     

On the economics of R&D and technological collaborations: Insights and results from the project colline

Research collaborations involve co-production and exchange of knowledge across organisational boundaries. They involve governance of intellectual property rights and partners' use of collectively produced knowledge. The principal findings arise from case studies of consortia governance in biotechnology and software and substantial variety in arrangements is identified. This variety may be explained by the appropriability of knowledge in particular research domains as well as by the nature of the knowledge generated. Consequences of governance rules are explored for European research consortia and for collective standards making activities. The analysis indicates several policy conclusions: government policy has an important role in overcoming market failures in consortia formation; adoption of any uniform intellectual property rights model for consortia would be likely to reduce research productivity; policies aimed at stimulating consortia formation must take account of the nature of knowledge that is to be exchanged.