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The transition to neoliberal hegemony during the last quarter of the twentieth century is generally portrayed as a contest between Hayekians and Keynesians. This portrayal overlooks the brief but potent effervescence of the neo-Malthusian movement. Biologists Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, and Donella Meadows led a social movement that pursued environmentalist governance wherein scarce resources and population growth were managed by command-and-control instruments, Pigouvian taxation, and coercion. The neoclassical mainstream of economics conceded to the neo-Malthusian upstarts that if a "backstop" energy source was not discovered, then there were indeed "limits to growth," but neoliberals eventually devised alternative environmental frameworks, such as Elinor Ostrom's "commons" and John Dales's "cap-and-trade." The first significant clash between neoliberals and neo-Malthusians came in the form of a bet between Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich over commodity prices during the 1980s. This article reconstructs the broader context of their confrontation, as well as the theoretical influences on Simon's cornucopian framework of "resourceship." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the causal effect of education on time preference. To define our measure of time preference, we use responses to hypothetical questions involving intertemporal trade-offs from the Indonesian Family Life Survey. We instrument years of education with exposure to the Indonesian INPRES primary school construction program of the 1970s that caused exogenous variations in the cost of going to school. The local average treatment effect of the program was a 9 percentage point decrease in the probability of a female respondent choosing the most impatient response for every additional year of schooling. The results are robust to alternative definitions of the time preference measures but sensitive to changes in samples and specifications. The findings add to the evidence on the endogeneity of individual preference parameters that are often taken to be constant in neoclassical economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labor in capitalism is use-value- and value-producing, but not only value-producing; to fulfill its purpose, labor in capitalist society must be surplus-value-producing labor. In chapter 7 of I Capital i , volume 1, Marx says things about the labor process in general, but it is a mistake to conclude, as Jürgen Habermas does, that because we can say things in general about the labor process that there is a labor process-in-general. Marx reminds us that to treat the capitalist mode of production as if it were simply producing useful things is to engage in bad abstraction: "It must never be forgotten, that in capitalist production what matters is not the immediate use-value but the exchange-value and, in particular, the expansion of surplus-value. This is the driving motive of capitalist production, and it is a pretty conception that - in order to reason away the contradictions of capitalist production - abstracts from its very basis and depicts it as a production aiming at the direct satisfaction of the consumption of the producers" (Marx, I Theories of Surplus-Value i , 495). [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the development of political concepts of neoliberal capitalism. Topics mentioned include the reconceptualization of the neoliberalism phenomenon and antineoliberal politics, the use of social scientific theory of neoclassical economics, and the emergence of political subjectivity.

The neoclassical economic model predicts that price controls lead to deadweight losses. In experimental auction markets, actual deadweight loss is greater than what the neoclassical model predicts, because access on the buyer side under price controls is more random in practice than what the neoclassical model predicts. The randomness that accounts for losses being larger than predicted further implies not only that price controls are no general cure for unfair access but that price controls can be a source of such unfairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern environmentalism and neoclassical economics have much in common, but unfortunately the commonalities too often cloud how markets and the environment can be productively linked. The commonalities most often focus on the conditions for equilibrium in ecosystems and economies and on how human action thwarts both systems from achieving equilibrium. A more realistic link between the two disciplines should focus on the dynamic nature of ecosystems and economies. That link depends on property rights and markets to harness entrepreneurship for the purpose of connecting human demand on nature's bounty with dynamic natural forces. The purpose of this Article is to provide a way of reconciling environmentalism and markets. It criticizes the equilibrium approach to ecology and economics because it misses the dynamic connection between nature and human action.1 A better alternative for linking ecology with economics builds on the teachings of Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek and Ronald Coase regarding the role of prices, property rights, and transaction costs in guiding human action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research establishes that the rise in life expectancy during the second half of the twentieth century led to larger, but not wealthier, populations. In terms of the neoclassical growth theory, these findings indicate that the potential positive effects of health on human capital and productivity (TFP) are limited. The current paper decomposes this corollary. Specifically, it demonstrates that life expectancy promotes human capital skills, which, according to the neoclassical theory, suggests that the TFP elasticity with respect to health is close to zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

R. H. Coase makes two claims in his most important articles: (1) a positive cost of using the price system is needed to explain the existence and importance of firms, and, therefore, neoclassical theory, which treats the price system as free to all, offers no explanation for the existence of firms, and (2) neoclassical theory's important deduction--that a private ownership, competitive economy allocates resources efficiently--is valid only if there is no cost to the provision and use of a price system. I reject both claims in this article and go on to argue that the assumptions that underlie neoclassical theory's perfect competition model are appropriate to the purpose for which it is intended; namely, to understand resource allocation in a private, decentralized economic system. The assumptions that underlie Coase's reasoning serve a different purpose--to understand organization within firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The favorite—long shot bias describes the long-standing empirical regularity that betting odds provide biased estimates of the probability of a horse winning: long shots are overbet whereas favorites are underbet. Neoclassical explanations of this phenomenon focus on rational gamblers who overbet long shots because of risk-love. The competing behavioral explanations emphasize the role of misperceptions of probabilities. We provide novel empirical tests that can discriminate between these competing theories by assessing whether the models that explain gamblers' choices in one part of their choice set (betting to win) can also rationalize decisions over a wider choice set, including compound bets in the exacta, quinella, or trifecta pools. Using a new, large-scale data set ideally suited to implement these tests, we find evidence in favor of the view that misperceptions of probability drive the favorite—long shot bias, as suggested by prospect theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that (Marshallian) income elasticities are proportional to (Frisch) own price elasticities if all goods are additively separable. This implies that luxuries are likely to be easier to postpone. It also implies that preferences over "consumption" are unlikely to display a constant elasticity of substitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoclassical wage theory is based on the premise that a worker's utility is based on his own wage and his own hours of work, without reference to the wages and hours of others. This article reviews anecdotal evidence that the wages of others are a powerful force in determining worker satisfaction, such that utility goes down when the wages of others go up. The resulting comparisons are a powerful force in determining wage structure, but do not exclude ultimate effect of neoclassical wage determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is the purpose of this article to explore in detail the assumption made that the Marshallian theory of joint supply is equivalent to the theory of public goods. It was established that certain of the fundamental points which emerged in the railway rate theory debates originating between F.W. Taussig and A.C. Pigoyu are directly applicable to the problem of distinguishing between the theories of joint supply and public goods. The apparent basis for applying the model of Marshallian joint supply to the analysis of public goods can be demonstrated by comparing joint supply equilibrium. It is suggested that the prices established for pure public goods are truly discriminatory and not merely differential as in the joint supply model.

The characteristics of political economist and professor, George J. Stigler as a neoclassicist are explored. He became a major architect of the field following his receipt of a doctorate degree in 1938. His thinking about industrial organization is highlighted in the very first paragraph of his collection "The Organization of Industry," published in 1968. He also made very clear that his notion of industrial organization is simply applied price or resource allocation theory with an emphasis on empirical and policy studies. Over his career, he contributed more than 30 articles and three books to industrial organization topics, but much of what he wrote about regulation and politics is closely related. In addition, his text "The Theory of Price," both influenced and was influenced by the field of industrial organization.

A key economic issue is whether poor countries or regions tend to grow faster than rich ones: are there automatic forces that lead to convergence over time in the levels of per capita income and product? We use the neoclassical growth model as a framework to study convergence across the 48 contiguous U.S. states. We exploit data on personal income since 1840 and on gross state product since 1963. The U.S. states provide clear evidence of convergence, but the findings can be reconciled quantitatively with the neoclassical model only if diminishing returns to capital set in very slowly. The results for per capita gross domestic product from a broad sample of countries are similar if we hold constant a set of variables that proxy for differences in steady-state characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "Marshallian" approach assumes a prohibitively high cost of monitoring the sharecropper's activities while the "monitoring" approach argues that landlords stipulate and effectively monitor sharecroppers' activities. I present new evidence using detailed data collected from eight Indian villages. Most tenants own some land of their own; this provides a controlled environment in studying the impact of contractual arrangements. The differences in input and output intensities on owned minus sharecropped land of the same household are found to be sizable and significant, suggesting a rejection of the monitoring approach and supporting the notion of the "Marshallian productive inefficiency" of sharecropping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis of firm behavior when both money price and time price are determinants of quantity demanded. The importance accorded to prices in economic analysis has been reinforced by the analysis of the role of time prices as a component of the total price in the theory of choice. Economist Gary S. Becker has demonstrated how the time prices associated with the consumption of goods influence an individual's behavior. Empirical studies have attempted to measure the effect of time prices and generally tend to verify their importance. The article discusses several points of departure for the analysis, and the basic model is constructed and its properties discussed. In the article, the comparative static properties of the model are derived and discussed. The results there are in contrast to other models of product differentiation where changes in the parameters lead to no predictable response. The article presents an analysis of discrimination in terms of both price and time, and analyzes product differentiation in a competitive market.

This article provides a summary of a conference on occupational segregation and the emergence of a new field called dimorphics, which focuses on studying the differences between male and female roles. The author highlights the importance of interaction mechanisms among societal systems and the goal of achieving an occupationally integrated society. The article explores policy issues and unanswered questions in the field of dimorphics, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of the subject. It discusses the factors contributing to occupational segregation based on gender, such as the potential imbalance between female labor supply and demand. The text also examines the Soviet Union's experience with attempting to integrate women into the workforce and discusses the characteristics of an occupationally integrated society, including part-time work and shared child-rearing opportunities. Unanswered questions about the origins of occupational segregation, job allocation based on gender, and the stability of tokenism are raised, highlighting the need for further interdisciplinary research in this area. [Extracted from the article]

This document is a commentary on three papers that discuss the economic dimensions of occupational segregation and discrimination based on sex. The first paper examines the neoclassical and institutional theories of discrimination and criticizes the neoclassical viewpoint for not explaining sex discrimination adequately. The second paper focuses on the effects of sex discrimination on wages, particularly for female-headed households. The third paper discusses potential explanations for unemployment rates based on intrinsic differences and emphasizes the discouraged worker effect. The commentary also introduces a model of perceptual equilibrium to explain segregation against women and argues that economic theories alone cannot fully explain the causes of discrimination. Additionally, the commentary addresses the relation of marriage and divorce to female wages and the importance of maintaining the family as an economic and nutritional unit for raising children. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses sociological aspects of British economic thought. This article seeks to amplify and interpret economist J.A. Schumpeter's remarks, but in a provisional rather than a comprehensive and definitive way, for there are serious gaps in people's knowledge. In 1885, when economist Alfred Marshall became professor of political economy at Cambridge, the condition of his subject was profoundly discouraging, and its immediate prospects seemed little better. Its public reputation had fallen, owing to the combined effects of a sharp public reaction against classical economics, an increased concern about current economic and social problems.

Assesses the effect of savings on the rate of national income growth based on the Neoclassical growth models of economics. Relation between the growth rate of the national product and the saving-investment coefficient; Production function aspects of the Harrod-Domar model; Studies showing the correlation between investment ratios and the national-product growth rates.

Part textbook, part treatise, this volume makes some progress down the long road from the received body of neo-classical trade theory toward the goal of an integrated and tested series of theoretical hypotheses about the relation of international trade to economic growth. Meier immediately aligns himself with the conservators of the neo-classical tradition and against the intellectual bomb-throwers who call for a completely different theoretical (or at least, polemical) start on the problem. True, parts of the book stick to a restatement of conventional policy conclusions and their conventional justifications. But the author makes some definite headway at using the standard mode of analysis to explain why some of its own more cheery predictions for the poorer countries have not come to pass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]