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Our goal is to highlight the relationship between vested interests of the meritocratic elite and the deteriorating situation of the common man. We provide an example of rising income inequality in selected OECD countries over the past thirty years. Income inequality is growing, despite the increase in labor productivity based on technological progress, which we prove by using robust panel regression models. Our findings could be explained by the effect of “extreme meritocracy” that describes a situation in which wages for “the working rich” are growing faster than their productivity, and creating wage stagnation for the middle-class workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of ongoing criticisms of the lack of pluralism in economics, we discuss the development of “heterodox” economics since the 1970s in Germany. Following Imre Lakatos’s concept of scientific research programs (SRP), we examine some classifications of economics, specifying the understanding of diversity in light of the “axiomatic variations” of mainstream economics. This forms the basis for our subsequent description of the development of heterodoxy in Germany, with special reference to the founding of new universities and the reform movements in the 1970s. We show that the heterodox scene flourished in this period, but that this pluralization remained fragmented and short-lived, so that by the 1980s heterodoxy was on its way to becoming marginalized again. The history of heterodoxy in Germany thus presents itself as an unequal “battle of the paradigms,” and can only be told as a story of failure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]