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The authors analyze the economic opinions of teachers and economists from the former Soviet Union who participated in economic education programs sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education under the auspices of the National Council on Economic Education from 1995-2001. They sought to determine the level of consensus on economic topics among the participants, and then analyzed their concordance with U.S. economists. They conclude that there is a significant level of consensus among the participants from the former Soviet Union, but this consensus is often at odds with the views of American economists. (Contains 2 tables.)

Stimulated by social scientists' and especially social psychologists' contributions during World War II, as well as by America's post-war economic and population growth, the period from 1945 to 1970 was widely viewed as a "Golden Age" for American social science. Interdisciplinary social psychology arguably was in the vanguard of these developments. Progress since then have been variable and in some ways negative for social psychology, not only as an interdisciplinary field, but also within its parent disciplines of psychology and especially sociology, where social psychology could plausibly become extinct within twenty-five years. The decline of social psychology as a field and a broad influence on the social sciences, society, and public policy has coincided with a rise of economics to an analogous vanguard position. Understanding the reasons for and implications of these trends has been limited, with a focus on analyses of developments within particular disciplines. However, developments across the social sciences, and society more broadly, are equally or more important to understanding these trends. Future prospects also depend heavily on these broader societal forces, but the inertial tendencies of trajectories since 1970 within and between social science disciplines and fields will necessarily play a major role. The twenty-first century offers the prospect of renewed importance of social psychology in a more interdisciplinary and integrated set of social and policy sciences, if social psychologists and the parent disciplines of sociology and psychology are prepared to capitalize on and take leadership of emerging opportunities. (Contains 3 figures, 2 tables and 1 footnote.)

Only governments can ensure, through laws and policies, the provision of universal public goods, such as a safe supply of water, affordable health care and housing. They can regulate commerce and the private sector. However, governments cannot legislate Jean-Paul Sartre's radical freedoms, Amartya Sen's developmental freedoms, or Hannah Arendt's recognition and respect for difference. This article presents the philosophical definitions and analyses of freedoms by Sartre, Sen, and Arendt. Sartre, Sen and Arendt are of interest to sociologists because their analyses are rooted in societal forms, practices and processes. Sartre and Sen offer sociologists an epistemological foundation for evaluating political and economic freedoms, and Arendt offers a foundation for understanding complex social relations. Sartre poses the biggest challenge to the deep and complex American ethos of freedom because he radically decenters self-interest. That is, "I must fight for others' freedoms, and they will fight for mine." It is a win-win dialectic, not one that gives rise to inequalities and continually reinforces inequalities. (Contains 1 note.)

Illustrates how, using introductory-level microeconomic models, an instructor can show various economic theorists' explanations of short run employment and output fluctuations. Identifies the competing schools of thought as old Keynesian, new Keynesian, and new Classical (which includes real business cycle theorists). Includes illustrative graphs for each model. (MJP)

Argues that neoclassical conceptions of political geography separate economic from political processes and therefore ignore the consequences of economic policies. Uses discourse theory to show how the pretensions of objectivity embedded in neoclassical trade theory obscure these consequences. Briefly reviews trade theory from Adam Smith to the present. (MJP)

Criticizes some of the basic principles expounded in John Locke's "Second Treatise on Government." Argues that Locke's ideas on private property, capital investment, and social good are inherently contradictory. Asserts that the market theory of property inevitably leads to endemic economic exploitation and oppression. (MJP)

Social scientists must grapple with how to pursue knowledge about an uncertain and complex world. This challenge is accentuated when scholars wish to engage responsibly with policy-makers and the public in the interests of social betterment. In this article, we use the scholarly literature on uncertainty and complexity to examine how these issues complicate the practice of engaged scholarship. We ground our analysis in interviews with publicly engaged scholars on the ethical challenges they have faced and how they have navigated uncertainties and complexities in their applied work in peace and security. We identify four broad ethical dilemmas associated with publicly engaged scholarship and propose ways that scholars might begin to navigate these challenges. Our analysis urges greater acceptance of uncertainty and complexity in the social science community and associated epistemic humility in collective scholarship, pedagogy and public engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, social scientists have begun to study the implications of increasing pressures in the early academic career. Studies focusing mostly on the life sciences have shown junior scholars making research decisions based on a productivity logic to increase their chances of career success. In this paper, we extend this literature to the very different context of economics, characterized by a dominant mainstream, a clear hierarchy, and an independent/small-team approach to scholarship. Adopting a culture-in-action framework, we analyze how cultural repertoires help early career economists deal with the sometimes competing career pressures associated with working in high-status departments. Drawing from in-depth interviews with tenure-track economists in three Scandinavian countries, we find that skillful use of discovery-talk and delivery-talk helps respondents respond to the challenges they face as junior academics. Implications for research include the avoidance of, e.g., interdisciplinary work and questions of only regional importance. Furthermore, the data indicate that discovery and delivery notions partly overlap and so contribute to preserving economics as a relatively coherent and homogenous field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper defends that it is possible to offer a Kantian argument for justifying the introduction of Universal Basic Income (UBI). It first briefly presents Philippe van Parijs' argument for UBI based on the concept of real freedom for all. In doing so, it will focus on its general structure and central insight, without entering too much into other issues like the economic feasibility of UBI. It second briefly presents Kant's concept of external freedom and especially focuses on some of its components to assess whether there is some closeness to van Parijs' concept of real freedom. It further considers whether UBI is not only compatible with a Kantian position, but can be justified from such a position because it represents a tool for concretely realizing external freedom as presented in the Doctrine of Right and for attaining the ethical ideal of virtuosity presented in the Doctrine of Virtue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ibn Khaldun's economic thought, in his phenomenal book Al-Muqaddimah (The Prolegomenon), has been the subject of interest for many social scientists, including some economists of our era. He is considered to be among the early Muslim scholars, who wrote about the fundamental theories of economic science, three centuries before Adam Smith, who is widely regarded as the 'father of economics'. However, six hundred years after Ibn Khaldun's death, a question arises as to whether his economic thoughts are still relevant in the contemporary world. This paper attempts to analyse some of the main economic theories of Ibn Khaldun and reviews whether they are still relevant or being discussed in the modern economic theory or applied in the economic practice. The study found that from amongst the six main economic thoughts, he wrote about in his book, Al-Muqaddimah, almost all are still widely used and practiced. However, his theory on money needs more deliberate research and further investigation, as the world has long replaced gold and silver money with fiat money and other kinds of currencies such as cryptocurrencies, which were not known at his time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on ideas, truth, and the academy-state relationship. Topics include that ideas are associated with people and people interact within institutions; relationship of institutions with survivability; and that social scientists need a more nuanced approach to how ideas, institutions, and interests play out in generating social change.

A literary criticism of the book "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" by Joseph A. Schumpeter, is presented. Topics discussed include Schumpeter's home discipline, to history to sociology to political science to law to philosophy to business and entrepreneurship; and work dealing with questions surrounding the logic of economic, social, and political change and organization.

A literary criticism of the book "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" by Max Weber is presented. Topics discussed include extensive debate concerning both the validity of the work's method and the accuracy of its substantive theses; the features of this asceticism resemble in large part the ethical orientation within Protestantism; and that capitalism is capable of a multiplicity of forms is conventional in the contemporary context.

Although social scientists have been investigating the nature and impact of job satisfaction for many decades, economists only started to investigate job satisfaction systematically in the late 1980′s. Almost from the first systematic studies of job satisfaction by economists, the research potential of the notion of pay level comparisons was realized. The idea of pay level comparisons in job satisfaction has proven particularly useful also because it has important implications for a number of standard theoretical and economic policy results. However, the inclusion of the variable of comparison wage in job satisfaction and the resulting supporting empirical findings, are in sharp contrast to the orthodox approach, given that in mainstream economic theory an individuals' utility is usually assumed to be a function of absolute income only. Despite the important theoretical and policy implications, mainstream economic theory has not paid much heed to the job satisfaction conceptual formulations and empirical findings. The paper argues that there are methodological reasons for this state of affairs which seem to be linked to the subjective well-being research in general, and to the job satisfaction literature in particular. A strong mistrust against the method of stated preferences and the still inherent methodological bias against the integration of psychological findings, are suggested as the two prime reasons. Although a few prominent figures in job satisfaction research have realized the mainstream methodological attitude, it is necessary that job satisfaction specialists should consider more seriously the methodological limitations of traditional mainstream economics that relate to their research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses what has the relationship between Austrian Economics and Public Choice. Topics include in Human Action, Ludwig von Mises, in fact, presents Economics as a part of a broader social science that has devoted to the study of all processes of human action; and organizing society according to one's wishes ends up destroying the social order.

Using theory-based research in the development of behaviour-change interventions, the book critically evaluates empirical evidence on the effectiveness of those interventions and might inspire policymakers and policy scholars designing better demand-side climate policies. Cases cover topics such as policy circulation through the "Twitterverse", understanding policy tourism, big philanthropies as agents of policy circulation, policy narratives, and enacting persuasion. Policy design efforts are often hampered by an inadequate understanding of how policy tools and actions promote effective policies. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses about the new generation of critical theorists, seeking to poke holes in the history of economic theory and liberal political economy. Topics discussed include demonstrating the inherent inefficiency, instability and immorality of the capitalist system; an intellectual crisis in the fields of intellectual history and the discipline of history; and abandoning of the disciplines of history and intellectual history.

Over the past decades, econometrics and formal empirical methods have become more and more important to economics and hence to the teaching of economics. Within the economics major today there are many more courses in econometrics and statistics than there were in the past; in addition, most upper-level field courses include an almost mandatory econometrics component. Because the introductory and intermediate macro and micro courses currently do not include an introduction to econometrics, and instead concentrate on teaching students theory, this means that in addition to their core theory courses, undergraduate economics students need a core metrics course, or, better yet, a set of core metric courses, in addition to their introductory and intermediate theory core courses to properly prepare them for their field courses. 3 While there is some movement in econometrics toward the data science approach, such as the increased focus on nonparametric methods in econometrics, and work in Bayesian econometrics, that work is still the exception. [Extracted from the article]

Scientists across disciplines must often work together to address pressing global issues facing our societies. For interdisciplinary projects to flourish, scientists must recognise the potential contribution of other disciplines in answering key research questions. Recent research suggested that social sciences may be appreciated less than hard sciences overall. Building on the extensive evidence of ingroup bias and ethnocentrism in intergroup relations, however, one could also expect scientists, especially those belonging to high status disciplines, to play down the contributions of other disciplines to important research questions. The focus of the present research was to investigate how hard and social scientists perceive one another and the impact of interdisciplinary collaborations on these perceptions. We surveyed 280 scientists at Wave 1 and with 129 of them followed up at Wave 2 to establish how ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations underpinned perceptions of other disciplines. Based on Wave 1 data, scientists who report having interdisciplinary experiences more frequently are also more likely to recognise the intellectual contribution of other disciplines and perceive more commonalities with them. However, in line with the intergroup bias literature, group membership in the more prestigious hard sciences is related to a stronger tendency to downplay the intellectual contribution of social science disciplines compared to other hard science disciplines. This bias was not present among social scientists who produced very similar evaluation of contribution of hard and social science disciplines. Finally, using both waves of the survey, the social network comparison of discipline pairs shows that asymmetries in the evaluation of other disciplines are only present among discipline pairs that do not have any experience of collaborating with one another. These results point to the need for policies that incentivise new collaborations between hard and social scientists and foster interdisciplinary contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Obama administration, America made a shift in its foreign policies to re-focus on Asia. The strategy, known as 'Pivot to Asia', was used to contain a rising China. In this editorial note, I appropriate the geopolitical term to call for a scholarly refocus on Asia (and the broader Asia Pacific region). JCEA started as an area journal. While it has become more technology-focused and less geographically-bounded in its coverage of topics, the journal recognizes the centrality of the region's political economy and technological forces in setting (and upsetting) global norms and rules. The Asia Pacific contains the world's freest economies as well as the most oppressive regimes. It breeds both technology giants and laggards. As new geopolitical tensions loom, it is where the digital iron curtain is drawn, and where the vice and virtue of innovations debated. Social scientists in the English world, who lend extensively on European and American cases, can benefit from studying the Asia Pacific by testing whether and how local experience conforms to or confronts with universal theories. Very likely, western-centric norms and models become morphed and entangled in the grounded local particularity, reflecting many shades of this diverse place. In my arguments below, I highlight the Asia Pacific as a site of contradiction, as well as a site of contention and negotiation. My emphasis is that regional particularity holds the key to answer concurrent debates in the West concerning governance and accountability in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science is often described as a set of discipline-specific paradigms that share common concepts, theories, and practices. However, during the Anthropocene, this image of science has become inapplicable and is potentially damaging. Today, many natural and social scientists confront problems and systems that transgress traditional disciplinary boundaries--we focus on ecologists and economists. We claim that these changes justify rethinking the prevailing image of science, along with the relation between life scientists and social scientists. The time is ripe to recognize the new normal in Anthropocene science and spell out what transdisciplinary problems entail for research practice. We suggest three central issues should be recognized by any adequate characterization of the new normal. First, given the preponderance of natural-social systems in the Anthropocene, we claim that there are circumstances when analyzing such systems requires new methodological standards. Second, Anthropocene science will increasingly involve discussions that link the normative and the scientific, where questions of how and what we should study imply questions of value. Finally, because the vast majority of Anthropocene science will be interdisciplinary, we identify some of the mechanisms that allow researchers to engage with social scientists and scholars in the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early decades of the 20th century witnessed much discussion about the separation between positive and normative analysis, and the legitimacy of the prescriptive claims often advanced by social scientists. The paper investigates British debates about the reconstruction of the world order as a topic that brought together social analysts with very different backgrounds, and had the LSE as one of its focal points. The urgency of international politics at the time made it more difficult to sustain a clear distinction between positive analysis and policy prescription. To Lionel Robbins, the topic belonged to the applied domain of political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I The books in this edition of Book Shelf have been selected along the following lines: provide an historical perspective about development and explain how globalization is shaping up within the Global South; tell about stories and examples of resistance by social movements and their attempts to put in place alternative models to the current globalizing capitalism; challenge the narrative about privatization and the private sector as playing a leading role in development. i I The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements i discusses core theoretical perspectives, recent contributions from the field, and how patterns of macro social change may affect social movements, as well as suggesting what contributions social movement studies can give to other research areas in various disciplines. Contestations over knowledge - and who controls its production - are a key focus of social movements and other actors that promote food sovereignty, agroecology and biocultural diversity. Rosset and Altieri, two of the world's leading agroecologists, outline the principles, history and currents of agroecological thought, the scientific evidence for agroecology, how to bring agroecology to scale and the contemporary politics of agroecology. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the life and works of American economist and social scientist Gary Becker, who believed that economics could and should tackle serious social problems. According to the author, Becker's approach was to extend the boundaries of economics to topics such as education, discrimination and crime.

The article presents the author's comments on the proper role of a political scientist or an economist in politics, war, and taxation. The author believes that these experts should look for problems in the society and not merely wait for the questions that are asked of them, for indeed, there will likely be a biased selection of the questions, which would lead the people farther from the truth than biased answers. Furthermore, in order to maximize their value as economists, they should not be loyal to any leader or party, but rather strive with the skills they have and should always seek to improve, to be true to themselves and the people to which they are serving as economists.

Nighttime lights, calculated from weather satellite recordings, are increasingly used by social scientists as a proxy for economic activity or economic development in subnational regions of developing countries where disaggregated data from statistical offices are not available. However, so far, our understanding of what nighttime lights capture in these countries is limited. We use geo-referenced Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 29 African countries to construct indicators of household wealth, education and health for DHS cluster locations as well as for grid cells of roughly 50 × 50 km. We show that nighttime lights are positively associated with these location-specific indicators of human development, and that the variation in nighttime lights can explain a substantial share in the variation in these indicators. We conclude that nighttime lights are a good proxy for human development at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between economic and political inequality has long concerned social scientists, but research remains limited in scope. Most studies focus on isolated cases, highly restricted subsamples, or subunits within countries. Using data for up to 136 countries between 1981 and 2011, this study analyzes whether and how income inequality affects the distribution of political power for, and respect for the civil liberties of, a society’s rich and poor people. When income inequality is high, do rich people command greater political power and enjoy stronger civil liberties than poor people do? To answer these questions, the study uses both pooled regression analyses and two-stage models with instrumental variables to identify causal effects. The results are decisive: income inequality is inimical to both political and civil equality. These findings hold for developed as well as developing countries and for democratic as well as nondemocratic countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the experiences of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina that damaged Gentilly, New Orleans in 2005. Topics include the recollection of the events during the hurricane in 2005, the methods of recovering used by the people, and the role of social scientists in visiting the affected people.

The first professional societies in the United States, from the 1880s to the 1910s, understood history to be closely associated with the other social sciences. Even in the mid-twentieth century, history was still grouped with the other social sciences, along with economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology. But in the past few decades, history and anthropology in the United States (though not necessarily in other countries) have moved away from the social sciences to ally themselves with the humanities—paradoxically, just when the other social sciences are becoming more committed to historical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on approach to empirical research that attributed less importance to formal theoretical models of optimization and equilibrium as vehicles for defining specific research questions and hypotheses. It mentions conjectures of other social scientists or common sense opinions of participants in policy debates and theory precedes empirical analysis in economics. It also mentions opportunities for testing theory using probabilitybased inferential techniques.

Business economists face increasing challenges at this political and policymaking juncture. 'Experts' and economists are out of favor with the public and with certain policymakers. In response, business economists should be frank about our failures and the limits of our models. We can then be ready to defend truth against falsehood. In our defense of fact-based decision making, we must first assert that data matter, and the unbiased integrity of that data matters. We must support and defend the work of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Census Bureau. Business economists must be story tellers, transmitting historical memory of past crises, of past attacks on our profession and data sources (such President Nixon's targeting of the Bureau of Labor Statistics). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years policy makers and social scientists have devoted considerable attention to wellbeing, a concept that refers to people’s capacity to live healthy, creative and fulfilling lives. Two conceptual approaches dominate wellbeing research. The objective approach examines the objective components of a good life. The subjective approach examines people’s subjective evaluations of their lives. In the objective approach how subjective wellbeing relates to objective wellbeing is not a relevant research question. The subjective approach does investigate how objective wellbeing relates to subjective wellbeing, but has focused primarily on one objective wellbeing indicator, income, rather than the comprehensive indicator set implied by the objective approach. This paper attempts to contribute by examining relationships between a comprehensive set of objective wellbeing measures and subjective wellbeing, and by linking wellbeing research to inequality research by also investigating how subjective and objective wellbeing relate to class, gender, age and ethnicity. We use three waves of a representative state-level household panel study from Queensland, Australia, undertaken from 2008 to 2010, to investigate how objective measures of wellbeing are socially distributed by gender, class, age, and ethnicity. We also examine relationships between objective wellbeing and overall life satisfaction, providing one of the first longitudinal analyses linking objective wellbeing with subjective evaluations. Objective aspects of wellbeing are unequally distributed by gender, age, class and ethnicity and are strongly associated with life satisfaction. Moreover, associations between gender, ethnicity, class and life satisfaction persist after controlling for objective wellbeing, suggesting that mechanisms in addition to objective wellbeing link structural dimensions of inequality to life satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists have often focused upon how transnational corporations and elites mold socioeconomic organization and change in an era of neoliberal globalization. Often overlooked, however, are the active roles played by labor and nature in the construction of contemporary forms of capitalism. Examining the case of Bolivia, this paper explores how the laborers and natures in the country's two dominant economic sectors--hydrocarbons and minerals--shaped the country's neoliberal and counterneoliberal shifts. I argue that, while both sectors were subjected to similar processes of neoliberalization, the materiality of the natural resources and the labor required to extract them have created divergent paths of counter-neoliberalization with different implications for the scope and reach of post-neoliberal possibilities. In theorizing neoliberal and counter-neoliberal shifts, scholars should thus seek to understand not only changing property rights, regulations, and institutional forms, but also the intimate relationships between commodities and their creators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Discusiones Filosóficas is the property of Universidad de Caldas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The lack of a clear framework identifying data to link ecosystems to analyses of human well-being has been highlighted in numerous studies. To address this issue, we applied a recently developed economic theory termed "final" ecosystem goods and services - the biophysical features and qualities that people perceive as being directly related to their well-being. The six-step process presented here enabled us to identify metrics associated with streams that can be used in the analysis of human well-being; we illustrate these steps with data from a regional stream survey. Continued refinement and application of this framework will require ongoing collaboration between natural and social scientists. Framework application could result in more useful and relevant data, leading to more informed decisions in the management of ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the debate among African American over education of African Americans in the U.S. Topics discussed are concept of social roots of knowledge by social scientists, integration of community and economics believed by integrationists, and comparison of the integrationists such as sociologist Franklin E. Frazier and separists such as professor Maulana Karenga.

Copyright of Cuadernos de Economia is the property of Universidad Catolica del Uruguay Damaso Antonio Larranaga and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the concept and meaning of new economics. It examines how the terminology, methodology, and concept employed in the issue are consistent with the meaning that has been generally recognized and accepted as constituting elements or principles of economics. It also mentions two general observations relative to the state of debate between classically trained economists and experimental/behavioral economists in the discipline. Furthermore, it notes the central issue and purpose of the debate in which a good theory depends on the value of judgment.