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[10] At the very least, market competition requires some degree of formal liberty to enter the market to offer goods and services, which means that an established supplier offering a good may be driven out by a new supplier offering the good on more favorable terms. If, however, suppliers are repeatedly outcompeted, they will eventually be driven out of the market, and this threat of elimination is aggravated by the fact that market competition essentially allows for an unlimited number of competitors. Being driven out of competition may pose an existential material threat.[15] This existential dependence on competitive outcomes is the most significant distinguishing feature between market competition and other forms of human competition.[16] In political competition, for example, citizens can easily refrain from politics if they wish.[17] Finally, in market competition we also put our social existence at stake. Heath thinks that in market competition, too, the ideal of being something like a good sport can be invoked in order to prevent the exploitation of market failures, even while market competition exempts actors from certain everyday moral norms (Heath, [28], pp. 104-113). Hence, the result is that both the morality internal to the market and morality surrounding the market are likely to only feebly counteract the downward sloping tendency of market competition. [Extracted from the article]

Since he won the Nobel Prize and joined the World Bank as Chief Economist, most of us see Stiglitz as a policy-oriented economist clearly aligned with the political left. To those with preconceived ideas about Stiglitz's world-view, it may come as a surprise that Stiglitz argues strongly in favour of competition - very much in line with what we teach in first-year economics classes. I feel that in large parts, and as sometimes quite explicitly stated by Stiglitz, Australia is an example of the policies Stiglitz advocates. [Extracted from the article]

The market economy can be defended using the lens of virtue ethics. Modern virtue ethics was developed originally by the English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Virtue ethics rejects consequentialism and focuses on the virtues. And human nature appears to be collaborative in both language and economic relations exemplified by exchange. By adapting the concept of 'characteristic virtues', developed by Alasdair MacIntyre, it follows that collaboration has its own particular virtues. These virtues can produce prescriptions which mitigate the costs of economic transactions and collaboration. The development of behavioural economics has shown human beings sometimes fall short of the rationality described by neo-classical microeconomics. But virtuous action tends to correct these deficiencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that to understand Foucault's attraction to neoliberalism, we must understand the elective theoretical affinities that he perceived between this current in economic thought and one of the central elements of his own philosophical project: the critique of humanism or 'anthropologism' (that is, the tendency in modern thought to sift all knowledge through human knowledge). Specifically, the essay examines moments in Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures when Foucault clearly refers to the arguments of his earlier work, The Order of Things, the locus classicus of his philosophical antihumanism. In particular, Foucault claimed that economists of the Chicago School developed a theory of labor that escaped the limitations of the 'anthropological' theory of labor associated with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. He also interpreted the notion of homo oeconomicus and Smith's idea of the market's 'invisible hand' as critiques of the characteristically modern attempt to make transcendental claims on the basis of human nature. The essay concludes by asking if Foucault's philosophical antihumanism provides an adequate vantage point from which to critique contemporary capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial and post-industrial economies are characterized by a high degree of structural interdependence. Once an economy attains a level of economic development in which the technology enables a substantial portion of the population to enjoy a standard of living significantly above subsistence, 'the material needs' of the system become difficult to define because they are interconnected with the relations of production in complex ways. In particular, demand comes to play a key role in the subsequent development of the system. This article presents an intersectoral model that integrates Keynesian and Kaleckian elements onto the classical surplus approach. The aim of the model is to provide a non-neoclassical framework that can be used to analyze how demand, income distribution, and production are interconnected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents redistributive taxation and economic growth as a noncooperative differential game in which the politically powerful poor (workers) control redistribution whereas the economically powerful rich (capitalists) control accumulation. Both groups are assumed to be interested in maximizing the sum of their own discounted consumption over an infinite horizon. The players use trigger strategies which permit the construction of threats designed to sustain cooperation as an equilibrium, The properties of the trigger strategies and the dependence of sustainable cooperative policies on the technology preferences and development history of the economy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nobel Laureate James Buchanan and his colleagues and followers have applied the tools and methods of neoclassical economics to the study of politics, developing the theory of Public Choice, the economic study of non- market decision-making In an effort to subject this hypothetical system to empirical validation, it is confronted with the phenomena of Ayatollah Khomeini's "ideal" Islamic State as described in the leader of Iranian theocracy's writings and as developed in contemporary Iran The prophet Muhammad recognized no separation of politics and religion, of church and state Faith in Islam required faith not only in the oneness of God and Muhammad's prophethood but also in the prophet's religious, moral, legal and political commands Khomeini's revolutionary heterodoxy views his theocratic despotism as establishing the rule of the 'just jurists-the upper echelons of the clergy-and makes them and property owners the beneficiaries Thus it is not "class neutral" as Public Choice theory requires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various new contributions on postfordism and flexible specialization have appeared. The article debates on flexible specialization, but there are issues of wider significance given the unsealed state of urban and regional research. The basic argument of this article is simply that formal theory of the firm under uncertainty cannot support the broad historical conclusions as to the nature of the present phase of capitalist development and its spatial tendencies. The roles of social, political and ideological relations in structuring capitalist production are pushed into the background, where they are inadequately handled by appropriation of regulation theory. The article argues with the approach offered by A.J. Scott, which does not contribute to the task of identifying these structures and their interdependent reproduction through day-to-day economic practices. It is appropriate to describe his formal analysis as neoclassical. This project cannot be conducted on a priori basis, but requires new empirical inputs based on concrete research into the social and political processes through which real-world markets and firm strategies are constructed.