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This paper explores the implications for modern economic thought of the debate on Theodicy, i.e., the coexistence of a good, almighty God and worldly evils. In the 17th century, this problem was raised by Pierre Bayle. The analysis focuses on the 18th century Italian school of Civil economy represented by Antonio Genovesi. Our argument is that Genovesi, and Giambattista Vico before him, reacted to Bayle's Manichaean and Atheistic view on theodicy, and that Genovesi's reaction influenced his view of the market as a place of mutual assistance where the invisible hand holds a secondary and subsidiary role compared to virtues in promoting the common good.

Meritocracy is gaining momentum in public discourse, being close to the determinants of people’s demand of social justice (equality of opportunity, social mobility). Conversely, in Academia meritocracy is the object of harsh critiques. The meritocratic rhetoric brings people to overlook the factors which contributed to their success (unequal starting conditions, luck) over their individual actions, legitimating socioeconomic inequalities. Recently, it has been argued that market-driven societies foster the problems related to meritocracy. The concept of merit, conceived as the value of the individual contribution to the common good of society, is absorbed by market value. While we share the concerns on meritocracy, we question the idea that those are necessarily connected to the market sphere. To prove that, our paper digs in the theological roots of the concept of merit to better understand meritocracy. We inquire Pelagius–Augustine debate on human merit and salvation, and its influence on Rawls’s critique of meritocracy. We base on the “Augustinian” Rawls our argument that market is not a meritocratic domain, but that in market there is space for merit conceived as ‘legitimate expectations.’ Our aim is to prove that merit can find some space in market societies without incurring in the problems of meritocracy.

The culture conveyed by global firms becomes the perfect tool to embody and strengthen the spirit of our time. Nothing is capable of enhancing and strengthening the values of the individual and his passions as the capitalist company. This is why the words and virtues of ‘business’ are becoming the words and virtues of our social life including politics, health care, education, and so on. Merit, efficiency, competition, leadership, incentives and innovation are now the only ‘good’ words of communal life. In the absence of other safe places capable of producing a different culture and values, the virtues of companies present themselves as the only ones to be recognized and cultivated. This essay discusses virtues that, although not considered important by the current business culture, nevertheless are becoming more and more crucial for the survival and growth of organizations. In particular, work-related suffering shows that there are virtues that are not ‘buyable’. This advances a point about the necessity of welcoming vulnerability in work communities to prevent the systematic destruction of its values, creating a global culture of immunity. Conversely, such destruction will eventually lead to the dismantling of most of the world organizations.

Several studies have succeeded in teaching animals (primates, pigeons, rats, but not mice) the value of tokens by having them executing a task using a vending-machine apparatus, where in order to receive the primary reinforcement (food), the animals had to perform a specific action that allowed them to obtain the secondary reinforcement (tokens: metal balls). We tried to assess this kind of behavior in mice that had previously been trained to use some tokens, with the aim of rewarding them not with food, but with other tokens, as a result of a token economy task. We found that mice exhibit economic behavior. Further on, our research tried to investigate the effect of stress on their operant decision-making. Therefore, the mice were divided into two groups: a Control group (n=10) and a group subjected to an Unpredictable Chronic Mild Stress (UCMS) treatment (n=8). We found that chronic stress increases some aspects of sub-optimal economic activity.Summary statementWe designed an original model enabling to assess behavior in mice that had previously been trained to use some tokens, with the aim of rewarding them not with food, but with other tokens. Further on, our research investigated the effect of stress on their operant decision-making.

In mainstream business and economics, prizes such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom are understood as special types of incentives, with the peculiar features of being awarded in public, and of having largely symbolic value. Informed by both historical considerations and philosophical instances, our study defines fundamental theoretical differences between incentives and prizes. The conceptual factors highlighted by our analytical framework are then tested through a laboratory experiment. The experimental exercise aims to analyze how prizes and incentives impact actual individuals’ behavior differently. Our results show that both incentives (monetary and contingent) and prizes (non-monetary and discretional rewards) boost motivation to perform if awarded publicly, but only prizes crowd in motivation promoting virtuous attitude.

The modern approach to the economics of happiness can be reconduced to the impressive work known as the ‘Easterlin paradox’. At the beginning of the seventies the economist Richard Easterlin observed that, even though within each country higher incomes were associated with higher levels of happiness, in a country over time average levels of happiness do not increase as the average income increases. In other words, the very rich are happier than the very poor, but as the country gets richer happiness remains almost constant. The evidence was first proposed in his original work for the US during the period 1946–70 (Easterlin 1974) and then during the period 1972 to 2002 (Easterlin 2005) when the gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States almost doubled while happiness remained constant. In a more recent paper (Easterlin 2015) the author confirmed the validity of the paradox using US data in the period 1972–2014. This evidence suggests that, beyond a certain income level required to meet basic needs, the so-called subsistence level, additional income doesn’t lead to additional happiness. Individual wellbeing is made of a broader set of factors (health, relations, life sense), other than pure income, which need to be accounted for in order to define a worthwhile life. Indeed, it is worth remarking that, in a modern sense, the economics of happiness can no longer be confined to the evaluation of subjective or psychological wellbeing, but also has to encompass the whole intellectual and political movement known as going beyond GDP and its implications in terms of the measurement and analysis of quality of life (QoL).

This paper is a reconstruction and a reconsideration of Achille Loria’s (1857–1943) economic and social thought, in particular his criticism of capitalism. Loria, a leader of the Italian an...

In this economic debate, incentives (material, extrinsic) and awards (symbolic, intrinsic) are conceived as two opposite tools to prompt human actions. In this article, we provide a historical argument to problematise this opposition. We investigate the idea of prizes (“premi”) in the works of civil economist Antonio Genovesi, and its seeds in Thomas Aquinas’ thought. They both discuss if material rewards can crowd-in intrinsic motivations. Aquinas considered the crowding-out risks related to honour (award). Genovesi stressed the role of private prizes (incentives) and market in fostering the development of society, and claims that crowding-in is more common than crowding-out.

From the very beginning of civilization, economic reality and words have been intertwined with religions and vice versa. It would be enough to think at the phenomenon of sacrifice, that is, the first “language” that religions used to communicate with the divine. In the Western culture, a deep cross-fertilization between theology and oikonomia has occurred in both the Old and the New Testament. In addition, modern political and civil economy, namely the Northern and Southern European economic traditions, can be properly understood in relation to Christian religion in its Catholic and reformed humanisms. These two different spirits of capitalism have still important effects in today’s US and EU ways of understanding the nexsus between market and society. In this paper, the author explores some of the issues where these differences in spirit are more relevant (i.e., gratuitousness and meritocracy) and then concludes with some hints about the nature of a different “spirit” of capitalism, that is coming from the Catholicism.

In “On the Concept of ‘Felicitas Publica’ in Eighteenth-Century Political Economy,” a recent paper in this journal, Federico D’Onofrio strongly criticizes the interpretation that Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni have offered of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan tradition of civil economy and public happiness, as articulated by Antonio Genovesi. D’Onofrio claims that Bruni and colleagues have not fully explored the political meaning of public happiness within eighteenth-century economics, and that Bruni unfairly criticized methodological individualism on the basis of the intrinsically social character of happiness. This paper is a reply to D’Onofrio.

In this chapter we will analyze the forms of companies and organizations that are created for more complex reasons than simply the pursuit of profit. We will consider the so-called “non-for-profit” firms, which go beyond the traditional concept of non-profits or the Third Sector to move in the direction of the civil economy and the civil enterprise, which has its specific nature and logic. Finally, we will discuss the concept of a values-based organization (VBO) and consider its particular characteristics and potential.

Die Analyse im vorhergehenden Kapitel hat uns genugend Bausteine geliefert, um einige zentrale Grunde zu erkennen, warum sich die Wirtschaftswissenschaft auf die individuelle, instrumentelle und nicht-tuistische Beziehung konzentriert hat. Im ersten Kapitel haben wir das neuerlich aufkommende Interesse fur eine Form der Reziprozitat gesehen, welche ich – wie bereits gesagt – mit groser Sympathie betrachte, mich aber nicht vollstandig zufriedenstellt.

Wir haben uns bisher mit zwei Formen der Reziprozitat befasst, und dabei Argumente vorgebracht, mit denen sich die Dynamik ihre Entstehung erklaren lasst – anhand von Beispielen, die fur das zivile Leben bedeutsam sind.

In diesem Kapitel wird unsere Analyse verfeinert und erweitert, indem wir von einer zweidimensionalen in eine dreidimensionale Welt ubergehen werden. Bei diesem Ubergang muss noch einmal der Blick zuruck auf die zweidimensionale Welt gehen. Bei zwei Strategien konnten wir durch einen Vergleich zwischen den beiden erwarteten Nutzen bereits in recht praziser Form sagen, welche Art der Reziprozitat – oder Nicht-Reziprozitat – sich auf lange Sicht in einer bestimmten Population durchsetzen wird.

In this chapter we will consider the criteria that economists use to form value judgments about the comparative desirability of alternate paths for economic policy. Recall that economics is a practical science, a science that produces knowledge in order to suggest courses of actions for improving human welfare. A criterion for judging is clearly necessary to be able to make judgments. In this chapter, that criterion is utilitarianism. It entered economic discourse with an influential 1789 work by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the creator of utilitarianism. After presenting and commenting on the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics, we will first consider market failures and then government failures.

On November 18 2018, HEIRS (a network of economists working on Happiness Economics and Interpersonal relations) organized a conference in Naples, Italy. The aim of the conference was to refresh the debate on happiness, capabilities and opportunities by connecting scholars with different cultural backgrounds. There were some good reasons for this, related both to the way happiness research has been evolving in the last few years, and to the way the capability approach has been interpreted in the wider realm of the equality of opportunity. These issues were at the core of the discussions held during the two-day conference that had as keynote speakers Bruno S. Frey, Mozaffar Qizilbash and Robert Sugden, among others. In this editorial we briefly survey three contributions discussed at the Conference, published as articles in the current issue of the International Review of Economics.