The Moral Economy

The Moral Economy PDF Author: Samuel Bowles
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300221088
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends.

The Moral Economy

The Moral Economy PDF Author: Samuel Bowles
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300221088
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book

Book Description
Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends.

A/moral Economics

A/moral Economics PDF Author: Claudia C. Klaver
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 9780814209448
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A/Moral Economics is an interdisciplinary historical study that examines the ways which social "science" of economics emerged through the discourse of the literary, namely the dominant moral and fictional narrative genres of early and mid-Victorian England. In particular, this book argues that the classical economic theory of early-nineteenth-century England gained its broad cultural authority not directly, through the well- known texts of such canonical economic theorists as David Ricardo, but indirectly through the narratives constructed by Ricardo's popularizers John Ramsey McCulloch and Harriet Martineau. By reexamining the rhetorical and institutional contexts of classical political economy in the nineteenth century, A/Moral Economics repositions the popular writings of both supporters and detractors of political economy as central to early political economists' bids for a cultural voice. The now marginalized economic writings of McCulloch, Martineau, Henry Mayhew, and John Ruskin, as well as the texts of Charles Dickens and J. S. Mill, must be read as constituting in part the entities they have been read as merely criticizing. It is this repressed moral logic that resurfaces in a range of textual contradictions--not only in the writings of Ricardo's supporters, but, ironically, in those of his critics as well.

The Moral Economists

The Moral Economists PDF Author: Tim Rogan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691191492
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral rather than material lens What’s wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted in utilitarian terms, the critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century is primarily concerned with disparities in income and wealth. It was not always so. The Moral Economists reconstructs another critical tradition, developed across the twentieth century in Britain, in which material deprivation was less important than moral or spiritual desolation. Tim Rogan focuses on three of the twentieth century’s most influential critics of capitalism—R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, and E. P. Thompson. Making arguments about the relationships between economics and ethics in modernity, their works commanded wide readerships, shaped research agendas, and influenced public opinion. Rejecting the social philosophy of laissez-faire but fearing authoritarianism, these writers sought out forms of social solidarity closer than individualism admitted but freer than collectivism allowed. They discovered such solidarities while teaching economics, history, and literature to workers in the north of England and elsewhere. They wrote histories of capitalism to make these solidarities articulate. They used makeshift languages of “tradition” and “custom” to describe them until Thompson patented the idea of the “moral economy.” Their program began as a way of theorizing everything economics left out, but in challenging utilitarian orthodoxy in economics from the outside, they anticipated the work of later innovators inside economics. Examining the moral cornerstones of a twentieth-century critique of capitalism, The Moral Economists explains why this critique fell into disuse, and how it might be reformulated for the twenty-first century.

Moral Markets

Moral Markets PDF Author: Paul J. Zak
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400837367
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics), and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy.

Economics as a Moral Science

Economics as a Moral Science PDF Author: Peter Rona
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331953291X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
The book is reclaiming economics as a moral science. It argues that ethics is a relevant and inseparable aspect of all levels of economic activity, from individual and organizational to societal and global. Taking ethical considerations into account is needed in explaining and predicting the behavior of economic agents as well as in evaluating and designing economic policies and mechanisms. The unique feature of the book is that it not only analyzes ethics and economics on an abstract level, but puts behavioral, institutional and systemic issues together for a robust and human view of economic functioning. It sees economic “facts” as interwoven with human intentionality and ethical content, a domain where utility calculations and moral considerations co-determine the behavior of economic agents and the outcomes of their activities. The book employs the personalist approach that sees human persons – endowed with free will and conscience – as the basic agents of economic life and defines human flourishing as the final end of economic activities. The book demonstrates that economics can gain a lot in meaning and also in analytical power by reuniting itself with ethics.

Moral Aspects of Economic Growth, and Other Essays

Moral Aspects of Economic Growth, and Other Essays PDF Author: Barrington Moore
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726420
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Barrington Moore, Jr., one of the most distinguished thinkers in critical theory and historical sociology, was long concerned with the prospects for freedom and decency in industrial society. The product of decades of reflection on issues of authority, inequality, and injustice, this volume analyzes fluctuating moral beliefs and behavior in political and economic affairs at different points in history, from the early Middle Ages in England to the prospects for liberalism under twentieth-century Soviet socialism. The social sources of antisocial behavior; principles of social inequality; and the origins, enemies, and possibilities of rational discussion in public affairs—these are among the topics Moore considers as he seeks to uncover the historical causes of some accepted forms of morality and to assess their social consequences. The keynote essay examines how moral codes grew out of commercial practices in England from medieval times through the industrial revolution. Moore pays special attention to conceptions of honesty and the temptation to evade that inform the volume as a whole. In the other essays, he considers particular political issues, viewing "political" in its broadest sense as an unequal distribution of power and authority that carries a strong moral charge. Free of preaching and advocacy, his work offers a rare reasonable assessment of the morality of major social institutions over time.

A Moral Political Economy

A Moral Political Economy PDF Author: Federica Carugati
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108873421
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Economies - and the government institutions that support them - reflect a moral and political choice, a choice we can make and remake. Since the dawn of industrialization and democratization in the late eighteenth century, there has been a succession of political economic frameworks, reflecting changes in technology, knowledge, trade, global connections, political power, and the expansion of citizenship. The challenges of today reveal the need for a new moral political economy that recognizes the politics in political economy. It also requires the redesign of our social, economic, and governing institutions based on assumptions about humans as social beings rather than narrow self-serving individualists. This Element makes some progress toward building a new moral political economy by offering both a theory of change and some principles for institutional (re)design.

The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior

The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior PDF Author: David C. Rose
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199781745
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
It then identifies specific characteristics that moral beliefs must have for the people who possess them to be regarded as trustworthy.

Economics as Moral Science

Economics as Moral Science PDF Author: Bernard Hodgson
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3662044765
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Economics as Moral Science investigates the problem of the ethical neutrality of "mainstream" economic theory within the context of the methodology of economics as a science. Against the conventional wisdom, the author argues that there are serious moral presuppositions to the theory, but that economics could still count as a scientific or rational form of inquiry. The basic questions addressed - the ethical implications of economics, its status as a scientific mode of theory-construction, and the relation between these factors - are absolutely fundamental ones for an understanding of contemporary economics, the philosophy of the human sciences, and our current market culture. Moreover, the study provides a thorough philosophical analysis of the critical issues at stake from the inside, from the credible perspective of a particular, but foundational economic theory - the neoclassical theory of rational choice.

The Moral Economy

The Moral Economy PDF Author: Laurence Fontaine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107018811
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
The Moral Economy examines the nexus of poverty, credit, and trust in early modern Europe. It starts with an examination of poverty, the need for credit, and the lending practices of different social groups. It then reconstructs the battles between the Churches and the State around the ban on usury, and analyzes the institutions created to eradicate usury and the informal petty financial economy that developed as a result. Laurence Fontaine unpacks the values that structured these lending practices, namely, the two competing cultures of credit that coexisted, fought, and sometimes merged: the vibrant aristocratic culture and the capitalistic merchant culture. More broadly, Fontaine shows how economic trust between individuals was constructed in the early modern world. By creating a dialogue between past and present, and contrasting their definitions of poverty, the role of the market, and the mechanisms of microcredit, Fontaine draws attention to the necessity of recognizing the different values that coexist in diverse political economies.