History of Economic Rationalities

History of Economic Rationalities PDF Author: Jakob Bek-Thomsen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319528157
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
This book concentrates upon how economic rationalities have been embedded into particular historical practices, cultures, and moral systems. Through multiple case-studies, situated in different historical contexts of the modern West, the book shows that the development of economic rationalities takes place in the meeting with other regimes of thought, values, and moral discourses. The book offers new and refreshing insights, ranging from the development of early economic thinking to economic aspects and concepts in the works of classical thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Karl Marx, to the role of economic reasoning in contemporary policies of art and health care. With economic rationalities as the read thread, the reader is offered a unique chance of historical self-awareness and recollection of how economic rationality became the powerful ideological and moral force that it is today.

History of Economic Rationalities

History of Economic Rationalities PDF Author: Jakob Bek-Thomsen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319528157
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book

Book Description
This book concentrates upon how economic rationalities have been embedded into particular historical practices, cultures, and moral systems. Through multiple case-studies, situated in different historical contexts of the modern West, the book shows that the development of economic rationalities takes place in the meeting with other regimes of thought, values, and moral discourses. The book offers new and refreshing insights, ranging from the development of early economic thinking to economic aspects and concepts in the works of classical thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Karl Marx, to the role of economic reasoning in contemporary policies of art and health care. With economic rationalities as the read thread, the reader is offered a unique chance of historical self-awareness and recollection of how economic rationality became the powerful ideological and moral force that it is today.

The Varieties of Economic Rationality

The Varieties of Economic Rationality PDF Author: Michel Zouboulakis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317817494
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
The concept of economic rationality is important for the historical evolution of Economics as a scientific discipline. The common idea about this concept -even between economists- is that it has a unique meaning which is universally accepted. This new volume argues that "economic rationality" is not not a universal concept with one single meaning, and that it in fact has different, if not conflicting, interpretations in the evolution of discourse on economics. In order to achieve this, the book traces the historical evolution of the concept of economic rationality from Adam Smith to the present, taking in thinkers from Mill to Friedman, and encompassing approaches from neoclassical to behavioural economics. The book charts this history in order to reveal important instances of conceptual transformation of the meaning of economic rationality. In doing so, it presents a uniquely detailed study of the historical change of the many faces of the homo oeconomicus .

Rationality in Economics

Rationality in Economics PDF Author: Vernon L. Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139466461
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The principal findings of experimental economics are that impersonal exchange in markets converges in repeated interaction to the equilibrium states implied by economic theory, under information conditions far weaker than specified in the theory. In personal, social, and economic exchange, as studied in two-person games, cooperation exceeds the prediction of traditional game theory. This book relates these two findings to field studies and applications and integrates them with the main themes of the Scottish Enlightenment and with the thoughts of F. A. Hayek: through emergent socio-economic institutions and cultural norms, people achieve ends that are unintended and poorly understood. In cultural changes, the role of constructivism, or reason, is to provide variation, and the role of ecological processes is to select the norms and institutions that serve the fitness needs of societies.

Rationality and Irrationality in Economics

Rationality and Irrationality in Economics PDF Author: Maurice Godelier
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168037X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This book is the result of a research project begun by the author in 1958 with the aim of answering two questions: First, what is the rationality of the economic systems that appear and disappear throughout history—in other words, what is their hidden logic and the underlying necessity for them to exist, or to have existed? Second, what are the conditions for a rational understanding of these systems—in other words, for a fully developed comparative economic science? The field of investigation opened up by these two questions is vast, touching on the foundations of social reality and on how to understand them. The author, being a Marxist, sought the answers, as he writes, ‘not in philosophy or by philosophical means, but in and through examining the knowledge accumulated by the sciences.’ The stages of his journey from philosophy to economics and then to anthropology are indicated by the divisions of his book. Godelier rejects, at the outset, any attempt to tackle the question of rationality or irrationality of economic science and of economic realities from the angle of an a priori idea, a speculative definition of what is rational. Such an approach can yield only, he feels, an ideological result. Rather, he treats the appearance and disappearance of social and economic systems in history as being governed by a necessity ‘wholly internal to the concrete structures of social life.

Rationality in Economics: Alternative Perspectives

Rationality in Economics: Alternative Perspectives PDF Author: Ken Dennis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401148627
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Ideas linked to rational choice theory started to appear frequently in the economics literature in the 1960s and 1970s, but the attention given to rationality widened to include commentators presenting far-reaching appraisals and critiques. The literature grew to a steady flow and spanned diverse areas of thought including socialist and `rational-choice Marxist' assessments, and other approaches including institutional, sociological, psychological, ethical, choice-theoretical, strategic, and game-theoretical treatments of rationality. This diversity of literature led to the creation of this volume. What does rationality mean? Was there some common core of meaning that held all of these seemingly disparate developments together, or were there discernable schools of thought with peculiarities that set them clearly apart from one another? The essays in this volume illustrate that diversity, and despite the variety of approaches there remains a common core of meaning that accommodates not so much a radically different set of concepts of rationality as a highly variegated array of methods and approaches to this subject. Contributors address topics of their choice on the concept of rationality in economics, and the selection of these contributors is meant to represent a variety of backgrounds and approaches.

Rationality in Economic Thought

Rationality in Economic Thought PDF Author: Armando C. Ochangco
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781858989556
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The main theme of this book is the methodological problem of rationality in economic thought. The author investigates the different interpretations of this problem advanced by major figures in the history of economic thought. The book examines the history and rationality of the 'theory of value' from Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall and attempts to understand these arguments and criticisms within a general methodological vein. It goes on to provide a complete historical account of the ideas and arguments on value propounded by Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Jevons, Walras and Marshall as well as by more recent scholars such as Sraffa and Debreu and interprets their methodological differences. The author proposes a novel 'pragmatic-pluralist' methodological interpretation which borrows and creatively synthesizes ideas from many sources, including Wittgenstein (language-games), Searle (performatives), Habermas (communicative reason), hermeneutics, Marx and the pragmatic tradition. Rationality in Economic Thought will be of interest to students and scholars of the history of economic thought, economic methodology and the philosophy of the social sciences.

Quasi Rational Economics

Quasi Rational Economics PDF Author: Richard H. Thaler
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 9780871548474
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Standard economics theory is built on the assumption that human beings act rationally in their own self interest. But if rationality is such a reliable factor, why do economic models so often fail to predict market behavior accurately? According to Richard Thaler, the shortcomings of the standard approach arise from its failure to take into account systematic mental biases that color all human judgments and decisions.

Predictably Rational?

Predictably Rational? PDF Author: Richard B. McKenzie
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642015867
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Mainstream economists everywhere exhibit an "irrational passion for dispassionate rationality." Behavioral economists, and long-time critic of mainstream economics suggests that people in mainstrean economic models "can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the will power of Mahatma Gandhi," suggesting that such a view of real world modern homo sapiens is simply wrongheaded. Indeed, Thaler and other behavioral economists and psychology have documented a variety of ways in which real-world people fall far short of mainstream economists' idealized economic actor, perfectly rational homo economicus. Behavioral economist Daniel Ariely has concluded that real-world people not only exhibit an array of decision-making frailties and biases, they are "predictably irrational," a position now shared by so many behavioral economists, psychologists, sociologists, and evolutionary biologists that a defense of the core rationality premise of modedrn economics is demanded.

The Economics of Rationality

The Economics of Rationality PDF Author: Bill J Gerrard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134915284
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
The concept of rationality is the heart of modern economics. Neo-classical theory seems unable to proceed without assuming a rational agent seeking to find the optimal means to a well defined end. Yet many find this uncritical treatment of rationality problematic. It takes little account of culture history or creativity and consequently many economists find this insistence on rationality of little use when trying to explain a wide range of economic phenomena. Increasingly these include a large number of game theorists and others involved in mainstream theory as well as those typically opposed to neo-classicism. The Economics of Rationality contains a number of critical perspectives on the treatment of rationality in economics.

Imagining Interest in Political Thought

Imagining Interest in Political Thought PDF Author: Stephen G. Engelmann
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822331223
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
DIVEngelmann revisits Jeremy Bentham's work in the context of later liberal political theorists./div