Kenneth Boulding's AEA presidential address argued that economics is a moral science. His view derived from his general systems theory thinking, his three systems view of human society, and his early contributions to evolutionary economics. Boulding's argument that economics could not be...

Kenneth Boulding’s AEA presidential address argued that economics is a moral science. His view derived from his general systems theory thinking, his three systems view of human society, and his early contributions to evolutionary economics. Boulding’s argument that economics could not be...

This paper departs from the standard abstract economics approach to health economics to develop a specifically contextualist approach to the subject emphasizing social and historical circumstances affecting health provision. Following Polanyi, it sees the economy as socially embedded and...

This paper examines the implications of Chicago School economist Edward Lazear's 2000 defense of economics imperialism using standard trade theory. It associates that defense with interdisciplinarity or the idea that the sciences are relatively autonomous, but treats this defense as a mask for a...

This paper departs from the standard abstract economics approach to health economics to develop a specifically contextualist approach to the subject emphasizing social and historical circumstances affecting health provision. Following Polanyi, it sees the economy as socially embedded and...

This paper discusses how counterfactual thinking can be incorporated into behavioral economics by relating it to a type of attribution substitution involved in choices people make in conditions of Knightian uncertainty. It draws on Byrne’s ‘rational imagination’ account of counterfactual...

Departures from self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of ?social preferences?. We design a range of simple experimental games that test these theories more directly than existing experiments. Our experiments show that subjects are more concerned with increasing...

This chapter examines the nature of ethics and economics as a single subject of investigation, and uses a complex systems approach to characterize the nature of that subject. It then distinguishes mainstream economic and social economic visions of it, where the former assumes that market...

Participants in experimental games typically can only choose actions, without making comments about other participants' future actions. In sequential two-person games, we allow first movers to express a preference between responder choices. We find that responder behavior differs substantially...

The paper first discusses the methodological problem of identifying change in economics, given that change is always present in any discipline. It rejects ‘inventory’ methods that subjectively compare ‘new’ and ‘old’ concepts, and argues we should focus on economics’ disciplinary...