Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists’ engagements with other disciplines – e.g. mathematics, statistics,...

This paper explores the rise of money and class society in ancient Greece, drawing historical and theoretical parallels to the case of ancient Egypt. In doing so, the paper examines the historical applicability of the chartalist and metallist theories of money. It will be shown that the origins...

This paper advances three fundamental propositions regarding money: (1) As R. W. Clower (1965) famously put it, money buys goods and goods buy money, but goods do not buy goods. (2) Money is always debt; it cannot be a commodity from the first proposition because, if it were, that would mean...

Paul A. Samuelson taught that every society has to choose between butter and guns. Individuals have to make the Gossen test of utility equivalence. The authors of the recent Mirrlees Review seem to believe that they can avoid this choice by considering taxation only. But how can one decide on...

When two production techniques are compared, reswitching occurs when a technique begins by being cheapest at a low interest rate, switches to being more expensive at a higher rate, and then reswitches to being cheapest at yet higher rates. Some believe the inconsistency undermines the...

Since its beginnings, and more clearly since the mid 1800, Economics has been resting on the assumption that economic agents make rational decisions, maximizing their utility or well-being according to their own preferences and interests. The economic order resulting from that plurality of...

This paper explores a pluralist approach to moral economy in two ways. First, as a review, four major schools of thought on the rental of land in India are described. I focus on their normative and ontic assumptions. Second, noting that none of these schools is value-neutral, a plurality of six...

This paper compares and contrasts two schools of political economy: the Austrian School, prominent members of which include Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; and the Bloomington School, which was founded by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It is argued that the two traditions share a good deal in...

This essay introduces the key themes, and papers, in an edited volume entitled, Commerce and Community: Ecologies of Social Cooperation. Since the end of the Cold War, the human face of economics has gained visibility and generated new conversations among economists and other social theorists....