Over the last twenty years, law and economics has effectively internalized behavioral critiques of its assumption of individual rationality. By contrast, it has failed to appreciate the implications of growing challenges to the other crucial pillar on which it is built: methodological...

Douglass North gehört zu den führenden Sozialwissenschaftlern des 20. Jahrhunderts. Er wurde für seine bahnbrechenden Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der ökonomischen Geschichtstheorie mit dem Nobelpreis ausgezeichnet. Dieser Aufsatz rekonstruiert (a) seine kliometrische Diagnose der Moderne, (b)...

The methodology of Latin American economic structuralism has been generally interpreted as an implicit extension of classic French structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and others, without careful examination of the methodological pronouncements of Latin American economists and social...

This article agrees with Reardon (2019), that economics finds itself in a predicament caused by the neoclassical school. The dominance of neoclassical economics and its lack of response to calls for reform has been endemic. Reform must include both the neoclassical analysis as well as the system...

China’s economic transformation cannot be fully explained by focusing on a single variable; rather, it is a result of multiple institutional factors. Since the introduction of market-oriented reforms in 1978, a combination of formal and informal institutional changes as well as top-down and...

Kornai's autobiography presents an interesting perspective of the intellectual environment of a Central European country of real socialism such as Hungary, from the Stalinist after-war years to the progressively more relaxed, but still constraining, atmosphere of the sixties and later. Of...

In 1481 when King John II ascended to the throne of Portugal, it was on the verge of bankruptcy. A quarter of a century later, Portugal all but ruled the world, economically and scientifically – at least. This article seeks to investigate the policy decisions of King John II and his successor,...

This paper was prepared for a symposium about Erwin Dekker’s (2021) recent biography of the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen, with attention to Tinbergen’s work as a development economist in the post-war era. Tinbergen’s “uniqueness” among other development economists is discussed, as...

In the second edition of his methodological Essay, Lionel Robbins attributes a significant role to uncertainty, dynamics and the time element. Understanding the motives that led to these revisions may offer important clues to assess what happened to political economy ever since, and how far...