Beyond private ownership of the means of production, what is the most important, or essential, fact of capitalism? Friedrich A. Hayek thought it was the economy of knowledge with which the system operated, whereas for Joseph A. Schumpeter it was the process of creative destruction. To our...

This paper explores a new theoretical and empirical approach to the assessment of human well-being, relevant to current challenges of social fragmentation in the presence of globalization and technological advance. We present two indexes of well-being - solidarity (S) and agency (A) - to be...

The success of an economic system depends on its having a strong basis of legitimacy in society. For much of the twentieth century, the legitimacy of "American capitalism" was based on the public belief that it would most rapidly and successfully advance the economic progress of the American...

We propose a social welfare function to evaluate a profile of income streams and compare the welfare gain of the actual profile relative to the income profile where the individual receives his first period income in each period. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the welfare...

Theoretical models of the Kuznets Curve have been purely analytical with little contribution towards an understanding of the timing of the process and the presence of additional mechanisms affecting its timing. This paper proposes an agent-based version of Acemoglu and Robinson's model of the...

"The period since the 1980s has seen sustained pressure on Africa's political elite to anchor the continent's development strategies in neoliberalism in exchange for vitally needed development assistance. Rafts of policies and programmes have come to underpin the relationship between continental...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual’s want of social status. For a given level of a population’s wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...