This book provides a coherent description of the main concepts and statistical methods used to analyse economic performance. The focus is on measures of performance that are of practical relevance to policy makers. Most, if not all, of these measures can be viewed as measures of productivity...

1. Happiness in economics : the roots and perspectives of a research programme -- 2. Scitovsky's research programme on human welfare -- 3. Enjoying creative activity by developing life skill -- 4. Comfort vs. creative activity as two sources of well-being -- 5. Addiction : from well-being to...

"Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." So wrote Adam Smith a quarter of a millennium ago. Using the...

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. Neoclassicism and Dissent, 1890–1925 -- 2. New Tracks for Economic Theory, 1926–1939 -- Introduction -- 3. Hicksian Keynesianism: Dominance and Decline -- 4. Keynesian Econometric Concepts: Consumption Functions, Investment Functions,...

Main description: The general assumption that social policy should be utilitarian--that society should be organized to yield the greatest level of welfare--leads inexorably to increased government interventions. Historically, however, the science of economics has advocated limits to these...

Main description: In a remarkably lucid and flowing style, Loren Okroi analyzes the ideas of three leading reformer-critics in the United States and places their main arguments in the context of the economic, social, and political history of postwar America. In so doing, he provides not only a...

One of the central tenets of mainstream economics is Adam Smith's proposition that, given certain conditions, self-interested behavior by individuals leads them to the social good, almost as if orchestrated by an invisible hand. This deep insight has, over the past two centuries, been taken out...