Milton Friedman’s “The Methodology of Positive Economies” is still one of the most widely read pieces on economic methodology. One reason for this might be Friedman’s attractive proposal that economists use theories and hypotheses as pragmatic devices to summarize data and make...

Gordon Tullock is recognized for being the first to recognize the true costs of rent-seeking as including not only the Harberger triangle but also the Tullock rectangle. This rectangle does not constitute merely a lossless transfer of wealth, but it causes a misallocation of resources as...

The aim of this paper is to discuss some major issues of Georgescu-Roegen’s work for Economic science with a special emphasis on the connection between the economic process and the entropy law. The flow-found approach is discussed and some possible implementations are proposed to measure the...

The paper aims to put into perspective Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s bioeconomics and Serge Latouche’s degrowth approaches. In particular, we analyse the foundations of these approaches such as they have been put forward by those two economists. If the cross-reading of their work shows both...

The origin of prospect theory is the desire to test the intuitive statistician in the real world. The development of this theory by the cognitive psychologists Kahneman and Tversky can be traced to the formers work in cognitive psychophysics, in which deviations from average behavior are termed...

According to Sohn-Rethel there is a “secret identity” between commodity form and thought form. Commodity exchange is a real abstraction – embodied in money – and constitutes a social a priori which reflects itself in the conceptual abstraction, i.e., in the abstract thought typical of...

The question of what is the 'Coase Theorem?' has no simple answer. The majority of articles covering a variety of issues on the 'Coase Theorem' still misrepresent the main message of Coase (1960). The remaining controversy over the 'Coase Theorem' is because the literature on Coase (1960) has...

This paper carries out a brief analysis of Amartya Sen’s thinking on Justice, based on Part IV of his book The Idea of Justice. Besides of describing Sen’s thoughts on the subject, the paper aims to contextualize it in the evolution of Sen’s work and in the general discussion on Justice in...

This volume – Predicting Crisis: Five Essays on the Mathematic Prediction of Economic and Social Crises – is the first of three sets of essays. In this first set the economic and social history of the United States is shown to be a “system of movement,” i.e. a logical and mathematic...