Economics was traditionally viewed as part of a wider study of human things, including ethics. It has drifted away from ethics despite the fact that ethical considerations inevitably form part of economics. After a brief introduction, the second section outlines the state of play in the...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but also to...

Die Begriffe Wohlfahrt und Wohlstand werden in ihrem dogmenhistorischen Entstehungskontext untersucht. Dabei wird zum einen der Schwerpunkt auf die von den Physiokraten, aber auch von John Stuart Mill, W. Stanley Jevons und sogar von deutschen Ordoliberalen thematisierten Wachstumsgrenzen gelegt...

Die Diskussion um Karl Marx ist lange Zeit nur ideologisch positionell geführt worden. Wer sich nicht als Gegner oder Befürworter der Marxschen Lehre erklärte, hatte es schwer, in dieser Diskussion Gehör zu finden. Im letzten Viertel des vorigen Jahrhunderts hat jedoch sowohl in...

In der Ökonomik tritt der zirkuläre "unechte" Fortschritt auf, der sich z.B. vom kumulativen, besonders für die Naturwissenschaften charakteristischen Fortschritt abgrenzt. Die Ideen- bzw. Dogmengeschichte kann somit eine wertvolle Erkenntnisquelle sein. In diesem Papier wird das Konzept der...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of paid basic income on fertility rates in a model in which fertility rates are endogenous. I show that when child labor is not a crucial part of the income of the family, then paid basic income will lead to higher fertility rates. However,...

Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's "true" model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models, which helped generate the data against which...

Reconciling the two dominant development models of the Washington Consensus (WC) and Beijing Model (BM) remains a critical challenge in the literature. The challenge is even more demanding when emerging development paradigms like the Liberal Institutional Pluralism (LIP) and New Structural...

It is sometimes pointed out that economic research is prone to move in cycles and react to particular events such as crises and recessions. The present paper analyses this issue through a quantitative analysis by answering two closely related research questions: (1) whether or not there are...