Since at least Max Weber, social scientists have looked closely at the nexus between markets and cities. Weber believed that cities and markets were inextricably linked. In his seminal work Economy & Society, for instance, Weber ([1921] 1978, p. 1213) describes the city as a market settlement....

This chapter explores some surprising and underappreciated commonalities between F.A. Hayek and Henri Lefebvre's writings on the market. The hope is that a richer conception of the market might result – i.e. one that corrects for Lefebvre's "anti-market bias" and Hayek's "abstractness" – by...

Although Schütz's relationship with the Austrian school of economics was an intimate one, Lavoie and other Austrian scholars have challenged (a) Schütz's characterization of praxeology as an objective science of subjective phenomena and (b) the ability of Schütz's phenomenology, which...

Don Lavoie was the consummate teacher. He embraced the life of the mind, the world of ideas and philosophies and books with all of his being. And, he taught by example rather than by pronouncements, that being a scholar meant that you had to respect but not be bound by disciplinary borders, that...

Britain's colonial adventures in the West Indies lasted almost five centuries. "Slavery...and the overarching experience of colonialism," as De Barros, et al (2006, xi) write, "have in many ways defined the...Caribbean." Similarly, as Thompson (1997: 11) described, the Caribbean is "the most...

The rival opinions expressed by Jeffrey Sachs in his book The End of Poverty and by William Easterly in The White Man's Burden epitomize the dichotomy in the economics literature regarding the role of foreign aid in eliminating extreme poverty. On the one hand, the majority of governments see...

The dominant model of exchange between economists and our cousins in the other social sciences is export. We seldom learn or even try to learn from our compatriots. We peddle our analysis (of everything from the virtuous to the profane), our methods (too often borrowed from the natural sciences)...

In Trinidad and Tobago, the Chinese, Syrian-Lebanese and White ethnic groups have the highest levels of self-employment, while Indians have emerged as the new business class. However, relatively few black Trinidadians are self-employed. Using survey data, this study examines whether these...

Market supporters have consistently emphasized that markets make it so that self-interested or even greedy individuals can only help themselves by serving their fellow men and women. This channeling of self-interest away from predation and toward profit seeking explains why market economies tend...

In The Bourgeois Dignity, Deidre McCloskey asserts that although there were many reasons that have been posited for the rise of the bourgeois class and the tremendous increase in the world's standard of living that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, including the enlightenment and the...