Capitalism and Arithmetic

Capitalism and Arithmetic

Author: Frank J. Swetz

Publisher: Open Court Publishing

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780812690149

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"The Treviso Arithmetic, or Arte dell'Abbaco, is an anonymous textbook in commercial arithmetic written in vernacular Venetian and published in Treviso, Italy in 1478. The Treviso Arithmetic is the earliest known printed mathematics book in the West, and one of the first printed European textbooks dealing with a science. The Treviso Arithmetic is a practical book intended for self study and for use in Venetian trade. It is written in vernacular Venetian and communicated knowledge to a large population. It helped to end the monopoly on mathematical knowledge and gave important information to the middle class. It was not written for a large audience, but was intended to teach mathematics of everyday currency. The Treviso became one of the first mathematics books written for the expansion of human knowledge. It provided an opportunity for the common person, rather than only a privileged few, to learn the art of computation. The Treviso Arithmetic provided an early example of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system computational algorithms."--Wikipedia.


Political Arithmetic

Political Arithmetic

Author: Robert William Fogel

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 0226256618

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We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn’t the case—economists simply didn’t have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy. With Political Arithmetic, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking—Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover’s interest in business cycles as President Harding’s commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression—and shows how, through trial and error, measurement and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making. The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, Political Arithmetic is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.


Capitalism and a New Social Order

Capitalism and a New Social Order

Author: Joyce Appleby

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1984-08

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 9780814705834

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Examines the vision of Jeffersonian Republicans and their impact on early American politics In 1800 the Jeffersonian Republicans, decisive victors over what they considered elitist Federalism, seized the potential for change in the new American nation. They infused in it their vision of a society of economically progressive, politically equal, and socially liberated individuals. This book examines the fusion of ideas and circumstances which made possible this triumph of America's first popular political movement. When the Federalists convened in New York to form the "more perfect union" promised by the new United Sates Constitution, they expected to build a strong central government led by the revolutionary members of the old colonial elite. This expectation was dashed by the emergence of a vigorous opposition led by Thomas Jefferson but manned by a new generation of popular politicians: interlopers, émigrés, polemicists—what the Federalists called the "mushroom candidates." They turned the 1790s into an age of passion by raising basic questions about the characters of the American experiment in government. When the Federalists defenders of traditional European notions of order and authority came under attack, they sought to discredit the radical beliefs of the Jeffersonians. Although the ideas that fueled the Jeffersonian opposition came from several strains of liberal and libertarian thought, it was the specific prospect of an expanding commercial agriculture that gave substance to their conviction that Americans might divorce themselves from the precepts of the past. Thus, capitalism figured prominently in the Jeffersonian social vision. Aroused by the Federalists' efforts to bind the nation's wealthy citizens to a strengthened central government, the Jeffersonians unified ordinary men in the southern and middle states, mobilizing on the national level the power of the popular vote. Their triumph in 1800 represented a new sectional alliance as well as a potent fusion of morality and materialism.


Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism

Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism

Author: Benedikt Koehler

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-06-17

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0739188836

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Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism proposes a strikingly original thesis—that capitalism first emerged in Arabia, not in late medieval Italian city states as is commonly assumed. Early Islam made a seminal but largely unrecognized contribution to the history of economic thought; it is the only religion founded by an entrepreneur. Descending from an elite dynasty of religious, civil, and commercial leaders, Muhammad was a successful businessman before founding Islam. As such, the new religion had much to say on trade, consumer protection, business ethics, and property. As Islam rapidly spread across the region so did the economic teachings of early Islam, which eventually made their way to Europe. Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism demonstrates how Islamic institutions and business practices were adopted and adapted in Venice and Genoa. These financial innovations include the invention of the corporation, business management techniques, commercial arithmetic, and monetary reform. There were other Islamic institutions assimilated in Europe: charities, the waqf, inspired trusts, and institutions of higher learning; the madrasas were models for the oldest colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. As such, it can be rightfully said that these essential aspects of capitalist thought all have Islamic roots.


Capitalism and Its Economics

Capitalism and Its Economics

Author: Douglas Dowd

Publisher: Pluto Press

Published: 2004-07-20

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780745322803

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This classic book is an ideal introduction to economic thought and the dominance of capitalism, ideal for students of economic theory and history. Now thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition includes a new preface and an additional chapter by the author. Analysing the relationship between economic thought and capitalism from 1750 to the present, Douglas Dowd examines the dynamic interaction of two processes: the historical realities of capitalism and the evolution of economic theory. He demonstrates that the study of economics celebrates capitalism in ways that make it necessary to classify economic science as pure ideology. A thoroughly modern history, this book shows how economics has become ideology. A radical critic of capitalism, Dowd surveys its detrimental impact across the globe and throughout history. The book includes biographical sketches and brief analyses of the major proponents and critics of capitalism throughout history, including Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, Rosa Luxemburg, John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, and Eric Hobsbawm.


Psychology and Capitalism

Psychology and Capitalism

Author: Ron Roberts

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2015-02-27

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 1782796533

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Psychology and Capitalism is a critical and accessible account of the ideological and material role of psychology in supporting capitalist enterprise and holding individuals entirely responsible for their fate through the promotion of individualism.


The Software Arts

The Software Arts

Author: Warren Sack

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-04-09

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0262352370

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An alternative history of software that places the liberal arts at the very center of software's evolution. In The Software Arts, Warren Sack offers an alternative history of computing that places the arts at the very center of software's evolution. Tracing the origins of software to eighteenth-century French encyclopedists' step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of artists and artisans, Sack shows that programming languages are the offspring of an effort to describe the mechanical arts in the language of the liberal arts. Sack offers a reading of the texts of computing—code, algorithms, and technical papers—that emphasizes continuity between prose and programs. He translates concepts and categories from the liberal and mechanical arts—including logic, rhetoric, grammar, learning, algorithm, language, and simulation—into terms of computer science and then considers their further translation into popular culture, where they circulate as forms of digital life. He considers, among other topics, the “arithmetization” of knowledge that presaged digitization; today's multitude of logics; the history of demonstration, from deduction to newer forms of persuasion; and the post-Chomsky absence of meaning in grammar. With The Software Arts, Sack invites artists and humanists to see how their ideas are at the root of software and invites computer scientists to envision themselves as artists and humanists.