The Natural Origins of Economics
The Natural Origins of Economics

Author: Margaret Schabas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-05-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0226735710

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References to the economy are ubiquitous in modern life, and virtually every facet of human activity has capitulated to market mechanisms. In the early modern period, however, there was no common perception of the economy, and discourses on money, trade, and commerce treated economic phenomena as properties of physical nature. Only in the early nineteenth century did economists begin to posit and identify the economy as a distinct object, divorcing it from natural processes and attaching it exclusively to human laws and agency. In The Natural Origins of Economics, Margaret Schabas traces the emergence and transformation of economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a natural to a social science. Focusing on the works of several prominent economists—David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill—Schabas examines their conceptual debt to natural science and thus locates the evolution of economic ideas within the history of science. An ambitious study, The Natural Origins of Economics will be of interest to economists, historians, and philosophers alike.

The History of Economics
The History of Economics

Author: Roger E. Backhouse

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781911116691

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Roger E. Backhouse and Keith Tribe present a broad introduction to the history of economic thought based upon courses they have taught for many years. Its main purpose is to provide an overview for students and teachers who have not had the opportunity of taking a course in the subject. The book is presented as a series of twenty-four lectures. Each lecture presents an outline of aims, a select bibliography, a chronology, an overview of between 3,000 and 4,000 words, and questions for further study or reflection. Contemporary understanding of economic principles sheds little light on the manner in which past thinkers thought, so the student is provided with the much-needed context behind the development of ideas as well as being guided through the original writings of economists such as Smith, Jevons, Marshall, Robbins, Keynes, and others. The emphasis is on the broad developing stream of economic argument from the seventeenth century to the present, seeking to emphasize a diversity that is sometimes suppressed in more conventional textbooks, which tend to organize their histories into sequences of schools of thought. With many years of experience teaching economic thought, the authors have honed their presentation to the needs of those with no previous background in the subject, without sacrificing analysis or rigor. The book will be warmly welcomed by students and teachers alike.

Nature
Nature

Author: Geerat Vermeij

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-02-09

Total Pages: 460

ISBN-13: 1400826497

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From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources. This universal truth unites three bodies of thought--economics, evolution, and history--that have developed largely in mutual isolation. Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics, and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems--competition, cooperation, adaptation, and feedback--govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns in both human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle. Using a wealth of examples of evolutionary innovations, Vermeij argues that evolution and economics are one. Powerful consumers and producers exercise disproportionate controls on the characteristics, activities, and distribution of all life forms. Competition-driven demand by consumers, when coupled with supply-side conditions permitting economic growth, leads to adaptation and escalation among organisms. Although disruptions in production halt or reverse these processes temporarily, they amplify escalation in the long run to produce trends in all economic systems toward greater power, higher production rates, and a wider reach for economic systems and their strongest members. Despite our unprecedented power to shape our surroundings, we humans are subject to all the economic principles and historical trends that emerged at life's origin more than 3 billion years ago. Engagingly written, brilliantly argued, and sweeping in scope, Nature: An Economic History shows that the human institutions most likely to preserve opportunity and adaptability are, after all, built like successful living things.

Natural Law and the Origin of Political Economy
Natural Law and the Origin of Political Economy

Author: Arild Saether

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-06-26

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 131720770X

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Samuel Pufendorf’s work on natural law and political economy was extensive and has been cited by several important figures in the history of economic thought. Yet his name is rarely mentioned in textbooks on the history of economic thought, the history of political science or the history of philosophy. In this unprecedented study, Arild Sæther sheds new light both on Pufendorf’s own life and work, as well as his influence on his contemporaries and on later scholars. This book explores Pufendorf ’s doctrines of political economy and his work on natural law, which was translated into several major European languages. Natural Law and the Origin of Political Economy considers the influence he had on the writings on political economy of John Locke, Charles Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith, amongst others. If Smith can be called the father of modern economics, this book claims that Pufendorf can be called the grandfather. This volume is of great importance to those who study Pufendorf ’s extensive works, as well as those interested in history of economic thought, political economy and political philosophy.

A Culture of Growth
A Culture of Growth

Author: Joel Mokyr

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-11-15

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0691168881

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Why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that spread across the globe. While much has been made of the details of the Industrial Revolution, what remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today's unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development. Bringing together economics, the history of science and technology, and models of cultural evolution, Mokyr demonstrates that culture—the beliefs, values, and preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior—was a deciding factor in societal transformations. Mokyr looks at the period 1500–1700 to show that a politically fragmented Europe fostered a competitive "market for ideas" and a willingness to investigate the secrets of nature. At the same time, a transnational community of brilliant thinkers known as the “Republic of Letters” freely circulated and distributed ideas and writings. This political fragmentation and the supportive intellectual environment explain how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe but not China, despite similar levels of technology and intellectual activity. In Europe, heterodox and creative thinkers could find sanctuary in other countries and spread their thinking across borders. In contrast, China’s version of the Enlightenment remained controlled by the ruling elite. Combining ideas from economics and cultural evolution, A Culture of Growth provides startling reasons for why the foundations of our modern economy were laid in the mere two centuries between Columbus and Newton.

A History of Ecological Economic Thought
A History of Ecological Economic Thought

Author: Marco P. Vianna Franco

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-01

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1000624617

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Contributing to a better understanding of contemporary issues of environmental sustainability from a historical perspective, this book provides a cohesive and cogent account of the history of ecological economic thought. The work unearths a diverse set of ideas within a Western and Slavic context, from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the late 1940s, to reveal insights firmly grounded in historiographical research and of import for addressing current sustainability challenges, not least by means of improving our grasp on how humans and nature can generously coexist in the long term. The history of ecological economic thought offered in this volume is rich and diverse, encompassing views that are bound by the observance of the tenets of the natural sciences, but which differ significantly in terms of the role of energy and materials to cultural development and the normative aspects involving resource distribution, social ideals, and policy-making. Combining the approaches of independent scholarly figures and scientific communities from different historical periods and nationalities, the book brings elements that are still missing in the scarce literature on the history of ecological economic thought and highlights the underlying threads which unite such initiatives. The book brings a fresh look into the historical development of ecological economic ideas and will therefore be of great interest to scholars and students of ecological economics, environmental economics, sustainability science, interdisciplinary studies, and history of economic thought.

Nature's Economy
Nature's Economy

Author: Donald Worster

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1994-06-24

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 9780521468343

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Nature's Economy is a wide-ranging investigation of ecology's past, first published in 1994.

Economics of Good and Evil
Economics of Good and Evil

Author: Tomas Sedlacek

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-07-01

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 0199831904

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Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have. Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a product of our civilization. It began within philosophy--Adam Smith himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory of Moral Sentiments--and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking, broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity, from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club. Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way we calculate economic value.

The Company of Strangers
The Company of Strangers

Author: Paul Seabright

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-05-02

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9780691146461

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The Company of Strangers shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives. This completely revised and updated edition includes a new chapter analyzing how the rise and fall of social trust explain the unsustainable boom in the global economy over the past decade and the financial crisis that succeeded it. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Paul Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, cities, and the banking system to provide the foundations of social trust that we need in our everyday lives. Even the simple acts of buying food and clothing depend on an astonishing web of interaction that spans the globe. How did humans develop the ability to trust total strangers with providing our most basic needs?

David Hume's Political Economy
David Hume's Political Economy

Author: Margaret Schabas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1134362501

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This collection of twelve new essays by distinguished scholars in the fields of history and the philosophy of economics is one of the first book-length studies of Hume‘s political economy.