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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Culture And Prosperity: The Truth About Markets—Why Some Nations Are Rich But Most Remain Poor (Book Review), Jonathan B. Wight Dec 2004

Culture And Prosperity: The Truth About Markets—Why Some Nations Are Rich But Most Remain Poor (Book Review), Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

John Kay’s latest book offers an absorbing romp through the history of economic thought in the 20th century. Kay attempts to explain the complex reality of a modern market system rather than resorting to simplistic theorizing about it. Gone are perfectly rational traders, perfectly competitive markets, incentive compatibilities, low transaction costs, informational symmetries, and no externalities. Kay highlights problems and problem solving as the ubiquitous and historical strata through which markets in the West evolved.


An Empirical Examination Of The Impact Of College Financial Aid On Family Savings, James Monks Jun 2004

An Empirical Examination Of The Impact Of College Financial Aid On Family Savings, James Monks

Economics Faculty Publications

The system of distributing financial aid dollars using needs analysis formulae implicitly imposes a financial aid tax on assets. Existing studies provide mixed evidence of the influence of this implicit tax on assets on wealth accumulation. This paper attempts to contribute to the literature on this topic by examining the sensitivity of results to various assumptions, specifications, and categories of assets, using more recent data that allows for the incorporation of recent developments in financial aid and college costs. I find much weaker evidence than existing studies that college financial aid has a significant impact on family savings.


On The "Bitter Quarrel" Between Economics And Its Enemies, Sandra J. Peart Jan 2004

On The "Bitter Quarrel" Between Economics And Its Enemies, Sandra J. Peart

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Economics has long had its enemies. The question is, why? What, precisely, is it about economics that its critics oppose? William Coleman seeks to tell the story of «anti-economics», «to take its measure» (p. 3), and then finally to defend economics from these attacks. His is a broad, sweeping study that uses a wide lens, panoramically over time, to survey the opposition. The crisis in economics, edited by Edward Fullbrook, provides us instead with a detailed snapshot of a recent sort of anti-economics - the Post-Autistic Economics (PAE) movement that originated among French economics students in 2000. Both serve to …


The Negro Science Of Exchange: Classical Economics And Its Chicago Revival, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart Jan 2004

The Negro Science Of Exchange: Classical Economics And Its Chicago Revival, David M. Levy, Sandra J. Peart

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

For analytical purposes, are economic agents—humans—the same or not? In this chapter, we argue that, historically, the debate between those who trusted in markets and those who did not followed logically from different answers to this questions. Starting with Adam Smith, classical economists held that humans are the same in their capacity for language and trade. They concluded that since markets are useful for some agents, they are beneficial for all of us. But the supposition of homogeneous competence was widely questioned in the nineteenth century but those who held that significant differences exist among humans, only some of whom …


"Not An Average Human Being": How Economics Succumbed To Racial Accounts Of Economic Man, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy Jan 2004

"Not An Average Human Being": How Economics Succumbed To Racial Accounts Of Economic Man, Sandra J. Peart, David M. Levy

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

In this chapter, we shall show how the attacks on the doctrine of human homogeneity succeeded—how, late in the century, economists came to embrace accounts of racial heterogeneity entailing different capacities of optimization.1 We attribute the demise of the classical tradition largely to the ill-understood influence of anthropologists and eugenicists2 and to a popular culture that served to disseminate racial theories visually and in print. Specifically, W. R. Greg, James Hunt, and Francis Galton all attacked the analytical postulate of homogeneity that characterized classical economics from Adam Smith3 through John Stuart Mill. Greg cofounded the eugenics movement …