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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Financial Crisis Viewed From The Perspective Of The Social Cost Theory, L. Randall Wray
The Financial Crisis Viewed From The Perspective Of The Social Cost Theory, L. Randall Wray
Social Cost Workshop
The talk examines the causes and consequences of the current global financial crisis. K.W. Kapp’s “social costs” theory is contrasted with the recently dominant “efficient markets” hypothesis to provide the context for analyzing the functioning of financial institutions. Rather than operating “efficiently,” the financial sector has been imposing huge costs on the economy—costs that no one can deny in the aftermath of the economy’s collapse. While orthodox approaches lead to the conclusion that money and finance should not matter much, the alternative tradition—from Veblen and Keynes to Galbraith and Minsky—provides the basis for developing an approach that puts money and …
The Social Cost Of Labor And Its Importance For Labor Economics, Robert E. Prasch
The Social Cost Of Labor And Its Importance For Labor Economics, Robert E. Prasch
Social Cost Workshop
The starting point and core notion of neoclassical or mainstream economics is a reductionist vision of the exchange of commodities. Missing is the historical, social, and legal environments within which exchanges occur. A parallel and equally problematic notion is that labor exists as something of a “found object.” By contrast, the classical school of economists understood that laborers must earn a wage equal to or greater than “subsistence” if society was to be an ongoing enterprise. Laborers must be fed, sheltered, socialized, and educated before they arrive in the labor market. This, in a phrase, is the Social Cost of …
Environmental Sustainability From A Social Cost Perspective, James Swaney
Environmental Sustainability From A Social Cost Perspective, James Swaney
Social Cost Workshop
Over a quarter century, efforts to build global environmental governance institutions have been thwarted by ideology and vested interests, while ecological degradation has accelerated and disparities in wealth, living standards and economic opportunities have grown. Nonetheless, the sustainability idea remains appealing and valid: Future generations can be protected from debilitating ecological degradation only if we, the present generation, redirect development to begin restoring ecological balance to key earth systems (e.g., oceans, climate, biodiversity). The social cost perspective (SCP) of institutional economics, rooted in the contributions of Karl Polanyi (1944) and K. William Kapp (1950), provides a framework for thinking about, …
The Discourse On Social Costs: Heterodox Vs. Neoliberal Economics, Sebastian Berger
The Discourse On Social Costs: Heterodox Vs. Neoliberal Economics, Sebastian Berger
Social Cost Workshop
This presentation analyzes the discourse on social costs, focusing on how neoliberal economists in the 1950s and 1960s embarked on the successful project to marginalize the heterodox view that social controls of the economy are a good thing because markets otherwise cause too many social damages. The paper mainly looks at the intellectual project of the institutional economists John M. Clark and K. William Kapp. Both collaborated in the 1940s in crafting the institutional theory of social costs as a critique of the neoclassical theory of costs and externalities (Arthur C. Pigou), as well as the rising post WWII neoliberalism …