Free Market in Its Twenties

Free Market in Its Twenties
Author: Maciej Kisilowski
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2014-07-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9633860466

This book provides a broadly managerial perspective on key trends that affect business decision-making in Central and Eastern Europe twenty years after the beginning of the region's transition to market economy. Reflecting different viewpoints, including economic, social, and political approaches, the essays helps managers of the region to understand better both regional and the global forces influencing their businesses – as well as to bring to their attention relevant cutting-edge approaches to business thinking and decision-making.

Meanings of the Market

Meanings of the Market
Author: James G. Carrier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-05-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000184439

For almost twenty years, the 'Free Market' has been a central feature of public debate in the West, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. In the name of the Market and its supposed benefits, governments and international agencies have imposed massive changes on peoples' lives. Curiously, scholars have paid little attention to the ways that the idea of the Market is invoked, to what it might mean and how it is being used. This book helps correct that state of affairs. Focusing on the United States, where the Market model is strongest, authors analyze portrayals of the Market, its values and the people within it, as a way of teasing out its assumptions and contradictions. They also describe extensions and practical applications of the Market model in policy-making in the United States and in explaining how firms work, show its political strengths and conceptual limitations. In bringing rigor and sustained critical analysis to a topic of growing global significance, this truly interdisciplinary study represents a coherent and incisive contribution to anthropology, sociology, politics, history and economics, as it challenges these disciplines to come to grips with one of the most potent cultural symbols of postmodernity.

Free Market

Free Market
Author: Jacob Soll
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1541620232

From a MacArthur “Genius,” an intellectual history of the free market, from ancient Rome to the twenty-first century After two government bailouts of the US economy in less than twenty years, free market ideology is due for serious reappraisal. In Free Market, Jacob Soll details how we got to this current crisis, and how we can find our way out by looking to earlier iterations of free market thought. Contrary to popular narratives, early market theorists believed that states had an important role in building and maintaining free markets. But in the eighteenth century, thinkers insisted on free markets without state intervention, leading to a tradition of ideological brittleness. That tradition only calcified in the centuries that followed. Tracing the intellectual evolution of the free market from Cicero to Milton Friedman, Soll argues that we need to go back to the origins of free market ideology in order to truly understand it—and to develop new economic concepts to face today’s challenges.

The Illusion of Free Markets

The Illusion of Free Markets
Author: Bernard E. Harcourt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780674066168

It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.

Free Market Economics

Free Market Economics
Author: Bettina B. Greaves
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1975
Genre: Capitalism
ISBN: 1610165462

Economics and Free Markets

Economics and Free Markets
Author: Howard Baetjer Jr.
Publisher: Cato Institute
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2017-05-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1944424512

When we stop to consider it, a free economy is a marvel. Millions of people, mostly unknown to one another, each producing some particular good or service, somehow manage to coordinate their actions in a vast, cooperative, productive order with no one in charge. How does it work? Economics helps us understand. This book introduces the concepts on which all of economics is founded, concepts such as subjective value and gains from trade, scarcity and opportunity cost, thinking at the margin, division of labor, and comparative advantage. It then introduces the foundational theory with which we understand how market prices emerge and change to reflect changing conditions: supply and demand analysis. It also introduces the principles that underlie spontaneous economic order: market prices provide the information we need to coordinate our actions with others’ actions, while profit-and-loss feedback guides entrepreneurs as to how best to satisfy others’ wants. Private property rights and freedom of exchange give us the incentive to interact in mutually beneficial ways.

Choose Economic Freedom

Choose Economic Freedom
Author: George P. Shultz
Publisher: Hoover Press
Total Pages: 77
Release: 2020-03-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0817923462

What are the keys to good economic policy? George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor draw from their several decades of experience at the forefront of national economic policy making to show how market fundamentals beat politically popular government interventions—be they from Democrats or Republicans—as a recipe for success. Choose Economic Freedom reconstructs debates from the 1960s and 1970s about the use of wage and price controls as tools of policy, showing how brilliant economists can hold diametrically opposed views about the wisdom of using government intervention to spur the economy. Speeches and documents from the era include a recently unearthed memo from Arthur Burns, Federal Reserve chair, in 1971, in which he argues in favor of controls. Under Burns's guidance and in the face of stubborn inflation, Nixon introduced wage and price guidelines and freezes. But over the long run, these became a drag on the economy and ultimately failed. It wasn't until the Reagan administration that these controls were reversed, resulting in a vibrant economy. The words of iconic economist Milton Friedman—whose "free to choose" ethos inspired the free-market revolution of the Reagan era—along with lessons Shultz and Taylor learned from the front lines, demonstrate that tried-and-true economic policy works.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Thomas Piketty
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 817
Release: 2017-08-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674979850

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.