Economic Evolution and Revolution in Historical Time

Economic Evolution and Revolution in Historical Time
Author: Paul Rhode
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2011-01-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0804771855

Papers originally presented at a conference sponsored by Stanford University's Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and held Sept. 26-27, 2008.

Structure and Change in Economic History

Structure and Change in Economic History
Author: Douglass Cecil North
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1981
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780393952414

In this bold, sweeping study of the development of Western economies, Douglass C. North sets forth a new view of societal change.

9 Historic Revolutions

9 Historic Revolutions
Author: Howard Sherman
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2020-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785275372

The book, REVOLUTION is designed to be easy reading for any person who wants to learn about the many painful but glorious steps in human social evolution. It could be used in academic institutions to teach and help readers how society has actually moved. Nine chapters are devoted to the description and evaluation of nine different revolutions, those that have been of the greatest importance in changing social institutions and social evolution in completely new directions. In addition to describing the revolutions, the book examines each revolution from the viewpoint of four different aspects of society: Economics, Politics, Technology, and Ideology. Near the end of the book, a chapter explains the major events of each revolution within the theoretical framework that has been developed. The next chapter states how the average revolution has happened in various processes and different dimensions, thereby creating a progressive theory of how the average revolution proceeds. Finally, the last chapter describes exactly how present history is progressing within the framework established within the rest of the book.

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction

Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Robert C. Allen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2011-09-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019162053X

Why are some countries rich and others poor? In 1500, the income differences were small, but they have grown dramatically since Columbus reached America. Since then, the interplay between geography, globalization, technological change, and economic policy has determined the wealth and poverty of nations. The industrial revolution was Britain's path breaking response to the challenge of globalization. Western Europe and North America joined Britain to form a club of rich nations by pursuing four polices-creating a national market by abolishing internal tariffs and investing in transportation, erecting an external tariff to protect their fledgling industries from British competition, banks to stabilize the currency and mobilize domestic savings for investment, and mass education to prepare people for industrial work. Together these countries pioneered new technologies that have made them ever richer. Before the Industrial Revolution, most of the world's manufacturing was done in Asia, but industries from Casablanca to Canton were destroyed by western competition in the nineteenth century, and Asia was transformed into 'underdeveloped countries' specializing in agriculture. The spread of economic development has been slow since modern technology was invented to fit the needs of rich countries and is ill adapted to the economic and geographical conditions of poor countries. A few countries - Japan, Soviet Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, and perhaps China - have, nonetheless, caught up with the West through creative responses to the technological challenge and with Big Push industrialization that has achieved rapid growth through investment coordination. Whether other countries can emulate the success of East Asia is a challenge for the future. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change

An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
Author: Richard R. Nelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1985-10-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780674041431

This book contains the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years. Nelson and Winter focus their critique on the basic question of how firms and industries change overtime. They marshal significant objections to the fundamental neoclassical assumptions of profit maximization and market equilibrium, which they find ineffective in the analysis of technological innovation and the dynamics of competition among firms. To replace these assumptions, they borrow from biology the concept of natural selection to construct a precise and detailed evolutionary theory of business behavior. They grant that films are motivated by profit and engage in search for ways of improving profits, but they do not consider them to be profit maximizing. Likewise, they emphasize the tendency for the more profitable firms to drive the less profitable ones out of business, but they do not focus their analysis on hypothetical states of industry equilibrium. The results of their new paradigm and analytical framework are impressive. Not only have they been able to develop more coherent and powerful models of competitive firm dynamics under conditions of growth and technological change, but their approach is compatible with findings in psychology and other social sciences. Finally, their work has important implications for welfare economics and for government policy toward industry.

From Political Economy to Economics

From Political Economy to Economics
Author: Dimitris Milonakis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2009-01-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134099444

Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future.

The Evolution of Economies

The Evolution of Economies
Author: Patrick Spread
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 131730330X

It is clear even to casual observation that economies evolve from year to year and over centuries. Yet mainstream economic theory assumes that economies always move towards equilibrium. One consequence of this is that mainstream theory is unable to deal with economic history. The Evolution of Economies provides a clear account of how economies evolve under a process of support-bargaining and money-bargaining. Both support-bargaining and money-bargaining are situation-related - people determine their interests and actions by reference to their present circumstances. This gives the bargaining system a natural evolutionary dynamic. Societies evolve from situation to situation. Historical change follows this evolutionary course. A central chapter of the book applies the new theory in a re-evaluation of the industrial revolution in Britain, showing how specialist money-bargaining agencies, in the form of companies, evolved profitable formats and displaced landowners as the leading sources of employment and economic necessities. Companies took advantage of the evolution of technology to establish effective formats. The book also seeks to establish how it came about that a ‘mainstream’ theory was developed that is so wildly at odds with the observable features of economic history and economic exchange. Theory-making is described as a process of ‘intellectual support-bargaining’ in which theory is shaped to the interests of its makers. The work of major classical and neoclassical economists is contested as incompatible with the idea of an evolving money-bargaining system. The book reviews attempts to derive an evolutionary economic theory from Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Neoclassical economic theory has had enormous influence on the governance of societies, principally through its theoretical endorsement of the benefits of ‘free markets’. An evolutionary account of economic processes should change the basis of debate. The theory presented here will be of interest immediately to all economists, whether evolutionary, heterodox or neoclassical. It will facilitate the work of economic historians, who complain that current theory gives no guidance for their historical investigations. Beyond the confines of professional theory-making, many will find it a revelatory response to questions that have hitherto gone unanswered.

A Farewell to Alms

A Farewell to Alms
Author: Gregory Clark
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2008-12-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400827817

Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.

A History of Economic Doctrines from the time of the physiocrats to the present day

A History of Economic Doctrines from the time of the physiocrats to the present day
Author: Charles Gide
Publisher: Good Press
Total Pages: 694
Release: 2019-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN:

This book provides a historical account of economic theories and doctrines from the physiocrats to modern-day scholars. The book challenges the prevailing verdict of history on the achievements of Smith, and the authors also designate Ricardo and Malthus as pessimists. In this book, the authors offer a perspective on modern theories by connecting them with their historical antecedents. It also provides insight into the development of economic theory across different countries.

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective
Author: Robert C. Allen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 13
Release: 2009-04-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0521868270

Why did the industrial revolution take place in 18th century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the 17th and 18th centuries.