A Worker's Economist

A Worker's Economist
Author: John Dennis Chasse
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2017-07-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351606271

John R. Commons is one of the few reformers of the past century whose major works are still actively read, whose ideas are still debated, and whose principles are still applied to the analysis of contemporary problems. His life spanned the years of America’s “Great Transformation,” from a nation of shopkeepers, farmers, and small towns to one of giant corporations, landless laborers, and crowded cities. He became involved in almost every aspect of America’s response to the damaging side effects of that transformation. A Worker’s Economist begins with John Commons’ childhood and education and continues through his life as a scholar, teacher, administrator, and reformer. Commons’ list of accomplishments are great in number and overall effect. He worked on the staff of the first government commission to investigate the economic and social consequences of corporate mergers. He served as a public representative on the commission that investigated industrial violence and workplace relations. He was a participant observer in America’s largest and most historic mineworkers’ strike. He wrote and administered the nation’s first constitutional worker compensation law. He developed principles of social reform and public administration that his students carried into the design and administration of the Social Security system as well as Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. John Dennis Chasse reviews Commons’ major works, describes the people with whom he worked, and follows the fortunes of the unions that were intrinsic to his vision of “collective democracy.” As a final testament to Commons’ importance, Chasse considers his legacy as it endures in the work of his students and beyond.

Secrets of Economics Editors

Secrets of Economics Editors
Author: Michael Szenberg
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2014-01-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262320126

Experienced economics editors discuss navigating the world of scholarly journals, with details on submission, reviews, acceptance, rejection, and editorial policy. Editors of academic journals are often the top scholars in their fields. They are charged with managing the flow of hundreds of manuscripts each year—from submission to review to rejection or acceptance—all while continuing their own scholarly pursuits. Tenure decisions often turn on who has published what in which journals, but editors can accept only a fraction of the papers submitted. In this book, past and present editors of economics journals discuss navigating the world of academic journals. Their contributions offer essential reading for anyone who has ever submitted a paper, served as a referee or associate editor, edited a journal—or read an article and wondered why it was published. The editors describe their experiences at journals that range from the American Economic Review to the Journal of Sports Economics. The issues they examine include late referee reports, slow resubmission of manuscripts, and plagiarism—as well as the difficulties of “herding cats” and the benefits of husband-wife editorial partnerships. They consider the role of the editor, as gatekeeper or developer of content; and they advise authors to write more carefully and clearly, to include citations that locate their articles in the context of the existing literature, and to update their work after it has been submitted and rejected elsewhere. The chapters also offer a timely, insider's perspective on the general effectiveness of the system of academic journals in economics. Contributors Richard V. Adkisson, Richard G. Anderson, William A. Barnett, Suzanne R. Becker, William R. Becker, Daniel W. Bromley, William G. Dewald, Antony W. Dnes, Zvi Eckstein, Richard Friberg, Esther Gal-Or, Craufurd Goodwin, Thorvaldur Gylfason, Campbell R. Harvey, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Leo H. Kahane, R. Preston McAfee, John Pencavel, Gerald Pfann, Steven Pressman, Lall B. Ramrattan, J. Barkley Rosser Jr., Paul H. Rubin, William F. Shughart II, Robert M. Solow, Daniel F. Spulber, Michael Szenberg, Timothy Taylor, Abu N.M. Wahid, Michael Watts, Lawrence J. White, Jürgen von Hagen, Fabrizio Zilibotti

Illiberal Reformers

Illiberal Reformers
Author: Thomas C. Leonard
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017-01-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691175861

In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, progressive income taxes, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Economic progressives championed labor legislation because it would lift up the deserving poor while excluding immigrants, African Americans, women, and 'mental defectives, ' whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman and to Anglo-Saxon race integrity. Economic progressives rejected property and contract rights as illegitimate barriers to needed reforms. But their disregard for civil liberties extended much further. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors, but to exclude them. -- Provided by publisher.

The Theory of Transaction in Institutional Economics

The Theory of Transaction in Institutional Economics
Author: Massimiliano Vatiero
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-07-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0429514654

Despite abundant literature on transaction costs, there is little to no in-depth analysis regarding what the transaction is or how it works. Drawing on both Old and New Institutional Economics and on a variety of interdisciplinary sources, this monograph traces the history of the meaning of transaction in institutional economics, mapping its topicality and use over time. This manuscript treats the idea of ‘transaction’ as a construct with legal, competitive and political dimensions, and connects different approaches within institutional economics. The book covers the contributions of key thinkers from different schools, including (in alphabetical order) Ronald H. Coase, John R. Commons, Robert Lee Hale, Oliver Hart, Mancur Olson, Thorstein Veblen and Olver E. Williamson. This book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of institutional economics, law and economics, and economics, and the history of economic thought.

Transaction Economics of John R. Commons

Transaction Economics of John R. Commons
Author: Shingo Takahashi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2024-10-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1040166504

Takahashi reconstructs the key blocks of one of the founders of the institutional school, John R. Commons’ theories of the evolution of capitalism and of institutional change by taking the concept of transaction as a central point of departure. Commons’ theories continue to influence modern economics, and in this book, Takahashi scrutinizes his construction of transaction and its features and offers a reinterpretation of Commons’ institutional economics and transaction economics. He then explores how Commons’ analysis of going concerns (e.g., firms) has broader and deeper applications that extend to monetary policy, labor policy, and the business cycle. Takahashi examines how Commons’ and Veblen’s dynamic theories share cumulative causation. He closes by positing that Commons’ transaction economics seeks “reasonable capitalism” through a virtuous cycle of reasonable value and generation of good business ethics. This book will be attractive to researchers of institutional economics, political economy, heterodox economics, as well as the history of economic thought, law, and ethics.