Economics , livre ebook

Pluto Press - Hugh Stretton

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

865 pages

English

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

This book provides a fresh introduction to real economics. Highlighting the complex and changing nature of economic activity, this wide-ranging text employs a pragmatic mix of old and new methods to examine the role of values and theoretical beliefs in economic life and in economists’ understanding of it.

It attends to the problems which have come with high productivity, rapidly changing technology and skills, changing proportions of earning and non-earning years in most people’s lives, and a faltering revolution in childhood and parenting which has brought stress and over-work for many women.

It addresses such issues as rising poverty, inequality, insecurity and the slow progress of environmental reform. In focusing on such abuses of affluence the text draws on institutional, Keynesian, green and feminist theories, while emphasising all approaches to understanding economic life.
PART ONE: STUDYING ECONOMICS

1. What you can know, what you can’t know

2. Causes & effects (1) The need to select

3. Causes & effects (2) How to select

4. Explanations and equations

5. The controversial language of economics

6. Efficiency, welfare and the scope of economics

7. Skills and values you will need

PART TWO: ECONOMIC GROWTH AND CHANGE

8. Understanding growth and change

9. Theories of economic growth

10. Institutional studies of economic

development

11. Some economic histories

12. Changing modes of production and sources of income

13. Technology

14. Wants

15. Childhood

16. Threatened social capital

17 Threatened natural resources

18. The rich democracies now

PART THREE: DEMANDS FOR GOODS & SERVICES

19. Dual demands: for goods & services, and for modes of supply

20. How are wants and tastes formed?

21. How do prices, incomes and tastes

influence demand?

22. The elasticity of demand

PART FOUR: THE PRODUCTIVE INSTITUTIONS

23. People as producers

24. Household histories

25. Household capital

26. Housing policies

27. Households: a summary

28. Business powers

29. Theories about firms’ purposes

30. How firms work

31. Costs of production: analysis

32. Costs of production: four ways to fix wages

33. Costs of production: how firms minimize their costs

34. How firms price their products

35. How firms invest

36. What private enterprises need from

government: a summary

37. Public growth

38. Public efficiency

39. What public enterprises need from government

PART FIVE: THE DISTRIBUTIVE INSTITUTIONS

40. Market theory

41. Market practice

42. Market examples

43. The composition & distribution

of wealth

44. The composition & distribution of income

45. Income policies

46. Taxation

PART SIX: ECONOMIC STRATEGY

47. The parts and the whole

48. Economic structure

49. How free should trade be?

50. Money and banking: national

51. Money and banking: international

52. Inflation

53. Employment

54. Global markets: Interactive effects of inadequately governed economic structure, trade, banking, exchange and employment

55. An open economy

56. A federal economy

57. Free-trading independence

58. Protected independence

59. Ex-communist options

60. Democracy in a global economy

Index

Sujets

Economics

Business

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 octobre 1999
Nombre de lectures	2
EAN13	9781849647939
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	11 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Economics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page iEconomics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page iiEconomics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page iiiEconomics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page ivEconomics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page v
to
Paul StreetenEconomics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page vi
Contents
Introduction ix
Acknowledgments xi
Part One Studying economics
1 What you can know, what you can’t know 2
2 Causes and effects (1) The need to select 12
3fects (2) How to select 19
4 Explanations and equations 30
5 The controversial language of economics 35
6 Efficiency, welfare and the scope of economics 48
7 Skills and values you will need 55
Part Two Economic growth and change
8 Understanding growth and change 66
9 Theories of economic growth 72
10 Institutional studies of economic development 87
11 Some economic histories 98
New directions
12 Changing modes of production and sources of income 129
13 Technology 143
14 Wants 162
15 Childhood 173
16 Threatened social capital 181
17 Threatened natural resources 189
18 The rich democracies now 209
viEconomics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page vii
Contents vii
Part Three Demands for goods and services
19 Dual demands: for goods and services, and for modes of supply 242
20 How are wants and tastes formed? 247
21 How do prices, incomes and tastes influence demand? 256
22 The elasticity of demand 271
Part Four The productive institutions
23 People as producers 280
Households
24 Household histories 287
25 Household capital 294
26 Housing policies 307
27 Households: a summary 326
Private enterprises
28 Business powers 329
29 Theories about firms’ purposes 361
30 How firms work 376
31 Costs of production: analysis 389
32 Costs of production: four ways to fix wages 398
33 Costs of production: how firms minimize their costs 411
34 How firms price their products 418
35 How firms invest 430
36 What private enterprises need from government: a summary 442
Public enterprises
37 Public growth 444
38 Public efficiency 449
39 What public enterprises need from government 472Economics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page viii
viii Contents
Part Five The distributive institutions
40 Market theory 486
41 Market practice 494
42 Market examples 505
Wealth and income
43 The composition and distribution of wealth 532
44 The composition and distribution of income 560
45 Income policies 594
46 Taxation 621
Part Six Economic strategy
47 The parts and the whole 636
48 Economic structure 658
49 How free should trade be? 665
50 Money and banking : national 688
51 Money and banking : international 708
52 Inflation 723
53 Employment 740
54 Global markets : Interactive effects of inadequately governed
economic structure, trade, banking, exchange and employment 751
National strategies
55 An open economy 761
56 A federal economy 777
57 Free-trading independence 796
58 Protected independence 809
59 Ex-communist options 820
60 Democracy in a global economy 834
Index 843Economics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page ix
Introduction
he rich democracies have economic troubles. Their uses of the environment are still far shortTof sustainable. They have obstinate unemployment and increasingly insecure employment.
Some have unbalanced trade and payments and escalating foreign debt. Because women’s new
equalities are incomplete they cause stress and over-work to many women. In English-speaking
countries a century of progress to greater equality has lately been reversed, and aid to poorer
countries has declined.
The resort to deregulation, privatization and smaller government since the 1970s proves to
have been a mistaken response to the new troubles, and an active cause of some of them.
Economists share responsibility for that ‘right turn’ in economic policy. Without their expert
authority it is hard to believe that the various political and business groups who drive the new
strategy could have persuaded majorities to support it, or tolerate it, for so long.
Many able economists now attack the offending theories and the education which perpetuates
them. This text offers them a new course-book for their students, and (I hope) some further
reinforcement for their reasoning. It draws on elements of postKeynesian, green and feminist
thought. But in the institutionalist tradition, its focus is on economic life and all workable ways
of understanding it, rather than any one body of theory. It differs from comparable textbooks in
the following ways.
Philosophy of science Bad economic theory can cause as much suffering and death as bad
medicine or engineering can. Medical students must spend a year at chemistry and biology
before they meet any medicine. Engineers must establish their maths and physics before they
learn to design bridges or computers. I believe it is just as important for economists to begin by
mastering two preliminaries: the intrinsic difficulties of a science of thoughtful, many-purposed,
self-changing, conflict-ridden social activity; and some profound historical changes, in process
now, to which economists’ theories need to respond. Current ‘Economics One’ courses tend to
neglect those two foundations or get them wrong. The first quarter of this text is devoted to them.
Values Economics is value-structured and controversial chiefly because it deals with such
complex activity that its simplifications are necessarily selective. The text explains at length,
with great care, why that is so, and why distinctions between ‘positive’ and ‘normative’
economics are unhelpful. (They may apply to many items of fact and opinion, but never to
whole analyses of complex activity.) Economists need to understand the relations between their
true-or-false factual knowledge, their unavoidably selective causal explanations, and the values
and social purposes which have to shape the selective and imaginative elements of their work.
Theory Like other human activity, economic activity has complex motivation. It varies with
cultural and political circumstances and changing technology. It is both repetitive and inventive,
cooperative and conflict-ridden. It can change while we study it, sometimes because we study it.
Such activity is not best studied by the use of a single comprehensive timeless monomotivational
axiomatic/deductive theory whose users further limit their understanding, wherever they can, by
ixEconomics 00 Intro 17/6/00 10:00 AM Page x
x Introduction
replacing the more informative language of the economic actors with the less informative
language of mathematics. Understanding economics is more like understanding politics or
history or psychology than it is like understanding physics. It is best to use all the methods that
will work. The text encourages students to measure and count and calculate, to trace complex
causal networks, to understand the ‘counter-factual’ assumptions of their causal analyses, to
understand economic actors’ minds, to imagine the likely effects of alternative policies and
institutional arrangements, and to gain vicarious experience by reading about diverse economic
systems and ways of doing things. The emphasis is on investigative skills, and instrumental uses
of whatever theory or experience helps with the case in hand.
But graduates with unorthodox beliefs risk professional disapproval and job discrimination.
For confidence and self-defence they need to understand thoroughly the reasons for and against
their non-conforming beliefs and the opposing orthodoxies. When it was proposed to simplify
this text by removing most of the debate about neoclassical theory to another book, publishers’
readers who want their students to use this text insisted that it stay as an essential of the
education which the book offers.
History Through the centuries since classical and neoclassical theory were conceived there
have been developments. The advanced economies now produce enough, if it were appropriately
distributed, to keep all their people in secure comfort. They have had the first two or three
generations of full democracy. Half their real incomes now come from sources other than paid work.
They are radically reforming women’s rights and opportunities. They lead in depleting and
polluting the world’s natural resources. Some are now increasing their inequalities: in the richest
of them, as GDP continues to grow, the real incomes of the poorest third or so of the people now
decline. In these circumstances it may make sense for further growth to take its place among, and
often after, a number of other collective purposes. The text invites students to consider the
implications of these and other historical changes for economists’ criteria of productive and allocative
efficiency, and for the desirable scope and uses of democratic governments’ economic powers.
Three sectors The twentieth century saw increasing production by public enterprises and
households. Together they now produce about half of the advanced economies’ goods and
services. The text treats modern economies as mixed economies with public, private and
household producers. The three sectors operate on partly different principles. They call for partly
different analysis. Their performance needs to be judged by partly different criteria. The text
deals with them accordingly. It emphasizes the intricate trade and interdependence between
them, and reviews better and worse ways of allocating resources between them.
Strategies There are chapters on the usual macroeconomic subjects - economic structure,
trade and exchange, money and credit, inflation, employment. But they are followed by six
chapters about economic strategies which may be appropriate for countries in different situations with
different resources and capacities. Particular conditions may be better bases for strategic
policymaking than theoretical preferences for bigger or smaller government, free trade or protection,
open or bou