“INTELLECTUALS . . . SEEK NEITHER TO understand the world nor to change it, but to denounce it,” so wrote Raymond Aron (1983, p. 158) in a damning critique of those who were very much his intellectual kindred. Such a sentiment may at first seem surprising since Aron was, after all, a Marxist scholar and lifelong socialist who felt comfortable with the social welfare states prevalent in postwar ...

Economics revolves around a central character: “economic man.” As historians, we are all familiar with various episodes in the history of this character, and we appreciate his ever-changing aspect even while many of our colleagues in economics think the rational economic agent of neoclassical economics is the same kind of person as Adam Smith’s economic man. The fact that this is a familiar his...

Info-Metrics in the Natural Sciences and Its Implications for the Social Sciences Amos Golan (American University and Info-Metrics) The study of information, the philosophy of information and entropy as a method of inference provides a unified approach to inference and learning across the disciplines. The Info-Metrics Institute promotes the study of information, information processing and optim...

transaction cost economics (tce), as a subset of new institutional economics (nie), is the combination of economics, organization and law. noble prize in 2009 was dedicated to oliver williamson who was the most popular face in the economics as tce main contributor. in tce, the main issues on the one hand is how institutions follow characteristics of transactions, on the other hand, the making o...

1. Introduction In the good old days, when general philosophy of science ruled the Earth, a simple division was often invoked to talk about philosophical issues specific to particular kinds of science: that between the natural sciences and the social sciences. Over the last 20 years, philosophical studies shaped around this dichotomy have given way to those organized by more fine-grained catego...

Part of the difficulty of introducing social economics into the principles course is the perception that social economics is anathema to mainstream economics. 1 As noted by Warren Samuels, however, "neoclassical economics is already a form of social economics" despite its "pretensions of methodological individualism and value-neutrality" [Samuels, p. 2]. Heilbroner also makes the case that the ...

This paper deals with the concepts of science and social control to be found within interwar institutional economics. It is argued that these were central parts of the institutionalist approach to economics as the key participants in the movement defined it. For institutionalists, science was defined as empirical, investigational, experimental, and instrumental. Social control was defined in te...

This paper examines critically the contributions of Cournot, Jevons and Walras as the founders of classical mathematical economics from a methodological standpoint. Advances in different economic schools and doctrines in the 19th century produced an environment of multi-dimensionality in economic analysis which was regarded by the pioneers of classical mathematical economists as a chaotic state...

Using an economic bargaining game, we tested for the existence of two phenomena related to social norms, namely norm manipulation – the selection of an interpretation of the norm that best suits an individual – and norm evasion – the deliberate, private violation of a social norm. We found that the manipulation of a norm of fairness was characterized by a self-serving bias in beliefs about what...