Positive Wirtschaftsanalyse oder normativer Wirtschaftsentwurf?

2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-245
Author(s):  
Christian E. W. Kremser
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Positive Economic ◽  
Normative Economic

Abstract Many people consider Adam Smith the first economist to describe the functioning of capitalism. In fact, Smith must be considered less the discoverer of capitalism, but rather as its inventor. The economic laws Smith formulated are institutionally bound to the commercial society, to use the corresponding phrase of Smith, which at that time – at least in its liberal version – has not yet be materialized. In this sense, it represents a utopia of economic policy that still had to be realized. Smith’s comments on commercial society should therefore be understood less as a positive economic analysis than as a normative economic draft.

Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
The University

Adam Ferguson was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. A friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Ferguson was among the leading exponents of the Scottish Enlightenment’s attempts to develop a science of man and was among the first in the English speaking world to make use of the terms civilization, civil society, and political science. This book challenges many of the prevailing assumptions about Ferguson’s thinking. It explores how Ferguson sought to create a methodology for moral science that combined empirically based social theory with normative moralising with a view to supporting the virtuous education of the British elite. The Ferguson that emerges is far from the stereotyped image of a nostalgic republican sceptical about modernity, and instead is one much closer to the mainstream Scottish Enlightenment’s defence of eighteenth century British commercial society.

Taking unconsidered preferences seriously

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 209-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Sugden
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Natural Conditions ◽  
Normative Economics ◽  
Actual Behaviour ◽  
Normative Economic

In normative economic analysis, it is conventional to treat each person’s preferences as that person’s own standard of value, and as the standard by which the effects of public policies on that person should be valued. The proposal that preferences should be treated in this way is usually qualified by two apparently natural conditions—that preferences are internally coherent, and that they reflect the considered judgements of the person concerned. However, there is now a great deal of evidence suggesting that, in many economic environments, preferences of the required kind simply do not exist. It seems that the preferences that govern people’s actual behaviour are often incoherent and unstable. This prompts the following question: Is there a defensible form of normative economics which respects each individual’s actual preferences, whatever form they take? I shall try to show that there is.

Techno-Economic Analysis of Solar e-Cooking Systems for Rural Communities in Nigeria

2021 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 203-208
Author(s):  
Ogheneruona E. Diemuodeke ◽  
Michael Orji ◽  
Clinton Ikechukwu ◽  
Yacob Mulugetta ◽  
Youba Sokona ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sensitivity Analysis ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Clean Energy ◽  
Solar Pv ◽  
Battery Storage ◽  
Cost Of Energy ◽  
Induction Cooking ◽  
Design Analyses

This paper presents solar PV electric cooking systems to fill the gap of clean energy stove demand in Africa and in particular in rural communities. The design analyses of four different solar PV electric cooking configurations, based on resistive burner and induction burner, are presented. The levelised cost of energy (LCOE) of the solar PV induction e-cooking, with battery storage, is 0.39 $/kWh. Sensitivity analysis was done to ascertain the affordability range of solar PV e-cooking. It was shown that the combination of the reduced cost of investment and good sunshine would most likely make the solar PV induction e-cooking competitive. However, the acceptability of the solar PV induction cooking will require addressing some important technical, economic, policy and socio-cultural related barriers.

The Anglosphere as a Principle of Progress

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-37
Author(s):  
Michael Gardiner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
First Empire ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Language Area ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The Anglosphere is not only a linguistic entity, it is more fundamentally based in a binding of linguistic improvement, commerce, and historical advance, and it can be read in linguistic aspirations specifically set against the improving background of the Scottish Enlightenment. Enlightenment rhetoric guides answered the imperative of adjustment to British union and a desire to level the ground for individual public advance, and they define the language area in terms of a teleology, pointing inevitably towards commercial society. For literati like Adam Smith, linguistic improvement was the raw material of exchange, exchange was a clear historiographical good, and this good can moreover be demonstrated more or less empirically. The Anglosphere should be understood as a space that is simultaneously linguistic, economic, and historiographic, remaining readable in Victorian statecraft, and in Greater Britain’s ‘linguistic ethnicity’, and in the lost colonies of Britain’s ‘first empire’. It is doubtful, however, whether the Anglosphere in this understanding has retained its direction after the attenuations of the late twentieth century, the new pressures on property creation, and the undoing of the original ethical knot of language, economy, and historiography.

Enlightenment, Scottish

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
William Robertson

This term refers to the intellectual movement in Scotland in roughly the second half of the eighteenth century. As a movement it included many theorists – the best known of whom are David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid – who maintained both institutional and personal links with each other. It was not narrowly philosophical, although in the Common Sense School it did develop its own distinctive body of argument. Its most characteristic feature was the development of a wide-ranging social theory that included pioneering ‘sociological’ works by Adam Ferguson and John Millar, socio-cultural history by Henry Home (Lord Kames) and William Robertson as well as Hume’s Essays (1777) and Smith’s classic ‘economics’ text The Wealth of Nations (1776). All these works shared a commitment to ‘scientific’ causal explanation and sought, from the premise of the uniformity of human nature, to establish a history of social institutions in which the notion of a mode of subsistence played a key organising role. Typically of the Enlightenment as a whole this explanatory endeavour was not divorced from explicit evaluation. Though not uncritical of their own commercial society, the Scots were in no doubt as to the superiority of their own age compared to what had gone before.

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