Kaldor and Kornai on economics without equilibrium – two life courses

Nicholas Kaldor and János Kornai are known in the academic literature as the most principled and unyielding opponents of the neoclassical, mainstream economics in general, and the Arrow-Debreu General Equilibrium Theory (GET) in particular since the beginning of the 1970s. Nevertheless, they remained in the minority camp with their views until today. The mainstream of the economic profession still holds that only the neoclassical paradigm offers a comprehensive, systematic, consistent and, above all, mathematical (hence “scientific”) description of how modern economies operate. This paper aims at investigating why these two prolific writers, who were friends and spoke the same mother tongue, did not find a common ground and did not even try to build a school of followers jointly.

Culture and the Economy

This article examines the intellectual mission of a cultural sociology of the economy, its theoretical horizon, and its pragmatic relevance in times of economic crisis. It first considers classical sources of a cultural sociology of the economy before discussing the use of cultural analysis in contemporary economic sociology. It then outlines the central features of a cultural sociology of the economy and emphasizes the moral obligation of scholars to offer fresh insights into the mechanisms that sustain public confidence or help to repair it, and more specifically how a cultural sociology of the economy can contribute in this respect. It argues that a cultural sociology of the economy can help tackle three of the most pressing problems that loom on the horizon of the current world economic crisis: the general public’s loss of confidence for private corporations, the economic profession, and independent central banks.

Term and Legal Position of an Individual Enterpreneur in Republic of Serbia

An entrepreneur is a business-able physical person who performs activities to gain the profit and who is registered according to law. Starting from the national and theoretical and legal solutions and court practice from comparative law, the authors analyze the concept and the legal position of an individual entrepreneur noticing the problems and inconsistencies in legal regulations. The authors of the work make a few conclusions and suggestions: 1) terminology is not coordinated with legal terminology from comparative law. In our law, the legal term is “entrepreneur”, which is a too wide and unspecified term because in economic profession this term represents the genus term for individual and collective entrepreneurship; 2) analyze all forbidden activities for entrepreneurs, judge the reasons pro et contra and work on eliminating prohibitions and favouring legal entities; 3) set by law the bankruptcy of an individual entrepreneur i.e. the individual bankruptcy of a physical person; 4) work on passing a separate legislation in the field of the individual entrepreneurship, especially on passing and changing the laws which would regulate handicrafts (including old crafts and jobs of home industry), free professions as well as agricultural activity.

Honouring Parvez Hasan

It is indeed a privilege for me to join Dr Naved Hamid in paying tribute to Dr Parvez Hasan, an outstanding economist recognised for his work on development economics, on the economy of Pakistan, and the East Asian economies. The Pakistan Society of Development Economists honours him today for his contribution to. economics, to the development of the Pakistan economy and to the economic profession in Pakistan. Dr Naved Hamid has recalled Dr Parvez Hasan illustrious career. In my tribute to Dr Parvez Hasan I want to put his life and career in the broader context of the times he lived in and the important institutions in which he served and their development to which he contributed. To me the life of Dr Parvez Hasan, as so wonderfully captured in his recently published autobiography, "My Life My Country-Memoirs of a Pakistani Economist", is a story which covers not only the creation and early years of Pakistan's independence but is the story of its nascent years and the rise of the profession of economists in Pakistan. It is also the story of three remarkable economists, whose lives and careers were closely intertwined and of three great institutions which were to playa pioneering role in the economic development of Pakistan as well as in laying the foundation of serious analytical and applied research on emerging economic issues confronting the country.

SCALING LAWS IN THE MACROECONOMY

The practice of detecting power laws and scaling behaviors in economics and finance has gained momentum in the last few years, due to the increased use of concepts and methods first developed in statistical physics. Some disappointment has emerged in the economic profession, however, as regards the models proposed so far to theoretically explain these phenomena. In this paper we aim to address this criticism, showing that scaling behaviors can naturally emerge in a multiagent system with optimizing interacting units characterized by financial fragility.

Economy, Anti-Economy, Underground Economy: Conceptual and Terminological Problems

This paper discusses conceptual and terminological problems stemming from the lack of discipline in the field of exploration of the economic phenomena reflecting the unregulated practices, practices of non- compliance with the official order and cases of production of economic bads and loss of existing wealth. The resulting conceptual and terminological proposals are aimed at improving the structurization, formalization of economic knowledge and thereby quality of communication inside the economic profession as well as between economists and general public. The research is based on the principles (assumptions) of the holistic paradigm.

Frank Knight and the Productivity of Capital: Another Piece of the Puzzle

Through the 1930s, Frank H. Knight engaged the economic profession in a prodigious exchange over the nature and productivity of capital. Knight's efforts here were driven by three significant objectives: first, that capital theory had to be able to explain the broad fact of capital accumulation and growth as actually experienced by progressive societies; second, that existing doctrines had to be purged of the flawed vestiges of the classical-Ricardian theory of production if any progress was to be had in achieving the first objective; third, and last, that an alternative theory of capital needed to provide an explanation of the productivity of capital consistent with the fulfillment of the first two tasks. Knight failed in the third task or, at best, left the task incomplete.

The Impasse of Post Keynesian Distribution Theory

Why did the topic of income distribution loose its attraction for the economic profession? The article analyzes the structure of the Ricardian theory and of the post-Keynesian approach and discusses the question why after Pasinetti’s contribution distribution theory lost its economic significance and interpretative value. An alternative and less deterministic approach to functional distribution is proposed, taking into consideration the importance of money and expectations, the relation between the principle of effective demand and aggregate income and the difference between the behavior of the single entrepreneur and the macroeconomic system.