Aristotle’s geometrical accounting

This paper comments on Ambrosi’s ‘Aristotle’s geometrical accounting’ (Cambridge Journal of Economics 2018, 42, 543–576). While supporting Ambrosi’s case that Aristotle may well have used geometry to demonstrate accounting equivalence, the paper takes issue with Ambrosi’s specific approach to interpreting Aristotle’s ‘merit or worth’ in terms of income. It is entirely reasonable to understand worth in terms of income. However, Ambrosi implies that worth is determined by market prices; this is inconsistent with Aristotle’s treatment of distributive justice. Rather Aristotle states that relative worth is determined prior to market exchange. In other words, Aristotle seeks to identify the just price to which market prices may or may not correspond. Ambrosi’s own geometrical method is extended to illustrate this point, to provide a geometrical alternative to Ambrosi’s algebraic derivation of the key proposition ‘as builder to shoemaker, so shoes to houses’, and to resolve what Aristotle means by ‘one should not introduce them as terms in a figure of proportion when they are already making the exchange (since otherwise one of the two extremes will have both of the excess amounts) but when they are still in possession of their own products’. Aristotle deserves recognition as the first Western economist and as a Classical economist to boot, in the sense of holding that distribution is determined prior to exchange.

Information Asymmetry, Market Failure and Institutions: An Analysis of Effectiveness of Consumer Protection Legislation in India

Exchange is the basis of economic growth and development. If market works fully on the assumptions of classical economist market is self-sufficient in producing and allocating resources efficiently. Unfortunately, in the real world the assumptions of perfect rationality, perfect information and zero transaction cost are not realistic. In the absence of such features in an economic agent market bound to fail. In such situations of market failure we need formal institutions to devise constraints that structure behavior of an economic agent for political, economic and social interaction[1].

The early stages in the evolution of Economic Man. Millian and marginal approaches

The homo economicus (Economic Man) concept is one of the best-known components of economic theorising frequently recognised as a part of the “hard core” of the mainstream 20th-century economics. This model gained such a high status in times of the marginal revolution, although it was coined in the 1830s by the classical economist John S. Mill. Nowadays, homo economicus is commonly perceived as a model of rational economic agent maximising utility or preferences. The article aims to show that both the Millian approach and the marginal approach were more complex than the contemporary incarnation of Economic Man. One of the key differences between the early stages in the evolution of homo oeconomicus and the modern version of it refers to the notion of rationality. Whereas it is the constitutive element of the 20th-century homo oeconomicus, the requirement of full rationality was never explicitly articulated by Mill and marginal economists. Therefore, at the early stages of its evolution, the homo economicus model would have been much more resistant to the objections formulated against it by the 20th-century critics.

JOHN STUART MILL AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN

This article fills a gap in the literature by examining the only leading classical economist whose influence on Spain has yet to be studied. In particular, it analyzes the influence John Stuart Mill had on nineteenth-century Spain by showing the impact of his multifaceted work both in scientific philosophy and utilitarian philosophy, and in political and economic theory, as well as in the world of feminism.