The Unrealised Prospect of Historical Economics

During the 1880s a number of Oxford students took an interest in political economy, many of whom as students of history developed what has come to be seen as a ‘historical economics’ distinct from the kind of economics fostered in Cambridge by Alfred Marshall. Prominent among these was William Ashley, and also Arnold Toynbee, whose posthumous Lectures on the Industrial Revolution for the first time linked early nineteenth-century political economy directly to the idea of an ‘industrial revolution’, and interpreting British historical experience in these terms. Ashley had attended Toynbee’s lectures in Oxford and then co-edited them into the book; this chapter examines the kind of arguments that Toynbee put forward in the light of Ashley’s own early writings, and his teaching in Toronto and Harvard, where he was founding Professor of Economic History. Detailed examination of Toynbee’s text suggests that Ashley had a larger role in shaping it than hitherto realised, and this insight is then employed to make sense of Ashley’s subsequent ambivalence about contemporary economics, and his occasional disparagement of any economic reasoning that moved beyond the work of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848).

This Is the Way the World Ends, Not With a Bang but Bonds and Bullets

This article explores instinctive frames of human decision-making in environmental and resource economics. Higher-moment asset pricing combines rational, mathematically informed economic reasoning with psychological and biological insights. Leptokurtic blindness and skewness preference combine in particularly challenging ways for carbon mitigation. At their worst, human heuristics may generate perverse decisions. Information uncertainty and the innate preference for bonds-and-bullets portfolios may impair responses to catastrophic climate change.

Paradigms and Paradoxes in the Metamorphosis of Ecotourism

In 2020 and 2021, the entire evolution of human society is under the sign of a paradox, of the adversity of events, coming in avalanche. The tourist evolutions themselves suffer the imprint of the paradox. These paradoxes urgently require new paradigms, the famous ‘paradigm shifts’, mentality, optics, action. The purpose of this research is to outline the main aspects of the research problem and diagnose the situation, with focus on identifying hypotheses for future descriptive or causal research as well as to explore the reasons, attitudes and values of the paradigm and paradox, which differentiate the two notions approached: testing new concepts of forecasting, a product specific to the destination under analysis and in identifying other viable, sustainable alternatives and their analysis in parallel with modelling and promoting new ideas of tourism products or services, respectively improving the existing ones. This article aims to capitalise on the paradox, already successfully applied in economics by the author of the method and in shaping and delimiting ecotourism (in particular the ecotourism from the destination Ţara Haţegului – Retezat), emphasising the role of self-contradiction of the field, through a specific type of economic reasoning, in which the rapid evolution of tourism risks are becoming its own cause of its disappearance, knowing that too much tourism kills tourism. Responsibility and the mesological spirit are the only ways to counteract the paradox phenomenon, even a paradigm in the metamorphosis of ecotourism.

6. Leave It to the Market

Economic rationalism involves the intelligent deployment of market instruments to achieve public ends such as environmental protection and resource conservation. The instruments in question can involve the establishment of private property rights in land, air, and water; “cap and trade” markets in pollution rights (emissions trading); tradeable quotes in resources such as fish; green taxes, such as a carbon tax; and the purchase of offsets to compensate for environmentally damaging behavior. These instruments have been adopted in many countries, though with some resistance from those who believe there is more to life than economic reasoning.

Marketing Anglophone World Literatures

From the nineteenth century onwards, world literature has been closely connected to socio-economic reasoning, which has shaped (and continues to shape) how it is disseminated, received, and produced. Based on first marketing considerations by writers in the nineteenth century, this chapter outlines the importance of ‘glocal’ Anglophone literary markets and explores key developments and challenges in marketing Anglophone world literatures. In addition to investigating the seminal roles played by publishers, literary agents, and retailers, it discusses the impact of literary prizes, such as the Booker Prize, in the attention economy as well as growing trends of self-marketing, self-publishing, and the role of small online platforms in promoting national literatures and disseminating the works of both established and upcoming writers.

Housing Tenure Preferences among Students from Two Polish Universities

The housing rental market in Poland is underdeveloped and tilted towards temporary tenants, usually students and immigrants. To explore the flaws in the functioning of this market, we conduct a survey among 315 students from two Polish universities. We find that renting is not only perceived as a more expensive form of satisfying housing needs, but decreases satisfaction from utilizing the occupied house due to non-financial factors. Moreover, the perception of the relative advantages of owning versus renting is, to some extent, affected by flawed economic reasoning. Building on the above results, we discuss what policies could increase the demand for residential rental housing.

Capitalism, Cameralism, and the Discovery of the Future, 1300s–2000s

Modern models of economic growth and capitalist modernity rest on capital accumulation, inclusive institutions, and various often unquantifiable aspects of “culture” (to which institutions belong). Scholars have also pinpointed the ability, or rather illusion, of human individuals to plan and predict their economic and social future(s). This transition to future thinking opened European’s spaces of possibility during what Reinhart Koselleck famously labelled Europe’s Sattelzeit, c.1750–1850. Some have emphasized a European culture of dealing with contingency, which may have marked out a specific “Western” path toward modernity. Without making a claim to global history, and focusing on the German speaking lands, I propose that the discovery of the open economic future was a much earlier project. Modern capitalism had roots in continental economic visions as early as the 1500s. We know them under common labels such as “Cameralism” and “mercantilism.” They were also apparent in Anglo-Saxon and Swedish economic reasoning since the mid-seventeenth century, suggesting that we may speak of a broader European tradition. The present article thus wishes to add to the debate, showing possibilities of an alternative—or a wider, more inclusive—genealogy of the modern economic mind, pointing out fresh ways of bringing together culture and economic development.

El problema de la racionalidad en la economía neoclásica

The present work analyses the fundamental characteristics of homo oeconomicus, that is to say, the anthropological bases of the generalised economic mainstream reasoning, to demonstrate the deficiencies of this theoretical construction, particularly its incapacity to gather the social and ethical dimension of man. Considering these weaknesses, we will sys-tematise the diverse alternative proposals, insisting on the necessity to in-tegrate the «extraeconomic» dimensions within the economic reasoning, concretely, the ethical behaviour. In this sense we study specially the Humanist and Austrian schools. Finally, a set of necessary changes in the process of analysis of economic reasoning are proposed, trying to introduce anthropologic realism in economic models. Key words: homo oeconomicus, economic anthropology, ethics, hetero-dox perspectives. Clasificación JEL: B41, B50, B52, B53. Resumen: El presente trabajo analiza los rasgos fundamentales del deno-minado homo oeconomicus, esto es, las bases antropológicas del razona-miento económico generalizado en la mainstream, para poner de relieve las lagunas presentes en esta construcción teórica, en particular su inca-pacidad para recoger la dimensión social y ética del hombre. Partiendo de esta crítica, sistematizaremos las diversas propuestas alternativas, hacien-do hincapié en la necesidad de integrar las dimensiones «extraeconómicas» dentro del razonamiento económico, concretamente, las referentes al com-portamiento ético. En este sentido nos detendremos especialmente en las denominadas propuestas humanista y austriaca. Finalmente, y en razón de lo anterior, se proponen una serie de cambios necesarios en el análisis de la toma racional de decisiones por los agentes en Economía. Palabras clave: homo oeconomicus, antropología económica, ética, escue-las heterodoxas.

COVID-19 Pandemic and Lockdown Fine Optimality

The first stream of economic studies on public policy responses during the COVID-19 pandemic focused on the stringency, the effectiveness, and the impact of the countries’ interventions and paid rather little attention to the corresponding means used to support them. The present paper scrutinizes the lockdown measures and, particularly, examines the optimality of the lockdown fines imposed by countries worldwide towards ensuring citizens’ compliance. Initially, a triad of fine stringency indicators are compiled, and the stringency of fines is evaluated in a comparative context, among the countries considered. Consequently, the fine stringency is incorporated into a regression analysis with various epidemiological, socioeconomic, and policy factors to reveal any drivers of fine variability. Finally, theoretical approaches behind fine optimality are capitalized and real data are used towards estimating the optimal fine for each country considered. The objectives of the paper are, first, to check for any drivers of fine stringency around the world and, second, to develop and test a formula that could be used in order to assist policy makers to formulate evidence-based fines for confronting the pandemic. The findings of the paper highlight that fines do not seem to have been imposed with any sound economic reasoning and the majority of countries considered imposed larger real fines, compared to the optimal ones, to support the lockdowns. The paper stresses the need for the imposition of science-based fines that reflect the social cost of non-compliance with the lockdown measures.