This article advances a general theory of institutional change. I argue that because institutional change is essentially a process of selecting a few ideas out of many and solidifying them into institutions, competition of ideas and struggle for power to make rules are the heart of institutional...

Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy's unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend...

Order is one of those terms that have been often talked about but never rigorously defined. After a critical survey of existing definitions of order, I propose a more rigorous definition of order. I then develop a framework for measuring and comparing order. I go on to show that without a...

How the social system impacts agents is a central problématique in sociology. I argue that the social system impacts agents via six distinct though interacting channels: constraining and enabling by purely material forces, constraining/enabling by the interplay of material and ideational...

I identify idea, action, and outcome as the three key objects of social sciences and explaining them as the three key tasks of social sciences. I show that our failure to grasp the ontological differences of the three objects and the fact that explaining them may require different...

Bringing together the classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy's unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend...

Bringing together classic defense of liberty and democracy, the political economy of hierarchy, endogenous growth theory, and the new institutional economics on growth, we propose a new institutional theory that identifies democracy's unique advantage in prompting economic growth. We contend...

Neo-modernity is a new philosophical stand that transcends the modernism vs. post-modernism debate. Neo-modernity is a new meta-theory about the relationship between theories of knowledge and theories of society, underpinned by a social evolutionary approach toward human knowledge and society....

The economics of growth centered on technological knowledge in endogenous growth models and the new institutional economics of growth centered on institutions have largely chartered their separate courses so far. In this paper, we construct a new growth model that brings the two economics of...

Ashraf and Galor (2012) advanced the bold thesis that genetic diversity within different human populations has been a foundational determinant of long-run economic development. We show that their results are not robust after controlling for a key missing variable – the Eurasia dummy. After...