Kenneth Boulding’s AEA presidential address argued that economics is a moral science. His view derived from his general systems theory thinking, his three systems view of human society, and his early contributions to evolutionary economics. Boulding’s argument that economics could not be...

Kenneth Boulding's AEA presidential address argued that economics is a moral science. His view derived from his general systems theory thinking, his three systems view of human society, and his early contributions to evolutionary economics. Boulding's argument that economics could not be...

This paper examines the implications of Chicago School economist Edward Lazear's 2000 defense of economics imperialism using standard trade theory. It associates that defense with interdisciplinarity or the idea that the sciences are relatively autonomous, but treats this defense as a mask for a...

The paper first discusses the methodological problem of identifying change in economics, given that change is always present in any discipline. It rejects ‘inventory’ methods that subjectively compare ‘new’ and ‘old’ concepts, and argues we should focus on economics’ disciplinary...

This chapter examines the nature of ethics and economics as a single subject of investigation, and uses a complex systems approach to characterize the nature of that subject. It then distinguishes mainstream economic and social economic visions of it, where the former assumes that market...

This paper departs from the standard abstract economics approach to health economics to develop a specifically contextualist approach to the subject emphasizing social and historical circumstances affecting health provision. Following Polanyi, it sees the economy as socially embedded and...

This chapter examines John Tomer’s contributions to our understanding of the concept of human capital. Tomer criticized the standard mainstream view of the concept as narrowly focused on education and training and as seeing investments in human capital as having “an individual, cognitive,...

This paper examines how attribute substitution (AS), central to the psychology of choice and behavioral economic reasoning, can be understood when combined with counterfactual thinking (CFT), often called ‘what if’ or ‘if only’ thinking, and how their combination creates important...

As an interdisciplinary field, economics and ethics has been taught in many different ways, including in my experience teaching the course over many years. This paper describes the challenges teaching this subject involves and the strategy I ultimately adopted for doing so after trying different...

This paper discusses how counterfactual thinking can be incorporated into behavioral economics by relating it to a type of attribution substitution involved in choices people make in conditions of Knightian uncertainty. It draws on Byrne’s ‘rational imagination’ account of counterfactual...