In 1998, Paul Krugman published a collection of short polemical essays on economic themes under the title The Accidental Theorist And Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science . Among those essays was one entitled "In Praise of Cheap Labor: Bad Jobs at Bad Wages Are Better than No Jobs at All"....

Tony Lawson has argued that the methodology of neoclassical economics is deductivist: in constructing their formal models, economists hope to be able to provide explanations based on laws, as described by the deductive-nomological model of explanation. This article argues in contrast that...

A knowledge economy still produces goods and services, although by the important use of knowledge. Therefore, economic models are relevant to understanding how a knowledge economy should properly work, particularly the financial system in a knowledge economy. When finance fails, all knowledge...

This paper concerns the role played by mainstream economics in the unequal assertion of people's right to clean water. First of all there is a conflict between satisfying wants and asserting rights. Second there is also a contradiction between aiming at maximizing social utility and ensuring...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contrast conventional economists' belief that human needs are optimally satisfied by the market, with Marx's view that capitalism has a narrow focus on money making, where satisfying human needs is at most a by-product of the system's restricted...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide alternatives to the economic man image of human behavior and incorporate these alternative images which are based on motivational needs into utility analysis. Design/methodology/approach – Empirically derived psychological variables define...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a perspective on need that derives from a personalism which is grounded in Catholic social thought and runs counter to the individualism of mainstream economics, focusing on need in the context of three economic activities: consumption, work,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to deal with questions of instability and economic crises, deriving theoretical arguments from Marx's and Schumpeter's works and presenting relevant empirical evidence for the case of the US food manufacturing sector. Design/methodology/approach – The...