This work questions how governments should balance the aims of justice and economic efficiency when intervening in the economy. It covers the main advances of fairness theory and reviews the experimental work of economists as well as the more standard approaches of moral philosophers.

"If we all agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable (and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now), then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of capitalist societies? In A Political Economy of Justice, a team of luminary social scientists consider the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. "We look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other," the editors write. "From that beginning, we aspire to chart a way forward to a just economy." Across 14 essays that blister with relevance to our moment as a society and polity, A Political Economy of Justice sketches the boundaries of a new theory of justice: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; the roles of institutions and governments. The editors' introduction makes clear that these are no half-effort book chapters from busy luminaries; they are wholly original works born of a set of guiding principles and deeply, communally edited. The result, they hope, is something greater than what is typically achieved by an academic volume"--

This book provides an analysis of the work of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. It argues that these authors use argumentative and narrative depictions of character to reinforce a sense of societal decorum as a stabilizing foundation for their theories.

This volume brings together papers inspired by the work of Duncan Foley, an extraordinarily productive economist who has made seminal contributions to a wide variety of areas. Foley’s work cannot be easily classified, but one thread that runs through it is a critical examination (along both ethical and analytical lines) of conventional neoclassical economic theory, particularly involving general equilibrium theories of value and money. Foley was a pioneer of complexity economics as well, which adopts approaches to these questions drawn from natural sciences, so the collection therefore has an interdisciplinary quality that will interest a wide variety of readers. Some of the chapters are intellectual biographies that contextualize and identify Foley’s contributions to Keynesian macroeconomics, Marxian value theory, and complexity theory in economics. The topics covered include the economics of complexity; the ethics of general equilibrium theory; the economics of climate change; applications of Keynesian, Marxian and Ricardian political economy; and money and financial crises. The collection should be useful to scholars who work in various economic traditions critical of the currently dominant free-market approach, but it also speaks to scholars of critical theory in various disciplines beyond economics such as the mathematicians, physicists, and other natural scientists who are interested in understanding the complexity of social processes using their analytical frameworks. This book should also appeal to graduate students in economics who are working in these traditions, as well as scholars (including current graduate students in orthodox programs) who are dissatisfied with the current state of economic theory and would like to satisfy their intellectual curiosity by sampling the contributions of critical theorists.

In early 2007, there were approximately 140 living wage ordinances in place throughout the United States. Communities around the country frequently debate new proposals of this sort. Additionally, as a result of ballot initiatives, twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia, representing nearly 70 percent of the total U.S. population, maintain minimum wage standards above those set by the federal minimum wage.In A Measure of Fairness, Robert Pollin, Mark Brenner, Jeannette Wicks-Lim, and Stephanie Luce assess how well living wage and minimum wage regulations in the United States serve the workers they are intended to help. Opponents of such measures assert that when faced with mandated increases in labor costs, businesses will either lay off workers, hire fewer low-wage employees in the future, replace low-credentialed workers with those having better qualifications or, finally, even relocate to avoid facing the increased costs being imposed on them.The authors give an overview of living wage and minimum wage implementation in Louisiana, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut to show how these policies play out in the paychecks of workers, in the halls of legislature, and in business ledgers. Based on a decade of research, this volume concludes that living wage laws and minimum wage increases have been effective policy interventions capable of bringing significant, if modest, benefits to the people they were intended to help.

Over its lifetime, 'political economy' has had different meanings. This handbook views political economy as a synthesis of the various strands of social science, treating it as the methodology of economics applied to the analysis of political behaviour and institutions.

This book identifies and analyses the political economy elements in Gandhi's thought; evaluating the spiritual and ontological basis of Gandhian political economy, and examining the contemporary relevance of Gandhian political economy both in terms of alternative types of heterodox political economy and in terms of policy. The book presents a groundbreaking step in the creation of a new 'Gandhian' political economy.

Global Political Economy (GPE) is a broad and varied field of study and draws insight from a great number of fields and approaches. One of the serious problems confronting academics and students is the sheer mass of theories and debates in the field. This textbook provides up-to-date summaries of the debates and approaches that are currently at the forefront of both European and American GPE. This new revised and expanded second edition contains updated versions of most of the original chapters. In addition, there is a new section entitled ‘Emerging issues in contemporary Global Political Economy (GPE)’ and six new chapters. The second edition is structured around three themes: Part I focuses on the six central concepts of GPE: state, firm, power, labour, finance and globalization. Each one of them has been increasingly subjected to a rigorous and critical evaluation in recent scholarship. Part II covers a select number of theories and debates currently at the forefront of GPE: game theory; behavioural economics; neo-, sociological and evolutionary institutionalism; neo-Marxism; development and post-development; libidinal economies; and economic constructivism. Part III, which is new to this edition, is entitled ‘Emerging issues in contemporary Global Political Economy (GPE)’ and focuses on war, state and International Political Economy (IPE); race, gender and culture; environmental politics; and the rise of China. This is essential reading for all serious scholars and advanced students of IPE.

Fairness and Freedom compares the history of two open societies--New Zealand and the United States--with much in common. Both have democratic polities, mixed-enterprise economies, individuated societies, pluralist cultures, and a deep concern for human rights and the rule of law. But all of these elements take different forms, because constellations of value are far apart. The dream of living free is America's Polaris; fairness and natural justice are New Zealand's Southern Cross. Fischer asks why these similar countries went different ways. Both were founded by English-speaking colonists, but at different times and with disparate purposes. They lived in the first and second British Empires, which operated in very different ways. Indians and Maori were important agents of change, but to different ends. On the American frontier and in New Zealand's Bush, material possibilities and moral choices were not the same. Fischer takes the same comparative approach to parallel processes of nation-building and immigration, women's rights and racial wrongs, reform causes and conservative responses, war-fighting and peace-making, and global engagement in our own time--with similar results. On another level, this book expands Fischer's past work on liberty and freedom. It is the first book to be published on the history of fairness. And it also poses new questions in the old tradition of history and moral philosophy. Is it possible to be both fair and free? In a vast array of evidence, Fischer finds that the strengths of these great values are needed to correct their weaknesses. As many societies seek to become more open--never twice in the same way, an understanding of our differences is the only path to peace.