Drawing on more modern expressions of economic analysis, this book explores the interplay between wellbeing, nature and moral values in economics. In standard accounts of economics, these three themes are typically treated in isolation from each other, or else overlooked entirely. This book argues that due to this blinkered approach, standard economic analysis is poorly equipped to deal with global contemporary challenges including climate change, biodiversity loss, sustainability, and the risk of pandemic diseases. The book reviews the economic literature to show that the last few decades has seen the re-insertion into economic analysis of human wellbeing, natural resources and moral values: three themes present in early economic thought that are highly relevant to the challenges ahead. The book argues for the greater integration of these three themes as the natural environment is crucial to human wellbeing, and moral values are essential for environmentally benign behaviors. The book also focuses on how specific moral values, identified by contemporary moral psychology, actually shape economic behavior rather than how abstract ethical principles they should shape economic behavior. The book will be of significant interest to readers in the economics and social sciences, particularly behavioral economics and social psychology.

What are the ends of economic activity? According to neoclassical theory, efficient interaction of the profit-maximizing "ideal producer" and the utility-maximizing "ideal consumer" will eventually lead to some sort of social optimum. But is that social optimum the same as human well-being? Human Well-Being and Economic Goals addresses that issue, considering such questions as: Does the maximization of individual welfare really lead to social welfare? How can we deal with questions of relative welfare and of equity? How do we define, or at least understand, individual and social welfare? And how can these things be measured, or even assessed? Human Well-Being and Economic Goals brings together more than 75 concise summaries of the most significant literature in the field that consider issues of present and future individual and social welfare, national development, consumption, and equity. Like its predecessors in the Frontier Issues in Economic Thought series, it takes a multidisciplinary approach to economic concerns, examining their sociological, philosophical, and psychological aspects and implications as well as their economic underpinnings. Human Well-Being and Economic Goals provides a powerful introduction to the current and historical writings that examine the concept of human well-being in ways that can help us to set goals for economic activity and judge its success. It is a valuable summary and overview for students, economists, and social scientists concerned with these issues.

Suggests how theories and techniques widely used in business and industry can be applied to schools as a group complementing each other. For administrators, reformers, teachers, parents, and anyone else interested in education. Explains the theory behind each of the five technologies, then describes tools for its implementation. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?

Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics), and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy.

Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends.

This book expands upon a range of economic insights within the overall context of critical theory, particularly with respect to the question of socioeconomic inequalities, and presents an explanation of how critical theory provides a number of interesting perspectives for economists. Economic agents, deliberately imprisoned in their instrumental rationality as a means to survive under competitive relationships, are microscopic constituents of systemic forces which exist beyond their will. Despite the subjective rationality of such agents in terms of formally logical transitivity and consistency, aggregate market distributional mechanisms also display non-rational patterns. The crucial aspect of the dynamics of this system consists of the paralysing effect of the high level of socioeconomic inequality, which is driven by a permanent struggle for self-preservation under competitive rules; it is a reminiscence of natural, uncivilised relationships that constituted the reproduction process of the whole. These reified agents thus become instruments of their socially constructed powers on the one hand, and objects of their existential conditionality on the other. Hence, the dialectical approach adopted by the author aims to uncover the way in which structurally genetic market forces govern individual behaviour, as well as how individual behaviour shapes these structurally genetic forces, which, together, form the transcending principles of unequal distribution. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the political economy, philosophy and the methodology of the social sciences, especially those concerned with inequality issues. This book includes a preface written by Professor Martin Jay.