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The book treats two approaches to decision theory: (1) the normative, purporting to determine how a 'perfectly rational' actor ought to choose among available alternatives; (2) the descriptive, based on observations of how people actually choose in real life and in laboratory experiments. The mathematical tools used in the normative approach range from elementary algebra to matrix and differential equations. Sections on different levels can be studied independently. Special emphasis is made on 'offshoots' of both theories to cognitive psychology, theoretical biology, and philosophy.

Stimulus or laissez-faire? That's the essential debate about what to about financial crisis in our time. It was the same in the 1930s.In this world before and after the Great Depression, there was a lone voice for sanity and freedom: Ludwig von Mises. He speaks in The Causes of the Economic Crisis, a collection of newly in print essays by Mises that have been very hard to come by, and are published for the first time in this format.Here we have the evidence that the master economist foresaw and warned against the breakdown of the German mark, as well as the market crash of 1929 and the depression that followed.He presents his business cycle theory in its most elaborate form, applies it to the prevailing conditions, and discusses the policies that governments undertake that make recessions worse. He recommends a path for monetary reform that would eliminate business cycles and provide the basis for a sustainable prosperity.In foreseeing the interwar economic breakdown, Mises was nearly alone among his contemporaries. In 1923, he warned that central banks will not "stabilize" money; they will distort credit markets and generate booms and busts. In 1928, he departed dramatically from the judgment of his contemporaries and sounded an alarm: "every boom must one day come to an end."Then after the Great Depression hit, he wrote again in 1931. His essay was called: "The Causes of the Economic Crisis." And the essays kept coming, in 1933 and 1946, each explaining that the business cycle results from central-bank generated loose money and cheap credit, and that the cycle can only be made worse by intervention.Credit expansion cannot increase the supply of real goods. It merely brings about a rearrangement. It diverts capital investment away from the course prescribed by the state of economic wealth and market conditions. It causes production to pursue paths which it would not follow unless the economy were to acquire an increase in material goods. As a result, the upswing lacks a solid base. It is not real prosperity. It is illusory prosperity. It did not develop from an increase in economic wealth. Rather, it arose because the credit expansion created the illusion of such an increase. Sooner or later it must become apparent that this economic situation is built on sand.Did the world listen? The German-speaking world knew his essays well, and he was considered a prophet, until the Nazis came to power and wiped out his legacy. In England, his student F.A. Hayek made the Austrian theory a presence in academic life.In the popular mind, the media, and politics, however, it was Keynes who held sway, with his claim that the depression was the fault of the market, and that it can only be solved through government planning.Just at the time he wanted to be fighting, Mises had to leave Austria, forced out by political events and the rising of the Nazis. He wrote from Geneva, his writings accessible to too few people. They were never translated into English until after his death. Even then, they were not circulated widely.The sad result is that Mises is not given the credit he deserves for having warned about the coming depression, and having seen the solution. His writings were prolific and profound, but they were swallowed up in the rise of the total state and total war.But today, we hear him speak again in this book.Bettina B. Greaves did the translations. It is her view that in that in the essays, Mises provides the clearest explanation of the Great Depression ever written. Indeed, he is crystal clear: precise, patient, and thorough. It makes for a gripping read, especially given that we face many of the same problems today.This book refutes the socialists and Keynesian, as well as anyone who believes that the printing press can provide a way out of trouble. Mises shows who was responsible for driving the world into economic calamity. It was the inevitable effects of the government's monopoly over money and banking.

"Dilorenzo and Block have rendered an invaluable service to scholars and students interested in Public Choice, Austrian Economics and Liberalism. Their critical analysis of Public Choice from the Austrian perspective is timely and relevant to clarify important misconceptions about both schools of thought that although in some aspects are complementary in many others offer a significantly different and even opposite approach. This is a most welcome book that was very necessary and fills an important vacuum in the literature." - Jesús Huerta de Soto"I congratulate DiLorenzo and Block for writing this important and courageous book chastising Public Choice. Austro-Libertarianism and Public Choice are to some degree complements; both veer in the direction of support for private property, fee enterprise and capitalism, and against government involvement in the economy. But they are also substitutes, in that the former is a consistent underpinning of the free marketplace, where the latter is not." - Han-Hermann Hoppe

This book deals with the origin and functions of money and banking, emphasizing the role both play in the promotion of economic order. Developing the insights of Hayek and others of the Austrian tradition, Professor Horwitz argues that an appreciation of the spontaneous evolutionary processes that produce and maintain our monetary institutions shou

In this unconventionial and sharply written text, Hollander introduces the work of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill, and, on specific Malthus and Marx. He leads the student through the nuances of the arguments, making clear how he agrees with or challenges recieved ideas about their writings. Attention is given to the precursors of the classics, to their immediate successors, and to the Sraffian system.

Information, Incentives, and Economics Mechanisms was first published in 1987.In 1960, economist Leonid Hurwicz formulated a theoretical model that initiated a field of research on the design and analysis of economic mechanisms (the institutional rules and structures by which economic activity is coordinated). By treating mechanisms as a "variable," this research provided a methodology for their comparison. The inefficiency of mechanisms arises from 1) the dispersion of information among agents, and 2) agents' incentives to seek private advantage from this dispersion. Exploration of these limits to efficiency was pioneered by Hurwicz in 1972, and has become a major area of active research. In part, this research enables economic theory to be a more effective instrument for the study of how a society can and should organize its economic activity.The fourteen new papers in this volume -- by a group of distinguished economists, all former students, colleagues, and collaborators of Hurwicz -- address major themes in the study of information and incentives for implementing desired economic allocations. Two comprehensive survey essays provide introductions to the topics of incentive in decentralized organizations generally and, more specifically, in classical models of private goods and public goods economies. The following sections deal with informational aspects of mechanism theory, information and the stability of general resource allocation mechanisms, market mechanisms, and nonmarket and general mechanisms.In addition to the editors, the contributors are: Masahiko Aoki, Kenneth J. Arrow, Xavier Calsamiglia, Jerry R. Green, James S. Jordan, Jean-Jacques Laffont, John Ledyard, Thomas Marschak, Eric Maskin, Andreu Mas-Coleli, Kenneth R. Mount, Andrew Postlewaite, Jean-Charles Rochet, John Roberts, David Schmeidler, and William Thomson.

These lectures contain a masterful summing up of Nicholas Kaldor's critique of the foundations of mainstream economic theory. They provide a very clear account of his theoretical structures on regional differences, primary producers and manufacturers, and on differing market structures and the likely course of prices and quantities in different markets over time. The first four lectures are concerned with theory, history and explanation; the fifth consists of a detailed set of integrated policy proposals.

In this, the first of two volumes, Murray Rothbard - one of the major figures in twentieth-century Austrian economics - argues with clarity and force that economics is a deductive science based on the fundamental realities of action, scarcity and the passage of time. Such conviction is demonstrated in the first part of this book, where Professor Rothbard analyses method. The second part focuses on some of the theoretical debates within the Austrian school, including property and justice rights, welfare economics, value and efficiency. In the third section Rothbard considers the Austrian approach to money and calculation, including discussion of the definition of the supply of money, freely floating exchange rates and calculation and its role under socialism. This latest volume of Murray Rothbard’s work goes some way to represent the important contributions he made to the field. The second volume of Murray Rothbard’s essays on Austrian economics is also available.

Michael Polanyi's The Contempt of Freedom quite plausibly helped to steel Friedrich Hayek to write The Road to Serfdom. In a 1941 review of Polanyi's book, Hayek wrote: The four essays [of the present book] were...written during the five years between 1935 and I940 when the ideas of liberty "were left almost uncultivated" and "the progressive minds were so fascinated by the prospects of the revolution in Russia that they had little interest left for the fate of the traditional liberties." [Polanyi's] analysis...in the essay on the "Rights and Duties of Science " is perhaps the most illuminating discussion yet attempted of the psychological propensities which so frequently turn the man of science into an ardent advocate of central planning, and of the inconsistencies which this attitude involves. While Professor Polanyi has no doubt that "the major force behind this attitude is the passionate desire to put science into the consciously organised service of human welfare", he is convinced that a consistent policy of "organising" all scientific research..."would actually stop the development of science altogether". Discover here an early work of the man who coined the term "spontaneous order" and wrote Science, Faith and Society (1946), The Logic of Liberty (1951), Personal Knowledge (1958), The Study of Man (1959), and The Tacit Dimension (1959).

Lipton, Professor Michael

This new edition (completely reset) of Planned Chaos features a new introduction by Chris Westley of Jacksonville State University. The introduction brings this classic up to date - not that it has ever fallen out of date or ever will.The title comes from Mises's description of the reality of central planning and socialism, whether of the national variety (Nazism) or the international variety (communism). Rather than create an orderly society, the attempt to central plan has precisely the opposite effect. By short-circuiting the price mechanism and forcing people into economic lives contrary to their own chosing, central planning destroys the capital base and creates economic randomness that eventually ends in killing prosperity.This important work was written decades after Mises's original essay on economic calculation and includes the broadest and boldest attack on all forms of state control.

(pocketbook)

Book by Trotsky, Leon

Jews, Money and Social Responsibility is a lively discussion of socially responsible shopping, investment and philanthropy from an American Jewish perspective. The authors explore Judaism's teachings on economics, wealth, individual responsibility and community to develop a contemporary ethic of money and society. Their work offers a unifying vision of economic life that can sanctify and heal ourselves and our world.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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Isaak Illich Rubin (12 June 1886, Dinaburg, now Latvia - 27 November 1937, Aktobe, now Kazakhstan) was a Soviet Marxian economist. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. He was executed in 1937 during the course of the Great Purge, but his ideas have since been rehabilitated. Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism in the labor theory of value. Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest in alienation with his later economic theory, Rubin argued that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped, defined, and limited by social structures, which take on a uniquely "objective" economic form under capitalism. Significantly, Rubin is at pains to argue that simple commodity production is not a historical phenomenon that developed into capitalism, as it is often understood by both Marxists and critics of Marx; rather, it is a theoretical abstraction that explains one aspect of a fully developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on. Rubin's work was never reissued in the Soviet Union after 1928, but in 1972 Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was translated into English by Fredy Perlman and Milos Samardzija. This work became a foundation stone of the "value-form" approach to Marxist theory, exemplified by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Chris Arthur, Geert Reuten, and the "Konstanz-Sydney" group (Michael Eldred, Mike Roth, Lucia Kleiber, and Volkbert Roth). In this interpretation of Marx, "it is the development of the forms of exchange that is seen as the prime determinant of the capitalist economy rather than the content regulated by it". Capitalism is here understood as a method of regulating human labor by giving it the social form of an exchangeable commodity (the "value-form"), rather than a disguised or mystified system that is otherwise similar in content to other class-based societies. According to Arthur, the rediscovery of Rubin's "masterly exegesis" was "the most important single influence on the value form approach to Capital". (wikipedia.org)

A new English translation of Isaak Illich Rubin’s classic Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. First published in the Soviet Union in 1923, Rubin’s book sparked a fierce value controversy with contemporary Soviet economists during the late 1920s. As such, the present translation is conceived as a variorum edition, including all the essential supplementary materials related to this foundational work in Marx’s value theory, published here in English for the first time. In addition to Rubin’s main work, this edition includes his four most important related publications, as well as ten debate articles written and published by his contemporary proponents and opponents.