Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics by Amitai Etzioni (English) Paperback Bo

The Nile on eBay   Moral Dimension by Amitai Etzioni

Synopsis coming soon.......

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

Blending elements of psychology, philosophy, and sociology with economics, Etzioni presents a bold new vision of the social sciences - one which proposes that broader moral, social and political concerns modify economic behaviour and shape individual decision-making. In establishing the necessitary of moral and social considerations in economic behaviour, he provides a provocative new framework for a more comprehensive, ethical and realistic approach to the social sciences today.

Author Biography

Amitai Etzioni, University Professor at George Washington University and Visiting Professor at the Harvard Business School, 1987-89, is the author of numerous books, including The Active Society.

Table of Contents

ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsChapter 1: The New Paradigm: Underlying ThemesPART I: BEYOND PLEASURE: THE CASE FOR DEONTOLOGICAL SOCIAL SCIENCESIntroductionChapter 2: Pleasure, Altruism, and the Great XChapter 3: Substantive Differences: Moral Not Equal PleasureChapter 4: Some Evidence: People Act UnselfishlyChapter 5: The Irreducibility of Moral BehaviorPART II: BEYOND RATIONALISM: THE ROLE OF VALUES AND EMOTIONSIntroductionChapter 6: Normative-Affective FactorsChapter 7: How Inefficient? The Scope of Intra-Cognitive LimitationsChapter 8: What Is Rational?Chapter 9: Instrumental Rationality: Supportive ConditionChapter 10: Thoughtless Rationality (Rules of Thumb)PART III: BEYOND RADICAL INDIVIDUALISM: THE ROLE OF COMMUNITY AND POWERIntroductionChapter 11: Collective (Macro) RationalityChapter 12: Encapsulated CompetitionChapter 13: Political Power and Intra-Market RelationsChapter 14: In Conclusion: Policy and Moral ImplicationsOverview and Propositional InventoryBibliographyName IndexSubject Index

Review

John W. Gardner Former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare The Moral Dimension: Toward A New Economics is at the leading edge of social thought in this country. It may be the most important book of the year.Alan Lewis Journal of Economic Psychology This is a book I will keep close to my desk and refer to often. It is packed with ideas eloquently expressed, if something new is to happen in economics (i.e., the emergence of a more behavioral, social, psychological economics), because of its wide appeal, this book will rank high among those providing the necessary momentum for change.Aaron Wildavsky University of California, Berkeley A seminal work that will help change our ideas about how the world works.Harvey Cox Harvard Divinity School Shows that unless economics and moral values are considered together, we will understand neither. Etzioni has built a sturdy bridge not only between economic theory and the humanities, but between economics and the entire cluster of disciplines that deals with human valuing and choosing. Although he signals some real dangers in continuing to apply outmoded rationalistic models, he also sketches the encouraging vision of a new economics that is once again integrated into a wider human enterprise.

Review Quote

John W. GardnerFormer Secretary of Health, Education and WelfareThe Moral Dimension: Toward A New Economicsis at the leading edge of social thought in this country. It may be the most important book of the year.

Excerpt from Book

Chapter 1 The New Paradigm: Underlying Themes TOWARD A NEW SYNTHESIS Both social scientists and intellectuals draw on overarching sets of assumptions -- or paradigms -- to organize their efforts to understand our world, the goals we pursue, the ways we choose means to advance our goals, and the ways we relate to one another as we proceed as individuals or in unison. When these paradigms are used to formulate theories and policies that are limited in their empirical and ethical scope, the study of our world suffers, and so do efforts to administer to its ills. This book argues that the neoclassical paradigm -- that of a utilitarian-based version of radical individualism -- needs to be integrated into one that is more encompassing. After outlining the differences in the core assumption between the prevailing neoclassical paradigm (most noted, in the groundwork for neoclassical economics) and an emerging deontological paradigm (that of the I&We charted here), the differences between the two paradigms are explored from social philosophic, ethical, epistological, historical, and methodological viewpoints. Finally, ways to synthesize the two paradigms are indicated. The neoclassical paradigm is a utilitarian, rationalist, and individualist paradigm. It sees individuals as seeking to maximize their utility, rationally choosing the best means to serve their goals. They are the decision-making units; that is, they render their own decisions. The coming together of these individuals in the competitive marketplace, far from resulting in all-out conflict, is said to generate maximum efficiency and well-being. The notion of a community, to the extent that it is included in this paradigm, is often seen as the result of the aggregation of individual rational decisions. These utilitarian assumptions are found at the roots of neoclassical economics (for additional discussion, see p. 46). However, they play a key role in major theories in all contemporary social sciences. Since there is much more to neoclassical economic theory than these assumptions, and since the assumptions serve to form social science theories other than neoclassical economics, it seems useful to refer to them as a neoclassical paradigm. This paradigm plays a key role in contemporary political science (e.g., in the Public Choice school); in psychology (e.g., in the balance theory, which sees group members as continuously calculating the merit of membership rather than that of being "involved" or "committed"); in sociology (e.g., exchange theory); and even in anthropology (in works that argue that preliterate tribes conform to the laws of neoclassical economics, e.g., Schneider, 1974), history (e.g., North, 1981), and law (e.g., Posner, 1977). Moreover, the neoclassical paradigm plays a major role in our public policy, dialogues, intellectual life, and the social and political philosophies that the public embraces. While outside the social sciences, the terms used in public discourse to refer to the neoclassical paradigm have changed over the decades, currently the terms laissez-faire conservative and libertarian are most often used to refer to it. The neoclassical paradigm, and the theories formulated by drawing on its assumptions and core concepts, have been criticized as unrealistic, unproductive, and amoral (Malinowski, 1922; Parsons, 1937; Thurow, 1983; Allvine and Tarpley, 1977; Wilber and Jameson, 1983). However, the defenders of the neoclassical paradigm and theories can offer a strong response to these criticisms: They can challenge their critics to point to theories of behavior that are more productive than the prevailing one. "You cannot beat a theory with nothing," is more than a clever rejoinder -- it is a somewhat overstated but far from unfair comment on the state-of-the-art. Where do we go from here? The question concerns the way scientific and intellectual progress is attained. In this area we build on Thomas Kuhn''s insight on the role and dynamics of paradigms. They provide an orderly way of organizing our thinking about a disorderly world. Developing a paradigm involves large investments that encompass many hundreds of thousands of human work-years, the expenditure of billions of dollars on data collection and analysis and elaboration of models, and the considerable effort entailed in reaching consensus, among those who share a given paradigm, about what one should assume the world is like. The magnitude of these investments provides a reason for holding on to vested paradigms. In addition, there are matters of ego-involvement and prestige pecking order that need not concern us here, and matters of ideological commitments to which we turn below. As long as there is no other productive paradigm, it is difficult to object to efforts to maintain the neoclassical paradigm, even if it encounters some so-called "stubborn facts" (facts incompatible with the theory), or other limited challenges (for instance, discovery of some internal inconsistencies). In fact, it is proper to attempt to shore up, augment, or modify the paradigm, and the theories that build on it, to absorb challenges, in the hope of avoiding a paradigm shift; it is also proper to preserve the mainframe of the prevailing paradigm -- as long as there is no successful alternative, even if these efforts cannot be successfully completed (or can only be completed by introducing far-fetched assumptions, or at the price of rendering tautological parts of the theory). So far, no such alternative seems to have arisen. As Ulen wrote (1983, p. 576): "...many of the most recent presidential addresses to the American Economic Association have been highly critical of received micro- and macro-economic theory. However, there has not yet been an offering of a new paradigm." If by a new paradigm he means one that is successful, able to provide a context to a wide array of evidence, and gain consensus, he is surely right. He goes on to recognize "the profession''s quite natural attempt to plaster over the current paradigm''s cracks with such ingenious fillers as transaction costs and rational expectations." (Ulen, 1983, p. 576.) While more than cracks have appeared in the facade, the procedure, to reiterate, is not merely "natural" but legitimate. Indeed, Ulen''s own work further illustrates the point. After referring to a review of the literature by Nelson and Winter (1983, p. 577) that shows "the limited abilities of organizations and individuals to optimize," Ulen wonders if this is sufficient reason to replace orthodox theory rather than "merely patching it." Another student of the same challenge (Rubin, 1983, p. 719) wonders if this means that the neoclassical paradigm must be "scrapped," or that the new approach (in this case, evolutionary economics) can be absorbed into neoclassical economics, a procedure which he strongly prefers. Others try to evolve new paradigms. If and when such efforts are successful, it does not mean that the neoclassical paradigm will crumble. There have been several sciences in which two paradigms co-existed simultaneously in open competition for long periods of time. Marxism, after all, is a paradigm that does seek, among other things, to explain economic behavior. It long co-existed with the neoclassical paradigm, neither driving it out, nor being driven out by it. The thesis developed in this volume suggests a different interparadigmatic pattern: The self-oriented, rational behavior "modeled" by neoclassicists is assumed to occur within the context of personality structure and society. These, in turn, are perceived not merely as reflections of the aggregation of individual acts but as being formed to a significant extent by forces and dynamics that are fundamentally different, in ways to be specified, from those assumed by the neoclassical paradigm. That is, rather than abandon neoclassical concepts and findings, they are viewed here as dealing with subsystems within society (markets) and personality (in which rational decision-making is circumscribed, substituted and, on occasion, supported by emotions and values). In other words, the approach followed here is one of codetermination: It encompasses factors that form society and personality, as well as neoclassical factors that form markets and rational decision-making. Moreover, we can go beyond suggesting that both approaches need to be synthesized; we can specify to some extent how they are related to one another: The paradigm advanced here seeks to characterize the context within which the forces that the neoclassical approach focuses on are played out, a context that sets limits and provides direction to those forces. (For additional discussion re personalities, see Part II, especially Chapter 6; for society, see Part III, especially Chapter 12.) CORE ASSUMPTIONS A major virtue of the prevailing neoclassical paradigm is that it states its core assumptions very clearly. This work progresses by changing these core assumptions and by exploring the consequences of such a change. Three basic changes are made concerning what people are after, how they choose their ways, and who is doing the choosing. Where the neoclassical assumption is that people seek to maximize one utility (whether it is pleasure, happiness, consumption, or merely a formal notion of a unitary goal), we assume that people pursue at least two irreducible "utilities," and have two sources of valuation: pleasure and morality (the subject of Part I). The neoclassical assumption that people render decisions rationally (by a definition to be clarified) is replaced by the assumption that people typically select means, not just goals, first and foremost on the basis of their values and emotions. Far from always "intruding on" or "twisting" rational deliberations, values and emotions r

Details ISBN0029099013 Author Amitai Etzioni Short Title MORAL DIMENSION Pages 314 Language English ISBN-10 0029099013 ISBN-13 9780029099018 Media Book Format Paperback Year 1990 Imprint The Free Press Subtitle Toward a New Economics Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Illustrations black & white illustrations Residence US Affiliation Columbia University George Washington University DOI 10.1604/9780029099018 UK Release Date 1990-06-15 NZ Release Date 1990-06-15 US Release Date 1990-06-15 Publisher Simon & Schuster Publication Date 1990-06-15 DEWEY 330.155 Audience General AU Release Date 1990-06-14 We've got this

At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it.With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love!

TheNile_Item_ID:6511232;