Jon D. Wisman

Straightening out the backward-bending supply curve of labour: from overt to covert compulsion and beyond

The inadequancy of the work-leisure choice model of orthodox theory suggests the need to reexamine the nature of work from the vantage points of anthropology and economic history. Such a reexamination challenges the theory of human behaviour upon which the work-leisure model is built. It suggests that work is not necessarily painful. Moreover, it suggests that more attention needs to be given to the potential for institutional changes which encourage creativity in the workplace.

The Scope and Promising Future of Social Economics1

This essay explores the future potential for Social Economics. Since the beginning of modern economics, the mainstream has been steered by what might be called a material progress vision, whereby the generally unacknowledged pesumption is that economic growth will make the good life possible. Accordingly, such potential components of human welfare as more creative and fulfilling work, greater equality in the distribution of opportunity, wealth and income, and a greater degree of community can be more or less ignored for the present. Less guided by this vision, and unfettered by a pretense of value-neutrality, Social Economics does not view such components of welfare as subsidiary to economic growth. Instead, it is more focused upon the wholeness of social life, more concerned with the full requisites of the good and just society. By drawing upon recent work in psychology, sociology, and especially happiness research, Social Economics is found to offer a more promising orientation towards future economic concerns than does mainstream economics.

The ignored question of workplace democracy in political discourse

Reports that although there has been significant progress towards greater worker participation and even fuller forms of workplace democracy in recent decades, its potential is all but ignored in modern political discourse. Addresses the compelling reasons why it should receive greater attention. States that greater workplace democracy offers the only viable and sustainable strategy for transcending the divergence of interests between capital and labour. Reveals that this conflict of interests slows productivity growth in a number of ways, most especially underinvestment in human capital, and problems of worker motivation. Also, explains that because of capital’s ever‐increasing mobility, this conflict heightens the pace of community disintegration.

Capital‐Labour Tensions and Liberal Economic Thought

It was typical in nineteenth century economic thought to view the tensions between the interests of capital and labour as critical to industrial society. Yet later economic thought has generally reduced these tensions to those captured in contract theory. Explores how this narrowing of focus has cast an important source of contemporary social dynamics into the shadows. A broad survey is made of the various ways in which capital‐labour tensions are manifested in today′s advanced industrial economies, with special attention given to the case of the USA. Concludes with a discussion of how intensified international competitiveness, combined with our increasing distance from the threat of material privation, may force societies to restructure their economies so as to eliminate the source of capital‐labour tensions. The task facing liberal economic thought is to expand its scope to better provide guidance for meeting this challenge.

The methodology of W. Arthur Lewis's development economics: Economics as pedagogy

Abstract Lewiss work represents much of the best potential of economic science. Like Keynes he has transcended not only the ideology of natural law cosmology, but also the positivist-guided focus upon the endless testing of minute hypothesis and the endless formalization of non-falsifiable bodies of doctrine. Courageously and pragmatically, Lewis attempts to verify his theory not just statistically or in terms of internal logical consistency, but more broadly in terms of its accordance with general social knowledge, history, and social relevance in instructing humanity how to live better. His implicit methodology suggests that economics at its best is pedagogy.

What the American Elite Won over the Past 35 Years and What All Other Americans Lost

Sometimes we have to step back and take a comprehensive look at the state of our society. The authors do just this in a thorough piece about not only rising inequality and slow wage growth but also social values we hold dear.

Guaranteed Employment and Universal Child Care For a New Social Contract

The United States is falling behind many other rich nations on a broad spectrum of measures of the quality of life. These include social mobility, inequality, education, crime, health and longevity. Polls suggest that many Americans have not only lost their optimism concerning the future, but have become angry as well. This article sets forth the elements of a new social contract, one that would deliver substantial results almost overnight and which conforms to the traditional American values of the importance of work, that everyone should have a fair opportunity for upwards mobility, and the central importance of the family. This proposal is composed of two parts: The first is guaranteed employment, and where necessary, the retraining required to enable workers to successfully enter the regular workforce. The second is universal child care to give all parents the possibility of participating in the labor force. The article discusses in depth how these measures would reverse the relative decline in quality of life in America. It also reveals how, although these measure would be costly, their payoff for the economy would far offset the costs.

Marx, the Predisposition to Reject Markets and Private Property, and Attractive Alternatives to Capitalism

Abstract Ever since capitalism came to be recognized as a new economic system, its principal institutions of private property and markets have had vociferous critics, of whom none was more wide-ranging and influential than Karl Marx. Marx claimed that not only were private property and markets critical to creating an ideological patina of freedom behind which, as in slavery and feudalism, a small class extracted from the mass of producers practically all output above that necessary for bare subsistence, they were also corrupting. Yet, Marx recognized that capitalism, unlike earlier exploitative systems, was radically dynamic, producing unprecedented wealth, while transforming not only all it inherited from the past, but also its own nature so as to eventually empower even the producers, who he believed would abandon these capitalist institutions. This article claims Marx was correct in identifying the core problem of capitalism to be its extreme inequality in the ownership and control of the means of production, but that finding fault with private property and markets has been a mistake that has impeded the generation of an attractive and viable alternative to capitalism. It concludes with an outline of an alternative which would eliminate the core problem of exploitation due to unequal ownership and control of the means of production, while retaining roles for private property and markets. It would entail two components: Guaranteed employment at living wages and democratic worker control of firms.

Politics, Not Economics, Ultimately Drives Inequality

Depicting economic inequality as a product of natural economic forces is the ideology that itself has led to greater inequality, argues the author. Ideology has had a part in rising inequality for centuries. Now it takes the form of a supposed “objective” science of economics. This is the challenge, writes the author, that those who seek more equal incomes now face.