Economics and Utopia (Economics as Social Theory)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and optimistic view of the future of economic life
Review: Once again, Hodgson asks us to think BOLDLY and with confidence about our post cold-war economic future. The book does not romanticize in the least; rather it deepens the challenge he laid at the feet of academic orthodoxy and policy elites in western democracies in "Economics and Evolution". His view of the relation of scientific and technological knowledge and the possibilites they hold for transforming microeconomic transactions both within and between firms and his call for a dynamic reconfiguration of property rights so as to allocate resources in an ecologically sustainable and democratically humane manner, lay down a huge gauntlet for those who wish to maintain the status quo. Indeed he challenges us all to "to develop the capacity to unlearn, and learn anew" and see this process as the key to changing our core economic assumptions to embrace the evolutionary world we all inhabit. Capitalism is not the end of history, Hodgson says, and our persistent positing of socialism as it's "opposite" has outlived it's usefulnesss and blinds us to forms of economic organization which are more democratic, egalitarian and sustainable than either have ever been.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent and optimistic view of the future of economic life
Review: Once again, Hodgson asks us to think BOLDLY and with confidence about our post cold-war economic future. The book does not romanticize in the least; rather it deepens the challenge he laid at the feet of academic orthodoxy and policy elites in western democracies in "Economics and Evolution". His view of the relation of scientific and technological knowledge and the possibilites they hold for transforming microeconomic transactions both within and between firms and his call for a dynamic reconfiguration of property rights so as to allocate resources in an ecologically sustainable and democratically humane manner, lay down a huge gauntlet for those who wish to maintain the status quo. Indeed he challenges us all to "to develop the capacity to unlearn, and learn anew" and see this process as the key to changing our core economic assumptions to embrace the evolutionary world we all inhabit. Capitalism is not the end of history, Hodgson says, and our persistent positing of socialism as it's "opposite" has outlived it's usefulnesss and blinds us to forms of economic organization which are more democratic, egalitarian and sustainable than either have ever been.