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This book offers a vision of economics in which there is no place for universal laws of nature, and even for laws of a more probabilistic character. The author avoids interpreting the practice of economics as something that leads to the formulation of universal laws or laws of nature. Instead, chapters in the book follow the method of contemporary philosophy of science: rather than formulating suggestions for practicing scientists of how they should do research, the text describes and interprets the very practice of scientific research. This approach demonstrates how economists can explain economic phenomena not by subsuming them under general laws, but rather by building models of these phenomena, by referring to causes, or even by investigating what is in the nature of given factors, events, or circumstances to produce.
The book traces three main approaches to the sociology of post-Soviet societies: studies guided by neoliberal theory and/or practice; work which may be termed neoconservative in orientation, and which is often a response to the first; and a third type of work that is considered both critical and reflexive, and which seeks to transcend the limitations of the other approaches. The book is divided into three parts, addressing polity, culture and economy. In each section, authors endeavour to transcend both neoliberalism and neoconservatism, and reach for a third approach, 'critical social science'. This is a broad movement, and the authors vary in their own explanatory and normative ideas as they carve out frameworks that will enable them to develop a more rigorous and at the same time more comprehensive and critical understanding of social change.
One of the characteristic facts concerning the “catching-up countries” is the exceptionally large variation in their per capita annual rate of growth, from about zero to about 10%. The papers published in this monograph show that this rate is strongly dependent on the rate of investment, the quality of the labour force and the quality of institutions. The rate of investment is, in turn, dependent on the rate of domestic savings. In Poland, domestic savings are shown to have been and continue to be very low by international standards. The trend rate of growth of about 3.7% has been about 2 pp. higher than that of the most developed economies, mainly thanks to the development of modern mar...
Omniconomics shows how we can make human society intrinsically sustainable, harmonically embedded in nature, with the help of a completely new approach in which traditional economics is transformed. Citing the fallacies of existing economic approaches as directly responsible for many of the environmental and social threats faced by society today, Niko Roorda presents a new, interdisciplinary science: omniconomics. This framework has its foundations in an innovative, joined-up approach, in which all aspects of the natural and social sciences are inextricably linked. It will better allow for new solutions to tackling urgent issues, including climate change, deforestation, environmental and eco...
This open access book examines from a variety of perspectives the disappearance of moral content and ethical judgment from the models employed in the formulation of modern economic theory, and some of the papers contain important proposals about how moral judgment could be reintroduced in economic theory. The chapters collected in this volume result from the favorable reception of the first volume of the Virtues in Economics series and represent further contributions to the themes set out in that volume: (i) examining the philosophical and methodological fallacies of this turn in modern economic theory that the removal of the moral motivation of economic agents from modern economic theory has entailed; and (ii) proposing a return descriptive economics as the means with which the moral content of economic life could be restored in economic theory. This book is of interest to researchers and students of the methodology of economics, ethics, philosophers concerned with agency and economists who build economic models that rest in the intention of the agent.
Idealization XIV: Models in Science offers a detailed ontological, epistemological and historical account of the role of models in scientific practice. The volume contains contributions of different international scholars who developed many aspects of the use of idealizations and models both in the natural and the social sciences. This volume is particularly relevant because it offers original contributions concerning one of the main topic in philosophy of science: the role of models in such branches of the sciences and the humanities like comparative historical sociology, economics, history, linguistics and political philosophy. Contributors are: Giacomo Borbone, Krzysztof Brzechczyn, Mieszko Ciesielski, Adam Czerniak, Xavier de Donato Rodríguez, José L. Falguera, Adolfo García de la Sienra, Lidia Godek, Igor Hanzel, Łukasz Hardt, Krzysztof Kiedrowski, Barbara Konat, Zenonas Norkus, Piotr Przybysz, Piotr Szwochert
This book surveys Poland’s move from being a post-feudal, backward, peripheral country to being a modern, capitalist, European state: from the partition of the commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania to the abolishment of ‘second serfdom’; late industrialization to state socialism; post-partition fragmentation to post-Second World War westward dislocation; and from the ‘Solidarność’ movement to accession into the European Union. Could Poland really be considered an ‘underdeveloped’ nation throughout the last 200 years? What factors contributed to its ‘backwardness’? Has Poland yet managed to catch up with the West? This book, the first overview of the modern economic history of Poland to be published in English, addresses these and many other questions crucial for developing our understanding of the economic history of modern Central-Eastern Europe. The economic development of Poland is analyzed through data and statistics, as well as through analysis of the ideas that paved the way for the politics of economic and social modernization.
This book presents a selection of papers based on the XXXIII Białowieża Workshop on Geometric Methods in Physics, 2014. The Białowieża Workshops are among the most important meetings in the field and attract researchers from both mathematics and physics. The articles gathered here are mathematically rigorous and have important physical implications, addressing the application of geometry in classical and quantum physics. Despite their long tradition, the workshops remain at the cutting edge of ongoing research. For the last several years, each Białowieża Workshop has been followed by a School on Geometry and Physics, where advanced lectures for graduate students and young researchers are presented; some of the lectures are reproduced here. The unique atmosphere of the workshop and school is enhanced by its venue, framed by the natural beauty of the Białowieża forest in eastern Poland. The volume will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in mathematical physics, theoretical physics and mathematmtics.
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