Full text open access link to this chapter on publisher Palgrave Macmillan/Springer’s site: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-37435-7_3 and to corrections to the chapter.
Or download chapter from this website RichardSamans.net: 52-page PDF
Cite this chapter: Samans, R. (2024). Original Sin or Wayward Practice? Living Standards as a Trickle-Down, Residual Consideration of Modern Economics. In: Human-Centred Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37435-7_3
Abstract
This chapter investigates whether modern economics’ shortcomings with respect to inclusion, sustainability and resilience—its treatment of living standards as a residual consideration—can be attributed to the original conceptualization of liberal political economy or a subsequent misapplication of its founding principles. It finds that the discipline’s most influential early theorists and codifiers—Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall—explicitly contextualized their insights about the power of market-based resource allocation in a larger perspective and complementary set of prescriptions. These emphasized the important role of institutions—legal and other norms, policy incentives and public administrative capacities in multiple domains—in helping to translate the increased economic growth enabled by market-based resource allocation into broad improvement in social welfare. Each of these pioneers considered increased production and national income, the wealth of a nation, as a means and not an end in itself. Each emphasized that the ultimate purpose of an economy is to advance the material well-being, or standard of living, of society as a whole. The chapter makes extensive reference to their original texts and traces how their shared view of the crucial institutional underpinnings of inclusion, sustainability and resilience got lost in translation during the evolution of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy into twentieth-century economic science.
Important details for the book Human-Centred Economics by Richard Samans
For more details, see the publisher’s page for the book, or its main page on this website, RichardSamans.net
Cite the book as follows: Samans, Richard. Human-Centred Economics: The Living Standards of Nations. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. | © ILO: International Labour Organization 2024. | Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. | This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland. | The responsibility for opinions expressed in this book rests solely with the author (Richard Samans), and its publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO or its constituents of the opinions expressed herein. |
Published: 03 December 2023 | Print ISBN 978-3-031-37434-0 | Online ISBN 978-3-031-37435-7
Open Access This book or chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. | The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.