Three paradoxes surround the division of the costs of social reproduction:
* Women have entered the paid labour force in growing numbers, but they continue to perform most of the unpaid labour of housework and childcare.
* Birth rates have fallen but more and more mothers are supporting children on their own, with little or no assistance from fathers.
* The growth of state spending is often blamed on malfunctioning markets, or runaway bureaucracies. But a large percentage of social spending provides substitutes for income transfers that once took place within families.
Who...

Only in the past twenty years have debates surrounding modernism and postmodernism begun to have an impact on economics. This new way of thinking rejects claims that science and mathematics provide the only models for the structure of economic knowledge.
This ground-breaking volume brings together the essays of top theorists including Arjo Klamer, Deirdre McCloskey, Julie Nelson, Shaun Hargreaves-Heap and Philip Mirowski on a diverse range of topics such as gender, postcolonial theory and rationality as well as postmodernism.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Economic criticism brings together economics and literary scholarship, demonstrating that literary and theoretical texts may be fruitfully examined for their economic form, content and contexts and that economic theories and texts may also be illuminated by scrutinizing their tropes, narrative devices and ideologies. This collection brings together 27 essays by influential literary and cultural historians, as well as representatives of the vanguard of postmodernist economics. Contributors include: William Milberg, Deirdre McCloskey, Janet Sorenson, Jean-Joseph Goux, Marc Shell. The text...

'No reality please. We're economists'. There is a wide spread belief that modern economics is irrelevant to the understanding of the real world. In a controversial and original study, Tony Lawson argues that the root of this irrelevance is in the failure of economists to find methods and tools which are appropriate for the social world it addresses.
Supporting his argument with a wide range of examples, Tony Lawson offers a provocative account of why economics has gone wrong and how it can be put back on track.

Following the failure of 'really existing socialism' in Eastern Europe and Asia, the market is now generally perceived, by Left and Right, to be supreme in any rational economic system. The current debate now focuses on the proper boundaries of markets rather than the system itself. This book examines the problems of defining these boundaries for the recent defences of the market, and shows that they highlight major weaknesses in the cases made by its proponents.
The author draws on considerable research in this area to provide an overdue critical evaluation of the limits of the market,...

Critical realism, with its focus on the causal structures underlying observable phenomena, has been one of the most significant developments in the philosophy of social science in the latter-20th century. This volume extends its insights into the fields of economic philosophy methodology and theory in such a way as to open up new forms of investigation in economics and change the nature of economic reasoning. It is argued that the specific value of this approach is that it encourages attention to the capacities, structures and powers that explain observed event regularities in economic life...

For many the East European revolutions of 1989 and the disintegration of the USSR represented not only the overdue demise of Soviet-style communism, but also the obsolescence of all utopian ways of thinking. This text argues history has reached its end-state in the form of a victorious liberal-democratic capitalism and all attempts to imagine an alternative social order were now damned as both futile and quixotic. Beyond Utopia? rejects the belief that utopian thinking is a necessary condition for the development of alternative solutions to the problems of the present and thus for historical...

This volume rethinks the classic question of what, how and for whom economics is produced. Drawing from a range of perspectives, from postmodernism to critical realism, it casts light on the relationship between the producers and consumers of economic knowledge, both academic and non-academic. Challenging the ivory tower view of economists as disinterested producers of scientific knowledge against the unscientific economics of the lay person, the authors advance a vision of economic knowledge as irreducibly plural and dispersed, rather than as a unified accumulation of academic thought. It...