The emergence of high-performance computers and sophisticated software tech nology has led to significant advances in the development and application of operations research. In turn, the growing complexity of operations research models has posed an increasing challenge to computational methodology and computer technology. This volume focuses on recent advances in the fields of Computer Science and Operations Research, on the impact of technologi cal innovation on these disciplines, and on the close interaction between them. The papers cover many relevant topics: computational probability;...

1 Warren J. Samuels The study of economics as discourse requires a perspective that focuses on the relationships among knowledge (or truth), discourse (or lan guage), and meaning. Central to this task is the recognition that the con duct of economic analysis uses words and that words embody meanings that are applied to the object of study, but do not necessarily derive from that object although they define that object for us. Knowledge Economists are engaged in efforts to understand and explain the econ omy. In the pursuit of this knowledge they have attempted to make coherent the respect(s)...

This book began when a letter reached my desk in November 1989. Written by Warren Samuels, professor of economics at Michigan State University and editor for Kluwer Academic Publishers, the letter reviewed the philosophy behind Kluwer's series on recent economic thought and accordingly expressed interest in the controversies that surround con temporary topics in the discipline. It graciously went on to invite me to organize, consonant with that philosophy, a volume of chapters on saving. Soon thereafter I learned that the chapters were to be original compositions. I also learned that I would...

In the last decade the techniques of social choice theory, game theory and positive political theory have been combined in interesting ways so as to pro vide a common framework for analyzing the behavior of a developed political economy. Social choice theory itself grew out of the innovative attempts by Ken neth Arrow (1951) and Duncan Black (1948, 1958) to extend the range of economic theory in order to deal with collective decision-making over public goods. Later work, by William Baumol (1952), and James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock (1962), focussed on providing an "economic" interpretation...

William O. Thweatt This book is the second in three surveys of the literature in the history of economic thought in the Kluwer Recent Economic Thought series. The first book, covering the pre-classical literature, has already been published; a third, on the neo-c1assical period, is planned for 1988. This middle book surveys the writings on classical political economy for the past 30 years, or roughly since the publication of Joseph Schumpeter's 1954 monumental History of Economic Analysis. Shortly after World War II, the American Economic Association spon sored a Survey of Contemporary...

People live by ideas which help them to make sense of their experiences. Yet different people live by different ideas. Without an attempt to communicate and comprehend, they would at best be unable to share, at worst be obliged to fight. This book is concerned with communicating and comprehending. It takes the view that ideas matter and that a dialogue with alternative worldviews is a civilised exercise in tolerance.
Economic Thought and Political Theory, concentrates on the ideas of Plato, Steuart, Mill, Schumpeter, Hayek, Buchanan, the Catholic social economists and the...

Long before policy analysis emerged as a separate profession with its own graduate schools, economists offered advice about government policies. Positive economics provides the tools for predicting the impacts of prop osed policies; normative economics, especially welfare theory, offers a framework for valuing the impacts of policies in terms of efficiency and simple notions of equity. With the expansion of economic theory into ever wider fields of human behavior, it is no wonder that economists have prominence as teachers and practitioners of policy analysis. Indeed, many economists see...

Over the past two decades we have witnessed something of a revolution in the natural sciences as thermodynamic thinking evolved from an equilibrium, or 'classical', perspective, to a nonequilibrium, or 'self organisational' one. In this transition, thermodynamics has been applied in new ways and in new fields of inquiry. Chemical and biological (evolutionary) processes have been analysed, increasingly, in non equilibrium thermodynamical terms. Economics has, since the late 19th century, relied heavily upon metaphors and analogies derived from the natural sciences - mechanical analogies cast...