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There is a story that has been told by both the physicist Stephen Hawking and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. They report that a famous scientist was lecturing on the structure [...]

It is a great honour to deliver the third annual Wheelwright lecture, and I am deeply grateful to the faculty, students, and alumnae of the Political Economy Department at the [...]

The business community in the United States forged an alliance with the religious Right in 1970s and ever since then there is a divergence in the trajectories of market societies between the United States and Western Europe. A neo-Polanyian theoretical framework is suggested to understand the dynamics within contemporary market societies because it effectively identifies the key mechanisms that drive the developmental trajectories of contemporary market societies.

As dynamic collaborations between networks of specialists have become more central to developing cutting‐edge innovations, designing and sustaining innovation policies that foster them has become an increasingly central concern. This article reviews the characteristics of the "developmental network" or "neo‐developmental" states that have been shown to foster innovations at the technological horizon. It then analyzes the US case to suggest why some developmental network approaches to governance have proven relatively durable, while others have not. We conclude with a discussion of what can – and cannot – be learned from the US case, and suggest the importance of comparative work on the sustainability of effective innovation‐centered approaches to governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. economy has undergone a major transformation over the past quarter century. This transformation has the potential to improve living standards and humanize working conditions as advanced technologies increase [...]

This paper challenges the conventional belief that household saving in the U.S. declined during the Reagan Years. The paper proposes a definition of the household financial surplus that is available for use by corporations and the public sector. It shows how existing measures of household saving diverge from this definition, and it proposes alternative estimates of the trend of this household financial surplus in the 1980s. These alternative estimates show no downward trend, and in most years, the available supply of funds has exceeded business and government demands., The variable components of household saving during the Reagan administration was presented. Factors such as capital gains and capital consumptions, which are not considered by the traditional approaches in measuring household savings, are taken into account as well as other factors including financing for household extensions, capital gains and losses, social security surplus and public pension funds. It was conluded that household savings did not decline during the Reagan administration.

President Bill Clinton's plans of federal investment in infrastructure, training, and education, though better than its predecessors, needs institutional reforms if it is to give greater latitude to democracy, equality, personal liberty, and environmental protection. The possible areas of institutional reform to be integrated with the economy are reform in the election process, in banks and corporate bodies, and in the use of capital.

Capital could be made more readily available by reforming the rules governing corporations, preventing capital flight to foreign countries and legislating against the misdirection or withholding of capital for political ends. The task is to reduce the power of those who hold assets without creating a huge state apparatus. To ensure productivity in corporations owned by employees, management decisions will have to be institutionalized. Profits could then be redistributed through taxation.