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This paper undertakes an interdisciplinary analysis of the global coronavirus crisis of 2020-2021, its immediate aftermath and lessons learned, through the use of some core principles of institutional and evolutionary political economy. The principle of historical specificity and evolution (linked to uneven development) examines the background to the emergence of the crisis, plus its evolution and transformation through time. The principle of heterogeneous groups and agents scrutinizes the crisis through the various groups and individuals associated with gender, class, ethnicity, age and species. The principles of circular and cumulative causation (CCC) and contradiction investigate the multiple factors responsible for the crisis and how they interact in determining the depth and recovery from the crisis. The principle of uncertainty illustrates the changing expectations underlying the business climate and consumer confidence affecting socioeconomic performance, as well as current and future policies associated with health, regulation, budgets and money. A conclusion follows.

This article critically evaluates the forms of love capital being accumulated by people in capitalist economies, through the lens of some of the core general principles of heterodox political economy (HPE). We start by situating love historically in the neoliberal culture and then examine the six main love styles as well as the five critical factors through the process of circular and cumulative causation. We then scrutinise the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism involving the nurturance gap, disembedded economy and freedom constraint which inhibit the generation of holistic love capital. The path dependent nature of love is then linked to relational phases and instabilities, especially involving serial monogamy in the United States. Some of the core principles of HPE provide a vantage point for scrutinising the problems involved in stimulating holistic love capital in the contemporary environment.

This paper outlines a long-term policy and institutional framework for reducing the intensity of recessions, debt crises and financial instabilities, especially for the Core nations and areas that bore the brunt of the anomalies during 2008-2013. We argue that institutional changes need to be systemic, amounting to the construction of a new social structure of accumulation (SSA) or mode of regulation (MOR), which we call an SSA of embedded communitarian liberalism. Five institutional spheres are introduced which are in need of systemic change, due to the entrenched contradictions and problems which the current set of institutions generate. These involve firstly institutions within the world-system of finance and production; secondly relating to finance versus industry; thirdly capital versus labor; fourthly state systems of production; and fifthly the interlinking of state, community and ecology.

This article explores the link between trust and law through the prism of the mafia phenomenon. Mafias spread in a context of "endogenous mistrust" and manage to privatize law by imposing an unwritten system of rules in their territory. This alternative system of law has consequences in terms of distorted access to economic opportunities for non-Mafiosi as it is oriented in favor of its affiliates and external backers. It also leads to the emergence of negative social capital benefiting Mafiosi but unable to create relationships based on genuine trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural Economics and Theory: The Evolutionary Economics of David Hamilton, edited by David Hamilton, Glen Atkinson, William Dugger and William Waller. New York: Routledge, 2011. Hardcover: ISBN 978-0-415-49091-7, $155.00, 272 [...]