https://www.zef.de/fileadmin/downloads/2015_Gomez-Baggethun_Muradian_EcoEco.pdf

In markets we trust? Setting the boundaries of Market-Based Instruments in ecosystem services governance

Does political ideology influence economic research? We rely upon purely inductive methods in natural language processing and machine learning to examine patterns of implicit political ideology in economic articles. Using observed political behavior of economists and the phrases from their academic articles, we construct a high-dimensional predictor of political ideology by article, economist, school, and journal. In addition to field, journal, and editor ideology, we look at the correlation of author ideology with magnitudes of reported policy relevant elasticities. Overall our results suggest that there is substantial sorting by ideology into fields, departments, and methodologies, and that political ideology influences the results of economic research.

/pdf/political-language-in-economics-5fgyiclca4.pdf

Political Language in Economics

In the social sciences, there are two things one can do with a theory and the aspect of reality it is meant to explain: one can use the theory to improve reality2, or one can use reality to improve the theory. The purpose of the present thesis is very much to do the latter. The empirical problem concerns the proper scope of government3, which we will use to examine the new
institutional economics (hereafter: NIE) as it was developed starting with the work of Ronald Coase.4 For reasons that will be explained below, we will focus particularly on the history of the railway industry in Western Europe.

https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/6066706/thesis_M_Holterman.pdf

The transaction costs of semi-public institutions : railway history as a challenge for coase

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critique the philosophical underpinnings of the growing field of Islamic economics.Design/methodology/approach – A critical and comparative review of Islamic economics texts written by key proponents during the last eight decades is undertaken. The origins of this nascent science are traced and factors that gave impetus to its development examined. The different characterisations of the discipline as it has developed within the broader socio‐political context are contrasted.Findings – The proponents of Islamic economics have had little success in shaping a distinctive paradigm for their discipline, beyond arguing that it is underpinned by a strong moral ethic. By and large, its epistemological roots have remained firmly within the framework of rationalism/empiricism and methodological individualism. Consequently, Islamic economics has not been able to shed its neoclassical moorings, the very paradigm it originally set out to replace. Several of the contradictions ...

/pdf/islamic-economics-still-in-search-of-an-identity-3zmvga8p9e.pdf

Islamic economics: still in search of an identity

sense knowledge we have of our lives consists largely of misunderstanding. In part, this occurs because of simple ignorance. As C. Wright Mills argued, people have direct awareness only of the private orbits in which their daily lives revolve, and lack the sociological imagination required to grasp the &dquo;intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history.&dquo; But beyond ignorance we confront deception. Psychoanalysis, for example, teaches that we have but a surface knowledge of our own motives, and that we intentionally limit this knowledge for fear of discovering what lies below. The external world also eludes us. There, history teaches that political power endeavors to conceal its nature behind ideological smokescreensand, as we saw again in the Vietnam era, behind outright lies. The success of social science can be measured by the extent to which it expands the boundaries between our private orbits of direct experi-

/pdf/the-caravan-rolls-on-forty-years-of-social-problem-research-uu33cxx484.pdf

William O. Romine

Papers

Science and ideology

Ion channels and neurotransmitters