Ecological economics arose in the final decades of the 20th century out of concerns for environmental protection and economic sustainability. It was largely a response to a real or perceived lack of physical and biological underpinnings in neoclassical economics. It was also intended to infuse economics with a moral philosophy, in contrast with the amoral implications of neoclassical models por...

Is ecological economics mainly a natural science or a social science? Ecologists may start from a natural science perspective emphasizing positivism and value-neutrality as their theory of science. When looking for similarly inclined scholars in the social sciences they will find friends among neoclassical economists. But theory of science is not limited to positivism and economics is much more...

51 WALTER BLOCK is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed chair in economics, WILLIAM BARNETT II is associate professor of economics, and STUART WOOD is associate professor of economics and finance at Loyola University, New Orleans. Block would like to thank David Kennedy, Tony Sullivan, and the Board of Directors of the Earhart Foundation for financial support used to write this paper. An...

This paper investigates whether since the 1980s neoclassical economics has been in the process of being supplanted as the dominant research programme in economics by a collection of competing research approaches which share relatively little in common with each other or with neoclassical economics. A shortlist of the new approaches in recent economics includes game theory, experimental economic...

Many transition policies, based on neoclassical economics, failed in Eastern Europe, Former Soviet Union, and China. The paper argues that the failure is due to the viability assumption of the neoclassical economics. The neoclassical economics implicitly assumes a firm to be able to earn a socially acceptable profit in an open, competitive market if the firm has a normal management. However, ma...