There is a schism within economics between the neoclassical and behavioral schools. A primary cause of the behavioral ascent is the experimental evidence of deviations between actual behavior and the neoclassical prediction of behavior. While behavioral scholars have documented these “anomalies,” they have made little progress explaining the origin of such behavior. This paper proposes a biolog...

The development of the permanent income/life cycle consumption hypothesis was a key blow to Keynesian and Kaleckian economics, and, according to George Akerlof, it “set the agenda” for modern neoclassical macroeconomics. This paper focuses on the relationship of housing wealth to neoclassical consumption theory, and in particular, the degree to which homes can be treated collectively with other...

In their recent analysis of the alleged decay in modern economics, Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis claim to find its source and origin in the ‘marginal revolution’ of the 1870s. They argue that this development led to ‘methodological individualism’ and the detachment of economics from society and history. I contest their account of the marginal revolution and of the role of Alfred Marshall amon...

The relation between Thermodynamics and Economics is a paramount issue in Ecological Economics. Two different levels can be distinguished when discussing it: formal and substantive. At the formal level, a mathematical framework is used to describe both thermodynamic and economic systems. At the substantive level, thermodynamic laws are applied to economic processes. In Ecological Economics, the...

In recent years, interest in the role of institutions in economic society has increased and economists have been forced to incorporate them into economic analysis. The institutional perspective has not only brought new challenges for economics, but also led to a re-evaluation, redefinition, and transformation of the discipline itself. It would not be an overstatement to say that the method by w...

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...

Bayesian rationality is the paradigm of rational behavior in neoclassical economics. An economic agent is deemed rational when she maximizes her subjective expected utility and consistently revises her beliefs according to Bayes's rule. The paper raises the question of how, when and why this characterization of rationality came to be endorsed by mainstream economists. Though no definitive answe...