Development economists have superseded any necessity of using Arrow’s methodological individualism (MI) in focusing on cross-cultural, cross-national, or developmental economics. This study examines whether analysis of cross-cultural economic models might include a concept of economic generosity as a type of economic structuration that deviates from MI principles and is closer to what economist...

Today a convergence between the fields of anthropology and economics has re-emerged after decades during which the dictates of methodological individualism, as strikingly elucidated by Kenneth Arrow, had seriously limited and hampered effective scholarship in studies of economic and social development in developing countries. A new generation of development economists represented by Spolaori an...

i agree entirely with nir eyal’s perspective that denying treatment to obese patients is morally wrong. however, the reasons for this belief differ in some ways from eyal’s analysis. in this commentary, i will try to explain the similarities and differences in our perspectives. my primary claim is that the denial of treatment to obese patients is wrong principally because (i) it eschews a whole...

Individuals of Asian descent (including East Asians and South Asians) constitute one of the fastest growing segments of Canadian society, with the 2001 Canadian census reporting an increase of 27 percent since the 1996 census (Statistics Canada, 2001, 1996). In 2000, Asians represented nearly 10 percent of the total Canadian population. Thus it is not surprising that the demand for culturally r...

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...

There are several approaches in the social sciences that seek to provide causal explanations of social phenomena neither in terms of general causal laws nor in terms of case-specific narratives , but, at a middle level of generality, in terms of recurrent causal patterns or “mechanisms ” (Hedström and Swedberg 1998 ). Typically, these approaches invoke micro-mechanisms to explain macro-social p...

Eudaemonics is the study of the nature, causes, and conditions of human well-being. According to the ethical theory of eudaemonia, reaping satisfaction and fulfillment from life is not only a desirable end, but a moral responsibility. However, in modern society, many individuals struggle to meet this responsibility. Computational mechanisms could better enable individuals to achieve eudaemonia ...

By anachronistically attributing the origin and growth of popular education entirely to state intervention, standard histories of state education have failed to delimit sufficiently the state's role in educational development. This paper offers a theoretically based examination of the British state's intervention in the emerging market for popular education in England during the nineteenth cent...

We critically review the methodological practices of two research programs which are jointly called ‘neuroeconomics’. We defend the first of these, termed ‘neurocellular economics’ (NE) by Ross (2008), from an attack on its relevance by Gul and Pesendorfer (2008) (GP). This attack arbitrarily singles out some but not all processing variables as unimportant to economics, is insensitive to the re...