Daniel W. Bromley - Böcker

Anxiety and alienation threaten modern democracies. Political anger runs rampant in the United States, Britain voted to leave the European Union, authoritarian governments control several European countries, and millions of desperate migrants are streaming north out of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Many people blame stagnant household incomes and economic inequality. However, Possessive Individualism argues that the origins of world disorder are in the failure of the Enlightenment to anticipate the acquisitive individual as a creature of global capitalism.Daniel Bromley provides a fundamental critique of contemporary capitalism to explain why the world now finds itself in widespread disorder. Capitalism's basic flaw, he argues, is "possessive individualism." Glorification of the rational individual motivated by acquisitiveness prevents the adoption of necessary government programs that would ease the economic burden on beleaguered households. Meanwhile, possessive individualism enables managerial capitalism-controlled by the "one percent"-to suppress wages and salaries, embrace automation, and move jobs overseas. Capitalism is no longer an engine of improved livelihoods and social hope.Drawing on evolutionary institutional economics and political theory this book offers two remedies to the crisis of modern capitalism. Escape from the crisis requires that the isolated acquisitive individual rediscovers a sense of loyalty to others-as neighbors, as colleagues, and as participants in the shared social process of living. Escape also requires that the private firm be reimagined as a public trust in which the economic well-being of employees becomes a central part of its purpose. In the absence of these dual transformations, capitalism as we know it cannot endure.

Economics, Ethics, and Environmental Policy: Contested Choices offers a comprehensive analysis of the ethical problems associated with basing environmental policy on economic analysis, and ways to overcome these problems.

Economics, Ethics, and Environmental Policy: Contested Choices offers a comprehensive analysis of the ethical problems associated with basing environmental policy on economic analysis, and ways to overcome these problems.

In the standard analysis of economic institutions--which include social conventions, the working rules of an economy, and entitlement regimes (property relations)--economists invoke the same theories they use when analyzing individual behavior. In this profoundly innovative book, Daniel Bromley challenges these theories, arguing instead for "volitional pragmatism" as a plausible way of thinking about the evolution of economic institutions. Economies are always in the process of becoming. Here is a theory of how they become. Bromley argues that standard economic accounts see institutions as mere constraints on otherwise autonomous individual action. Some approaches to institutional economics--particularly the "new" institutional economics--suggest that economic institutions emerge spontaneously from the voluntary interaction of economic agents as they go about pursuing their best advantage.He suggests that this approach misses the central fact that economic institutions are the explicit and intended result of authoritative agents--legislators, judges, administrative officers, heads of states, village leaders--who volitionally decide upon working rules and entitlement regimes whose very purpose is to induce behaviors (and hence plausible outcomes) that constitute the sufficient reasons for the institutional arrangements they create. Bromley's approach avoids the prescriptive consequentialism of contemporary economics and asks, instead, that we see these emergent and evolving institutions as the reasons for the individual and aggregate behavior their very adoption anticipates. These hoped-for outcomes comprise sufficient reasons for new laws, judicial decrees, and administrative rulings, which then become instrumental to the realization of desired individual behaviors and thus aggregate outcomes.

This volume addresses a range of issues pertaining to the presence of risk in environmental policy. Topics covered include individual perceptions of risk, the valuation of environmental risks, the reporting and discussion of risks in the media, alternative government roles in addressing environmental risks, and examples of several public policy issues involving risks - biotechnology, hazardous waste facilities, and occupational hazards. These issues are viewed in the context of collective perceptions of entitlements that determine individual and group exposures to environmental risks. The book includes contributions from scholars in the field of risk and uncertainty across a number of disciplines including decision sciences, psychology, environmental economics and risk and uncertainty.

This book systematically deconstructs the pervasive and counter-productive discourse surrounding environmental policy. The authors argue that environmental policy problems are always framed such that conflict is inevitable—a particular project or policy must be accepted versus a specific environmental asset that must be protected.

This book systematically deconstructs the pervasive and counter-productive discourse surrounding environmental policy. The authors argue that environmental policy problems are always framed such that conflict is inevitable—a particular project or policy must be accepted versus a specific environmental asset that must be protected.

Based on 30 specially commissioned pieces by leading authorities in the field from the US and Europe, The Handbook of Environmental Economics represents the most comprehensive volume of environmental and natural resource economics published to date. It covers the full range of issues presently at the forefront of environmental policy including key aspects of such critical areas as pollution, sustainability and global environmental policy. It is essential reading for students, researchers and faculty as well as to policy makers and those with a wider interest in the issues.

This title contains the definitive contributions to the institutional foundations of environmental issues. It covers the foundations of welfare economics, externalities, market failure, and the central nexus of law and economics. Each contribution illustrates the fundamental importance of institutions - the legal scaffolding of an economy - to environmental problems. This understanding of the institutions of an economy then leads into extensive coverage of how to diagnose environmental problems and then to formulate policy solutions to deforestation, degraded fisheries and pastoral regimes, pollution, land-use conflicts, contested property rights, the tragedy of open-access natural resources and general development problems in sub-Saharan Africa.

Sustaining Development brings together, in one accessible volume, a selection of Daniel W. Bromley's path-breaking theoretical and empirical papers on economic development and environmental problems in the developing world.The book emphasizes the institutional dimensions of the environment and development problem, paying particular attention to the role of property regimes in understanding the causes and consequences of environmental degradation. Daniel W. Bromley, one of the world's leading environmental scholars, addresses the conceptual and empirical issues of alternative property rights, institutions and incentives as they relate to environmental resources. Drawing on empirical work, he sheds new light on the pressing problems faced by governments in the developing world as they struggle with the twin challenges of poverty and resource degradation. Throughout the book Professor Bromley pays careful attention to the policy implications and policy formulation of the issues under discussion.Sustaining Development will be welcomed by environmental and development economists as well as policymakers in both the industrialized and developing world.

We have undertaken this volume in the belief that there is now sufficient research completed on environmental risk to justify a retrospective assessment of what is known. Our authors and our intended audience are eclectic indeed. Environ­ mental risk assessment receives increasing attention in the media today. The populace is practically assaulted with stories, with anecdotes, and with conflicting evidence. It is our hope that these chapters will provide the reader with a comprehensive glimpse of a fast-growing field in public policy. No complete survey of the literature would be possible or meaningful. We offer here instead the integrative thoughts of some of the most respected analysts in the field. We believe that the coverage is coherent, the perspectives are illuminating, and the individual "treatments deserving of careful study. We are grateful to Warren Samuels of Michigan State University who is editor of the Kluwer series on recent economic thought. We are also grateful to our Kluwer editor, Zach Rolnik. Both have been gracious in their toleration of unconscionable delays. IX The Social Response to Environmental Risk Policy Formulation in an Age of Uncertainty 1 ENTITLEMENTS AND PUBLIC POLICY IN ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS Daniel W. Bromley* [all rights] are conditional and derivative ... they are derived from the end or purpose of the society in which they exist. They are conditional on being used to the attainment of that end.