Erik S. Reinert – författare

After his death Thorstein Veblen was hailed as ‘America’s Darwin and Marx’ and is normally portrayed as the perennial iconoclast. He severely criticised traditional economics and attempted to create an alternative approach based on a much more complex view of human beings. He is one of the most celebrated economists of our age and has been the inspiration for many books; the predatory version of capitalism we now again experience, the phenomenon of studying cultures of consumption and the darker sides of gilded ages can be traced back to Veblen. A conference in Veblen’s ancestral Norway marked the 150th anniversary of his birth. The aim of the conference was to consolidate Veblen scholarship and evaluate his relevance for the problems of today. This collection offers the results of that endeavour; it is a milestone of Vebleniana which assesses all the most salient aspects of his life and influence. Many of its contributors also push into uncharted territory, examining the man and his work from new and necessary perspectives hitherto ignored by scholarship.

The subject matter is approached from several complementary perspectives. From a historical angle, the Handbook charts the mercantilist and cameralist theories that emerged from the Renaissance and developed further during the Enlightenment. From a geographical angle, it includes chapters on African, Chinese, Indian, and Muslim approaches to economic development. Different schools are also explored and discussed including nineteenth century US development theory, Marxist, Schumpeterian, Latin American structuralism, regulation theory and world systems theories of development. In addition, the Handbook has chapters on important events and institutions including The League of Nations, The Havana Charter, and UNCTAD, as well as on particularly influential development economists. Contemporary topics such as the role of finance, feminism, the agrarian issue, and ecology and the environment are also covered in depth.

This comprehensive Handbook offers an unrivalled review and analysis of alternative and heterodox theories of economic development. It should be read by all serious scholars, teachers and students of development studies, and indeed anyone interested in alternatives to development orthodoxy.

Contributors: M. Alacevich, R. Arocena, J.G. Backhaus, E.B. Barbier, R. Bielschowsky, C.N. Biltoft, R. Boyer, L. Burlamaqui, C.P. Chandrasekhar, M. Cimoli, A.M. Daastøl, G. Derluguian, W. Drechsler, S. Endresen, M.S. Erkek, M.S. Floro, J. Ghosh, J.-C. Graz, J.P. Hochard, I. Ianos, P. Jha, A. Kadri, R. Kattel, J.A. Kregel, B.-Å. Lundvall, A.C. Macedo e Silva, J.A. Mathews, L. Mjøset, S. Moyo, R.R. Nelson, G. Omkarnath, E. Özveren, J.G. Palma, P. Patnaik, G. Porcile, E.S. Reinert, S.A. Reinert, P.R. Rössner, A. Saltelli, M. Shafaeddin, A. Singh, I.G. Shivji, J. Sutz, Y. Tandon, E. Thurbon, F. Tregenna, H.S. Ünal, L. Weiss, T. Xu, P. Yeros, X. Zhao

Advancing experience-based theories in the debate of economic development, this Modern Guide provides a qualitative, holistic and nuanced understanding of economic inequality by uniquely combining explanations from a large number of academic fields. It covers a wide array of issues influencing wealth and poverty, technological innovation, ecology and sustainability, financialization, population, gender and geography, and considers the dynamics of cumulative causations created by the interplay between these factors. By looking at falling real wages, world income distribution, and refugees and migrants in poorer regions, it ultimately explains why wealth and poverty are so unevenly distributed globally.

The cutting-edge discussions in this Modern Guide will prove invaluable for students and scholars from a range of disciplines including economics and development studies. In today’s world of ‘single-issue management’, the alternative theories of mutual influence in this book will prove useful to policy makers working across a variety of economic fields.

The expert contributors gathered here approach underdevelopment and inequality from different evolutionary perspectives. It is argued that the Schumpeterian processes of ''creative destruction'' may take the form of wealth creation in one part of the globe and wealth destruction in another. Case studies explore and analyse the successful 19th century policies that allowed Germany and the United States to catch up with the UK and these are contrasted with two other case studies exploring the deindustrialization and falling real wages in Peru and Mongolia during the 1990s. The case studies and thematic papers together explore, identify and explain the mechanisms which cause economic inequality. Some papers point to why the present form of globalization increases poverty in many Third World nations.

Members of the anti-globalization movement will find the explanations given in this book insightful, as will employees of international organizations due to the important policy messages. The theoretical interest within the book will appeal to development economists and evolutionary economists, and policymakers and politicians will find the explanations of the present failure of many small nations in the periphery invaluable.

This volume introduces two unique and hitherto largely unknown contributions to the making of modern economic knowledge and makes them available internationally for the first time in full English translation. The messages of the books are seemingly contradictory, one focuses on the role of individual interests and the other on the role of government., but together they form two important pillars for the economics profession: self-interest and industrial policy.

- Written in 1597 Barthélemy de Laffemas’ General regulation for the establishment of manufactures (originally in French: Reiglement général pour dresser les manufactures) is one of the earliest voices in the history of political economy emphasizing the necessity of manufacturing and large-scale industry as the source of the wealth of nations.

Located somewhat at the cross-roads between medieval Scholasticism and early mercantilism the book presents a basic version of the infant industry argument and European standard model of economic development which evolved into the works of Enlightenment thinkers such as Colbert and Friedrich List and of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial policy in all the countries that followed England’s path to industrialization, including the post-WW II Marshall Plan.  - Leonhard Fronsperger’s On the praise of self-interest (German original: Von dem Lob deß Eigen Nutzen, 1564) is the first documented instance of the ‘Mandeville paradox’, a theorem in modern economics usually associated with much later writings including Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705/14), and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776).