Nancy L. Schwartz - Böcker

Americans conceive of the process of political representation as operating like a "transmission belt." Elections convey citizens' preferences unchanged into the legislative assembly and thereby allow them to participate, through their representatives, in the political affairs of the nation. This conception stands firmly in the tradition of liberal thought, as does much theory about political representation. In that tradition, government is defined primarily in terms of power, and elections are little more than the means by which that power is transferred from the people to their representatives. In The Blue Guitar (the title alludes to a poem by Wallace Stevens), Nancy L. Schwartz offers a radically new understanding of representation. As she sees it, representatives should be—and, in the past, have been—more than mere delegates or trustees of individual desires and interests and the process of representation more than the appropriation of power and control. Ideally, representation should transform both representative and citizen. Representatives should be caretakers of the community, not the watchdogs of special interest groups or individuals. Citizens in turn should feel increased personal responsibility for the whole that membership in the community entails. Moreover, representatives should serve as founders of their constituencies, constituting communities whose members value citizenship as an end in itself. In her analysis, Schwartz canvasses the political experience of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance city-states to discover the communitarian meaning of citizenship, and she draws on classical political theory from Plato to Rousseau and Hegel, on the political sociology of Marx and Weber, and on such contemporary theorists as Arendt and Pitkin. Schwartz also enters the controversy over whether local, state, and national legislators should be selected by district or at-large elections. After examining a set of key Supreme Court cases on voting rights and district elections, she proposes that representatives come from single-member geographic districts.

Technical advance requires resources and is motivated by the quest for profits; therefore, the rate and direction of advance is determined by the economic system. Recognition of this fact has focused attention on the performance of the market economy in the allocation of resources to technical advance, and the consequent body of research is surveyed and synthesised in this book. The theories of market structure and innovation proposed by Schumpeter, Galbraith, Arrow, Schmookler, Scherer, Mansfield, Phillips, Barzel, Kamien and Schwartz, Loury, Nelson and Winter, Grabowski, Dasgupta and Stiglitz, and others are presented in an integrated form. These theories deal with the nature of competition, the incentives to innovate and the pace of innovative activity under different market structures, and the existence of a market structure that yields the most rapid rate of innovation. In addition, the findings of seventy empirical studies dealing with various facets of the microeconomics of technical innovation are presented. The book is designed to be accessible to economists working in a variety of situations - in universities, business and government - and who are concerned with questions of technical innovation. It is also suitable for senior-level undergraduates and first year graduate students approaching the subject in a comprehensive way for the first time.

'Leading economists presenting fundamentally important issues in economic theory' is the theme of the Nancy Schwartz lectures series held annually at the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management of Northwestern University. Reporting on lectures delivered in the years 1983 through 1997, this collection of essays discusses economic behavior at the individual and group level and the implications to the performance of economic systems. Using non-technical language, the speakers present theoretical, experimental, and empirical analysis of decision making under uncertainty and under full and bounded rationality, the influence of economic incentives and habits, and the effects of learning and evolution on dynamic choice. Perfect competition, economic development, social insurance and social mobility, and negotiation and economic survival, are major economic subjects analyzed through our understanding of economic behavior.

'Leading economists presenting fundamentally important issues in economic theory' is the theme of the Nancy Schwartz lectures series held annually at the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management of Northwestern University. Reporting on lectures delivered in the years 1983 through 1997, this collection of essays discusses economic behavior at the individual and group level and the implications to the performance of economic systems. Using non-technical language, the speakers present theoretical, experimental, and empirical analysis of decision making under uncertainty and under full and bounded rationality, the influence of economic incentives and habits, and the effects of learning and evolution on dynamic choice. Perfect competition, economic development, social insurance and social mobility, and negotiation and economic survival, are major economic subjects analyzed through our understanding of economic behavior.

Inland Waterway Transportation explores how tools of economic analysis can improve the efficiency of both public and private investment in inland waterway transportation. Originally published in 1969, this study investigates how waterway transportation has been affected by public operating policy, costs and charges for the use of waterways in the United States as well as the impact of relationships central to waterway policy and individual firms such as the effect of the waterway environment on a firm’s efficiency. This title will be of interest to students of Environmental Studies and professionals.