Real Life Economics

The past fifty years have witnessed the triumph of an industrial development that has engendered great social and environmental costs. Conventional economics has too often either ignored these costs or failed to analyse them appropriately. This book constructs a framework within which the wider impacts of economic activity can be both understood and ameliorated. The framework places its emphasis on an in-depth understanding of real-life processes rather than on mathematical formalism, sressing the independence of the economy with the social, ecological and ethical dimensions of human life.

Contributors: Tony Lawson, University of Cambridge; Alejandro Sanz de Santamaria, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia; Wolfgang Sachs, Institute for Cultural Studies, Essen; Geoffrey Hodgson, Polytechnic of Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Amitai Etzioni, George Washington University, Washington DC; John Oliver Wilson, University of California; Roefie Hueting, Central Bureau of Statistics, The Hague; David Pearce, University College, London; Richard Norgaard, University of California; Mark Lutz, University of Maine; Jane Wheelock, Sunderland Polytechnic; Orio Giarini, Graduate Institute of European Studies, Geneva; Anisur Rahman, International Labour Office, Geneva; Mario Kamenetzky, World Bank (retired); Manfred Max-Neef, Development Alternatives Centre, Santiago; Robert Chambers, University of Sussex; Oyvind Lone, Ministry of the Environment, Oslo; Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont, Free University of Brussels; Ian Miles, University of Sussex; Peter Soderbaum, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; Mitchel Abolafia, Cornell University, USA; Nicole Biggart, University of California; Paul Ekins, Birkbeck College, London; Paul Streeten, Boston University, USA; Geoffrey Mulgan, Polytechnic of Central London; Hilary Wainwright, University of Manchester; Severyn Bruyn, Boston College, USA

Paul Ekins, Manfred Max-Neef