"Geoff Hodgson's confident and creative reworking of critical perspectives in economics continues." --Professor Ian Gough, University of Bath
"It is very well written. . . . It deserves to be a great success and I am confident that it will be one." --Professor Ugo Pagano, University of Siena, Italy
"This is a brilliant, very ambitious and sensible work. It is more a work of diagnosis and critique than of prescription and prognosis, but it does focus on key elements of any future economy: diversity, learning, the structure and culture of governance and the forms of participatory democracy. . . . The work further enhances the reputation of Hodgson as the leading institutionalist theorist of the present day. More important, it should stimulate further work by others." --Warren Samuels, Michigan State University
"This book is exceedingly pertinent to current economic discourse. It is a most creative and persuasive contribution, adding important and new insights both in particular and in general, and exhibiting a superior level of professional scholarship, awareness and capacity." --Marc Tool, California State University, Sacramento
Amazon.com: seamus@accessone.com from seattle, wa , February 11,
1999
Excellent and optimistic view of the future of economic life
Once again, Hodgson asks us to think BOLDLY and with confidence about
our post cold-war economic future. The book does not romanticize in the
least; rather it deepens the challenge he laid at the feet of academic
orthodoxy and policy elites in western democracies in "Economics and Evolution".
His view of the relation of scientific and technological knowledge and
the possibilites they hold for transforming microeconomic transactions
both within and between firms and his call for a dynamic reconfiguration
of property rights so as to allocate resources in an ecologically sustainable
and democratically humane manner, lay down a huge gauntlet for those who
wish to maintain the status quo. Indeed he challenges us all to "to develop
the capacity to unlearn, and learn anew" and see this process as the key
to changing our core economic assumptions to embrace the evolutionary world
we all inhabit. Capitalism is not the end of history, Hodgson says, and
our persistent positing of socialism as it's "opposite" has outlived it's
usefulnesss and blinds us to forms of economic organization which are more
democratic, egalitarian and sustainable than either have ever been.