What is money? Where does it come from? Who makes it? And how can we understand the current state of our economy as a crisis of money itself?In Making Money, Ole Bjerg turns these questions into a matter of philosophical rather than economic analysis. Applying the thinking of Slavoj Zizek and other scholars to mainstream economic literature, Bjerg provides a radical new way of looking at the mysterious stuff we use to buy things. It is a theory unfolded in reflections on t...

What does it mean to be a man? While this is a key question for at least half the population of the world, Ole Bjerg argues that it has been largely forgotten by philosophy. In his groundbreaking new book, he mobilizes ideas from Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt to coin the notion of Being-Man as an alternative to the conventional talk about gender and identity. This leads into an exploration of love, sex, work, art, truth, fatherhood, women, and other existential issues confronting men ...

Poker is an extraordinary worldwide phenomenon with major social, cultural, and political implications, and Poker: The Parody of Capitalism investigates the game of poker as a cultural expression of significance not unlike art, literature, film, or music. Tracing the history of poker and comparing the evolution of the game to the development of capitalism, Ole Bjerg complicates prevalent notions of “casino capitalism” and correspondingly facile and simplistic comparisons of late c...

Over the course of the last ten years the issue of debt has become a serious problem that threatens to destroy the global socio-economic system and ruin the everyday lives of millions of people. This collection brings together a range of perspectives of key thinkers on debt to provide a sociological analysis focused upon the social, political, economic, and cultural meanings of indebtedness.The contributors to the book consider both the lived experience of debt and the more abstrac...

Parallax of Growth explores the ideas of economy and ecology and the factors that have put them on a collision course. Bjerg argues that our current mode of economic organization is characterized by an inherent �debt drive�, whereby the creation of money through the issuance of commercial bank credit has locked our economy into a vicious circle of forced growth and increasing debt.Parallax of Growth is not a catalogue of solutions to the ecological or the economic...

Political Theory has been transformed in the last thirty years by the introduction of methods of analysis imported from mathematics and economics. Modern students of the subject need to know something about Rational Choice Theory, Game Theory, and Collective Choice Theory if they are to be able to master contemporary discussions. This little book, by well-known philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, lays out the elements of these technical subjects in a precise fashion that achieves a sprightly a...

This monograph critically reviews and updates real estate valuation theory, which is based on neoclassical economics, in light of developments in heterodox economic theory. Building on a comprehensive historical account of the evolution of value theory, the book uses new institutional economics theory and critical realism as lenses through which problems in standard valuation theory and practice are expatiated, and as the foundation for an alternative theory. The new theory is employed to ...

This is a history of economic thought from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes - but it is a history with a difference. Firstly, it is a history of economic theory, not of economic doctrines, that is, it is consistently focused on theoretical analysis, undiluted by entertaining historical digressions or biological colouring. Secondly, it includes detailed Reader's Guides to nine of the major texts of economics, namely the works of Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Marshall, Wickstead, Wicksell, Wa...

This book is an examination of the nature of economic explanation. The opening chapters introduce current thinking in the philosophy of science and review the literature on methodology. Professor Blaug then turns to the troublesome question of the logical status of welfare economics, giving the reader an understanding of the outstanding issues in the methodology of economics. This is followed by a series of case studies of leading economic controversies, which shows how controversies in ec...

The new economy, under the impetus of the ever-widening outreach of the Internet, is undergoing a transition. In the meantime, theres also been a shift to the information paradigm, with its emphasis on lack of foresight. These processes have almost completely supplanted the concept of market that was once one of the most cardinal features of conventional economic theory.In Toward a General Theory of Exchange: Strategic Decisions and Complexity, author Dr. Javaid R. Khwaja ...

In the midst of one of the most serious financial upheavals since the Great Depression, George Soros, the legendary financier and philanthropist, writes about the origins of the crisis and proposes a set of policies that should be adopted to confront it. Soros, whose breadth of experience in financial markets is unrivaled, places the crisis in the context of his decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity. ...

In the midst of the most serious financial upheaval since the Great Depression, legendary financier George Soros explores the origins of the crisis and its implications for the future. Soros, whose breadth of experience in financial markets is unrivaled, places the current crisis in the context of decades of study of how individuals and institutions handle the boom and bust cycles that now dominate global economic activity. "This is the worst financial crisis since the 1930s," writes Soros...