Canada was under no obligation to engage in homesteading, nor did it face the types of threats to its sovereignty as the United States. And yet Canada quickly copied most of the US homesteading system because it still required a rushed occupation of its prairie provinces. Not only is the Canadian situation broadly consistent with the property rights hypothesis, but the special details of the Canadian system provide an additional out-of-sample test.

I met Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) twice at Stanford University, the place where he lived, taught, and researched for most of his life. The first meeting was on his invitation to join him for lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club to decide whether he would schedule a meeting with me later to do the actual interview. Being a warm day under the California sun and given that he was already in his nineties, I expected Arrow to be accompanied by his wife or some other relative who would give him a ride to the club and pick him up afterward. This quickly turned out to be a complete misconception. Arrow arrived in his silver Toyota Camry all by himself and dressed up with coat and tie; he quickly entered the club and was greeted by name by almost everyone working there – including the waiters and the young woman stacking white plates next to the salad bar. He had reserved a quiet table in the back of this bright and large restaurant room that he also preferred for his weekly lunches with Pat Suppes, which they apparently have held every Monday for many years. Almost two hours later, when we finished our ice cream and said goodbye, he added, to my relief, that he would be willing to meet again at his office to conduct the interview the next week. He sprinted to his car and drove away. So, lunch had gone well; I had survived the test. Next time, we met in his office at Stanford’s sandstone-colored Landau Economics Building. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his office was literally packed with books, files, and papers. At the same time, given the elegance and orderliness of Arrow’s mathematical abstractions, there was something thrilling and even life-affirming in seeing that he kept an office in such an improvisational state – a testament to his unfiltered and teeming curiosity. After removing and stacking even more books spanning topics from environmental economics to the history of economics – the desk had disappeared under piles of notes and annotated drafts – two chairs suddenly emerged somewhere in the middle of the room. Arrow sat down, almost disappearing between these mountains of sources he had engaged with over the years.

This chapter argues that a more adequate understanding of unemployment can be developed by building on Marx and Keynes. Both Marx and Keynes already theorise unemployment, but a better theory can be developed through a critical, Marxist appropriation of Keynesian insights. The first section identifies Marxist arguments around so-called ‘primitive accumulation’ and how the establishment of a ‘reserve army’ of labour is functional for capitalism. Suggesting that such functional arguments are useful but insufficient, the chapter accordingly continues by identify important arguments in Marx and Keynes by which agents’ motivations can be understood to reproduce unemployment. The second section identifies Marx’s depiction of imperatives to accumulate, which create alternative processes of labour recruitment and displacement, and the third section identifies how Keynes’s model of unemployment equilibrium points to situations in which entrepreneurs rationally fail to increase employment. Keynes’s model provides a potentially important ‘snap-shot’ of what need to be reconceived as dynamic and changing processes. The fourth section accordingly develops claims made by both Marx and Keynes that capital’s adjustments are uneven and hence conducive to reproducing unemployment. There are multidimensional, sectoral, temporal and spatial processes of uneven development which mean there are at most only a series of moving equilibria. The fifth section turns to states and economic policy, reiterating that states can and do act, pursuing more or less effective employment policies, and that unemployment remains a contested political achievement.

Describes Meade’s involvement in economic policy debates during the 1960s.

Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to privatize infrastructure construction through the public-private partnership (PPP) market, the majority of investors in this sector are still state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, the government that contracts for the infrastructure construction and service usually holds a significant proportion of shares in PPP projects. This chapter explains this phenomenon using the legal theory of SOEs. It finds that, in practice, the government typically retains the power to terminate PPP projects in the public interest when new circumstances arise, while the courts offer limited protection to private investors. As a result, private investors may be deterred from investing due to concerns about government opportunism. Furthermore, it observes that a judicial reform enhancing the independence of judges is associated with an increase in the proportion of shares held by private investors and a decline in shares held by SOEs and local governments. These findings suggest that a robust legal system promotes the extent of privatization by boosting the confidence of private investors.

This chapter reviews literature on game-theoretic analysis of voting. Both cooperative and noncooperative concepts are used to answer questions, such as, How do candidates or parties propose alternatives to voters in strategic interactions? Why do voters vote? What are the implications of asymmetric information for candidates’ and voters’ incentives? Do prevoting deliberations improve information sharing? If so, through what type of rules? Sophisticated voters may act strategically, and therefore it matters whether one’s choices are pivotal. In the presence of private information, the mechanism design approach is highly appropriate, as voters’ incentives can be heavily influenced by the institutional settings that determine how votes are transformed to election outcomes. The analysis of information aggregation in large-scale elections brings important insights to our understanding of representative democracy. Due to the nonexistence of a core and the cyclical structure of pairwise comparison, there may be a fundamental difficulty in the preference aggregation by majoritarian democracy in large-scale elections. The chapter concludes with questions for future research: How does the limitation of preference/information aggregation in large-scale elections affect the stability of representative democracy? What determines the robustness of democratic norms? What is the role of the media in the presence of information asymmetry, particularly in ideological battles where information filtering can play an exacerbating role?

One relatively recent development related to the growth of practical market design is the need to deal with big strategy sets that may involve parts of the economic environment beyond the boundaries of the individual marketplaces. A related matter is that in naturally occurring environments, strategies may be discovered in the course of play. Discovering new strategies is very much like inventing new technology, or new game theory: all of these things can change the game in important ways. These issues blur the borders of what historically were regarded as separate domains of game theory, namely the theories of cooperative and non-cooperative games.

This chapter introduces economics as Keynes encountered it and then how his own work before the General Theory begins to break from orthodoxy. First, it discusses the classics as they were understood by Marx, for whom ‘classics’ was a qualified term of approval, as distinct from the ‘vulgar’ school of mere apologists. It briefly identifies what was lost from this tradition in the later marginalist revolution in terms of its treatment of economic aggregates and economic interrelation, which Keynes substantially recovers, and in terms of the classics’ focus on production and growth, in which Keynes has little interest. This first section then discusses the beliefs which Keynes criticised, the adherence to the quantity theory of money and Say’s Law. The second section introduces Jevons’s and Marshall’s marginalism, their vision of an exchange economy, the concepts of utility and disutility, and their attitude to money, production and labour. Keynes has a somewhat ambivalent relationship: both in and against this tradition. There is a sense in which he can point out its failings precisely through a more careful application of its principles. The third section discusses Keynes’s own early work, particularly the Tract on Monetary Reform and the Treatise on Money. Keynes would retrospectively see himself as having still been orthodox when he wrote these earlier books, but they anticipate important later themes and the Treatise, in particular, sometimes makes more radical departures, and attempts a more dynamic analysis, than would the General Theory.