Critique Of Market Research Articles

Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias

Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina: A Critique of Market and State Utopias

Rationality What? Misconceptions of Neoclassical and Behavioral Economics

Both behavioral and neoclassical economists maintain a concept of strict rationality that is exceptionally narrow. Neoclassicists use it as a tool both to explain what agents actually do and as a prescriptive framework. Behavioralists do not believe it adequately explains actual behavior but that it is still a good prescriptive framework. My view is that whatever the technical virtues of strict, narrow rationality in providing a foundation for useful economics constructs, it is completely inadequate as a prescriptive standard. The appropriate concept of rationality for evaluation purposes must be “liberal” or broad, reflecting the complexities of human decisionmaking. Behavioral economists are blind to much of this at a normative-prescriptive level. So their critique of market or other outcomes is impoverished.

Global Climate Change: What has Science Education Got to Do with it?

Despite a near universal consensus among scientists regarding the perils of climate change for human civilizations, climate change has not emerged as a key issue among science educators. This position paper advocates for the centrality of climate change in science education. Using Polanyi’s critique of market in capitalist societies, it positions global climate change as an outcome of commodification of nature in market dominated societies. Thus, the paper argues that global climate change is primarily a societal issue that needs a societal response much more than a technological one. Further, it presents a case for considering science education as an important element of societal response to global climate change. In the end, the paper presents some ideas for re-imagining science education for the global climate change era.