Wealth In Society Research Articles

Silence of the wealthy: How the wealthiest 0.1% avoid the media and resort to hidden strategies of advocacy

As the wealthiest groups have emerged as increasingly significant in societies, this article explores society's wealth elites from the vantage point of media and communication studies. Bridging the literature on policy advocacy and mediatisation, the article examines the hidden and public advocacy strategies of the wealthy. Drawing from 90 interviews with the wealthiest 0.1% in Finland, this study shows the wealthy's highly strategic stance towards the media and journalism. Most of all, they prefer to avoid the media and journalism, while actively using hidden advocacy strategies and being confident in their ability to wield political influence. As a consequence, the wealth elites may remain hidden from the public eye, making them ‘shadow elites’, whose power and scrutinisation pose a challenge to society and journalists as well. The findings support the view that paradoxically, one reaction to mediatisation – the media's heightened powers – is the deliberate avoidance of it.

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

The Legal Meaning of Coasean Economics

Coase's zero transaction cost assumption is not the most basic meaning of Coasean economics. For Coase, the law is essential to understanding the economic system and thus society's wealth. Coase claimed that legal delimitation of property rights leads to the maximization of social value, either through market transactions or through direct conferral of rights. To sustain such market transactions, the stability of the law is needed. A cost-benefit case-by-case approach would not suffice. The law's system of norms, including such concepts as binding precedent, is indispensable. These legal norms are not arbitrary when and just because they take economic consequences into account. For example, Coase's theory of the firm teaches that property rights should be assigned to the highest value user because institutional competition constrains the courts, the government, and the legislature.

Well-being and the Wealth of Nations: How are They to Be Defined?

Questions relating to well-being have recently returned to the limelight, notably with the publication in September 2009 of the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission report on the measurement of economic performance and social progress. Has this commission changed the terms of the debate on what a society's wealth and well-being are? Has it proposed new paradigms? In accepting the limitations of GDP as a key indicator of well-being, has it developed a new theoretical foundation and new evaluation criteria suited to a very different situation and to very different priorities from those that prevailed at the time when GDP first became established as a measure of national economic performance? These are the main questions raised and reviewed by this paper.

Vocational and skill shortages in Vietnamese manufacturing and service sectors, and some plausible solutions

The competition for talent is global. Reducing skill shortage problems boosts employment participation with a flow‐on effect to the health and well‐being of societies. Employment distributes a society's wealth among its citizens with a level of equity. This paper focuses on skill shortages in the labour force in Vietnam (in particular professional and technical qualifications) and basic capabilities in the manufacturing and service sectors. This is a qualitative research study involving an extensive literature review using secondary data. It concludes that skills shortages present significant challenges for the Vietnamese government. Plausible solutions to these identified challenges include focusing on substantial revisions to the national education and training systems in consultation with numerous associated stakeholders. The problem is both a national and an institutional human resource management (HRM) issue; such consultation should involve government policy‐makers, industry associations, unions, educational and HRM specialists.

CSR and Reporting by Selected Indian Companies: An Exploration

CSR has become popular all over the globe. In the developing countries like India, there are various formal and informal ways in which a business can make a contribution towards CSR practices. CSR can be regarded as a way by which the companies are integrating their social, environmental and economic concerns into their values, culture, strategy, decision making and operations to improve the society and the society's wealth. With deliberate and sincere efforts of the companies, they are attaining success in achieving their corporate goals in terms of social development, and are also able to enhance their corporate reputation. The ethical aspects related to CSR have become more apparent due to globalization and laws relating to social responsibilities and developments. For the present paper, the literature was examined on CSR and Corporate Sustainability. Nowadays, innumerous companies have been adopting CSR practices in order to attain corporate sustainability. The present research paper is confined to study various dimensions, features and the impact of CSR on the Indian corporate sector, i.e. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Coca - Cola India, BHEL and Wipro. The outcomes of the study show that the companies under study are following the CSR practices in many fields like education; community development; environmental protection; energy conservation; waste material management; health management; water management, etc. and are trying to encourage CSR awareness among different parts of the society.

CSR and Reporting by Selected Indian Companies: An Exploration

CSR has become popular all over the globe. In the developing countries like India, there are various formal and informal ways in which a business can make a contribution towards CSR practices. CSR can be regarded as a way by which the companies are integrating their social, environmental and economic concerns into their values, culture, strategy, decision making and operations to improve the society and the society's wealth. With deliberate and sincere efforts of the companies, they are attaining success in achieving their corporate goals in terms of social development, and are also able to enhance their corporate reputation. The ethical aspects related to CSR have become more apparent due to globalization and laws relating to social responsibilities and developments. For the present paper, the literature was examined on CSR and Corporate Sustainability. Nowadays, innumerous companies have been adopting CSR practices in order to attain corporate sustainability. The present research paper is confined to study various dimensions, features and the impact of CSR on the Indian corporate sector, i.e. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Coca - Cola India, BHEL and Wipro. The outcomes of the study show that the companies under study are following the CSR practices in many fields like education; community development; environmental protection; energy conservation; waste material management; health management; water management, etc. and are trying to encourage CSR awareness among different parts of the society.

Enhanced SEG Online expands member services

SEG is a truly global organization, with more than two-thirds of our membership living outside the United States. SEG Online is the best way to make the Society's wealth of knowledge available to all. Thanks to corporate leaders like China National Petroleum Corporation, ION, Halliburton/Landmark, PGS, and Seismic Micro-Technology (SMT), SEG continues to bolster our member services through SEG Online. These are corporations with a keen interest in advancing geophysical technology and strengthening the profession of applied geophysics.

Some Evolutionary Economics of Family Partnerships

The article focuses on the economics of family partnerships. It states an allegory involving a prehistoric couple who split their responsibilities of gathering food and building a fire to create econometric models for family behavior. In theory, monogamous couples have exactly the same interest in their reproductive success, hence completely shared interest in their children. This is not the case in practice, as a variety of marital problems, divorce, and remarriage adversely affect the equation. The observed fact that an increase in a society's wealth tends to decrease family size runs counter to evolutionary biologic theory. No one theory in economics or biology has an adequate explanation for the reduction in family size as wealth increases. A variety of outside factors, notably the decline in child mortality and the change from an agricultural to an urban society, affect the models in both disciplines.

The Externality of Victim Care

In a world with no transaction costs, tort law would not be necessary. Instead, injurers and victims would bargain among themselves to produce the mix of activities and care that would maximize their own and thus society's wealth.1 Of course, transaction costs do exist, and they are of sufficient magnitude to prevent bargaining between injurer and victim: for example, pedestrians cannot identify and write contracts with each driver that might injure them. In this real world, the economist's ideal regime of tort law would generate liability rules that induce injurer and victim alike to choose the activities and levels of care they would have chosen in a world without transaction costs.3 For three decades, lawyers and economists have expended significant effort evaluating the economic consequences of various common law liability rules. In so doing they have sought to determine which liability rule(s), if any, will maximize social wealth, that is, induce injurers and victims to replicate the mix of care and activities for which they would have bargained in the absence of transaction costs.4 This

The Firm and its Profits

What sets the firm apart from other producers is the commercial nature of its operations. The firm produces for the market and only for the market. It produces goods and buys them not in order to consume them but in order to them or their products. While economic agents other than the firm commodities, the sale of commodities is not the end of their exchange transactions. They sell in order to buy instead of in order to sell. Workers engage in exchange to acquire necessities, landlords do so to get luxuries, and owners exchange their goods to get ones that have a higher utility than their endowments. Exchanging for the purpose of selling is exchanging for the purpose of money making. For, as Marx emphasized, buying in order to is rational, benefits those that do it, only if commodities can be purchased for less money than can be made through their sale or the sale of goods which can be produced with them. The difference between the money spent on their purchase and the money made through their sale or that of their products is the profit from the transaction, and this profit or monetary gain is the objective of the firm's operations. Money acquisition, although necessary for the purchase of goods, is not the same as goods acquisition. Instead of giving one goods, money gives one the power of purchasing them, a title to a certain portion of society's wealth. In striving for profit the firm strives to extend its claim over the wealth of nations. Firms want not to consume this wealth but to own it, to acquire it not use it. The firm's profit end is the end of wealth acquisition. Firms differ from other economic agents not only in the way they relate to the wealth of nations, but, also, in the way they obtain it. Others get a part of this wealth by contributing to its production. Their incomes are earned, the market values (measures) of productive services. Profit, in contrast, while a component of price, is not itself a price, the market worth of any good or service; It is the component of the nation's income and is viewed as such in all traditions of economic thought. The unearned nature of profit income stems from its roots in purchase and sale transactions. These transactions result in a monetary gain only when 1) goods are sold (bought) for a price greater (less) than their market value or 2) goods are sold for a price higher than their cost of production. The first case is the mercantilist one of profit through goods alienation, through cheating in exchange. Profit comes at the expense of others, of those who bought goods for more than their worth or sold them for less than their value. In the second case, the one traditionally dealt with in income distribution theoriesv profit is the surplus of the product's value over that of its inputs. Profit, here, is the residual income from sales proceeds, the income which remains after paying for all the factor services which contributed to the product's production. In neither case is profit earned, received in return for a service rendered, for goods supplied or any effort or sacrifice incurred in their production. Insofar as profit is not a reward, the price of any productive contribution, profit seeking activities are not necessary for production. But if they are not necessary for production, if entrepreneurship is not one of production's factors, then what are they necessary for? What is the firm's role in the economy and does what it does with its profits or how it makes them justify their receipt? How does the accumulation of wealth further the economic ends of society, enhance the wealth of nations? The following turns to economic thought for an answer to these questions. It examines the arguments for the firm and explanations of its profit.

The old socialist idea and the new century

For much of the 20th century the progressive “vision” of the future in many parts of the world promoted traditional socialist theory—namely, that equality and democracy could best be achieved by a “system” in which ownership of society's wealth ("the means of production") is vested in a structure controlled by society. This “system theory” has now collapsed. The crisis of mainstream liberalism and social democracy, however, leads to a closely related problem: What happens if socialism's “distant cousin"—the welfare state—also loses its capacity to achieve the fundamental goals its core theory affirms? A less commonly recognized question concerns the implications when the foundation of the conservative theory of liberty also falters. Reviewing these three issues together illuminates the central theoretical problems the old socialism has bequeathed to the new century.

Bargaining rules of thumb

A steady-state, random-matching game model is used to described bargaining in a large population, where bargainers choose rules of thumb to apply across the board in a class of bargaining situations they face. The unique population equilibrium rule distributions are computed for certain cases of the model. These are then used in an exercise to analyze the relationship between a society's wealth and the relative frequency of haggled transactions in the society.

Is the Fear of Privatization Justified?

Debates in and around parliament on draft laws on property, land, local economy, and self-management have clearly shown that the property category with all its definitions remains for us the thing in itself. Property in our thinking is identified with the property content of appropriation. Moreover, even such categories as stocks, monetary resources, etc., are in fact elements of society's abstract wealth that do not contain a single grain of natural matter. They are not property but merely financial documents that guarantee the right to appropriate a certain property. Under conditions of highly developed credit, this right becomes an independent object of appropriation and the most characteristic [object of appropriation], vis-a-vis which property appropriation becomes a subordinate element of dominant relations of general borrowing of property rights. Modern society deals not with appropriation through alienation but with appropriation through borrowing.

Is the Fear of Privatization Justified?

Debates in and around parliament on draft laws on property, land, local economy, and self-management have clearly shown that the property category with all its definitions remains for us the thing in itself. Property in our thinking is identified with the property content of appropriation. Moreover, even such categories as stocks, monetary resources, etc., are in fact elements of society's abstract wealth that do not contain a single grain of natural matter. They are not property but merely financial documents that guarantee the right to appropriate a certain property. Under conditions of highly developed credit, this right becomes an independent object of appropriation and the most characteristic [object of appropriation], vis-à-vis which property appropriation becomes a subordinate element of dominant relations of general borrowing of property rights. Modern society deals not with appropriation through alienation but with appropriation through borrowing.

The Occupational Status and Wages of Women in the USSR

The strategy of accelerating socioeconomic development in the country as developed by the Ibenty-seventh Congress of the CPSU aims not only at achieving a new quality of economic growth, but also at dealing with social problems, and improving the organization and incentives of labor. Some extremely timely questions arise in this context having to do with the occupational position and wages of women, who today constitute more than half (51 %)1 of all workers and employees. Working women encounter special problems because they must fulfill not only their work obligations in production, but also their duties as wife, mother, and child-raiser, which are no less important. These issues are systematically being resolved as society's wealth grows by implementing special measures, which, as stressed by the CPSU program, are an "object of constant concern of the Party. " The lbenty-seventh Congress of the Party noted the achievements of socialism in freeing women from economic and social oppression, and in creating for women equal opportunities to work, obtain an education, and participate in social life, and especially stressed the necessity of improving conditions of work and everyday life for women, and of raising the material well-being of the family.

The Efficiency and the Efficacy of Title VII

In a recent article in this journal,' John Donohue argues that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,2 which forbids employment discrimination on racial and other invidious grounds,3 may well be an efficient intervention in labor markets, even if efficiency is narrowly defined as maximizing social wealth. His argument is of considerable interest. Social welfare legislation, notably including legislation designed to help minority groups, is usually thought to involve a tradeoff between equity and efficiency, or between the just distribution of society's wealth and the aggregate amount of that wealth. If Donohue is right and equity and efficiency line up on the same side of the issue, these laws are considerably less problematic than they have seemed to some observers. Donohue's argument builds on Gary Becker's theory of racial discrimination.4 For Becker, discrimination by whites against blacks is the result of an aversion that whites have to associating with blacks.' This aversion makes it more costly for whites to transact with blacks than with other whites. Becker likens this additional transaction cost to transportation costs in international trade.' The higher those transportation costs are, the less international trade there will be. Countries such as Switzerland that are highly dependent on such trade because

John Appleton of Maine and Commercial Law: Freedom, Responsibility, and Law in The Nineteenth Century Marketplace

More than half a century ago, Walton H. Hamilton recognized the dual economic and moral spirit of the nineteenth century's ‘sense of individualism’ when he wrote that the legal maximcaveat emptor‘served well its two masters, business and justice’. However, recent scholarship has captured only half that spirit. Historians have concentrated on business and attributed the way judges shaped the law of the marketplace to their desire to promote economic growth. James Willard Hurst, in his seminalLaw and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century United States, posits ‘the release of individual creative energy’ as the ‘dominant value’ in American law for the first half or three-quarters of the nineteenth century, pointing to such developments as the judicial embellishment of ‘procedures and instruments to promote dealing at a distance and on credit’ in response ‘to the needs of a growing commerce’. Lawrence M. Friedman states that nineteenth century contract law was ‘attuned to the needs of a growing economy, at least as the leading judges read those needs’. Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek credit the content of pre-Civil War contract law to the ‘developmental, entrepreneurial bias’ of antebellum judges. According to Bernard Schwartz, the job of American law, at least through the Civil War, was ‘to furnish the legal tools necessary for effective mobilization of the community's resources’. William E. Nelson, adding a class twist to the ‘developmental’ theme, writes that the law in the nineteenth century ‘came to be a tool by which those interest groups that had emerged victorious in the competition for control of law-making institutions could seize most of society's wealth for themselves and enforce their seizure upon the losers’.

Beyond Automation

We agree essentially with the analysis of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, as stated in its memorandum to President Johnson. That memorandum holds explicitly that cybernation invalidates the traditional methods by which society's wealth is distributed. Implicit in the Committee's report is the thesis that our present economic and social system (read capitalism) is now facing breakdown through a deepening paradox: income, hence consumption, hinges on employment; while accelerating productivity with all its potential of abundance, hinges on the very opposite—elimination of human labor. This paradox cannot be resolved within capitalism's distributive framework of wage labor.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.