Social Costs Today: Institutional Analyses of the Present Crises

Contemporary, strictly interdependent, financial, socio-economic and ecological crises are associated with a pattern of economic activity that subordinates substantial short and long term interests of society to sectional groups and vested interests within the economy. This book reassesses the work of key institutional economists such as Veblen, Commons, Clark and Kapp in the context of the current crisis and the theory of social costs. This book addresses the need for an updated theoretical framework to address those crises, namely social costs as extremely heterogeneous, widespread and cumulatively self-reinforcing adverse effects, induced by the ordinary functioning of business and market institutions in advanced global capitalism and offers evidence-based analyses of essential dimensions of the contemporary financial, socio-economic and ecological crises, and the policies required to deal with them.