Constructing the International Economy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy) Illustrated Edition

Great introduction for anyone interested in constructivist analysis and political economy. Could be interesting and appropriate for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and faculty alike.

Overall, this book is excellent. It recognizes that modern macroeconomics is an empty tautology based on SEU (Subjective expected utility) theory so that all decision makers are able to specify exact probabilities for all relevant outcomes and identify all outcomes.This is the defihition of " rational" currently used by all mainstream schools of economics. It is essentially just a development of Jeremy Bentham's approach from the 1790's.The authors' are incorrect ,however, in their belief that ":...Concerning uncertainty, Keynes's and Hayek's perspectives are particularly insightful and have much in common with the perspectives adopted by economic sociology.Like Frank Knight ,both writers made the role of radical uncertainty explicit and addressed the related questions of epistemology" (p.139).Hayek argues that each individual has only a small piece of the total relevant evidence. This could be linked to Keynes's weight of the evidence ,w. Each decision maker has a w <1.Unfortunately, Hayek then argues that market prices take all of the tiny ,dispersed pieces of information and concentrate it in a form that allows savvy,smart entrepreneurs to identify the correct decision to make.These concentrated price vectors eliminate the problem of uncertainty..The problem of uncertainty is solved as long as there is no government interference in the market price mechanism..GLS Shackle deserted Hayek in the mid 1930's precisely because Shackle realized that Hayek was claiming that market prices solved the problem of uncertainty.