Development Macroeconomics or Bourgeois Virtues

Development Macroeconomics

Author: Pierre Richard Ag nor

Since it was first published in 1995, Development Macroeconomics has remained the definitive textbook on the macroeconomics of developing countries. Now, in this fully revised and updated third edition, Pierre-Richard Agénor and Peter Montiel cover the latest advances in this rapidly changing field, making this the most up-to-date, authoritative, and comprehensive book available on the macroeconomic issues and challenges developing nations confront today.

Agénor and Montiel provide completely new and expanded coverage of fiscal discipline, monetary policy regimes, currency and banking crises, monetary unions, management of capital flows, the choice of an exchange-rate regime, public capital and growth, the political economy of stabilization and adjustment--and much more. They review attempts that have been made to adapt standard macroeconomic analysis to conditions in developing economies, and they use a variety of analytical models to address the macroeconomic policy issues that most concern these countries. Agénor and Montiel systematically examine empirical evidence on behavioral assumptions and on the effects of macroeconomic policies in developing nations. They also provide extensive references to literature in the field.

This new edition of Development Macroeconomics is the ideal introduction for students and an indispensable resource for researchers.

• Fully updated and expanded
• Provides the most comprehensive treatment of the macroeconomics of developing nations
• Features new material on fiscal discipline, monetary policy regimes, currency and banking crises--and much more
• Includes extensivereferences
• Serves both as a graduate textbook and a resource for researchers

Read also Globalization and Stratification in the United States or PMP Exam Preparation Guide

Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

Author: Deirdre N McCloskey

For a century and a half the artists and intellectuals of Europe have scorned
the bourgeoisie. And for a millennium and a half the philosophers and theologians of Europe have scorned the marketplace. The bourgeois life, capitalism, Mencken’s “booboisie,” and David Brooks’s “bobos” all have been, and still are, framed as responsible for everything from financial and moral poverty to world wars and spiritual desuetude. Countering these centuries of assumptions and unexamined thinking is Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, a magnum opus offering a radical view: capitalism is good for us.

McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with astonishing erudition and range of reference. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.

High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and, of course, economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, adead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.

The New York Times - Jim Holt

McCloskey probably won't sway many readers who do not already share her convictions, but for all the book's flaws one can't help being impressed by her verve, erudition and fitful brilliance. When she argues that Vincent van Gogh was actually a good bourgeois, or that Jesus, notwithstanding the Sermon on the Mount, was pro-commerce, the rhetorical moves are as deft as the claims are surprising.

Publishers Weekly

Eschewing the notion that capitalism is evil and the middle class is soft and cowardly, University of Illinois professor McCloskey argues that bourgeois economic practices and people promote the widest possible range of virtues. An economically free and prosperous middle class is not only peaceable, law-abiding and prudent, McCloskey argues, it can also be artistic and spiritual, and support traditional cultures, protect the environment, win wars, make discoveries and care for the unfortunate better than aristocratic or proletarian social organizations. Though her overarching aim is to develop a modern theory and taxonomy of virtues, promoting libertarian economic views and summarizing 250 years of normative economic writings, McCloskey only sketches her argument here; the details will be left to three subsequent volumes. Most of this book is a technical survey of virtues that emphasizes Catholic theology, though it includes material from other traditions. The prose style is arch and obscure, often relying on brief quotations from philosophers, economists and historians and then rebutting them. Without the future volumes, these challenging 600 pages represent a highly idiosyncratic survey with no obvious focus. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

McCloskey (economics, history, English, & communication, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; Crossing: A Memoir) intends her new book as the first in a quartet defending the bourgeois class. She incorporates nearly the entire range of the humanities, from philosophy and religion to linguistics, literature, and history, to drive home her argument that the bourgeois class, with its adherence to capitalism, has been a positive force for human civilization. She defines bourgeois virtues as those stemming from commerce and also benefiting society; for example, the virtue of not cheating customers because it is bad for business translates into a striving for justice in all things. McCloskey presents some wonderful insights about bourgeois values, but she will put off many readers with her numerous quips and her almost stream-of-consciousness writing style. She also peppers her text with allusions that are not always identified. Her writing style is reminiscent of both James Joyce and a very literate cocktail party conversation. Neither works for this subject matter. Only for comprehensive libraries with a readership sophisticated enough to digest her words.-Lawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, PA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Apology : a brief for the bourgeois virtues	1
	Appeal	55
1	The very word "virtue"	63
2	The very word "bourgeois"	68
3	On not being spooked by the word "bourgeois"	79
4	The first virtue : love profane and sacred	91
5	Love and the transcendent	100
6	Sweet love vs. interest	108
7	Bourgeois economists against love	117
8	Love and the bourgeoisie	126
9	Solidarity regained	139
10	Faith as identity	151
11	Hope and its banishment	160
12	Against the sacred	167
13	Van Gogh and the transcendent profane	176
14	Humility and truth	184
15	Economic theology	195
16	The good of courage	201
17	Anachronistic courage in the bourgeoisie	212
18	Taciturn courage against the "feminine"	223
19	Bourgeois vs. Queer	231
20	Balancing courage	241
21	Prudence is a virtue	253
22	The monomania of Immanuel Kant	263
23	The storied character of virtue	270
24	Evil as imbalance, inner and outer : temperance and justice	279
25	The pagan-ethical bourgeois	290
26	The system of the virtues	303
27	A philosophical psychology?	314
28	Ethical striving	320
29	Ethical realism	332
30	Against reduction	337
31	Character(s)	346
32	Antimonism again	352
33	Why not one virtue?	361
34	Dropping the virtues, 1532-1958	369
35	Other lists	379
36	Eastern and other ways	386
37	Needing virtues	394
38	P & S and the capitalist life	407
39	Sacred reasons	416
40	Not by P alone	424
41	The myth of modern rationality	433
42	God's deal	442
43	Necessary excess?	451
44	Good work	461
45	Wage slavery	469
46	The rich	478
47	Good barons	488
48	The anxieties of bourgeois virtues	497
	Postscript : the unfinished case for the bourgeois virtues	509