Aims & Scope

The capitalist system is of great interest and importance in view of its outstanding dynamism relative to that of other systems tried in the past century. Yet the established body of economic theory — intertemporal, information-theoretic and game-theoretic — does not incorporate key elements of the capitalist dynamic: business innovation as distinct from technological advance and the contributions of entrepreneurs and financiers to the innovation process. As a consequence, established theory cannot capture the core of the dynamism. In fact it contradicts the existence of such dynamism: Capitalism is an evolving, unruly, open-ended system while the theory implies a deterministic future however buffeted it is by stochastic shocks.

The Center on Capitalism and Society aims to further understanding of the mechanisms of capitalist dynamism and the satisfactions it gives. In capitalist economies, new commercial ideas are the driving force. The implementation of many of them is boundless because either they do not require technological advance or they induce the advance they need. Their formation, development and adoption lifts a capitalist economy's performance in most dimensions: productivity and pay, job creation and how rewarding the jobs are — mental stimulation, intellectual development and personal growth. Yet such new ideas raise difficulties owing to Knightian uncertainty about their value. Our task is to model the processes by which the entrepreneurs and financiers of capitalist economies generate and select new ideas for try-out and the ways in which consumers and producers manage to evaluate the new products and methods. With such models we can see better how one fabric of economic institutions might give better performance than another.

The new publication (supported by a generous grant from the Kauffman Foundation) provides an outlet for scholarly work that advances the goals of the Center, especially for those articles whose length, subject matter, approach, etc. might preclude publication in a standard journal. We want to stimulate and provide a forum for discourse for ideas that may not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Accordingly we will publish papers along with the commentary of a reviewer, leaving room for "agreement to disagree."