We found a match
Your institution may have rights to this item. Sign in to continue.
- Title
New Paradigm in the Service Economy The Search of Economics for Scientific Credibility: In between Hard and Soft Sciences.
- Authors
Giarini, Orio
- Abstract
After the very long cycle (about 10,000 years) of societal and economic development based on agriculture, followed by a short cycle in which the industrial revolution became the prime mover (for less than 3 centuries), the world has entered a phase marked by the growing and determining importance of service activities (both monetarized and non-monetarized) . This transition is a key to understanding many of the current 'crises' confronting humanity and to benefitting from and promoting emergence of a new era in human development. The right starting point is to redefine the notion of value on which the Wealth of Nations is now more and more based. This is not simply a technical issue concerning the growth of services over purely industrialization processes. It implies a fundamental change. In a modern service economy, the production of value starts long before the actual point of manufacturing with fundamental research, continues through numerous stages of technological and social process, and extends beyond the time of sale through a prolonged period of utilisation of products and systems - the true basis for measuring added value), and finally ends with waste disposal (a negative value). All this happens during a period of time largely based on uncertainty and management of all sort of risks (foreseeable and unforeseeable). From this perspective, all the pretentions of classical economics to generate and measure value based on the idea of static equilibrium appear more and more antiquated and inadequate. Prices and costs have to be estimated based on hypotheses including the future.
- Subjects
SERVICE economy; CRIMES against humanity; HUMANITY; ECONOMIC equilibrium; CLASSICAL school of economics; HUMAN behavior; ECONOMICS; PSYCHOLOGY
- Publication
Cadmus, 2014, Vol 2, Issue 3, p94
- ISSN
2038-5242
- Publication type
Article