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How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality-and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment

In the 1940s, mathematicians set out to design computers that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. The Irrational Decision tells the story of how they settled on a peculiar mathematical definition of rationality in which every decision is a statistical question of risk. Benjamin Recht traces how this quantitative standard came to define our understanding of rationality, looking at the history of optimization, game theory, statistical testing, and machine learning. He explains why, now more than ever, we need to resist efforts by powerful tech interests to drive public policy and essentially rule our lives.

While mathematical rationality has proven valuable in accelerating computers, regulating pharmaceuticals, and deploying electronic commerce, it fails to solve messy human problems and has given rise to a view of a rational world that is not only overquantified but surprisingly limited. Recht shows how these mathematical methods emerged from wartime research and influenced fields ranging from economics to health care, drawing on illuminating examples ranging from diet planning to chess to self-driving cars.

Highlighting both the power and limitations of mathematical rationality, The Irrational Decision reveals why only humans can resolve fundamentally political or value-based questions and proposes a more expansive approach to decision making that is appropriately supported by computational tools yet firmly rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgment.

This volume examines the state of the economic history discipline around the globe. It raises and answers questions such as: What are its roots, how did it evolve, and what is the current state of the discipline in each country or region presented?

Transcending traditional Western paradigms, the book gathers renowned economic historians from around the globe to engage in a comprehensive dialogue about economic history's global standing. Investigating its role in shaping future economists, addressing pivotal questions, and its symbiotic relationship with economics, contributors analyze economic history's resonance across continents. By doing so, the chapters are not intended to be a survey of the research on each country, but rather an overview of the discipline: its practice, training, and position within the broader economics discipline.

Addressing an academic audience, this book further analyzes the interplay of human capital scarcity and its profound impact on academia, spotlighting the evolution of economic history in diverse cultural and regional contexts. Scrutinizing historical milestones, such as Schumpeter's paradigm-shifting pillars and Romer's reflections, the book discusses the need to redefine economic history's role and takes readers on a journey through economic history from its pivotal role to its integration into the broader discipline.

How have companies reacted to new competitors from Asia over the course of globalization? And what roles have narratives, expectations, and perceptions played? This study examines these questions by considering Grundig and Telefunken, traditional German consumer electronic companies, and the strategies they employed in their competition with Japanese companies in the period 1950 to 1987.

This book reveals how the formation of the Chinese socialist system in the 1950s dramatically transformed the nation's economy, and charts how the newly established economic system functioned during the planned economy period (1949-1978), through focusing on Shanghai, which had served as the center of China's modern economy since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on the rich historical primary sources of the Shanghai Municipal Archives, this study examines the impact of the institutional change wrought by the introduction of the socialist system on Shanghai's economy, through a careful comparison with the economic structure before 1949. Moreover, it also explores the distinctive features of the Chinese socialist system, first and foremost the relationship between local governments and local businesses that came about through the socialist transformation of private enterprise, by analyzing Shanghai's fiscal structure and a series of key industries, including the textile, machinery, rubber processing, cement, and power industries. This historical study proffers a new understanding of the long-term economic history of modern China across the pivotal 1949 and 1978 divides and sheds light on the origin of what has come to be known as "socialism with Chinese characteristics" today.

A study of the changes in wealth and its distribution in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Paris that maps the interplay among wealth, inequality, and welfare

Successful economies sustain capital accumulation across generations, and capital accumulation leads to large increases in private wealth. In this book, Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal map the fluctuations in wealth and its distribution in Paris between 1807 and 1977. Drawing on a unique dataset of the bequests of almost 800,000 Parisians, they show that real wealth per decedent varied immensely during this period while inequality began high and declined only slowly. Parisians' portfolios document startling changes in the geography and types of wealth over time.

Postel-Vinay and Rosenthal's account reveals the impact of economic factors (large shocks, technological changes, differential returns to wealth), political factors (changes in taxation), and demographic and social factors (age and gender) on wealth and inequality. Before World War I, private wealth was highly predictive of other indicators of welfare, including different forms of human capital, age at death, and access to local public goods. After World War I, public intervention reduced-but did not eliminate-the strong connection between wealth inequality and other forms of inequality. Over the two centuries covered, Paris and its wealth were on the vanguard of economic and social change that affected the rest of the country a generation later.

This book offers a vivid and accessible narrative of the evolution of financial markets from the first millennium to 2025. Through compelling historical accounts and engaging storytelling, it brings to life the complex transformations that have shaped global finance.

While Western financial centers such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Wall Street are thoroughly explored, the book also highlights the often-overlooked contributions of the East-including Islamic finance, ancient trade routes, and the Istanbul Stock Exchange.

Grounded in the institutional framework of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson-who argue that inclusive institutions are key to long-term development-and informed by Andrew Lo's Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, the book examines how financial systems have responded to shifting political, cultural, and economic forces.

Far more than a chronological history of stock exchanges, this is a global narrative of how institutions, adaptation, and the power of storytelling have shaped the financial world across centuries.

This edited volume examines the legal and economic world of the Romans through concepts, structures, and objects that reveal practices of standardization and localism. It explores the myriad ways in which the Roman Empire became an integrated political, social and economic system.

Split across two volumes, the collection addresses the dynamic interaction between Rome and its provinces in developing institutions crucial to societal and economic development. It challenges notions of uniformity, demonstrating how tensions between imperial standardization and local cultures could both drive innovative legal and economic practices and hinder empire-wide integration. The chapters explore broad questions from various disciplinary perspectives, including ancient economic history, law, papyrology, epigraphy and archaeology. Contributions cover diverse topics such as weights, measures, and coinage, legal practices, taxation, and cultural symbols. Each chapter investigates how, even as local communities adopted practices associated with Rome as a ruling power, local customs could, in turn, influence practices across the Empire.

By illuminating these reciprocal relationships, this book recontextualizes Roman standardization-not merely as a tool of imperial domination but as evidence of diverse socioeconomic practices and cross-cultural exchanges. It will be a valuable resource for scholars of ancient economic history, classical archaeology, and ancient law, as well as anyone interested in the economy and culture of Ancient Rome.

Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Tracing the origins of Britain's current malaise to the abandonment of social democracy

What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature peeling paint, weeds, and broken railings. Public services are no longer fit for purpose. A malaise seems to infect every aspect of British life: its economy, polity, social order, sense of well-being, domestic regional relationships, and place in the world. In The Land Where Nothing Works, the distinguished historian A. G. Hopkins offers an explanation, tracing Britain's current problems to decisions made in the 1980s that abandoned its postwar experiment in social democracy and mimicked policies of deregulation and privatisation promoted by the United States.

In 1945, the new Labour government's development programme aimed at creating a social democracy that would benefit all members of society. The counterrevolution launched by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1979, which remains in force today, promoted individualism and deregulation. The transition from one programme to another was a response to the growth of finance and services centred on the City of London, and to decolonisation, which redirected trade to Europe. The expansion of credit led to the financial crisis of 2008 and the years of austerity that followed, and fuelled the populist movement that culminated in Brexit. Hopkins argues that, instead of following the free-market policies of its mentor, the United States, Britain should draw on its own history of social democracy and borrow from its neighbours in Europe, where communitarian principles continue to be upheld.

An empirical analysis and new theoretical framework for understanding economic expectations and decision-making in different historical settings.

Expectations play a crucial role in shaping economic behavior. But how are expectations actually formed, and how has this changed over time? The financial crisis of 2007-08 cast doubt on traditional theories of expectation formation, particularly the rational expectations framework. In Contingent Expectations, Alexander Nuetzenadel and Jochen Streb examine the ways that past experiences influence the economic expectations and decision-making of households, investors, and policymakers through history, and offer an alternative perspective. Combining a comprehensive empirical analysis of expectation formation from the eighteenth century to the present day with an assessment of the relevant economic theory, Nuetzenadel and Streb present a new theoretical framework, contingent expectations, for understanding economic expectation.

Nuetzenadel and Streb show how economic actors developed new forecasting methods in response to rising uncertainty brought on by the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of global trade, financial market integration, and environmental crises. Tracing the evolution of economic theories on expectations, they find that when growing market volatility made forecasting more complex, economic agents often adapted with remarkable flexibility to changing circumstances. Challenging prevailing concepts of expectations, including rational choice and adaptive expectations, Nuetzenadel and Streb emphasize the heterogeneity of economic agents' cognitive practices-in particular, the need to consider variation in information costs and historical experience. Expectation formation, they argue, is contingent on each individual's current decision-making situation. Their account of the history of economic expectations has significant implications for current debates in economics.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the economic disparities that have characterized the global landscape in recent years based on an international political economy perspective. Utilizing a blend of theoretical explanation and empirical analysis, the book will delve into the multifaceted causes and consequences of global imbalances, with a focus on the US and China as major sources of global imbalances. Finally, it will propose certain strategic measures that are required to achieve the sustainable development of the global economy, in a work that will interest journalists, economists and scholars of international relations.

A 2,500-year history of international currencies that reveals new insights about the future of the U.S. dollar-as well as crypto and central bank digital currencies

Doubts about the international dominance of the dollar are only growing amid worries about tariffs, political dysfunction, and fraying international alliances. Will the dollar continue to reign supreme? In Money Beyond Borders, the leading authority on international currencies, Barry Eichengreen, puts the dollar's prospects in deep historical perspective by chronicling the entire history of cross-border currencies, from the invention of coins in the seventh century BCE to the cryptocurrencies of today and the central bank digital currencies of tomorrow.

Money Beyond Borders recounts how Greek and Roman coins became the first true international currencies. It tells how the Florentine gold florin became the "greenback of the Renaissance," and how it was succeeded by Spanish silver and a Dutch fiat currency. The book explains why the British pound dominated the international economy in the nineteenth century, why the dollar rose to the top during World War II, and why the dollar has survived predictions of the imminent loss of its preeminence since the 1970s.

The long history of international currencies shows that the same factors that encourage their widespread use eventually lead to their abandonment. Money Beyond Borders makes a powerful case that the dollar is now on the downside of this cycle, and it considers who the winners and losers will be when there is flight away from the greenback. Revealing important patterns in the life cycles of international currencies over the past 2,500 years, the book offers valuable lessons and insights about how currencies rise-and why they fall.

These edited volumes examine the legal and economic world of the Romans through concepts, structures, and objects that reveal practices of standardization and localism. They explore the myriad ways in which the Roman Empire became an integrated political, social and economic system.

Split across two volumes, the collection addresses the dynamic interaction between Rome and its provinces in developing institutions crucial to societal and economic development. It challenges notions of uniformity, demonstrating how tensions between imperial standardization and local cultures could both drive innovative legal and economic practices and hinder empire-wide integration. The chapters explore broad questions from various disciplinary perspectives, including ancient economic history, law, papyrology, epigraphy and archaeology. Contributions cover diverse topics such as weights, measures, and coinage, legal practices, taxation, and cultural symbols. Each chapter investigates how, even as local communities adopted practices associated with Rome as a ruling power, local customs could, in turn, influence practices across the Empire.

By illuminating these reciprocal relationships, these books recontextualize Roman standardization-not merely as a tool of imperial domination but as evidence of diverse socioeconomic practices and cross-cultural exchanges. They will be a valuable resource for scholars of ancient economic history, classical archaeology, and ancient law, as well as anyone interested in the economy and culture of Ancient Rome.

This book approaches the history of railway building and its impact on economic change in a new way. Using a more granular approach than has been used in the past, based on detailed case studies, this book aims to establish the effect of railway building on local economies and individual sectors within those micro-economies. From the resulting analysis, it has been possible to extrapolate the nuanced changes, not always growth as has often been suggested, to other places.

While this book examines the micro-economies of one deliberately selected constrained area, the conclusions drawn from the research are relevant to the whole of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. The findings are also relevant to other evolving economies, including those in Europe and the United States, throughout the nineteenth century.

The volume is aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars who are examining the economic and social history of the Victorian period. It would also be of value to business schools. This book has also been written to be an accessible history of nineteenth-century economic history, which will be of general interest to book sellers, librarians and the casual reader.

This book provides an overview of the history of food policy in the UK, tracing economic, social and political influences from the 1840s to present day.

In order to understand current food policies and the current food system, it is necessary to acknowledge the past influences that have led us to the present. Seeing food policy as a complex web of influences, this book traces food policy development from the period of public health reform during the 1840s, the impact of two world wars, the era of new food choices in the 1950s and 1960s, the beginnings of alternative food movement in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, to the modern and postmodern ages of consumer ethics and fair trade. It critically identifies the key influences across the different eras, both direct and indirect and formal and informal, as well as the key actors, and showcases how understanding the socio-political contexts supports our comprehension of food policy development and its adaptation to modern times. Following this roadmap, the book sets out the challenges ahead and discusses ways forward for a pragmatic and effective UK food policy that learns the lessons of the past.

This book provides an important introduction to the history of UK food and agricultural policy for students, scholars, policymakers and professionals, as well as those interested in food systems, public health and social policy more widely

This book offers an in-depth exploration of Indonesia's political economy from the aftermath of the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis to its emergence as a pivotal economic and geopolitical actor in Southeast Asia. It examines how Indonesia navigated structural reforms, decentralization, state-business relations, and shifting development strategies in response to both domestic challenges and global trends. Organized chronologically and thematically, the chapters trace Indonesia's economic governance through major milestones, including post-Suharto transitions, democratic consolidation, financial liberalization, the rise of state capitalism, and post-2008 global economic transformations. Key themes include political patronage and economic rent-seeking, infrastructure development, environmental and energy policy, technological innovation, and Indonesia's evolving international economic diplomacy.

Bridging the disciplines of political science, development economics, and international relations, the book brings together theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to understand how power, institutions, and global forces have shaped Indonesia's developmental trajectory. It is essential reading for scholars and practitioners interested in emerging markets, economic governance, and Southeast Asian studies.

If you haven't followed the money, chances are you don't know the real story of America and its Revolution. Nothing gives a clearer insight into this history than the life of early America's dominant merchant trader, first bank president, and first central banker, Thomas Willing.

In this book, Richard Vague shows how Willing bankrolled - and in the process helped save - the Revolution and then fundamentally shaped the financial architecture of the young Republic. So powerful was Willing that President John Adams complained that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were governed by him. Yet at a decisive moment in Willing's life he voted against independence, as conflict between Pennsylvania's moneyed elite and the emergent lower and middle classes embroiled the politics of 1776 in bitter class conflict. This dynamic would continue after independence, as Willing and his associates attempted to tame the democratic forces unleashed by revolution and thereby set up a tension that has never stopped shaping US politics.

This dramatic untold story sheds genuinely new light on the genesis of the American Republic, as well as the enduring economic and political conflicts that still shape US society today.

Economic growth is the religion of the modern world. It promises a solution to the most basic drama of our human existence: wanting what we don't have. But we live in a time when the frenzied pursuit of economic growth is jeopardizing the planet's viability and our very survival as a species. How did we get to this point in human history? How did we allow the pursuit of growth to become the apotheosis of human development?

To answer these questions, the distinguished economist Daniel Cohen takes us on a journey to understand human desire and the different registers on which it has expressed itself throughout history. He brings his panoramic grasp of the subject to bear on the key stages of social and economic development, from the Neolithic revolution to the digital age. The ideas of the great economists - from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Joseph Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes - are situated in their historical contexts and explained clearly and concisely. The result is a triumph of ambition and brevity: a history of the economy in 100 pages.

This book - the final work written by Daniel Cohen - will appeal to anyone interested in the economy and in the tension between a limited world and unlimited desires that lies at the heart of the great challenges we face today.

This book tells the story of the people who shaped the modern art market and its institutions to maximize the financial potential of their product. This transformation resulted in a fundamental and lasting redefinition of art. It is based on contemporaneous sources - diaries, letters, newspapers, journals - and on extensive analyses of proprietary data related to the evolution of the modern art market in London between 1700 and 1900. It describes how local artists' groups and other stakeholders led by historic individuals deliberately constructed a new 'aura' for art as well as a new market infrastructure that liberated their creativity from the doctrinaire restrictions of the past. This monumental enterprise resulted in a radical and lasting change in the course of our cultural legacy and, ultimately, paved the way for the development of modern art. Along the way, it also established artworks as coveted and unregulated financial assets with values in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

This book is the result of a decade of rigorous study on the interplay between the Chinese railway system and national social progress. It examines the reform, opening up, innovation, and development of Chinese railways over the past 40 years.

This book traces the evolution of the role played by the Chinese railway sector initially as a "bottleneck" in the national economy to the present vital "engine" of growth, highlighting its journey of restructure and transformation. The target audience includes general readers interested in China's modern history as well as the development of the Chinese railway industry, and experts and researchers in related fields.

The introduction defines "railway history" and explores the key factors driving the development of China's railway system post-reform. The first four chapters respectively unveil the four significant phases of railway reform and opening-up: the initial reform attempts (1978-1985), proactive changes (1986-1991), the transition to a market economy (1992-2003), and comprehensive promotion (2004-2018). Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the rise of high-speed railway in China and its global expansion. The conclusion articulates the essence of railway modernization and its relationship to broader reform initiatives.

This edited collection presents 16 new historical cases of wage formation and wage bargaining across the early modern and preindustrial world.

Recent literature has revived an established interest in the economic history of wage formation, underlining the gaps still existing in our understanding of wages' composition, quantification, and process of structuring. This collection will shed light on these points, examining diverse topics including in-kind and monetary payments, bonuses and supplements, work contracts, differentials between skilled and unskilled workers, women's work, slavery and coerced labour contracts, and wages in both diachronic and comparative perspective: how wages' structure and composition changes across times and spaces (both in terms of geographical areas and urban-rural environments). The book presents case studies from various geographical areas (from South America to India) from the preindustrial period to the contemporary age and features related contributions on the manufacturing sector, agriculture, mining, and public sectors. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of pre-industrial labour markets in economic, social and labour history.

Chapters 6 and 10 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book examines a largely overlooked social movement in West Germany, notable for its significant influence on the national apprenticeship system. The movement, which led to substantial increases in apprentice pay and contributed to long-term improvements in training quality, is analysed through a wide array of sources, including contemporary German-language literature, official statistics, and archival documents from trade unions and employers' associations.

Consideration of comparable changes in the UK, Switzerland, Sweden and the US contributes to a broader understanding of developments in Germany at the time.

Addressing an important gap in scholarship, the book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers in economic history, labour economics, social sciences and history, interested in a better understanding of the apprentice movement in Germany and its impact on educational reform, employment relations and apprenticeship.

Against the backdrop of transformations which have reconfigured access to information, communication, and collective discourse, The Political Economy of the Public Sphere critically examines the evolution of the public sphere from its origins in the 18th century to its contemporary digital transformation across Europe and the United States.

Adopting a political economy lens, the book analyzes how this crucial space for public communication and opinion formation is intrinsically linked to capitalism. It is shaped by market dynamics, the concentration of media ownership, and the commodification of audiences and their attention. Author Nikos Smyrnaios delves into the material and immaterial resources-like infrastructure, technology, influence, and agenda-setting-that affect the public sphere's functioning. Identifying key turning points-from the rise of mass media and deregulation to the dominance of digital platforms-the chapters demonstrate the impact of theory, civic engagement, state interventions, and corporate influence. In doing so, the work navigates the tension between the ideal of a democratic public sphere and its reality as a space embedded in power relations and contributing to the reproduction of inequalities.

Offering a comprehensive theoretical and historical overview of the transformations shaping today's media environment, the book provides a rigorous foundation for critically understanding the possibilities and limitations of mediated discourse in the 21st century. Ideal for scholars and students of media studies, political science, sociology and communication theory, it invites readers to reflect on historical precedents, confront current inequalities, and imagine alternative pathways for collective expression and democratic participation.