Ethical codes and income distribution. A study of John Bates Clark and Thorstein Veblen

In more recent times, a large group of economists have been working on bringing ethical issues into the economic discourse. This book follows this line of research, with a special focus on the labour market and income distribution. The works of John Bates Clark and Thorstein Veblen will be discussed as representative efforts to analyse the genesis and the propagation of ethical codes within opposing theoretical frameworks. Their contributions can be conceived as highly significant in two contrasting paradigms, i.e. the neoclassical and the institutional; also significant is their direct approach to the ethical dimension of income distribution. This is not to say that only John Bates Clark and Thorstein Veblen have dealt with this topic in the history of economic thought (Wicksteed, Edgeworth, Pigou, among the others, provided relevant contributions), but that a) since Clark was the major neoclassical scholar in the United States in the years between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century and Veblen had a similar position within the rising institutional paradigm; and b) since Clark and Veblen debated, in that period, the questions treated here, the comparison of their contributions can also help to understand better the cultural climate of the period in the United States.