Reconsidering Identity Economics: Human Well-being and Governance

This book presents an unorthodox identity economics that approaches social identity through a non-classical psychology. Garai applies the modern physics concept of wave-particle duality to economic psychology, finding a corresponding duality in object-oriented activity and historically generated social identity. These two factors interconnect to create a double-storied structure of social identity and its behavioral manifestations. The book then presents a calculation device for mediating between behavioral and identity economics. Garai then applies all these factors to two socioeconomic systems developed during the second modernization: Bolshevik-type ＂socialism＂ and post-Bolshevik ＂capitalism.＂ In this context, he examines the Eastern Bloc nomenklatura as a duality of bureaucratic and patron-client organization (＂state and party＂) and the establishment of both today’s material capitalism and its other half: human capital economics.

Laszlo Garai was the Founder and Head of the Departments of Economic Psychology at the University of Szeged, Hungary, and Nice University, France. He has also taught at Moscow State University, Russia, and branches of California State University at Bakersfield and San Bernardino, USA. He is the author of 21 monographs in Hungarian and Russian on economic, social, and theoretical psychology.