detest risk, requiring steady economic and stable markets. They recruit governments to serve their interests with fiscal and monetary policy. While the goals of an affluent society and complicit government serve the irrational technostructure, public space is simultaneously impoverished. Galbraith paints the picture of stepping from penthouse villas on to unpaved streets, from landscaped gardens to unkempt public parks. In Economics and the Public Purpose (1973) Galbraith advocates a "new socialism" (social democracy) as the solution, with nationalization of military production and public services such as health care, plus disciplined salary and price controls to reduce inequality and hamper inflation. New institutional economics With the new developments in the economic theory of organizations, information, property rights, and transaction costs, an attempt was made to integrate institutionalism into more recent developments in mainstream economics, under the title new institutional economics. Institutionalist political economy The vacillations of institutions are necessarily a result of the very incentives created by such institutions, and are thus endogenous. Emphatically, traditional institutionalism is in many ways a response to the current economic orthodoxy; its reintroduction in the form of institutionalist political economy is thus an explicit challenge to neoclassical economics, since it is based on the fundamental premise that neoclassicists oppose: that economics cannot be separated from the political and social system within which it is embedded. Institutionalism today The earlier approach was a central element in American economics in the interwar years after 1919, but was marginalized relative to mainstream economics in the postwar period with the ascendence of neoclassical and Keynesian approaches. It continued, however, as a leading heterodox approach in critiquing neoclassical economics and as an alternative research program in economics, most notably through the work of Ha-Joon Chang and Geoffrey Hodgson The leading Swedish economist Lars Pålsson Syll is a believer in institutional economics. He is an outspoken opponent to all kinds of social constructivism and postmodern relativism. Criticism Critics of institutionalism have maintained that the concept of "institution" is so central for all social science that it is senseless to use it as a buzzword for a particular theoretical school. And as a consequence, the elusive meaning of the concept of "institution" has resulted in a bewildering and never-ending dispute about which scholars are "institutionalists" or not—and a similar confusion about what is supposed to be the core of the theory. In other words, institutional economics has become so popular because it