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Marcus and Andrius are systematizing the ways that economists figure things out.

  • Please help us add more ways that economists figure things out! Write them on this page and you can include a url for reference.
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Add More Ways That Economists Figure Things Out

  • Optimal equilibrium - all maximize their profits
  • Keynes's equilibrium - business class has no more reason to invest, so there is unemployment
  • Dynamic equilibrium - all quantities are changing at the same rate, so relative ratios are unaffected
  • Do pendulum swings make sense? Are they expressions of disequilibrium?
  • Self-interest as the gravitational force which makes economic behavior predictable
  • Notions of economic friction (economic environment?) reducing arisal to equilibrium: sticky wages, national boundaries (on markets), rational expectations
  • Schumpeter. Creative destruction.
  • Marx. Means of production (ever changing).

Is Economics a Science? How & How NOT to Do Economics with Robert Skidelsky

  • Economics claims to be governed by law centered on equilibrium
  • Samuel Johnson. Economics is the queen of the social sciences. (Because of its mathematical basis.)
  • 2:40 A story that can't be told in math is not economics but from an inferior discipline.
  • If equilibrium (the balance of forces) is a groundless idea, then the claim to science is not vaild.

Unlimited wants, limited resources.

Critique: 1.Unreal behavioural assumptions 2.Excessive maths. 3.Claims to universal truth. 4.Demand for proper microfoundations. History of Economic Thought | How & How NOT to Do Economics with Robert Skidelsky 20:23

  • Human being as a calculating machine.
  • 21:53 Cliffe Leslie: Instead of investigating actual motives, economists construct a fictional person out of desire for wealth and aversion from labour.
  • 22:54 William Beveridge 1937. Economics is "survival of medieval logic". Economists are people "who earn their living by taking in one another's definitions of mangling."
  • 23:44 Wassily Leontief. "Uncritical enthusiasm for mathematical formulation tends often to conceal the ephemeral substantive content of the argument behind the formidable front of algebraic signs..." "In no other field of empirical inquiry has so massive and sophisticated machinery been used with such indifferent results..."
  • 24:48 Frank Hahn 1970. "It cannot be denied that there is something scandalous in the spectacle of so many people refining the analysis of economic states which they give no reason to suppose ever will, or have ever, come about."
  • 25:34 Harry Johnson 1971. "The testing of hypotheses [on which econometrics rested] is frequently merely a euphemism for obtaining plausible numbers to provide ceremonial adequacy for a theory chosen and defended on a priori grounds."
  • 27:03 German historical school introduced the idea that the validity of any economic law is confined to the period and place in which it developed. (As regards the idealization of the person.) Unlike rats in a lab you can't subject all of these people to the same conditions.
  • Keynes's animal spirits - you can't have tight microfoundations.
  • 30:18 "The defenses of the existing practitioners are so strong that th and make sure that young dissenters don't get preferment ... by following the orthodox line. It is very encouraging ... to find precursors of one's own heretical ideas. Any doubt you may have had about the value of what you're doing in economics has been expressed by some economist in the past and that should give one confidence that one isn't alone. In other words, one can recognize oneself in great thinkers in the past. I think you feel less lonely by studying the history of the subject."

Sources of ways

Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) Classification System

  • This is the official way that economics articles are classified into 20 categories and several hundred subcategories. These classifications guide us in understanding what is meant by economics so that we can be sure to cover the entire discipline.

General economics

Community economics

Culture and economics

Journals and Portals