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Revision as of 22:45, 14 December 2003

Old talk has been archived to Talk:Economics/Old talk

Someone wrote a bad review of economics section at kuro5hin:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2001/9/24/43858/2479/4#4

This comment could help the section to improve? joao

Not if it's from September 2001, as it appears to be. The economics section here now bears simply no resemblance to what was here then. It's now really quite good, and contains a wide variety of topic coverage. The main page economics is not good enough, among other things it simply fails to explain scarcity well enough. Someone should dig around in the older versions to find a better explanation.

Some topics I think would be worthwhile (off the top of my head):

Game theory (linking to John Nash etc), pareto optimality, exchange rate theory (pegged, float, dirty-float), Bretton Woods, Neo-Keynesian school, Milton Friedman, the Austrian School, utility theory, revealed preference, cardinality and ordinality, simple supply and demand, oligopoly / monopoly theory and competition, contestability, sunk costs, interest rates, money supply, the concept of a market, Walras and the concept of the auction, the business cycle, random walks, determinism and predictablity in economics (linking to chaos theory), financial markets, and theories of regulation and taxation.

Just linked 'em all to see which are here now (September 2003) - about half are, thankfully. Also needing to be worked in somewhere: Triple bottom line, ecosystem valuation, social welfare function, and any discussion of clearing and settlement - we've got Bank for International Settlements but no fundamental discussion of what it *does* - fiat clearing nor for credit clearing or for commodity clearing which are different again, nor creditworthiness. Some of these are finance topics but there will be overlap between list of finance topics and list of economics topics on such basic issues. Both may need to be updated to include all of the ones that exist.

Is Supply and demand good enough, or should there be a simple supply and demand? Also is Consumer theory what you mean by utility theory?? Jrincayc 01:09, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Off the top of my head though - I might come back to do some of them if I've got the time. Haven't really thought about most of this stuff for a few years now ...

C

Replaced scarcity, not because it isn't in the textbooks, but because "choices under scarcity" is just a verbose defintition of "trade". I vote for clarity.

I think the point of economics is to create those verbose definitions. It's not just "choice under scarcity" but also the NATURE of choice, the NATURE of scarcity. The Fundamentals section is good but has to make this clearer, and come up front.

Why insert the notion of scarcity?

Why not the allocation of resources, period? Whether they're 'scarce' or not isn't really relevant and too often a matter of opinion. There are plenty of doctors in the US, for example, but their distribution is hardly optimal. It's economic, however.

Because the allocation of non-scarce resources is generally rather trival. If the resource is non-scarce give everyone who wants it as much as they want. In situations where it is interesting like patents and copyright, the time required to create them is scarce. As an amateur economist, I would define scarcity as something that has an opportunity cost so in that economic sense doctors are scarce since there is something else that would be useful for them to do (say like be a doctor in a different county). Jrincayc 03:49, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

This question is just stupid. Economics is solely and only about ways to compensate for scarcity and achieve optimal distributions of scarce resources. That's all it can be.

The first sentence has no verb: "Economics (formally known as political economy) the governance of the production, distribution and consumption of wealth and the various related problems of scarcity, finance, debt, taxation, labor, law, inequity, poverty, pollution, war, etc. " ...I am going to insert the word studies for now. Feel free to fix it differently. Kingturtle 04:54, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)

A problem with this definition is that it is simply wrong to say that what passes for economics today includes all the studies formerly (and now in parallel) known as political economy. While there is consensus on one concept of technical economics and its methods, and on capital types, the latter has yet to be completely integrated into monetary policy, fiscal policy, accounting and such - thus there are well-defined packages of accounting reform and monetary reform that seem to have no valid reasons NOT to happen, other than the fact that someone benefits from the inertia and failure to do so. In the 20th century this exact situation led to two very nasty wars, and a third nasty confrontation over economic systems, that between them, have characterized the whole global polity and most moves towards world government. Accordingly, we are obligated to present economics in its full depth, and with its full impact on human society, and the present page simply does not do that adequately.

Hell, we're talking about distribution potentially of air, water, and food here. Hard to get more important than that.

"Economists are sometimes referred to as Methodological Individualists."

Hmmm... It sounds like you're saying that the two terms are synonyms, which is certainly not the case. Are you saying that all economists are MIs? Or that some people say that all economists are MIs? From the 5 minutes of Googling on the subject, I don't see why economists should necessarily be MIs. Axlrosen 23:54, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I agree that it doesn't make sense. Striking: Economists are sometimes referred to as Methodological Individualists. from the page. The link to Homo economicus fills the role that I think they are trying to get much better. Jrincayc 03:36, 21 Nov 2003 (UTC)

It's good that Homo economicus exists, because one can posit Homo ethicus, Homo ecologicus and other basic motives for what humans do.

The article as it stands in December 2003 is now balanced by "framing economics", an introduction that lays out the reasons why economic models do not fully explain human behavior (failing to deal with ethics, ecology and energy economics, how labour and welfare are actually produced, etc.) This could be abbreviated and some of it moved as criticism to Homo economicus. However, these qualifying statements need to be made, and stronger qualifying statements can be found at http://natcap.org - somewhere in there you can find a list of "the 15 bad assumptions made by economics itself."

The question of political economy as questioning the assumptions versus economics as putting them into models is also dealt with in that section.

Unfortunately, after the "framing economics" section, the "economics is real" view kind of takes over. It's telling that there is no article on Socialist economics or even labour economics, welfare economics. There's some on feminist economics and some on Marxist economics at Marxism, but, all told, these subjects are not taken seriously enough.

It would be good to see them treated as carefully as energy economics, green economics and human development theory are. Even if most of what is in these older theories (ecological economics, feminist economics, labour economics, welfare economics, and Karl himself) is now subsumed into the more recent theories, they remain of historical interest. David Ricardo is broadly considered the founder of labour economics... and very recent figures like Amartya Sen associate themselves with welfare economics. So you cannot have good coverage of economics without at least explaining what these theories are and how they settled the social/economic and ethical/economic questions.

Law and economics should also be mentioned as a way to apply economic models to law. It may be that these methods do not describe choice in the real world at all, but only in artifical/industrial/legal worlds created by humanity. If so that would explain why urban economics has become such a popular study lately. And where is rural economics and the fact that most of the classical theory evolved in a world where most of us were farmers?

These parts of the article remain in the minds of those who, while prepared to comment that they are missing, are unprepared to add them to the article. You could do us all a favour by adding them yourself. Cheers -- Derek Ross

Actually, I believe this anonymous IP is banned user EofT. If so, he could do us all a favour by trying to getting Jimbo's permission to edit, instead of trying to poke holes in our soft security. It's soft, but it ain't weak. -- Cyan 20:36, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Controversy over Economics

Removed:

There is very great controversy about how supply and demand questions, ethics questions, and ecology interact to restrict and frame economic questions. These questions are usually dealt with in the field called political economy.

The article on economic choice deals with what constitutes an economic, rather than a moral, political, or personal type of choice.

I agree sorta with the premis, and there has been a controversy over applying economics to various decisions. On the other hand this is not balanced as written, and I am not sure what a supply and demand question is. I personally think that controversy over economics should not go as part of the initial summary, but should instead go into a seperate section on the page if such is considered necessary. Jrincayc 21:57, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'd like to stress that there is substational information about alternative and in many cases obscure approaches to economics on Misplaced Pages. In fact, the alternatives are overall given more attention than mainstream economics in a variety of articles. The problem with the article on economics has always been that it has tended to be dominated by people who dislike the subject. I'm fine with criticism of economics, but the subject should first be given a clean, uninterrupted presentation, just like all the alternatives (green economics, natural capitalism and what have you). -- Galizia