Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jrincayc (talk | contribs) at 16:57, 17 December 2003 (Reply to EntmootsOfTrolls). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Old talk has been archived to Talk:Economics/Old talk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

Cyan has moved/censored the article to User:Cyan/kidnapped/Economic_choice and you should review what is said there. Incorporate as desired. User:EntmootsOfTrolls

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

While there is an admirable set of articles on a lot of important questions like value of Earth (one way to assess economics is whether it values the things that humans actually value), the idea that this is somehow "given mroe attention" is just not true. The few such topics covered are absolutely basic, and even essentials like ecological yield were only covered recently.

If anything the material overall is still balanced towards the neoclassical view you wrongly call "mainstream", which is by no means accepted or acceptable in pure form in most forums outside the US. In the UK all economists must learn Marxist economics and the Marxist critique of capitalism. Joseph Alois Schumpeter is covered, etc..

But test what you say another way: If what you say were true, there would be articles on the vast fields of labour economics and welfare economics which have been leading even to Swedish Bank Prizes lately (Amartya Sen the most obvious example). There'd be attention paid to labour theory of value and labor theory of value being about the same thing, and, there'd be discussion of David Ricardo as having founded that theory, not just a firm politicized dismissal. These errors aren't corrected, so if anything that shows systematic bias against the less quantitative and technical economics.

Everyone dislikes scarcity. But it is not just dislike that drives most criticism, it's a basic belief that economics assesses scarcity falsely and thus its basic constructs are irrelevant - there is no such thing as a commodity and no such thing as a product and no such thing as supply and no such thing as demand.

Of course there is not any such thing. There is also no such thing as a person, no such thing as a light bulb, no such thing as a tree. But we have words for them because we find the concepts useful. Supply is a useful concept, demand is a useful concept, and concept of supply and the concept of demand exists (maybe not in your mind, but certainly in mine). Unless you are interested only in the philosophical concept of nihlism, stateing that they don't exist is not productive. All models are false, and we precieve the world by making models of it, so you can take the extreme view that everything that we precieve is false. Many of the models of economics are useful, as in they are true enough that they can be used some of the time. You just have to understand that what you have is a model, and then decide, is this the right model? Supply and demand is a fairly good model for wheat but a lossy model for love. Most of the ideas that have been thought of for economics in the past hundred years have been to figure out where the failings of economics is and then incorporate that into a new model. Explain exactly where the models of economics fails and you may have something useful, claiming that they fail in general is completly true and completely useless. Jrincayc 16:24, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

You only believe in these things if you are taught to take a God's eye view of them. The "alternative" position is that quantifications applied in the contracts on commodity markets etc., are simply based on nothing, utterly ungrounded in anything but the authority that writes and enforces them. What is a "soybean" when there are breeding, genetic manipulation, pesticide use, and other comprehensive outcome differences that really and truly matter even to the consumer but aren't reflected in the numbers? There have been street protests by economics students in Europe on this grounds - that what they are taught is pure nonsense. No one believes, for instance, that GDP has any valid economic basis whatsoever. There is NO argument for that - its creators argue that it is not relevant for the purposes politicians and bankers use it for.

Yes, GDP has some severe problems. For example, I take care of my kid, no contribution to GDP. I pay some body else to take care of my kid, contribution to GDP, even if they do a worse job. Similarly, I have to buy a lock for my door, contribution to GDP. I can leave my door unlocked and don't need to buy a lock, no contribution to GDP. I am open to suggestions for a better measure. Maybe next time you come, you could work on writing well researched NPOV articles about Genuine Progress Indicator or Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare that do try to be more accurate measures. Jrincayc 16:35, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There are no more "alternatives", if you look at the discourse taking place at the UN and even at the World Bank, it is a question of deciding which of the ecology-driven approaches is the "mainstream"... the term natural capital for instance is now in wide use at both institutions.

Also, look at the lack of detailed articles on subjects such as those linked from market system - there is no detailed discussion of how an energy market differs from a debt market for instance, or even what collateral is. So the neoclassical assumptions that all contracts for all services are equally commodifiable, and that perfect competition assumptions can apply to imperfect/real situations of unequally distributed power, are both being baldly accepted. Else "we" would surely "need", and "have", articles on these detailed differences.

As it is such considerations are ghetto-ized in separate articles on energy economics that don't have the detail on how the energy trading mechanics of the real world actually work. This doesn't mean that energy economics is "alternative", it means that the impact of energy on the rest of economics has been censored/ignored. It means that energy has been treated as if it were no different than any other "commodity' - but of course "we" don't seen to be starting any foreign wars for control of oh say soybeans... nor putting trillion dollar budgets together for military devices that burn solar power... These issues dominate the political economy today, so it's pretty clear that economics articles that pretend these things are just part of some "free market" where people are making voluntary choices, is idiotic at worst, and ideological at best. User:EntmootsOfTrolls

EntmootsOfTrolls, I think that you could make some valuable contributions. Unfortunately, your behaviour overshadows your contributions. For example, the comments about economics are helpful to me to see where you are coming from (even if I disagree with quite a few of them). On the other hand (I'm an economist, so I have to say this), your removeal of the comment from Cyan and your combative strategy don't help things. I will gladly post any well researched, NPOV, GFDL articles that you email me that are appropriate material for an encyclopedia and will attribute them to you (I would love to see a good article on the World3 model (from Limits to Growth) and good articles on alternative measures to GDP and the problems with GDP). Since you claim that your banning was unfair, I am also willing to read your reason why you believe this. Good Day. Jrincayc 16:57, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)